Do Mine Enemies Vindicate Me? by Anthony McCarthy.

Can’t resist pointing this one out. Some of you might remember the post I did on alleged scientific findings in the area of political orientation and the objections to my mocking poli-sci mating with evy-psy. As with many of my Sunday morning mockeries, it was an article in the prestigeous “Ideas” section of the Boston Globe, one of my daily papers.

One of the main sticking points was the inability to adequately define what a “conserative” was in order to study the issue with science. Well, I don’t know if the writer of the “Surprising Insights into the Social Sciences” - one of my more frequent targets- reads this blog but apparently someone has come to the same conclusion, sort of.

'Conservative,' whatever that means

THE CONSERVATIVE BRAND may be more powerful than we assume. A team of psychologists ran several experiments to see if the label "conservative" (which has a different meaning in politics than it does in finance, where it refers to lower risk) could affect financial decisions. Republicans preferred the financial option labeled "conservative" - but only if they had been asked about their political identity. Democrats were not affected either way by the label. The bias remained even when the label was inaccurate and even after the Republicans were specifically asked to explain the meaning of the "conservative" label in the context of the financial decision.

Morris, M. et al., "Mistaken Identity: Activating Conservative Political Identities Induces 'Conservative' Financial Decisions," Psychological Science (November 2008).

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Also in the Boston Globe “Ideas” section is this far more satisfying column on the arbitrary usage monitors, who seldom go to the bother of even checking the OED to find out if their pronouncements are anything but arrogant and frivolous bloviation.

Wish I could find the old Nation article I used to re-read every once in a while, I believe it was by Jim Sleeper, mocking William Safire’s prescriptive grammar pretensions. He made some of the same points more than twenty years back. Alas, the phony linguists haven’t been mocked back into their holes.

Free Yourself From The Burden of Creating The Best Christmas Ever!
by Anthony McCarthy
This poor holiday, Christmas, has some of the heaviest baggage heaped on it. The entire bounty of Santa’s sleigh is as nothing compared to the fascism of the multitude of perfect Christmases dreamed up by the advertisement industry, Hollywood and hack writers going back into the 19th century. That a holiday allegedly in celebration of Jesus, one of the least materialistic of prophets, has become a huge part of the most materialistic of cultures shows that things have been out of hand for several generations now.

People with children will have the hardest time liberating themselves from the burden. Parents and the rest of us have been sold on the bizarre idea that it is a moral duty to indoctrinate children into the cargo cult that is our real state religion. But it’s the opposite. Children who aren’t burdened with excess junk in their lives, who aren’t fashion conscious from the age of five, who aren’t bothered by the competitive aspects of materialism seem happier to me than those who are fully programmed. Who needs it? Children who have too much seem to be the ones who turn into jerks at such an early age.

Women carry the greatest burden of the modern, American Christmas, but I suspect they have no matter where they lived. Someone once pointed out that the introduction of the sewing machine into the home didn’t free women from the drudgery of hand sewing, it led to their being required to produce absurdly ornate clothing in order to be considered respectable. That requirement, the appearance of material respectability, is one of the greatest burdens women carry. Even the appearance of adult men gets blamed on women, and they know it. Back in the 1970s, while standing in line at the supermarket, I noticed the woman’s magazine cover that carried the order to “Have Your Best Christmas Ever!” I recalled having seen it on the cover of some woman’s magazine every year from the time I learned to read. If anyone has seen the equivalent on a man’s magazine cover, I’ll eat my balaclava.

Just the other day I heard one of the ubiquitous TV cooks bragging about beginning her Christmas cooky baking on Columbus Day and having a freezer full of cookies to give away. She said that it was a tradition in her family going back three or more generations. Well, if that makes you happy, it’s not a particularly bad way to spend some free time. That is assuming you don’t rub it in the nose of the receivers - somehow, I’ve got a feeling that for many for whom Christmas is a competitive sport, that’s the point. No one should feel it’s a moral duty to bake thousands of cookies. Or to have the perfect display, or buffet or to find the choicest presents wrapped in the latest style. Women are made to feel guilty for the whole thing, for not having the time or money and so not trying, they are made to feel inadequate if they don’t go nuts over it and, let’s be honest, you’re not meant to ever achieve perfection. If you did, how could they sell you something to top it next year.

It was also in the 1970s that my very large family decided to free ourselves of having to give presents to each other and the resultant burdens that entailed. My mother instituted pulling names from a bowl at my sister’s birthday party (which comes about at Columbus day) and buying one moderately priced present for one person. It’s made the family Christmas party a lot merrier than it was before. About the only problem is that people forget who they have drawn so you have to keep a list. Secret Santa only complicates things. In recent years some of us have been agitating to just have children under 16 draw names but we haven’t won that one yet. But hope springs eternal.

So, instead of having an unpleasant Christmas of competition and excess, have a laid-back one. Don’t get conned into asking for much or spending too much. Have a Christmas with few trips to the store and fewer boxes delivered by UPS or Fed Ex. Don’t give the kids enough stuff to turn them into insufferable brats. You might find you actually like playing a board game with them if you take the competition out of it. If they read something instead of playing with whatever computer game is the hot thing this season, they might have something to say that’s worth listening to. Don’t go into debt, don’t fight the crowds. Make a few cookies if you want to, have a bit to drink. Leave the Christmas come ons at the check out line. It’s not your duty to go into debt to support the economy. Give money to the food bank, they can make it go farther than you can at the grocery store, give money to a street person. Don’t worry what they’re going to spend it on.

Happy Winter Solstice (by Suzie)

     One of my favorite essays on spirituality comes from Amy Martin. Here is how it begins: 

We are spinning.

Like the Sufi mystic who whirls as a spiritual practice, this planet rotates on its axis. We see this every morning, as we spin toward the sun and it appears to rise, and in the evening, it appears to set. The moon spins on its axis and orbits around us, and we spin together as we orbit around the sun. The sun spins on its own majestic axis as it orbits around the black hole at the center of this magnificent galaxy we call the Milky Way.

And at the most elemental level are the spinning atoms that coalesce to make all of matter, including you.

Circles inside circles inside spirals in the sky. All of it, supported by the dark.

Lawmakers go after "child modeling" (by Suzie)

        Two Republican lawmakers in Florida “are pushing legislation to help prosecutors go after operators of Web sites that, under the guise of legitimate modeling businesses, post photos of scantily-clad minors striking suggestive poses.”
         Similar legislation was proposed by the infamous former U.S. Rep. Mark Foley. That might make liberals think: Those damn, hypocritical Republicans are wasting our time on prudery. If you’re unfamiliar with these sites, click on this example at your own risk. ETA: Beware of using a work computer because this does look like child porn, even though it is readily available from a Google search.
         Doesn’t it seem like child abuse to allow your daughter to pose spread-eagled in underwear for men who pay a subscription fee? I’d worry how these pictures might encourage pedophiles, but the champions of free speech have assured us that images have no effect whatsoever on people’s desires, and thus, presumably the billion-dollar advertising industry is all for naught.
          In 2006, the NYT described 

the latest trend in online child exploitation: Web sites for pedophiles offering explicit, sexualized images of children who are covered by bits of clothing — all in the questionable hope of allowing producers, distributors and customers to avoid child pornography charges. …

They first appeared in the late 1990’s, when entrepreneurs, and even parents, recognized that there was a lucrative market online for images of girls and boys. …
Unlike the original sites, the newer ones are explicit in their efforts to market to pedophiles, referring to young children with phrases like “hot” and “delicious.” The children involved are far younger, and the images far more sexual ...

Friday critter blogging (by Suzie)

         This is Hayden, courtesy of my friend Susan Snyder's blog, Nature's Call. She took the photo of the gray wolf "at the Gizzly & Wolf Discovery Center in West Yellowstone, Mont., gateway to Yellowstone National Park." It's a fascinating place. She writes:

Frankly, if you have never seen wolf up close -- as I haven't -- it is plenty close. There is no mistaking one of these fabulous animals for a dog. Their fur is the thick, coarse variety that only a wild animal possesses, and their eyes have a depth that domestic animals lack.

But Hayden's sheer appearance of wildness isn't what took my breath. It was his howl -- a long, mournful wail that traveled up my spine and made my scalp prickle. It is deep, haunting and nothing whatsoever like the almost comical yip-yip-yawooo of a coyote. It is unlike any sound that I have ever heard.

I stood there under a cold gray sky and watched as Hayden pointed his nose into the falling snow and howled again, this time eliciting responses from other members of the pack. 

Susan goes on to discuss what humans have done to wolves. Please read her whole post.

Alec Baldwin alienates me (by Suzie)

         Thanks to Melissa Silverstein, I recently started watching "30 Rock," which I find hilarious, including the loathsome Alec Baldwin. No, I don’t mean the pompous character he plays, although I do loathe the character. I mean the pompous actor. This interview sums him up well.
          Although he’s known for supporting liberal causes … quelle surprise … he’s not so good on feminism. He told "30 Rock" creator Tina Fey: “You are a very attractive woman and you’ve got to work that. You’ve got to pop one more button on that blouse and you’ve got to get that hair done and you’ve got to ... glamour it up." I wonder how he would respond if she talked about him needing to lose weight.
          He has written for the Huffington Post. Here's an example:

When Hillary Clinton ran for President, she ran as a woman, in my opinion, and I believe that is why she lost. She invoked her Glass Ceiling Sister Act whenever she found it useful ...

          His book, “A Promise to Ourselves,” came out this fall. Once more, he attacks his ex-wife, Kim Basinger, and the legal system. Here’s a New York Times review. An example of his venom: "My ex-wife reaches an almost sexual level of satisfaction when she's in a room full of highpriced lawyers." Saying nasty things in court is one thing; it's another to write them up and travel the country, giving interviews. 
          You may remember him calling his daughter a "thoughtless little pig" in a voice mail last year. If not, the transcript is here. It's comically bad. 
         To the thrill of “men’s rights activists” – those who can forgive his other political views – Baldwin says the legal system is biased toward mothers; children suffer when they’re raised by single mothers; and feminists should recognize “parental alienation syndrome.”

         NOW criticizes the media for allowing Baldwin to push this debunked syndrome, which Sara Huizenga Lubbers calls the “It’s Not My Fault!” Syndrome. She takes on Baldwin here, and she notes PAS was invented by a pedophile. (Thanks to the latest Carnival Against Sexual Violence for including this.)
         Defend the Children explains:

Playing upon the familiar that some parents badmouth each other to children in divorce, Gardner called this experience a “syndrome.” Gardner then concocted the PAS strategy to prevent child abuse investigations by claiming children were “brainwashed” into making false abuse allegations by one parent against the other. Thus PAS strategy says whenever a child discloses abuse and fear of a parent in the context of a custody dispute, they should not be believed. The PAS tactic encourages judges to assume without investigation that child abuse allegations are false, placing abused children in grave danger…

Studies show 50 percent of abusers who batter their partner also physically abuse their children. But tragically, a 1996 study in the Family Law Quarterly found child custody evaluators did not consider a history of domestic violence as a major factor in their recommendations, but three-fourths of them cited alienation as a major determination.


Blerg! If Baldwin were my father, I'd be plenty alienated.

Tis the Season To Be Merry!

And to smell of broiled beef:

Looking to beef up your mojo this holidayseason? Burger King Corp. may have just the thing.

The home of the Whopper has launched a new men's body spray called "Flame." The company describes the spray as "the scent of seduction with a hint of flame-broiled meat."

The fragrance is on sale at New York City retailer Ricky's NYC in stores and online for a limited time for $3.99.

Burger King is marketing the product through a Web site featuring a photo of its King character reclining fireside and naked but for an animal fur strategically placed to not offend.

Is this real? I have no idea, but to mix lust and hunger might not be a good idea. Some of us already have enough problems with social intelligence. Now we have to walk around muttering "if it stands and moves it's not food", and muttering is another social faux pas. So is eating the dinner guests.

A very odd thing, altogether. Male objectification?

Mysteriouser and Mysteriouser

Such fun to break the grammar! I've been reading more on the opinions expressed on Rick Warren's website. He's almost your average right-wing Christian in that the website is opposed to abortion, believes in male leadership in family and in the church and is adamantly opposed to same-sex marriage. Where Warren differs some from the usual type of wingnut fundie is in talking more about AIDS and poverty and such. That's a good thing.

Still, I find his pick as the invocation speaker at Obama's inauguration a most mysterious one. Is the political intent really to attract Republican evangelists to vote for the Democratic Party? This will not work. As Warren states somewhere, no abortion and no same-sex marriage are among their non-negotiables. As one might argue that the reverse of those are among the non-negotiables of many, many progressives and liberals it would appear that the Democratic Party would have to change some of its basic policies to attract the evangelists, and changing those policies would lose them a large number of current Democratic voters.

What does Obama say about all this? Let's see:

"I am a fierce advocate of equality for gay and lesbian Americans. It is something that I have been consistent on and something that I intend to continue to be consistent on in my presidency," Obama said at a morning news conference to announce several financial appointments. "What I've also said is that it is important for American to come together even though we may have disagreements on certain social issues."

Here's that term 'social issues' again. Note that Warren's website resources include an article which tells us how Christian women must subjugate themselves to male leadership:

4. Submission does not mean slavery.
Let's release a few old notions and fears! Paul uses an entirely different word in Ephesians 6:5 when he instructs slaves to obey their masters. This Greek word for "obey," huakouo embraces more of the meaning people often mistakenly associate with marital submission. Hupaaakouo means "to obey, to yield to a superior command or force (without necessarily being willing)." The term draws a picture of a soldier saluting his commander, not a wife submitting to her husband!

Hubba, hubba! (I have no idea why I wrote that.)
Aravosis has more on Obama's reaction and so does Sargent.

Who the invocation speaker is might ultimately not matter very much, of course, and I'm not criticizing the Warren choice as some indication of what Obama will do in his administration. But I'm concerned about the choice nevertheless, because these choices are meant as signals. So what is the signal? And to whom?

The oddest thing of all is that Warren was a McCain supporter. His sermon from October says this about the presidential election:

We don't need more visionaries in America. We don't need more smart leaders. We need leaders with character. We need leaders who aren't interested in image, but are willing to say: "What you see is what you get."

Here's where I see the task of the future for us dirty fucking hippies and feminazis and such: To teach politicians that 'social issues' is not about what we eat for Thanksgiving or how we arrange flowers. Those issues are about freedom, justice, economics, dignity and respect.

Rick Warren

Is to give the invocation at Obama's inauguration, maybe as part of the new inclusiveness: Everybody can be a Democrat now! Even a wingnut!

It certainly seems that a social conservative is to be welcomed in this rather noticeable manner. You see, social conservatism only hurts women, gays and lesbians and people in similar categories, so it's nothing to worry about.

Alternatively, letting Warren speak at the inauguration might be a way to give something to the social conservatives without actually letting them influence government policy. That way everybody is included but the policies can stay sane!

Clever politicking, in other words, if you ignore how the choice of Warren looks from the progressive side of the political aisle. Why is it that the Democratic Party always ignores the progressives, I wonder?

Well, not always. Progressives are greatly in demand for all that drudge-work right before elections. But that's about it.


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Note: I'm unsure who invited Rick Warren in an attempt to butter up the religious right. It might not have been Barack Obama himself.

Added: It appears to have been the The Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, run by the House and Senate.

Weird/Funny

This video. What is it that makes me want to watch something like that? After the first car slides backwards it's pretty obvious that the video is all about more cars sliding backwards.

Nobody Could Have Predicted

That a political ideology of markets-gone-amok combined with at most voluntary self-monitoring as the ideal way to manage the beast could result in this:

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox said the agency failed to act for almost a decade on "credible and specific allegations" of wrongdoing by Bernard Madoff, who authorities say bilked investors of as much as $50 billion.

Allegations dating back until at least 1999 "were repeatedly brought to the attention of SEC staff, but were never recommended to the commission for action," Cox, 56, said in a statement yesterday. He announced an internal probe to review the "deeply troubling" revelations.

"He's revolted by what he found out, but it's also in his interest to be revolted," said James Cox, a securities law professor at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina who isn't related to the SEC chairman. "He's taken a lot of heat over SEC enforcement."

The SEC, already faulted in connection with the collapse of Bears Stearns Cos. and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., now faces criticism for failing to detect what Madoff termed "a giant Ponzi scheme." Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd yesterday called on the agency to explain how the "massive fraud" went undetected. Madoff, 70, was arrested Dec. 11 after he allegedly told his sons that his eponymous firm, founded in 1960, was no more than "a giant Ponzi scheme," the SEC said.

Instead of wielding subpoena power to obtain information, SEC staff "relied upon information voluntarily produced by Mr. Madoff and his firm," Cox said.

Hmm. And now Madoff voluntarily tells us that his sons knew nothing about the scheme.

It's crucial not to separate every one of these cases or to look at them as some sort of bad apples in an otherwise most wonderful American apple pie. The incentives the government gave to the financial industry in the last twenty years were not that different from an invitation to a nonstop orgy with free booze. Nobody had to really read the small script at the bottom of the invitation which mentioned that of course people should drink responsibly and keep the noise levels down. And if you didn't drink responsibly? Nothing bad would happen to you.

Except the party is over now. It's the cold light of the morning-after and everyone fights over whose puke it is all over that white sofa. Guess who gets to pay the cleaning bills?

The Caroline Kennedy Story

I like Digby's take on it. Dynasties are not good in a democracy. Or perhaps it is that democracy cannot survive under a dynastical form of government? It's not just Caroline Kennedy, by the way. Ken Salazar's brother has been proposed as his replacement. Nepotism is a general danger very much alive in American politics (the Bush dynasty being just one of many examples).

At the same time, it has always been harder for women to get to the top and being born or married into a political family has historically been almost the only avenue which women have had to power. Just check what would have happened to the early women Representatives and Congresswomen in this country if we had applied a no-nepotism rule for the last eight decades.

That's part of the Caroline Kennedy story, together with all the other threads which make the story up: her father's sacrifice, the enormous appeal of her family, her own possible qualifications for the job and then the questions about someone being inserted from outside the political arena in a way which doesn't allow the citizens of the state of New York to truly learn what the candidate stands for.

Another part has to do with the loss of a female Senator if Hillary Clinton resigns and Governor Paterson appoints a guy in her place. This matters, because women are too few in the Senate and the loss of any one of them may reduce the number of women below a level where they cannot effectively work to bring up issues which are traditionally seen as women's issues (even though they are human issues). But there are other women vying for the seat of the Junior Senator from New York:

Kennedy is not the only woman interested in succeeding Clinton. Also eyeing the seat are Reps. Carolyn Maloney and Kirsten Gillibrand, New York City teachers union President Randi Weingarten and actress Fran Drescher, best known for her starring role on "The Nanny."

Carolyn Maloney has a lot of feminist support, by the way.

My Favorite Christmas Present

But of course it would be world peace, a just and caring society and the end to all horrible diseases. In reality, though, my best present was one I got at age eight or so. A caleidoscope, a modest tube covered in gray paper, so modest that I tore some of the paper off before realizing it wasn't just some more wrapping paper.

Yet what worlds opened up inside that humble tube! I never grew tired of the fantastic patterns it created, in brilliant jewel colors, or my attempt to find repeats in the patterns or asymmetries. Learning how the images was created was fun, too.

So what was your best present ever and why? It doesn't have to be a Christmas present, but it can't be world peace or anything similarly noble.

Penis Envy

This is the seventh post in my series about why feminism is still needed. (You can find the earlier six here.)

This one is about science and pseudo-science, about the study of sex differences and about the motives for such studies and their consequences.

Doesn't that look objective and scientific to you: 'the study of gender or sex differences'? I can see the men (and women! there must be a few women!) in their white coats in laboratories all over the country, sincerely and earnestly staring into test tubes or the desperate eyes of monkeys in cages, all studying gender differences without any preconceptions, without any bias. Just a pure-as(s)-snow scientific inquiry into why biology is destiny, but only for women. Almost as if the researchers just dropped to visit us from outer space, themselves un-gendered and totally uninterested in the uses their studies, totally unaware of any societal effects which mediate and influence any possible innate sex differences.

Which reminds me of my visiting alien. It has spent some time in university libraries, studying the biological and psychological explanations for why men and women differ. It just came back with a large pile of books (stolen! I must explain libraries better) and a list of comments and questions it still has.

We had a fun chat on the history of this field and the many accounts of female inferiority (for that's what the history of the field boils down to), ranging from the suspicion that women were deficient because of an imbalance of humours to worries about the womb over-riding the puny female brain (about as small as that of a chimpanzee) to penis envy and finally to evolutionary psychology and various current-day biological theories.

What's astonishing about all these theories is their almost total ignorance of the sexual division of labor, my alien friend pointed out, the fact that it is women who give birth to children and women who mostly spend years taking care of them. To an alien that looks like the sex difference, you know. But human theorizing gives the visible sex differences fairly short shrift, preferring to focus on the fascinating insides of the skull. Well, the female skull. And all the other bits of the female body which might account for the lesser female lives.

That this is the political use to which theories of sex differences are put to is obvious to my visiting alien. If the ancients 'proved' that it's women's bad humours which make them weak and scatter-brained it wasn't so that they could institute affirmative action programs for women in the government and the military, you know. Rather, it was to allow the then-status-quo to continue.

Likewise, the sudden focus on the dangerous and all-consuming wombs in the late nineteenth century had nothing to do with some new epidemic of 'women's complaints' but the desire of more women to enter higher education, a previously male arena, and the corresponding desire to keep them out. Hmm. What might work to achieve that? Let's see. Maybe women will have to choose between their mental health and fertility on the one hand and education on the other?

The most intriguing part of this odd history is the penis envy episode. Old Freud sure explained the Woman Problem there, in a totally untestable way, too! But it was Science speaking. Or Pseudo-Science, if you like. In any case, to criticize it means that you are politically motivated and probably have a wondering womb inside your brain. Hysteria, that's what you are suffering from! Real women learn to revel in their submission to vaginal orgasms and the ever-existing penis envy.

That was gender science then. Doesn't it look silly in hindsight? Remember that one day the same might be said about today's studies of gender differences. Don't you think that a fair spoonful of cynicism is important before agreeing with the current popularizers that, yes, women indeed are dripping, dripping with empathy but utterly uninterested in the single-minded male occupation of collecting coins without even a lunch-break (to paraphrase some ideas popularized by Louann Brizandine and Simon Baron-Cohen, respectively)?

My alien friend thinks so. It points out several reasons for such cynicism:

1. There's no field called 'the study of gender or sex similarities'. No fledgling assistant professor will make tenure or get promoted by publishing an article which points out that men and women really are rather similar in some characteristic. Just imagine the sensation that would be caused by a book titled Men Are From Baltimore. Women Are From Philadelphia. Snores.

2. New declarations of innate biological sex differences proceed with unseemly haste. Indeed, we have hardly learned one explanation (the left- vs. right-brainedness by sex, say, or the idea of man-the-bee flitting from one female flower to another) when we are offered another one (men use one brain half more, women use both halves, or the older man-the-provider looking for that young symmetrical woman with a 0.7 waist-to-hips ratio) and then yet another one (the female and male brains: meet the empathizer and the systematizer). And so it goes. Yet at every stage the argument is presented as a final one: The mystery of that elusive difference between men and women has been pinned down, finally! Conversation closed.

3. The flag of science is hoisted over all these inquiries! To criticize them must be politically motivated! To criticize them must be a sign of someone denying the value of scientific inquiry! To criticize them must mean that the critic thinks men and women are exactly identical!

To ask about the motivations and biases and the training of these researchers is simply an indication of the critic's own bias: Those who study gender differences (or rather, those who popularize them) are coldly objective thinking machines, have no axe to grind, don't even have a gender themselves! All they are asking are difficult questions with answers which are unsavory, even politically incorrect. And those answers must be scribbled down in great haste, great haste, the minute one study looking at the brains of four women and five men comes out. So it goes.

Why does any of this matter? First, because these studies are always a defense of the status quo. That status quo is always "the worst of times and the best of times" for women; the worst because the studies have established that women really can't (and don't even want to be) be equal with men due to all those hard-wired (by some prehistoric electrician) sex differences, and the best because the current arrangements in the society are the best women really can hope for. But of course the status quo of the different-humors theory was different from the status quo of the late nineteenth century which is different from the status quo of today.

Second, bad just-so theories about the difference between men and women affect more than what people talk about at cocktail parties. They affect the culture and its norms, and they affect the beliefs, aspirations and self-confidence of girls and boys yet not born.

One might think that this would make the popularizers of various gender essentialist theories pause and even have a sleepless night or two. One might think that they'd get up and read a few more articles critical of their theories. One might.

But then again, it might be my penis envy talking there.

Questions, Questions...

Why am I not too big to fail? Damn.

Could this blog be turned into a Ponzi scheme? Let Echidne teach you how to be rich! Let her list the 3 Secret Ingredients and the 11 Exclusive Wisdoms of Rich People! Or any number of items on any list you care to cook up! For only 29.99 per month, you get not only my brilliant guide-book (with faux snakeskin covers and absolutely real-looking gold initials -- your initials (or mine if you prefer) -- surrounded by a ring of rhinestone diamonds shaped like dollar signs) but a weekly reminder e-mail asking you if you are rich yet! I care! That's why I'm rich and you are not.

But wait! There's more! I will also teach you how to manufacture very similar-looking guide-books and how to sell them to others on your Very Own Richy Blog, where all you need to do is to lie back and count the money!

Nah. I cannot do it. Must be something about all the girly hormones coursing through my divine body...

Did you see Bill Moyers interview Glenn Greenwald? It will take you about twenty minutes and leave you with no more money, sadly.

This Slipped Past Me

Last summer. It's an excellent series of six short posts by Amanda Schaffer on the new gender difference evangelists (think of Stephen Pinker and Simon Baron-Cohen and Louann Brizandine and Susan Pinker). I highly recommend it for everybody. Schaffer talks science and evidence. I hope she will write a book on that topic.

The Red Shoes?

In the fairy tale the red shoes could not be removed and their movement could not be stopped. They just danced on and on down the road and up the hill and into the horizon:





From Think Progress.

Making Off With Your Money

One of the odd things about the collapse in the financial markets is all the creepy-crawlies found slithering desperately when yet another rock (or what seemed as reliable as a rock) is turned over. It's hard not to think that the free-market adulators just decided that ANYTHING the market decides to do is OK, including all sorts of fraud.

Take the Madoff (pronounced made-off) case. Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme:

Most Ponzi schemes collapse relatively quickly, but there is fragmentary evidence that Mr. Madoff's scheme may have lasted for years or even decades. A Boston whistle-blower has claimed that he tried to alert the S.E.C. to the scheme as early as 1999, and the weekly newspaper Barron's raised questions about Mr. Madoff's returns and strategy in 2001, although it did not accuse him of wrongdoing.

Investors may have been duped because Mr. Madoff sent detailed brokerage statements to investors whose money he managed, sometimes reporting hundreds of individual stock trades per month. Investors who asked for their money back could have it returned within days. And while typical Ponzi schemes promise very high returns, Mr. Madoff's promised returns were relatively realistic — about 10 percent a year — though they were unrealistically steady.

Mr. Madoff was not running an actual hedge fund, but instead managing accounts for investors inside his own securities firm. The difference, though seemingly minor, is crucial. Hedge funds typically hold their portfolios at banks and brokerage firms like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs. Outside auditors can check with those banks and brokerage firms to make sure the funds exist.

But because he had his own securities firm, Mr. Madoff kept custody over his clients' accounts and processed all their stock trades himself. His only check appears to have been Friehling & Horowitz, a tiny auditing firm based in New City, N.Y. Wealthy individuals and other money managers entrusted billions of dollars to funds that in turn invested in his firm, based on his reputation and reported returns.

The linked story recounts in great detail the S.E.C.'s attempts to investigate Madoff's firm. That all the earlier attempts failed smells funny to me. Remember that because Mr. Madoff had his own securities firm, the only sort-of outside check on his activities was the auditing firm, Friehling & Horowitz? Here's how that firm is described:

When Aksia researched Madoff last year, it learned the firm's books were audited by accountants Friehling & Horowitz, operating out of a 13-by-18 foot location in an office park in New York City's northern suburbs. One partner, in his late 70s, lives in Florida. The other employees are a secretary, and one active accountant, Aksia said.

I would love to see a careful study of what steps the earlier S.E.C. investigations took before deciding that Madoff was as pure as this new snowfall.

More Shoes

The shoe throwing incident in greater detail:

President Bush made a valedictory visit on Sunday to Iraq, the country that will largely define his legacy, but the trip will more likely be remembered for the unscripted moment when an Iraqi journalist hurled his shoes at Mr. Bush's head and denounced him on live television as a "dog" who had delivered death and sorrow here from nearly six years of war.

The drama unfolded shortly after Mr. Bush appeared at a news conference in Baghdad with Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to highlight the newly adopted security agreement between the United States and Iraq. The agreement includes a commitment to withdraw all American forces by the end of 2011.

The Iraqi journalist, Muntader al-Zaidi, 28, a correspondent for Al Baghdadia, an independent Iraqi television station, stood up about 12 feet from Mr. Bush and shouted in Arabic: "This is a gift from the Iraqis; this is the farewell kiss, you dog!" He then threw a shoe at Mr. Bush, who ducked and narrowly avoided it.

As stunned security agents and guards, officials and journalists watched, Mr. Zaidi then threw his other shoe, shouting in Arabic, "This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq!" That shoe also narrowly missed Mr. Bush as Prime Minister Maliki stuck a hand in front of the president's face to help shield him.

Bush called the incident a 'sign of democracy', and many Iraqis are demanding the release of al-Zaidi.

I hope that he will be released, too, and in no worse health than he was after being kicked and beaten by Maliki's security guards:

Mr. Maliki's security agents jumped on the man, wrestled him to the floor and hustled him out of the room. They kicked him and beat him until "he was crying like a woman," said Mohammed Taher, a reporter for Afaq, a television station owned by the Dawa Party, which is led by Mr. Maliki. Mr. Zaidi was then detained on unspecified charges.

Funny how saying that a man acts like a woman is always an insult.

The Shoe Incident

You can watch a journalist throwing his shoes at president Bush in Iraq and calling him a dog, both rather extreme insults in the culture. For extra interest, count the women present at this press conference.

Good Music for Chores

Well, for just listening, too, but I feel like moving when hearing Laura Nyro's "Stoned Soul Picnic."

Nasty Post IV

I've been thinking about research and the popularization of studies a lot in the last few days, for reasons which are evident a few posts down on this here blog. In particular, I've been thinking about what makes a study smell all rotten to me, and I've come up with a partial list:

1. The absolutely most awful case is the one where the researcher refuses to show you any of work which presumably led to some results, often rather sensational ones. You might not think that something like this could ever happen, but it does, my friend, it does. It's as if someone got a set of data, did some number-crunching on it and then widely posted the findings from that but refused to let anyone see how the numbers were actually crunched! Well, it's not 'as if'. This actually happened not long ago with a sensational argument widely written about in the right-wing media. When I e-mailed the researcher for the paper he told me to do my own calculations from the data set (a very large one). Stunning, is it not? And very much against the idea of transparency in academic work.

2. Not much better is the practice of omitting large chunks of analysis or data in the final paper. Both of these are a problem that resembles what happens in voting without a paper trail. You can't back-track someone's work. Indeed, you can't check it at all.

3. It's become more and more common for the press release about an article to appear BEFORE the article itself is available. This means that if the press release is popularized anyone who wants to criticize its conclusions is handicapped by not having access to the actual study. This was done with a fairly recent article purporting to show that women are less intelligent than men. I listened to the BBC on this topic, debating the article etc., when the article itself was not yet available at all. Talk about a slanting the playing field! By the time the article itself became available nobody was interested in the topic or how bad the article was.

4. Both studies and some people who popularize studies of a certain flavor present reviews of existing literature. Literature review is a standard beginning of most studies, and if you know the field at all just scanning through the references which are included may be enough to tell you that the study will be biased. The same is true of some popularizers and their work (coughDavidBrookscough).

To see what I mean, think of M&Ms. They come in all sorts of colors. Now suppose you are entertaining someone from Mars who has never seen those little pieces of chocolate. You pick out all blue M&Ms and hand them to your visitor, at the same time telling it that all M&Ms are blue. The visitor is quite likely to believe you, given the pile of blue M&Ms in its hand.

But of course blue is not the only color of M&Ms. This example is meant to tell you (in a sophisticated way) how you can pick from the existing research only those studies which support your argument and how that selection may end up looking like what the field is actually agreeing on. To know that this is not the case requires knowing more about the field.

Now, it's one thing to find something like the Blue M&M Rule (named by me!) in the hands of David Brooks. It's a totally different thing to find it used in a peer reviewed article. The latter should never happen. That it does means that someone in that field is not doing the work of proper criticism (and that applies with even more fervor to letting really bad statistical analyses get through).

5. A very common mistake in the studies I have criticized on this blog is the fallacy of assuming that if a particular theory leads to a certain prediction then finding that prediction realized in some data set means that the particular theory is true.

You have probably come across this in some other context. Suppose we call the theory A and the prediction B, and the way B is derived from A gives us:

If A, then B.

But this does not necessarily mean that

If B, then A

is also true. (Suppose that A=Echidne has just eaten a cheese sammich and B=there's food in her tummy. It's possible for 'If A, then B' to be true while not necessarily 'If B, then A' (because I may have eaten something else instead)).

This fallacy is utterly common among the narrowly defined evolutionary psychology studies (often called E.P. studies to distinguish them from general evolutionary psychology studies or e.p. studies), the ones which go out to hunt for support (B) for a particular theory (A) and come home with nothing else. This ignores all the other theories (C, D, E etc.) that might have produced the same prediction B.

6. The popularization bias. I have written about that many times before, but it's certainly true that a study telling us how similar men and women are in some respect will not be picked up by all those popularizers. Nope. But even a terrible study pretending to have found some significant gender differences will be popularized, at least if it accords with various hidden biases. It may become part of our 'received knowledge' and remain that way, even if many other studies later show it to be wrong. The debunking of study findings (such as the idea that men all over the world prefer women with a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.7) is not exciting enough for popularizations. This means that popularizations matter and that we should criticize bad popularizations, because they exert long-term influence.

More Cats

Pippin, courtesy of FeraLiberal. And again:

RIP Bettie Page (by Suzie)

       Bettie Page, whose pinup and BDSM photos turned her into a cult icon,   died Thursday. She’s a stellar example of someone who became a commodity, whose image profited others.
       Her “sex fiend” father molested her and her sisters, Page once said. After an abusive first husband and a gang rape, she left Nashville for New York, where she began posing for sexy photos to make money, and in hopes of becoming an actress.
        In interviews, she said she wasn’t personally into bondage, but she enjoyed the photo shoots. She said she never thought of her poses as sexual. In "The Notorious Bettie Page," she acts naïve and trusting. But Page was smart. The writer and director, Mary Harron, said she thinks Page must have known what she was doing, but “she had sealed herself off in some protective way from what disturbed her …”
         In middle age, she was treated for depression, violent moods and schizophrenia. Harron thinks Page suffered from mental illness earlier, but it went unnoticed.
         Page had wanted to be a missionary at one time, and she quit her modeling career, in part, to focus on Christianity. She ended up penniless, but finally got royalties for her work. 

          When commenting about her, a lot of men confuse women's sexuality with what women do to please men, to make a living or to get ahead. People talk about how she celebrated her sexuality, blah-de-blah, without noting that photographers paid her to pose in various ways. I wonder how people look at her photos and see only what they want to see. 

The media and rape, part 2 (by Suzie)

       While searching for examples for the post below, I remembered this case, whose bad wording seemed to merit a separate post.
      A stranger raped a college student last year after a parade. The initial story in the St. Petersburg Times quotes a Tampa police spokeswoman:

Initially, police were unsure that a crime had been committed because the woman was so intoxicated, she said.
It appeared to be a case of date rape at first, she said, because "she had willingly brought him back to her dorm."
But after interviewing the victim and the witness the next day, detectives concluded it was a case of sexual battery.

          This hits the trifecta of rape myths. The follow-up story discusses whether the college should alert students about date rapes. If a man rapes a woman he knows, then he’s no threat to others … wait, a minute, that’s crazy. I understand that it makes some difference in security precautions if a rapist breaks into a building or finds another way to get in. But predators are predators.

         By the third paragraph, the reporter is trying to be fair by … blaming the victim.

Though some students expressed outrage that school officials didn't notify them immediately, others suggested that the victim brought trouble on herself by drinking too much, leaving her friends and allowing a stranger into her room.

           In the fifth paragraph, the reporter explains that the rapist “escorted” the drunken student back to her room and then raped her. Escorted? Good grief.

The media and rape (by Suzie)

       At my last newspaper, an editor complained that I was biased as a feminist. The only evidence he could cite was that I had once called a rape victim a “survivor,” even though I noted in the feature story that she preferred that term over "victim."
       How the media handles rape has long interested me. I’d like to clarify some issues that have surfaced on feminist blogs, starting with some comments I made at Corrente.

       What you or I consider rape may not be defined that way in state law. For example, some states use "rape" for forced intercourse and "sexual assault" for sexual contact that doesn't involve intercourse. In other states, “sexual assault” includes forced intercourse. Media guidelines on libel and word usage call for reporters to use the proper legal terms.
       Similarly, reporters are not supposed to call a homicide a "murder" unless someone gets convicted of murder. The killer might end up being convicted of manslaughter, for example, not murder as defined under the law. The 2000 AP Stylebook is online and explains this.
       In the case against Roman Polanski, for instance, a recent NYT article describes him as having had “sex” with a 13-year-old, presumably because he pleaded guilty to “sex with a minor.” (He had originally been charged with rape, but plea-bargained down. Samantha Geimer has always maintained that she did not consent, but the article fails to mention this. His lawyers filed a motion this month to throw out the charge.)
       In some cases, everyone agrees that a rape (or sexual assault) occurred. A famous example would be the "Central Park Jogger" case. But in many cases, as with Kobe Bryant, evidence of intercourse doesn't prove rape. And defendants can try to explain away much physical abuse by saying the victim wanted rough sex. This has led some media to refer to "sex"  or "sexual intercourse" until rape is proven.
       “One of the issues I've seen in media stories is calling an alleged rape ‘sex’ or writing ‘it's undisputed that they had sex,’ when the defendant claims consent with the assumption that this is a neutral phrasing when it actually implies that the person reporting rape consented,” wrote Marcella Chester in an email. I had asked her opinion because I respect what she writes on her blogs, Abyss2hope and Date Rape is Real Rape. “The other issue I've seen is for unverified defense claims or leading defense questions to be repeated as if they are verified facts.”
        I agree that reporters need to be more careful in their coverage, and I would love to see the media discuss their wording more often. They should understand that “sex” has the connotation of consent, even though the dictionary does not define it that way. In fact, rape often is defined as forced sexual intercourse, thus making it a subset of sex.
         This can lead to problems such as the Nebraska judge who banned all use of the words “rape” or “sexual assault” in a rape case while allowing the accused to describe what happened as “sex.” (The prosecution gave up after two mistrials, and the creep went free.) In October, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal of the judge's decision.
         The mainstream media does not reveal the name of rape victims unless the victims consent. When a victim doesn't want her name used, reporters will call her a "victim" if it's undisputed that a rape occurred or if they can attribute the description to someone else, as in: "Police said the victim ...."If the man claims it was consensual sex, and a court hasn't ruled, then reporters will avoid the term “victim” without attribution. An example of this thinking is the judge in the Kobe Bryant case who ruled that the woman couldn't be called “the victim” in court. The NYT discussed the issue.
         Some reporters will refer to “the accuser,” which I think is a step up from “the alleged victim,” as noted in this Poynter column on the Bryant case. As with “rape” vs. “sex,” good reporters can “write around” the problem. They may substitute a description such as “the woman” or “the student,” but they need to avoid prejudicial descriptions, such as “the stripper.” (I’m thinking of the Duke case. Obviously, a lot of people think sex workers can’t be raped.)
        Writer Colette Bancroft commented on the Poynter column, saying the media uses "victim" for other crimes, such as theft or carjacking, even though the "victim" may turn out to be lying. I’d argue that reporters do use “victim” in rape cases until a question arises about what happened. Similarly, they stop using "victim" in any case where the crime is questioned.
        This may become moot as more and more media, including blogs, post the names of victims. (I can say "victims" all I want in this construction.) That happened in the Central Park and Kobe Bryant cases.

        It’s not just women’s names getting posted, of course. To me, the most disturbing trend in rape reporting is the vicious attacks online against women, especially those who accuse sports figures or other popular men. Even the victim of a man who is less known may find herself torn apart by the anonymous misogynists who comment on newspapers online. 
------------
           At Abyss2hope, you can check out the latest Carnival Against Sexual Violence.

           Marcella Chester is going to the Women, Action and the Media conference in March to speak on “Pulling the Plug on Rape Culture One Word at a Time:
Using Accuracy to Undermine Dangerous Attitudes and Injustice.” If this matters to you, please consider donating to defray her costs. You can click on the “chip in” button on her site. If you’re in the spirit to give, please don’t forget our own goddess, who has a link for donations at the top of this page.

Friday critter blogging (by Suzie)

This is a photo of Scrawny, taken by Phil Sheffield, who just adopted him from county animal services, where he is volunteering. I've heard that striped cats have a harder time getting adopted because there are so many of them. 

Sex and Statistics

My previous post about Daniel Kruger's study concerning the number of sexual partners people have had or wish to have and how that correlates with how much they spend resulted in me actually reading the original article.

I'm still a little bit flabbergasted by the fact that peer review passed it on. Who are the peers who thought this was an acceptably presented empirical analysis? The very reason for peer reviews is to weed out obvious mistakes of various types. But this did not happen with Kruger's paper.

To see why all this matters, remember that Kruger's main point is to seek current evidence which would bolster his evolutionary psychology argument that men who have more resources attract more sexual partners. It is not enough to find that people who have more resources attract more sexual partners, because the evo psycho theory is that what's appealing in men is resources and what's appealing in women is body. So we need to be shown that resources (or whatever weird proxy is used for them here, financial consumption values) are correlated differently with sex for men and women.

Given this, it would seem extremely important that the article showed us the results for the female data set. But it does not! We are just told that the results didn't show any relationship between financial spending by women and the number of sexual partners they had. So take it on faith?

Well, not quite. There's an odd bit about all this in the article. I quote:
Male and female samples were combined to provide a direct test of the predicted moderation by sex. Gender (1=female, 2=male) and financial consumption were multiplied to create an interaction term predicting each log transformed SOI variable.

Interaction terms are common in econometrics, too, and often one of the terms to be multiplied is a qualitative one, such as gender. The way one transforms qualitative binary variables into numerical ones is by using 1 and 0 as the values. It doesn't matter which sex we assign the value 1, because what the interaction term is measuring is the differential effect some other variable (the one we multiply the gender variable with) has on the variable we want to explain, by gender.

Now why would Kruger use 2 for men, instead of zero? Perhaps the statement is a typographical error? Perhaps men were assigned the value zero? Let's look at his findings about the interaction term assuming that we have a typo here:

The findings (from Table 2) give the coefficient for the interaction term as 0.01 for past sex and 0.015 for future sex. These would then be the extra effects each additional unit of the financial consumption measures have on the number of past and future sexual partners FOR THE GROUP we assigned the value 1. That would be women, if the initial discussion contained a typo. So women would actually be the group that has more sex the more they spend, not men.

My conclusion is that he really used 1 and 2 as the values for women and men. This doesn't make any sense at all to me. Perhaps someone can explain why he did it?

More generally, it's not possible to read the paper and to find out what the equations are that he actually estimated. The theoretical discussion at the beginning suggests that he has in mind something like this:

Number of sexual partners = Constant + b*education +c*marital status +d*age +e*financial consumption

where b, c, d and e (and the constant term) are the coefficients that the analysis will estimate when we plug in the data on education, marital status, age and financial consumption on the right-hand side and the three measures of the number of sexual partners on the left-hand side (for three analyses). Stars stand for multiplication.

These equations would be estimated separately for men and women, not because statistical tests show that this should be done, but because Kruger's basic theory believes that it should be done!

But it's not at all clear if he indeed estimated this equation but something which only contained the terms that stood out in the zero correlations table. If only those terms were included then the results he talks about in the press release don't actually control for marital status, say.

I now want to return to the interaction term discussion. Perhaps someone pointed out that it's not a great idea to argue that men and women are different in this behavior and then not to show any of the results that would let us judge the argument? Perhaps that someone suggested that it might be a good idea to pool the data (use all the data for both sexes in the three equations) and to add an interaction term for gender and financial consumption to test if there actually is a differential effect by gender? The equation would look something like this (assuming that no basic gender term was also included):

Number of sexual partners = Constant + b*education +c*marital status +d*age +e*financial consumption + f*(financial consumption*gender)

Here the gender term would equal 1 for one sex and 0 for the other sex. Suppose that we assign the value 1 for 'male' and the value 0 for 'female'. Now plug in those value to see the form the equation takes: The coefficient for financial consumption for women is e, while the coefficient for financial consumption for men is e+f. Estimation would give us the value for f.

There are all sorts of reasons why adding just one interaction term this way might not be good statistics (for example, it assumes no gender interaction in the other terms on the right-hand side). But I have never seen 1 and 2 used in these applications. It makes no sense.

What's the conclusion then? The article doesn't give us the evidence which it supposedly has unearthed. This means that we can't judge the evidence.

Where are my perks? (by Suzie)

         This newspaper article talks about a hairstyling franchise that caters to men. It offers "attractive female stylists and other perks," according to the cutline (or "caption") on one photo, and it was compared to Hooters.

       I wonder why so few businesses employ young, attractive men in skimpy clothes to please women. Is it assumed that women are content with a good hairstyle or good food? Are women less interested in hot men who are paid to be nice and serve them?

       The headline on the article is: "... salon does men's hair in a manly manner." Because if you're a real man, you like to play pool, watch sports, etc. 

       

Like Shooting Fish In A Barrel

I feel terribly guilty about writing yet another critical post about a summary of a study based on evolutionary psychology, this one:

Men are hardwired after eons of evolution to overspend, a new study suggests. Their maxed-out credit cards and mega-purchases have been tied to their desire to attract mates.

The biggest male spenders in the survey were found to have the highest number of reported past partners and desired the most future partners.

The finding, detailed in the current issue of the journal Evolutionary Psychology, did not hold with women.

Vying for women is simply what men do and have done for hundreds of thousands of years, said study leader Daniel Kruger, a social and evolutionary psychologist at the University of Michigan's School of Public Health. But how they entice mates has evolved.

"Men in the ancestral environment were valued if they were good providers," Kruger said. "Now we have this new consumer culture, so basically we show our potential through the consumer goods that we purchase, rather than being a good hunter or providing protection."

Hardwired to overspend! Wow.

How do we know that men in the ancestral environment were valued if they were good providers? Did Kruger hide behind a tree for a few centuries to observe how the men were valued and on what basis? And on what basis were the women valued? Did those women go out gathering, say? And did the group benefit from those gathering efforts? But the ancestral guys still didn't value their gathering, eh?

Goddess but I'm tired of this shit. Here comes the money shot:

Kruger used data collected from telephone surveys of more than 400 men and women with an average age of 34 (100 men and 309 women). Participants rated how much they agreed with three statements about their financial habits, such as "I always live within my income range," and "Each income period, I set aside at least ten percent for savings."

(A person who highly agreed with the statements would be considered conservative in matters financial, as opposed to consumptive.)

They also indicated marital status and sexual partners (their count for the past five years and number desired in the future).

Men who spent more (saved less) and who were more likely to shell out more than they earned reported having more sexual partners in the past five years and desired more future partners than other guys in the study.

Specifically, the 25 percent of men who were most conservative about spending had an average of three partners in the past five years and desired about one partner in the next five years. The 2 percent of men with the riskiest financial strategies had double those numbers.

Did you get that? The 2 percent of men with the riskiest financial strategies had twice as many sexual partners as the 25 percent of men who were the most conservative about spending? Could that be a typo?

After all, 2 percent of one hundred men is....two men! Why on earth would Kruger want to compare the two men who were the highest spenders to the twenty-five men who spent the least? Why not compare, say, the top twenty-five with the bottom twenty-five? I wonder if the two big-spenders are outliers, atypical in their answers.

It's a very odd study design (with three times as many women as men) and a very odd summary.

Do Bitches Have Feelings?

Heh. I bet I caught you with that horrible title for this post. It's really about bitches. And dogs:

Dogs can sniff out unfair situations and show a simple emotion similar to envy or jealousy, Austrian researchers reported on Monday.

Dogs sulked and refused to "shake" paws if other dogs got treats for tricks and they did not, said Friederike Range, an animal psychologist at the University of Vienna, who led the study into canine emotions.

"It is a more complex feeling or emotion than what we would normally attribute to animals," said Range.

The study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also showed dogs licked and scratched themselves and acted stressed when they were denied rewards given to other dogs.

Other studies have shown monkeys often express resentful behaviour when a partner receives a greater reward for performing an identical task, staging strikes or ignoring what they view as inferior compensation.

It turns out dogs are able to show a similar, if less sensitive, response, said Range in a telephone interview.

I have no idea if the study is any good and I'm not going to read it, because this is a fluff post (to make sure that not everything I write about is on feminism). Most dog owners would agree on the findings, though.

There's a funny Catch-22 in the expertise dog owners get about their dogs over time. On the one hand we learn an awful lot about dogs just by living with them and observing them. On the other hand, we are often viewed as biased observers of dogs, love making us prone to anthropomorphizing our dogs' behavior.

And of course domesticated dogs who live alone with humans are not representative of how dogs might act in a wild pack. Still, putting dogs into a laboratory is in some ways akin to finding how dogs would act in a concentration camp: It's a totally artificial environment. Yet we often study animals in cages and in mazes. Remember those famous studies about primate bonding in the 1950s? They were carried out in bare cages, too, so what we really learned from them is how primates might bond in prisons with nothing much to do or to see.

Oops. I'm already digressing from the fluffiness. Here it comes:

When my Henrietta the Hound was at her physical peak she loved to race other dogs in the dog park. She could catch and overtake all the other regulars except for the greyhound. One day a young Springer Spaniel came into the park, wanted to race Henrietta and won. Henrietta couldn't catch her because she couldn't turn very fast; she'd just keep running straight when the Springer swerved.

I had an enjoyable hour watching the two play the same game over and over again. Henrietta never caught the Springer. Then she changed her strategy: She started walking nonchalantly towards the Springer, stopping to sniff or to look at the horizon. Once she got close enough, she suddenly darted at the Springer.

It still didn't work, but I think I saw an attempt at deception there. Later I saw her trick Hank into certain forms of behavior by employing various types of deception. On the other hand, she broke off a piece of her dog biscuit and threw it to Hank when Hank whined for a piece (having already wolfed down her own biscuit).

How about that envy, then? I'm not sure if the emotion the study talks about is the same as human envy or it's something more like outrage at the unfairness. Those are not the same emotion in humans. What I do know is that I got told off pretty clearly if I absent-mindedly rewarded only one of the dogs for something.

Hip Hop And Hos

Nareissa Smith has written a fascinating piece on women performers and hip hop. Lots of food for thought there, and much of it generalizes to other types of music if not with quite the same strength. Here's a taste of her argument:

In fact, the intersection of capitalism and sexism has had another interesting effect on women in hip hop. First, the sexism - As Weiner states, there have always been women in hip hop – first, as stand-alone acts, then, as the "kid sister" or apprentice to a male rapper. But now, women in rap are even further marginalized. The only women that one sees in rap videos these days (so I hear, as I refuse to watch anymore) are so called "video vixens," scantily clad women whose sole purpose in her objectification is to serve the male gaze and narrative around her. So I ask: if the current iteration of hip hop is predicated on women being objects as opposed to subjects, and is predicated on removing any independent agency, where is the place for a woman to speak of her own authority - or at all?

I'm not sure if I'd call the way these markets work just simple capitalism, because there's something more than that going on, something more recent than the era of capitalism in general. It may be linked to those technological changes which made it possible to pass the same few stars/actors/singers into every household in the country, which made it almost impossible to make a living in the fields if you weren't one of that select handful, even if you were very good indeed. This concentration of markets is visible in television shows (which all tend to copy the one that sold best last year), in movies, in books, in ballet and in sports.

I find that focus on a few super-stars ultimately boring and less fertile than an imaginary alternative situation of many competing smaller markets seeking different customer groups. It appears to slow down truly new creativity. Thing do change, but perhaps more slowly than they would in that imaginary alternative, and once something new does manage to break through, well, everyone copies it again.

How does this all relate to the sexism Smith mentions? Once the contents of hip hop were commercially set as all about a certain kind of ultra-aggressive masculinity, combined with utter contempt towards women, that's how the market is seen. Not the easiest market for a woman to break into in any other role than as meat.

Do read Smith's whole piece. I remember reading about Ms. Sarah Baartman, the Hottentot woman who was displayed all over the world in the 1880s. But of course the source I read didn't even deign to give her name.

How About Those Pink-Collar Jobs?

Linda Hirshman makes an important point about the new planned infrastructure projects as a vehicle for fighting the recession and employing more people: They are not going to help very many unemployed women directly:

BARACK OBAMA has announced a plan to stimulate the economy by creating 2.5 million jobs over the next two years. He intends to use the opportunity to make good on two campaign promises — to invest in road and bridge maintenance and school repair and to create jobs that reduce energy use and emissions that lead to global warming.

Mr. Obama compared his infrastructure plan to the Eisenhower-era construction of the Interstate System of highways. It brings back the Eisenhower era in a less appealing way as well: there are almost no women on this road to recovery.

Back before the feminist revolution brought women into the workplace in unprecedented numbers, this would have been more understandable. But today, women constitute about 46 percent of the labor force. And as the current downturn has worsened, their traditionally lower unemployment rate has actually risen just as fast as men's. A just economic stimulus plan must include jobs in fields like social work and teaching, where large numbers of women work.

The bulk of the stimulus program will provide jobs for men, because building projects generate jobs in construction, where women make up only 9 percent of the work force.

Isn't it interesting how policies which on the face of it look gender-neutral are not really so, especially given the high levels of occupational gender segregation in this country? Still, there are some possibilities for creating more jobs for women, too:

Fortunately, jobs for women can be created by concentrating on professions that build the most important infrastructure — human capital. In 2007, women were 83 percent of social workers, 94 percent of child care workers, 74 percent of education, training and library workers (including 98 percent of preschool and kindergarten teachers and 92 percent of teachers' assistants).

Libraries are closing or cutting back everywhere, while demand for their services, including their Internet connections, has risen. Philadelphia's proposal last month to close 11 branches brought people into the street to protest.

Many of the jobs women do are already included in Mr. Obama's campaign promises. Women are teachers, and the campaign promised to provide support for families with children up to the age of 5, increase Head Start financing and quadruple the money spent on Early Head Start to include a quarter-million infants and toddlers. Special education, including arts education, is heavily female as well. Mr. Obama promised to increase financing for arts education and for the National Endowment for the Arts, which supports many school programs.

Also, Susan G. at Daily Kos pointed out that Obama addressed women directly in his speech about these projects. I hope that this means that he plans for projects which employ both men and women who have lost their jobs.

The Battle of the Sexes

A funny term, is it not? It's often used in those popularizations of gender research and similar juicy topics. The first time I saw it I immediately thought how very inappropriate it is. If we take the term seriously then men appear to have won that battle in Saudi Arabia.

But we are not supposed to take the term seriously, nooo. It's shorthand for funny-ha-ha type of articles on the topic of common quarrels between men and women or on some pseudo-biological crap about the sperm fighting the ova for supremacy. At the same time, the basic setup (battle, like in a war) is supposed to make us think of the two sides as equally well-equipped and equally aggressive armies in this war. Never mind that the "enemy" is in your family and includes one of your biological parents!

And never mind that women commit fewer violent acts than men and mostly don't have weapons training at all or that women are not allowed to fight in some countries on this planet. It's still a funny way of describing arguments about who should do the dishes, I guess, as long as you don't get that Saudi Arabia connotation from it.

In Other News

The Supreme Court has turned down an emergency appeal from a New Jersey man who says President-elect Barack Obama is ineligible to be president because he was a British subject at birth.

It's a very odd story, altogether, that desperate attempt to find Barack Obama ineligible on the basis of citizenship. I've tried to follow the arguments, but they tend to shift the way arguments usually do when only the goal is fixed and everything else varies to reach that goal.

There are people who focus on stuff like that and it's a good thing to be reminded of it. If you don't read right-wing blogs, that is.

Cardboard Cutouts

You probably came across this picture and the attached story last week. (By the way, if you're looking for a cheap-and-safe brain-scrambling alternative for alcohol, check out the comments thread to that WaPo blog post. It makes you scream and scream, it does.)

What's interesting about that frat party picture: The guy on the left is Obama's new director of speech writing, and the guy on the right also wears a t-shirt saying "Obama staff". The woman in the middle is a cardboard cutout. Don't know how she got invited to the party, but she probably never read all those warnings about frat boyz.

Nah. She's just cardboard so fooling around with her is A-OK. Don't we all do that when young and silly and so on? Of course we weren't speechwriters for the president-elect then, and some of us just stole traffic signs (Note: That's a dangerous thing to do and not mentioned as a nice harmless counter-example. It's mostly mentioned because I don't edit much).

Oh. And some of us weren't the right sex to grab the tits of cardboard cutouts. Don't know how I almost forgot that part.
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Suzie Madrak has an interesting take on this.

A Quick Thought For The Day

This has to do with the alcohol post right below and the one below it, the one where I linked to a piece about the fragility of male animals to environmental pollutants.

Have you ever thought about how many pieces in general are written about the fragility of women's bodies? They are more likely to get damaged in sports, running too much makes them stop menstruating, osteoporosis will get them if they don't get lots of calcium, their livers can't cope with drinking, their lungs can't cope with smoking, they have higher rates of depression because of all those female hormonal changes and so on and so on. Whether all or any of this is true is hard to tell sometimes, because the reason for such pieces isn't purely a sincere medical interest in the well-being of all the little ladies.

Yet women live, on average, longer than men.

Booze And Women

I bet you thought that might mean the same as 'drugs and hookers', something that men talk about while listing the main food groups. But no, sadly, it's all about the increased alcoholism among women. A New York Magazine article tells us about this by citing a few statistical facts concerning increased drinking among young women. Then the article goes on to interview all sorts of women who drink too much and then it tells us that the main reason for their drinking is feminism. Yeah. You don't need to actually ask women why they drink; it's clearly the cause of the striving towards gender equality, and the message is that Equality Is Bad For Women. Of course equality and feminism are defined very oddly in this article. The writers of the blog Jezebel are quoted as experts, for instance.

Is it not sad? Remember that there is no actual study about why women who drink too much do so. The feminism bit was just inserted into the story to make it sell more and perhaps incidentally to tell women that, nope, equality is not really possible. Look what happens when you try to drink like a guy?

I'd like to know what proportion of all alcoholics are female. It would be a good thing to know just so that we can set this female drinking epidemic into some kind of proportion with the general drinking epidemic. I'd also like to know whether 'drinking like a guy' means to drink the same number of glasses or pints or whether it means drinking the same amount in some proportional sense.

Reading the article made me think if I want to eat as much as my much-taller brother, just so as to feel equal. Some introspection reveals that I don't. Which makes me suspect that women don't actually drink as much as men with different body chemistries, just to feel equal in some odd way. If there is any equality-related aspect to excess drinking it's probably more a desire to fit in with the guys, to be accepted as one of them?

The article is really sad, because it could have taken a different avenue and actually talked about the dangers of excess drinking and the reasons people do it and the alternatives that might exist. That opportunity was lost, in favor of the argument that women really were better off when they couldn't drink in public and so had to drink less. Or get Valium from their family doctors.

You may have figured out by now that I'm a feminist. Yet I've never advocated increased alcoholism as The Path Towards Gender Equality. How odd the mainstream media sometimes is in its primal views about feminism.

Weird Ways Of Celebrating Women's Suffrage in Britain

I've been reading the U.K. Guardian about the eightieth anniversary of women's suffrage there. This piece has a feminist tone, a sad tone about the recent lack of any real progress, the tone of someone who feels rather alone in a world where women are supposed to offer to suck dick, work as Girl Fridays and then stay at home with their children. But it also has some interesting ideas about feminism perhaps coming towards its next wider awakening. I want to write about that more in the future.

If you go from that article to the survey about gender roles it mentions you are in for something rather smelly. This graph summarizes the findings. Click on it to see a larger version.





I was unable to find the actual survey anywhere, which means that I have no idea how the people were picked for questioning, how many they were and how leading the questions might have been. Thus, I can't tell whether the findings are easily generalizable or not. But note that the most traditional attitudes are often held by the youngest respondents, those who don't yet know that they are unlikely to even have the choice of just having one parent out in the labor force. That they hold such stereotypically sexist views is a bit disheartening, in any case.

I skipped from that to a story about how emasculated men now feel in Britain. A snippet:

The majority of almost 2,000 men aged 16 to 65 questioned by OnePoll, an independent market research company, admitted struggling to feel confident about their place in society. About half confessed to feeling most insecure when at work, while another 40 per cent also felt inadequate during nights out with friends.

All those questioned by the survey, commissioned by Braun, admitted to feeling increasingly emasculated by women and said their feelings of inadequacy soar when women are present.

ALL of them? That's just not at all likely. Either the survey is an utterly crappy one or the writer of this summary doesn't understand it.

If you take these three stories together (and add the title of a science article on the effect of environmental pollution of men:
"It's official: Men really are the weaker sex"), you might be left with a rather bad taste in your mouth about the way women are viewed in Britain, especially if you remember that the Guardian is probably the newspaper most likely to lend column space to feminist writings. Well, I was left with such a taste.

It seemed worth writing about, both to give those of you who are not female a glimpse into the kind of stuff I read almost every day, the kind of stuff which probably just floats past you (unless it's about the feminisation of boys, perhaps), the kind of stuff which just makes you feel down for no discernible reason until you become aware of all those little messages us girls get all the time.

So you can go through just one newspaper on one day (or one newspaper website at least) and what do you learn? That British young women are sexual objects defined by lap dancing and porn? That more more young Britons want women to stay at home than was the case five years ago? That British men are emasculated, based on a survey and physically threatened, too? Is any of this really true?

I don't know. But I do know the message that is being transmitted here and it's not one I treasure.