Greek Life (by res ipsa loquitur)

Hello, and thank you, Echidne, for the welcome and the opportunity to contribute to your blog. While you're gone, I'll be reading (among other things).

What will I read? Well, right now: this. Toting around I Don't has provoked some interesting reactions. Examples: Today I had my annual mammogram, and the radiologist, une femme d' un certain age who somehow managed to charm me while she painfully smushed my breasts between two super-thick pieces of plastic, laughed uproariously when she saw it sticking out of my bag. "Don't get married, dear heart! I was married! You're much better off on your own. Did I tell you I'm going gambling this weekend?" Then there's my cousin, who saw it when I met her for sushi one evening and said, "What the hell do you mean, 'I Don't'? What if your mother had said, 'I Don't?' You always overthink everything!" Finally there's my SO, a fine gentleman (and feminist) who glanced at the cover, raised one eyebrow, and said, "Interesting artwork. So who messed up this institution? It had to be the Christians, right?" Well, honey, it was flawed from the get-go, but the Christians certainly did their part!

In any case, about halfway through the book, my initial thought is this: the Greeks had it all figured out. Well, not Greek women, but the Greek men, who set up a seemingly perfect closed system to serve their need for care, companionship, and carnality. Your basic Greek guy -- no, not slaves, I'm talking Greek men of privilege -- had at least three women in his life:

1. Gynaekes (wives) to keep the home fires burning, bear and raise children
2. Hetaerae (courtesans) to stimulate mind and body. Educated, cultured, talented, beautiful: their conversation was sought, their opinions valued, their talents appreciated -- but they were still tossed when they lost their looks.
   
3. Pallakae (prostitutes) to sate one's day-to-day lust.

Excellent system (if you were a privileged guy) -- and one I'd like to try myself -- if I could be sure it wouldn't get me thrown in jail, exiled to St. Helena, or burnt at the stake.

But it also occurs to me that modern wives -- American ones, anyway -- are expected to possess the characteristics of all three classes of Greek companions -- and that that's way too much pressure for any one woman. A wife is supposed to make a home, maintain her own career or interests so that she can talk about something other than that home she's worked so hard to make, and be a vixen in the sack. (To be fair, modern husbands don't get off easily, either. You've got to simultaneously be SuperProvider, SuperDad, and SuperStud.) But back to those Greek guys ... well, the knee-jerk reaction is, "Sexists! How dare they be so piggy and so self-centered!" But then I think, "Wait. Maybe they were onto something, specifically, that being all three things simultaneously was going to be extraordinarily difficult."

So how did we go from isolating these functions into three separate roles to combining them into one single superwoman (or superman, as the case may be)? (Hint: Martin Luther is partly responsible) And does anyone really buy into the idea that a spouse -- female or male -- can or must even be all three? Or is such belief the provenance of the young and naive spouse? Is two out of three so bad? If so, which two? Would one out of three make a marriage?

I have questions. Do you have answers? Put 'em in comments.

The New Ms. Magazine Is Out

From my e-mail:

Top stories in the Summer Ms.:

-COVER STORY - "CYBERHOOD IS POWERFUL"- Ms. pays tribute to feminist mommybloggers and the online movement for mother's rights. Can they make the U.S. finally pay attention to demands for better work/life policy?

-EXCLUSIVE: "BAGHDAD UNDERGROUND" - Rape and violence against women are so prevalent in today's war-torn Iraq that local women's rights groups have started an "underground railroad" of shelters to save victims. Investigative journalist Anna Badhken was the first U.S. reporter allowed access to the hidden shelters; read her findings in a Ms. special report.

-"A MAN WHO TRUSTED WOMEN": Ms. magazine Senior Editor Michele Kort spoke extensively with those close to Dr. Tiller to create an intimate portrait of the murdered abortion doctor.

-"WHAT A DIFFERENCE A LATINA MAKES" Contrary to MSM reports, Sotomayor's "wise Latina" comment was based in solid research: there are cases in which justices' race and gender do matter. And therefore it's especially troubling that the lack of judicial diversity goes much further than the Supreme Court.
READ ONLINE EXCERPT

-"STONES CAN'T STOP THEM": Coverage of Afghan women often neglects to credit the hardworking women's rights movement there. The new Ms. covers Afghan feminists' victory in fighting the recent repressive Sharia law passed by Karzai. A revised version of the law was proposed July 9 --though Afghan women's rights activists are still demanding better.

Subscribing to feminist magazines is one of those things I do as a political act, by the way. It's not a bad thing to spend money on if you can afford it.

Vacation For Me

Starts today. I'm going to be gone for four weeks, exactly, give or take a few posts each week. In the meantime, you will be well cared for by Suzie, Xan, Liz, Prometheus6, res ipsa loquitur, Hecate and ProfWombat.

My warmest thanks for all these great writers and thinkers. I'm so pleased to have them help me out so that I can sun my scales and replenish my creative reservoirs.

I shall miss you all, sniff, until I come back.
----
Picture of Widget and Sasha by Doug.

The Great Murkan Marriage!!!!

I'm listening to this program on the local public radio. It's all about whether marriage is dying or not, whether it should or not and so on. The two women discussing it are my personal favorite female misogynist Caitlyn Flanagan and a comedian called Sandra Tsing Loh. Both of these women have written essays on marriage, and their views are presented as opposite ones and the listeners are asked to take sides! Sandra Tsing Loh thinks that marriage is no good for women (but she'd like to have a 1950s type husband who wouldn't know how to boil water) and Caitlyn Flanagan thinks everything wrong about marriage is up to women, men don't even exist as the objects of the women's choices).

Fuck it. I'm going to have a debate here between two people, one of whom thinks that broccoli is an alien from outer space and the other thinks that broccoli is a cancer on earth. You must take sides.

I hate badly framed debates. I also hate the kind of setup where neither of the so-called experts actually appears to know much about the history of marriage in general or how long the average marriage used to last (hint: not that long in many cases as mortality rates were rather different).

OK. My wrath is probably misplaced, because what's being said isn't that extreme. I just hate the idea that real information is not provided. For instance, Flanagan keeps on talking about the poor not marrying as if being poor isn't part of the reason for that. And then there's the final caller to the show who argues that men are looking for Mom2.0 in their wives and that women are looking for a better mother than theirs was in their husbands!!!! Notice how fathers just disappeared there altogether.

May I Just Say

That all the attention paid to the "birther movement" of the wingnuts is not only silly but very boring. I understand the rules of the game, and I also understand that if Obama's citizenship status wasn't attacked then something else would be. But surely the journalists don't have to cooperate. Or the bloggers.

If life is too short to stuff a mushroom (which it is), it is also too short for all this crap.

Poetry Club: An Interview With Katha Pollitt

You probably know Katha Pollitt best for her often-humorous but always-wonderful political columns in the Nation magazine or the collections of those columns. But she is also a poet, and has recently published a new book of poetry: The Mind-Body Problem (Random House 2009). She has kindly agreed to talk about her book here. She will even answer further questions which you can put into the comments!


Here are Katha's answers (marked by KP) to my six questions about her latest book and her poems in general:



1. Which poets have most influenced you as a poet? Which new poets do you find most interesting and why?



KP: My favorite living poet has to be Wyslawa Symborska, the Polish Nobel Prize-winner. I love her irony, her wit, the way she brings the grand sweep of history down to the smallest moment. I long to be influenced by her! I should be so lucky.

Other living poets I admire --Sharon Olds, Charlie Simic, Robert Pinsky, Marilyn Hacker, who has done so much to revitalize formal poetry and give it some zing. Right now I'm reading Brenda Shaughnessy's Human Dark with Sugar, which is wild and funny and extravagant and sexy.



Do you write poetry 'from a different place' inside you than prose?


KP: As I was writing the poems, I didn't see them as all that political. I kept that voice for my columns. But of course there are plenty of poems in the book that are political in a broad sense, and there's even a topical one: 'Trying to Write a Poem against the War,' which I wrote for the Poets Against the War anthology edited by Sam Hamill. 'Rapture' is another -- it's about the Christian fundamentalists who believe their going to be taken up bodily into heaven any day now, while the rest of us suffer all kinds of awful things here below. In my poem, their heaven is a kind of old-fashioned sea side resort, rather boring. All the action is down on earth.



2. Kay Ryan says about the book: "It's awfully good to have such a great-hearted poet as Katha Pollitt take on mortality's darkest themes. Again and again she finds a human-sized crack of light and squeezes us through with her." Do you agree with this assessment of the darkest themes? I'm asking because I found the book ultimately an optimistic one, ending with 'Lunaria,' in which you write of your desire to be "A paper lantern/lit within/and shining in/the fallen leaves."



KP: I try to give both light and dark, the bittersweet. I love to make a kind of shimmering between major and minor keys, sorrow and joy, loss and acceptance. Humor can do that -- if you say a sad thing in a funny or ironic way, you're complicating it, changing the frame. So in 'Collectibles' I write about the illusion of childhood happiness, which is very sad, but I do it through a description of finding in a flea market kitschy, funny items that used to be in my parents' kitchen: I give the memory and destroy the memory at the same time. ' Lunaria' is about the three phases of the plant of that name, also called Honesty or Money Plant, which has purple flowers in spring, green discs in summer, and, in autumn, silvery seedpods, which are very beautiful and translucent. It's my Three Ages of Woman poem. Not that I have reached the silvery seedpod stage quite yet!



3. Would you call yourself an urban poet? A Brooklyn poet (as one reviewer states)?


KP: I would be honored to be thought of as a Brooklyn poet. I grew up in Brooklyn and, in fact, my mother was born there, which makes me a Brooklynite of considerable ancestry. I've lived in New York City for most of my life. My landscape and people-scape is definitely urban. I'm not that interested in "nature poetry" or nature writing. I mean I'm all for nature! I just don't want to read about it much. When I write about the natural world, I'm really using nature as a metaphor, as in 'Lilacs in September': the hurricane-struck lilac producing out of season flowers is a kind of challenge to the reader (and the writer): 'what will unleash/itself in you/when your storm comes?'



4. Section II of the book is called After the Bible, with poems drawn from both Old and New Testaments: Adam and Eve, Lot's wife, Martha and Mary ("Well did he think the food would cook itself?/Naturally he preferred the sexy one,/the one who leaned forward with velvet eyes and asked/ clever questions that showed she'd done the reading"). How do these themes fit into your view of the world? Who are you speaking to in these poems?



KP: I'm not a believer -- far from it. The Bible is interesting to me because the stories are so strange and ambiguous and have so many odd gaps and because they deal with deep questions . I try to retell the stories with a twist of my own. In 'the Expulsion,' everyone, even God, is glad that Adam and Eve are leaving Eden-- in other words, beginning their real human lives of struggle, and choice, and conflict and creation. In 'Cities of the Plain,' God destroys Sodom and Gomorrah but then he misses them, because what's a moralist without a sinner? In 'Martha,' the speaker (the patron saint of housewives, by the way) is angry and depressed and resentful: she does the cooking and cleaning, and somebody has to do that, but Jesus tells her she should by like her sister and just listen to his words of wisdom. Not helpful!


5. The Poet As A Feminist. Your ideas about how feminism affects your poetry or not? "As girls they were awkward and peculiar,/wept in church or refused to go at all." How does this link to the Biblical theme?


KP: There are a number of poems in the book about the unfreedom of women. The poem you quote, "Lives of the 19th Century Poetesses," uses that horrible word "poetess" to emphasize the restrictions under which women, including gifted women writers, have labored-- the entrapment within the family, the confined life leading to eccentricity and even madness, or what is seen by others as madness, the marginalization and fundamental lack of respect. Lot's wife is a version of this woman -- she's "trudging behind the broad backside of God," away from Sodom with her awful husband, feverishly remembering an intense affair that ended badly. There is no place for her in the new life God is arranging for her supposedly oh-so-virtuous family, so she has to turn into a pillar of salt.

Any woman writer has some kind of relation to feminism, even if it's conflicted, because feminism is what lets them write at all, and to be published and taken seriously as artists. Without some kind of feminist consciousness-- or maybe I should say feminist unconsciousness --it would not be possible for a woman to write her own truth. Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, Muriel Rukeyser and a host of other women poets of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, changed the whole landscape of poetry for women. Suddenly, things that could not be said were speakable.


6. 'The Heron in the Marsh' is my favorite in the book, both because of its formal beauty and because it seems to condense that looking at the dark themes of life and yet coming to a resolution which is positive. Would you say that this poem is a microcosm of the message of the book? (The poem is reproduced here with Ms. Pollitt's permission.)


The Heron in the Marsh


At the end of summer
stands white and alone
a question mark


among the green reeds
that glow even as they fail.
Wanderer, lordless
samurai


with only yourself for armor,
tell me, why is loss real
even when love was not?
The tide seeps in,


the dark sand shines.
You lift your strong wings
and skim away
over the gray


and glittering
open water.




KP: It's interesting that you see the end of poem as hopeful. I see it as ambiguous: the poet asks "why is loss real/ even when love was not?" and instead of responding, the heron takes flight and skims away over " the gray/ and glittering/ open water." No answer there!

In a way, that poem does encapsulate the theme of the book, if it has a theme, which is the conflict or gap or lack of connection between our ideas, hopes, fears, and emotions about the world and, well, the world. That's what the mind-body problem is: the search for that connection. Religion is one way of trying to bridge that gap, trying to make coherent meaning out of what's within us and what's out there. Love is another, especially unrequited love. The attempt to make meaning out of essentially meaningless experience is what being human is all about.

Five Women, Five Accordions

I find this hilarious. The song is in Finnish, but here's a rough translation of the first few verses:

The mouths of girls have long watered for me
but my mama taught me to avoid women -
they are wild and crazy.

The girls grab on to me like burrs
because I've got that which entrances women
but I shall take care that
I die as a bachelor.

Everybody wondered over that
How weird, they said
But I said "I have other things to finger"
(refrain)
even when she comes to sit by my side [strictly: quickly collapses next to me].

The girls have often tried to hook me
but I have never taken the bait
A woman might be like fresh-baked bread
but I have the will-power of a man.

And I'm not lured by silks or nylons,
rouges, lipsticks or powder.
If you fall for those at night
you will feel rotten in the morning.

This boy will never finger a woman
An accordion is enough for my fingers
(refrain)
Even when she comes to sit by my side.

Bad television (by Liz)

Sometimes media consumption can really get me down. Last week was one of those weeks. There was the focus on surgeon general nominee Dr. Regina Benjamin's size. There was the peephole video of ESPN reporter Erin Andrews. There was the character assassination of the woman who accused an NFL star of rape. And then, I heard about Fox's new reality show "More to Love."

Most so-called reality shows are pretty awful to begin with, but this one seems especially awful. I have not seen an episode, nor do I plan to. The marketing alone is bothering me. The premise, according to Fox Broadcasting, is one "regular guy's" search for love among a group of "full-figured women", a "brawny prince" searching for a "curvy Cinderella." Ugh. Some of these women will go on their first dates on camera. Ugh ugh. More exploitation. More emotional manipulation. More focus on size as an "issue." Ugh, ugh, ugh.

This fatigued, feminist blogger has had enough. She needs a break and she will get that break tonight watching "Drop Dead Diva" on Lifetime. Yes, this show also focuses on size. But it is not one-dimensional. The premise is this: a thin, model wannabe dies and comes back to life as a plus-sized attorney. Deb, the main character, is not the stereotypical pretty, thin woman. Nor is she the stereotypical larger, smart woman. She is all of that and none of that and everything in between. What makes the show so compelling is Deb experiences life from multiple vantage points. And that, the ability to appreciate more than one point of view, (along with some witty banter and a few fashion references) is precisely what I need at the end of a long week.

Weird twins (by Suzie)

I'm posting this for Purple Girl, who commented on "resale therapy" yesterday. I wrote this poem about my own "weird twin," Mark, but I wonder if others of you have friends like this.

Reincarnation II

In another life, maybe,
we could not bear separation.
We made a pact.
This part is true: We were born
on the same morning, in the same hospital,
two white roses laid on the altar.
Before we forgot our past,
did we look across the nursery
and smile?

Funny Economics

Fred Barnes calls president Obama the know-nothing-in-chief. Because Obama supposedly doesn't understand economics.

I wouldn't be surprised by that, to be quite honest. Most economists don't really understand economics (says she in a snarky voice while filing her scales sharper). Economics is a very fuzzy science and not in that cuddly way.

But Barnes himself has gaping holes in his grasp of the Dismal Science:

Obama professes to believe in free market economics. But no one expects his policies to reflect the unfettered capitalism of a Milton Friedman. That's too much to ask. Demonstrating a passing acquaintance with free market ideas and how they might be used to fight the recession--that's not too much to ask.

But the president talks as if free market solutions are nonexistent, and in his mind they may be. Three weeks after taking office, he said only government "has the resources to jolt our economy back into life." He hasn't retreated, in words or policies, from that view.

At his press conference, Obama endorsed a surtax on families earning more than $1 million a year to pay for his health care initiative. This is no way to get the country out of a recession. Like them or not, millionaires are the folks whose investments create growth and jobs--which are, after all, exactly what the president is hoping for.

There's that free market animal again. It might come as a surprise to Mr. Barnes, but the concept of 'a free market' is not terribly common in economics. There are unregulated markets, true, and there are what economists call competitive markets.

But an unregulated market is not necessarily a competitive market and truly competitive markets are a little less common in real world than in the conservative religion which worships the Jealous God of something called free markets.

Then there's the idea of the rich people as the ones who give the rest of us jobs and growth, through their investments. But actually those people are called entrepreneurs, not rich people. Some rich people have inherited their wealth and some rich people invest and spend it abroad, not here at home.

Note also how Barnes ignores the demand side of the economy altogether. The entrepreneurs are not going to invest if there's no demand for their products and that demand depends on consumers having money. One way to get that money into consumers' paws is through government projects.

Barnes goes on the same way, by focusing on some issues and completely ignoring other issues. For example, he bemoans the high U.S. corporate tax rate and argues that it makes U.S.firms uncompetitive, but he fails to point out that the ultimate corporate tax payments in the U.S. are not high when compared to similar countries, because of all the loopholes the U.S. tax laws allow firms to use.

This Is Bad (Trigger Warning)

An eight-year old girl of Liberian origin was gang-raped in Phoenix by four boys also of Liberian origin and not much older than herself. But that's not the only reason this is news:

Lured by promises of chewing gum and raped in a shed by four boys barely older than her, an 8-year-old Liberian girl is now in foster care and living with strangers instead of the family that raised her and brought her to America.

...

Police say the girl's father told a police officer and a Child Protective Services worker that he doesn't want her anymore.

We must stop victim-blaming in all countries of the world. And we really must stop thinking that an eight-year old girl could somehow be responsible for her own gang-rape or that a raped woman or girl brings shame to her family. The shame belong to someone else entirely. Most prominently to all the cultures of the world which view girls as less valuable than boys.

It's not that long ago when much of rape here was regarded as shameful enough for women to hide from the authorities. It still happens, actually.

Friday flower blogging (by Suzie)

I love hibiscus. This was in my garden, when I lived in a house and had a yard.

Identity made material (by Suzie)

The following poem was published by Breath & Shadow: A Journal of Disability Culture and Literature as well as the Liddy Shriver Sarcoma Initiative. I think it relates to the post below. I've always been amused that people think I'm smarter when I'm wearing my glasses.
----------
Reincarnation I

In a complex world,
people see simply.
My identity has changed
as I’ve changed jobs, lovers,
clothes.
I become someone else
by taking off my glasses.
Now I’m a cancer patient,
the rest surgically removed.

Resale therapy (by Suzie)

As a volunteer in the cancer world, I’ve noticed that a lot of newly diagnosed patients feel the urge to give away stuff while others buy everything they ever wanted.

I work primarily with women, and I don’t know if men do this to the same degree as women. My guess is that this behavior is more common in women because women been attached to giving and shopping historically. In the West, for example, it often has been the job of women to remember gifts at holidays as well as to do the household shopping.

Women who give away stuff may see less value in material things as they value other aspects of their life more. Or, they may think the cancer will kill them, and they’d prefer to distribute their stuff to particular people while they still can. This may have to do with the desire to be remembered.

Those who indulge in “retail therapy” may feel like they have sacrificed enough. Or, they may want to enjoy what little time they have left. Shopping can be like hoarding for a rainy day.

I did the former when I was diagnosed. One motivation was: I had settled the estates of my grandparents and parents, and I wanted to lessen the burden on my executor. One friend was so creeped out that I told her she could return my carnelian necklace if I survived five years. (I’ve survived seven, and I got the necklace back. I forgot how pretty it was.)

In addition to giving away things, I didn’t buy new things. Why get new shoes if I’m going to be in a wheelchair? My mattress was almost 20 years old, but why get a new one if I’m just going to ruin it?

A couple of years ago, I got tired of living like a refugee, on the border between life and death. The shopping spree began. Because I can’t afford retail, I love Shopgoodwill.com (which I wrote about here) and a weekly flea market at a retirement center near my home. The flea market is open only to residents and their guests, and it's staffed by residents, mostly women in their 70s, 80s and 90s, like the witty Hungarian woman who loves cats and the woman who served as a WAVE in World War II. I enjoy them as much as I enjoy getting a Coach purse for $3.

Sometimes I “rescue” things – like the Finn Comfort sandals for $5 that were too small for me -- in hopes of finding them a home. For a friend’s wedding, I got some ridiculously overpriced bowl on her gift registry. As a personal gift, however, I gave her a Wedgwood bowl I bought for 50 cents because we had talked about how Wedgwood helped fund abolition activities.

Although I watched Absolutely Fabulous, I still didn’t know much about labels until I became a resale queen. I’m intrigued by the markup – how something can cost more than $100 at the mall, but I can get it NWT (that would be “new with tags” for you amateurs) for a few dollars.

Environmentally, I could never justify buying all this stuff new. But I’m happy to recycle it into my closet. A vegetarian, I stopped buying leather a while ago, but now, I’ve bought leather shoes and purses because I figure I’m not adding to the demand. (Phila, come out of hiding and chastise me, if you’d like.) Ditto for the black-pearl necklace.

As medical science takes me, organ by organ, new clothes help my body image. The ideal would be to love my body the way it is. In the meantime, some fantastic outfits have helped.

I know this sounds overblown, but this buying feels like a celebration of life. I’m enjoying the bounty of beautiful things and thinking I might live a while. Even if I don’t, I’ll go out in style.
---------------
Please talk among yourselves. Today, I should be driving back from Atlanta, where I went to see still more oncologists and urologists. While I was gone, I hope I won the Farscape action figures on the Shopgoodwill auction.

Some Thursday Fun

Sasha snoozing:





Picture by Doug


And then some Laura Nyro, bless her.

Thought For The Day

The whole New York Post's "Erin Andrews and Peeping Toms" article is really about who has the right to see women naked and whether the women themselves have any say in that.

The Post pretends to be shocked (shocked!) by the idea that someone took pictures of Ms. Andrews without her permission or knowledge and then put them up on the Internet. So shocking is all this that the Post must also print some of the pictures from the video, probably in order to let the rest of us Peeping Toms be equally shocked.

Writing From The Heart. What Heart?

Hard to do. Sometimes I grind my teeth to powder just to be able to type those keys calmly and logically. Sometimes I want to tear my clothes and scatter ashes on my head and then dance the dance macabre. Sometimes I want to sleep a century or two.

Not even goddesses can survive all that emotion. Hence the need to type as if I'm a robot, as if my skull contains nothing but graduate level textbooks, as if none of all this shit ultimately matters. Hence the need to look over those schoolmarm glasses ohso innocently, to pretend that one is leading a class in simple recital. Cool. Dry. Collected. And never, never, lose your temper.

That's what I wrote the other day when I tried to post something on how to strike the right balance between information and fire in blogging. Not quite the thing, obviously, but it was one of those days. We all have them, the days when we feel that all our effort is like drops of water trying to melt down Mount Everest.

But let's be more general: What is blogging for? Is it to provide information, to have a debate, to share in some human experience, to fight to death? How much emotion should be revealed, hinted at, ridiculed? What makes the energy that we toss back and forth here meaningful, human, alive? What opens eyes and ears and hearts? There must be balance of some kind, but not the arbitrary silliness of the mainstream media. Dancing only for the god of the dark moon is not balance.

Neither is being the first horsewoman of the Apocalypse. (Which brings me right back to the invisibility of women, hah, even in our myth-making.)

On The Roethlisberger Case

Ben Roethlisberger has been accused of rape. The case itself is something I cannot comment on yet, but it's worth pointing out that the media is not quite sure what to write about the rumors, so they asked ten sports reporters (all men) about their opinions on that. Well, sports reporters are mostly men, but the case is not about sports but about a sports celebrity.

As I pointed out, the actual case remains for the courts to decide. But in general a celebrity culture is unlikely to treat the two sides in cases like this equally.

Wifebeater

That's a name for a sleeveless t-shirt. I guess the idea is that it's worn by guys who beat their wives. Or looks like something that could be worn by guys who beat their wives. There's even something called a "shooter shirt," a sleeveless t-shirt with large armholes. According to the Wikipedia the name comes from the American South and the shirt is worn mostly by men as the large armholes could make women's breasts suddenly pop out.

So I'm wondering what a husband-beater would look like. Or a child fucker t-shirt. Or a murderer t-shirt. Note that what we accept and what we don't accept tells us lots about the culture we live in. Also makes feminazis humorless bitches.

Sigh. This is what I write when I should have my talons sharply on the day's hawt news items.

Reaching For The Moon

The Apostate discusses a post by Paul Campos about the fortieth anniversary of the first moon landing and the lack of women in the program. Here's Paul:

(2) Considered as an incredibly expensive and complex exercise in practical engineering, the Apollo program was indeed a stunning achievement. In many ways it was a paradigmatically American achievement, and specifically of American men, or rather boys as men (think of the most impressive neighborhood treehouse, times ten million). Aside from putting the Russians in their place, the most important motivation was probably the sheer desire to figure out how to actually make the thing work. And it was an intensely and peculiarly male project: I don't recall ever seeing a single woman in that huge Houston control center, where hundreds of guys in short-sleeved white shirts and crewcuts ran the show.

One measure of how much has changed in the last 40 years is that the very idea of a woman astronaut in the 1960s would have seemed outlandish to most Americans (that the Russians had a female cosmonaut was widely interpreted as a preposterous publicity stunt).

He later added an explanation to his post:

Update: In response to a couple of comments, I would have thought it obvious from my remarks about how much has changed in regard to things like gender roles and being an astronaut that I wasn't ascribing the intensely male atmosphere of the Apollo project to biology, as opposed to say sexist assumptions about men's and women's work.

But the absence of women astronauts in the program has a much more concrete reason: They were excluded from it. Books have been written about that: Margaret A. Weitekamp's Right Stuff, Wrong Sex and Stephanie Nolen's Promised The Moon.

And there were women involved with the project itself as described by Robyn C. Friend in The Women of Apollo. You can hear one of the original engineers, Ann Dixon, speak about her experiences here:





I'm not sure why women's history appears to evaporate the way it does.
----
Note that I'm not arguing here that women were common in the Apollo program. But there are all sorts of reasons for that.

Today's Short Economics Post

From the Wall Street Journal:

Executives and other highly compensated employees now receive more than one-third of all pay in the U.S., according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Social Security Administration data -- without counting billions of dollars more in pay that remains off federal radar screens that measure wages and salaries.

I'm sure that executives and other highly compensated employees are a very tiny percentage of all wage-earners.

Meanwhile, in Cincinnati

No, a cockroach has not eaten Cincinnati. Instead:

State legislation introduced this month by Rep. John Adams of Shelby County, and co-sponsored by five Cincinnati-area Republicans, would require women to get a father's written consent before having an abortion in Ohio.

The 'father' in the quote is not the woman's father. That's what I thought they meant at first. It's the man who made the woman pregnant. His permission would be needed unless the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest or caused risk to her life or health. The proposal seems to directly violate the right to privacy argument of Roe v. Wade.

Wild stuff. Smells of patriarchy more than the insides of an old dirty bowler hat. If you don't get the man's permission you have engaged in 'abortion fraud!'

The proposal doesn't seem to be an anti-abortion 'pro-life' bill as much as a men's reproductive rights bill.

You Are Old, Father William

That's from a nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll. The rest of the first verse goes like this:

'You are old, Father William', the young man said,
'And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head --
Do you think, at your age, it is right?'

I like it, because it's an excellent definition of ageism. Note the young man's assumption that someone with white hair shouldn't stand on his head any longer. Just because.

Ageism is different for men and women, on average. For instance, women are affected at younger ages than men. The U.K. Mirror has done some counting of the ages of various television presenters there, and came up with these findings:

We analysed a week's worth of programmes on the main five terrestrial channels and found the average age gap between male and female presenters is six years.

But on Channel 4 the average female presenter is 10 years younger than the average male.

The biggest gap on a single day is tonight on ITV1, where male presenters have an average age of 60, compared to 27 for the women.

AOn BBC2 on Monday, the gap was 18 years. And there is no day this week when the average age of female presenters is higher than their male colleagues.

Our findings come after Strictly Come Dancing was plunged into an ageism storm when judge Arlene Phillips, 66, was replaced with 30-year-old Alesha Dixon, while colleague Len Goodman, 65, survived.

Equality minister Harriet Harman hit out at Arlene's axing this week, saying: "I am suspicious there is age discrimination there."

Selina Scott, 57, won a landmark £250,000 out-of-court settlement and an apology in an age-discrimination suit against Five last December when they went back on a deal for her to cover Natasha Kaplinsky during maternity leave.

They opted for Isla Traquair, 28, and Matt Barbet, then 32, instead.

She said: "Companies want to employ only young people, so ageism has gone underground. It has become institutionalised and it is pervasive.

The Mirror investigation is not a proper study of ageist sexism or sexist ageism in the British television industry. (Such a study would look at a much wider group of occupations, including those behind the cameras, and it would control for all sorts of theoretically valid reasons why women might be younger in that industry.) But it's suggestive, and also suggests that we might want to inquire why all the women pundits on Fox News look to be in their twenties and in the Barbie mold, whereas the male pundits range from moderately good-looking to pretty ghastly.

OK. I put on the eyeglasses of someone who cares about the physical appeal of pundits there for a moment, to point out that we heterosexual women never get much eye-candy and are not expected to want it, either, and now I take them off, to speak about why this really matters:

It's because women in that industry will never reach the lifetime earnings of men in the same industry if they are forced out at much younger ages, and it's because the only reason for that might very well be looks-based ageism which affects women much earlier. What also matters is the fact that this kind of sexist ageism is semi-condoned and even expected by the watching public.

It also matters because the real world and the television world don't look at all the same in terms of age distributions. We all know many people over fifty in the real world. They are quite rare in the television world, and older women, in particular, seem to have died off due to some odd plague. Ultimately the television world might start affecting our views of how the world really looks, you know, and then older people walking down the street will come across as either invisible or somehow totally wrong.
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For an American example having to do with a Fox affiliate, read this.

Echidne Loves Jimmy Carter

Right now, anyway. As elmlish in the comments pointed out, Carter has come out strongly against the misogyny the major religions contain. His piece for the U.K. Guardian's "Comment Is Free" says this:

So my decision to sever my ties with the Southern Baptist Convention, after six decades, was painful and difficult. It was, however, an unavoidable decision when th e convention's leaders, quoting a few carefully selected Bible verses and claiming that Eve was created second to Adam and was responsible for original sin, ordained that women must be "subservient" to their husbands and prohibited from serving as deacons, pastors or chaplains in the military service. This was in conflict with my belief - confirmed in the holy scriptures - that we are all equal in the eyes of God.

This view that women are somehow inferior to men is not restricted to one religion or belief. It is widespread. Women are prevented from playing a full and equal role in many faiths.

Nor, tragically, does its influence stop at the walls of the church, mosque, synagogue or temple. This discrimination, unjustifiably attributed to a Higher Authority, has provided a reason or excuse for the deprivation of women's equal rights across the world for centuries. The male interpretations of religious texts and the way they interact with, and reinforce, traditional practices justify some of the most pervasive, persistent, flagrant and damaging examples of human rights abuses.

At their most repugnant, the belief that women must be subjugated to the wishes of men excuses slavery, violence, forced prostitution, genital mutilation and national laws that omit rape as a crime. But it also costs many millions of girls and women control over their own bodies and lives, and continues to deny them fair access to education, health, employment and influence within their own communities.

YESS! *Gives herself a high-five*

I have always said that religion is one of the pillars on which misogyny rests (the others being law and pseudo-science), and that is a truly awful thing. Because either some divine power is a sadistic one or the people who have interpreted the will of that divine power were far too often misogynists. And what are the poor women to do? If they demand their rights they go straight to hell, you know. Sigh.

Besides, for some odd reason all the major religions were created a long time ago and allowing women very few rights didn't seem that odd then, given that the Bible, for instance, urges slaves to obey their owners and such. But we have moved on from the idea that slavery is A-OK. So we could move on from the idea that women are fields for the men to plough as they will and that women should shut up in the congregation and wait until getting home to meekly ask for clarification from their much-wiser husbands. Assuming, of course, that they are let into the houses of worship at all.

Which Is It, Hon?

When conservatives and health insurance lobbyists talk against even the idea of a public option in health insurance they come up with funny stuff like this (from a few days ago):

In the Ways and Means session, Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, who offered the amendment to kill the government plan, said it would have unfair advantages over private insurers.

"It is impossible for the private sector to compete fairly with government, with all its muscle and all its tools," Mr. Ryan said. He predicted that many employers who now provided health benefits would "dump their employees into the public plan."

Under the bill, the government plan would initially pay health care providers at rates pegged to Medicare rates, which are on average lower than what private insurers pay. Some Democrats joined Republicans in objecting to this provision.

Mr. Pomeroy said: "I have a serious problem with the public plan in this bill because it's based on Medicare rates."

Why do I call it funny? Because the usual conservative argument against government provision of anything but dead people of other nationalities is that the government is too inefficient! Now suddenly it's too efficient! Butbut... I thought it was the markets which were efficient! My poor head hurts.

It would be possible to take that argument about the unfair advantages of the government and to transfer it to those markets where the larger firms have all sorts of 'unfair' advantages: economies of scale, the ability to get quantity discounts from their suppliers and so on. But I've never read a conservative critique of that (though they may exist, somewhere).

Then Mr. Pomeroy's argument that pegging the public option rates to Medicare reimbursement rates is not fair, because those rates are lower than the private rates. But isn't this reform supposed to be both about getting more people health care coverage AND slowing down the rate of increase in health care costs? If the public option is pegged to current private rates the costs won't be controlled at all and then THAT will show how very inefficient the government is, once again.

It's like a merry-go-round.

Gender-Based Persecution And Asylum

A piece in the Washington Post discusses the problem of women who seek asylum in the United States on the basis gender-based persecution in their home countries:

Rody Alvarado Peña, a victim of brutal domestic violence in her native Guatemala, sought refuge in the United States in 1995. An immigration court judge granted her asylum the next year, but almost 14 years later Rody remains in limbo. She is working in a convent in California and hoping that the Obama administration will finally resolve her case and take steps to protect women who flee their countries to escape certain death from gender-based violence.

The administration recently sent a positive signal about these types of cases, but it needs to do much more. The plight of Alvarado Peña -- an indisputably peaceful woman at risk for deportation -- underscores both the dysfunction in our immigration system and the fact that our nation's promise of mercy and refuge is still applied erratically, even capriciously.

Nobody disputes the facts of this case. At age 16, Alvarado Peña married a career soldier. He raped and beat her with abandon, breaking mirrors over her head, causing a miscarriage by kicking her until she hemorrhaged and viciously beating her until she lost consciousness. With divorce impossible without her husband's consent, and no shelters or supports available, Alvarado Peña fled to the United States.

Initially, she was granted asylum, but because a dispute continues over whether gender-based persecution is a basis for asylum, the Immigration and Naturalization Service appealed the case. A few years later, the Board of Immigration Appeals, the nation's highest immigration court, denied her asylum. The judges did not dispute what had happened to Alvarado Peña, and they recognized her husband's violence as "deplorable." Still, they found no basis in law to grant Alvarado Peña asylum.

Read the whole article as they say. I'm skating on thin ice here (due to not knowing the field very well), but it's my impression that the problem is how persecution is defined. If it is by the government of a country then the law grants a reason for granting asylum. If it is something the home country of the woman just condones or tolerates in general (say, by having laws against wife-beating on the books but not enforcing them) then there is no basis for political asylum.

I may be wrong about this and welcome more information. And discussion, of course.

Tiahrting

I have no idea how Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R) of Kansas says his last name, but I hear it as one of those embarrassing bodily eruptions. Because of this:

Arguing to restrict the public funding of abortions within the District of Columbia, Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Kans., suggested on Thursday afternoon that if such "financial incentives" were available some 47 years ago, Barack Obama himself may never have been born.

"If you think of it in human terms, there is a financial incentive that will be put in place, paid for by tax dollars, that will encourage women who are -- single parents, living below the poverty level, to have the opportunity for a free abortion," said Tiahrt. "If you take that scenario and apply it to many of the great minds we have today, who would we have been deprived of? Our president grew up in a similar circumstance."

"If that financial incentive was in place, is it possible that his mother may have taken advantage of it?" Tiahrt asked. "Clarence Thomas, Supreme Court justice, if those circumstances were in place, is it possible that we would be denied his great mind? The opportunity to have tax-funded abortions, a financial incentive, is something that I think most of us want to oppose in America and it's certainly deserves a clean up or down vote."

Note the racism? It's only black men who are mentioned as possible victims of abortion. It's harder to see the sexism, but note that it's only black men who are mentioned by name, except for president Obama's mother, and she is only brought in as someone who might have killed a fetus which would later have developed into a great mind.

You know, that argument has been used before. Usually it's about someone having aborted the person who would have cured cancer. It's never about someone having aborted Hitler, say, or a serial killer of the more common sort.

Then there's the sexism of ignoring the woman making those decisions in the first place. She's an aquarium for the great minds!

Finally, note the classism. The wealthy can afford to snuff out the great minds of the next generation, so we must not allow the poor single-mothers to do the same. Never mind that poor women are not given much help to bring up their children in the first place, and never mind that the Republicans always want to stop those programs which do exist, however good they are (Head Start comes to mind here).

Gah.

Did You Have A Great Weekend?

Sasha did. All you need is a pillow and some uninterrupted time. Pic by Doug.

Is it time for a gender bailout? Posted by Liz

Perhaps what ails us in the U.S. can't be solved by any amount of financial bailouts. Perhaps what we really need is a gender bailout. Instead of throwing money at our problems, why not women? Both Norway and Spain have mandated gender equity on corporate boards. Should the U.S. government demand the same?

Let’s review the numbers:

Women hold only 15 percent of all board seats in this country.

A new report from the National Council for Research on Women (NCRW) titled "Women in Fund Management" shows women are under-represented in fund management positions. Ten percent of all mutual fund managers are women and only three percent of the trillions of dollars invested in hedge funds are controlled by women.

There are similarly low percentages when you look at the number of female CEOs in the Fortune 500, female partners in law firms, women in newsrooms, women in Congress, etc. etc.

Yet,

Fifty-one percent of the country's population is female.

Women make 85 percent of all consumer purchasing decisions in this country.

Almost half of all workers in the U.S., and one third of all business owners, are women.

Studies continue to demonstrate women are strong assets in business. There is the data from Catalyst that shows companies with the highest number of women in top management experience better financial performance than companies with fewer women at the top. And a little know study from two Boston College professors shows that Wall Street responds more favorably to financial moves made by companies with a female CFO.

So how about a gender bailout? Some might see it as affirmative action. Others might view it as simple equality – half of the population holding half of the power. Or, it might be the kind of decisive leadership we need to help bail us out of our current economic situation.

How Our School Texts Are Created

Funnily enough, they evolve, and mostly in Texas, because the Texas school system is such a big buyer of books and the publishers don't want to make many different versions. So the objections of Texas fundamentalists can affect what many, many American children learn at school. Weird, eh?

Here's a story about some of the stuff that they discuss down in Texas:

The Dallas Morning News reported last week that conservative "experts" advising the state of Texas on school curriculum are arguing that the state's social studies and history textbooks are giving "too much attention" to some of U.S. history's most prominent civil rights leaders. David Barton, one of the so-called "experts," claimed Hispanic labor leader César Chávez "lacks the stature, impact and overall contributions of so many others." A colleague on the panel agreed, also singling out Thurgood Marshall for exclusion:

"To have César Chávez listed next to Ben Franklin" – as in the current standards – "is ludicrous," wrote evangelical minister Peter Marshall, one of six experts advising the state as it develops new curriculum standards for social studies classes and textbooks. [...]

Marshall also questioned whether Thurgood Marshall, who argued the landmark case that resulted in school desegregation and was the first black U.S. Supreme Court justice, should be presented to Texas students as an important historical figure. He wrote that the late justice is "not a strong enough example" of such a figure.

Goddess knows what they do about famous women (probably none of them count as famous) or about gender roles and such.

In The Series Of First Women

These seem worth following. Here's one:

More history was made at the White House on Thursday when President Obama climbed aboard his waiting helicopter: An all-female Marine Corps crew was taking him to Andrews Air Force Base.

It was Maj. Jennifer Grieves' last day in a rotation that made her the first female pilot of Marine One, the presidential helicopter.

To honor her achievement, Thursday's three-person crew was made up of women — another first.

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The pictures have nothing to do with the topic, though of course Sasha is a female and might be meeting her first teacup. Pictures by Doug.

Senate approves hate-crime legislation (by Suzie)

Gender, disability, sexual orientation and gender identity would be added to hate-crime legislation, under a measure passed yesterday by the Senate. Obama has promised to sign it into law. The act is named after Matthew Shepard.

You can read more here. Just remember that hate-crime statistics generally do not include gender now. I wrote about this in May. You may want to check out that post, plus the excellent comments.

ETA: links I left in comments in May. RAINN discusses rape as a hate crime. Here's a good law review article on why rape should be a hate crime.

In 1999, Sen. Ted Kennedy said rape should be prosecuted as a hate crime only if "gender animus" could be proven (or else it was done because of another bigotry, such as bias against gays). The conservative Concerned Women for America responded that all rape involved hate (although it opposes the classification of "hate crime" for any crime.)

Here are Lexia's comments from May:

Of the 45 states and DC that have hate crime laws, all of them cover race, religion and ethnicity. Only 28 cover gender. Again, more cover sexual orientation - 32. Source data here.

Thurgood Marshall's unworthy successor as lead council for the NAACP, Jack Greenburg, said, "Domestic violence is as American as apple pie, and you just wonder whether the federal courts can handle it." The quote was published in "Legal Times" during the passage of the 1994 Violence Against Women Act. Referenced here.

For men of any race, creed, color or sexual orientation, the greater the pervasiveness and degree of violence, the greater the urgency to eliminate it. For women and only for women, the inverse applies: It's too big a problem, so it's insoluble, so help us fight male violence against other men or shut up.

For a brief period from 1995 or so till 2000, rape was classified as at least a civil rights violation against women. In 1994, the Violence Against Women Act was passed after a "mountain of evidence" and years of congressional testimony showed that male violence affects the lives of almost every woman in America.

In 2000, VAWA was eviscerated by the Supreme Court in "U.S. v. Morrison." (Opinion) (Dissent here and here) ... VAWA had been opposed by federal judges from its inception, because women's rights were violated on such a massive scale the judges didn't want that clogging up the courts and keeping them from important business.

The other legal bastion of protection from violence and hate because of the body a person was born into, the 14th amendment, was ruled out for women in Gonzales v. Castle Rock in 2005.

Friday critter blogging (by Suzie)

This is an old photo of Tom telling Willie to back off; he's tired of Willie's kitten foolishness. It may be hard to see Tom's white paw, bright in the sunlight, reaching out for Willie.

Investing in women (by Suzie)

Investors often do not realize the power they have to move the needle on issues like gender empowerment. Every investor—and most of us are investors, if we have retirement plans—can tell their portfolio manager or plan administrator that they wish to vote their proxies in favor of gender equity, which means voting for shareholder resolutions on diversity disclosure and withholding votes from all-male boards of directors.

This quote comes from Joe Keefe, CEO of Pax World Mutual Funds, at the “Gender Equality as an Investment Concept” seminar in May in Washington, D.C. Pax describes its Women’s Equity Fund as “the only mutual fund in the U.S. whose focus is on investing in companies that invest in women."

When I worked for a newspaper owned by Media General, employees got stock as part of retirement plans. Some of us would add a note each year to our proxy, arguing to put a woman on the board. I don’t know if that helped, but it’s better than doing nothing.

Misanthropic men in movies and TV (by Suzie)

A friend lent me the first season of Showtime’s “Queer as Folk,” which ran from 2000 to 2005, and depicted gay friends in Pittsburgh. Watching it, I understood why porn has gotten more and more extreme. At first, I was amazed by the graphic sex scenes in every episode, and then I grew bored.

The misogyny among the gay men also bothered me. (I’ve written about this before.) Tops (the ones who penetrate anally or receive orally) often are depicted as strong and masculine while the bottoms are associated with the feminine. The tops definitely get more respect. Those who are more stereotypically feminine are subject to more ridicule from other gay men.

My last complaint has to do with the title of this post. The character Brian is a narcissist: a handsome, talented, high-earner who is cold, arrogant and manipulative. His friends Michael and Lindsay love him; the teenager Justin falls in love with him; and others consider him a friend. Brian gets praised when he finally sulks his way into doing something right.

It reminded me of “As Good as It Gets,” where an “obsessive-compulsive, misanthropic bigot” ends up with a beautiful, younger blonde because he finally does right. This is why I can’t get into “House,” where another selfish and arrogant man still wins praise. The anti-heroes of both of these pieces also are sexist, but that just seems part of their rebellious charm to some viewers.

Can you imagine women in any of these roles?

Reading Is Good For You!

Even if it's an old telephone directory and you really need to taste it. Pic by Doug of Sasha.

I have a special treat in store for you soon, my dear readers. Katha Pollitt has kindly agreed to be interviewed about her new book: The Mind-Body Problem: Poems. And you can ask her questions, too! So all poetry lovers, watch this blog in the next few days.

Class Wars, Take 34,567,890

I've always found it very hilarious that we are supposed to only see class wars when the lower classes fight, because in reality class wars are an ongoing business, and mostly they are waged by the powerful against the rest.

The propaganda is everywhere. For instance, I'm sure you've heard how very hard the rich work and that's why they deserve their incomes. The poor don't work, not at all, and no rich person has ever inherited all that dough.

Then there's the argument that all the societal wealth comes from the rich working so hard. If they decided to 'go Galt' then nobody would have those cushy minimum wage jobs any longer and wouldn't we cry then! So better not try to tax them back into poverty!

Anyone who argues differently is a) a communist, b) a welfare queen and c) just unwilling to pull herself up by those stiletto heels. Something of that sort. Yet none of this is interpreted as another battle in the class wars.

I thought about all this when I read some of the reactions to the new plan to use an extra tax on the high-income people to fund some of the health care changes the Obama administration is working on. Even if that extra tax is very small in percentage figures, those old arguments crop up.

One argument that is less and less founded in reality these days is the one about capitalists being the risk-takers who deserve high incomes because they are always just one misstep away from going bankrupt. The service they provide is supposed to be the carrying of risks in ways which allows for more innovation and more of those cushy jobs for the rest of us.

But the other side of that argument should be that a) workers don't have to carry that same risk and b) that the market is allowed to punish bad entrepreneurs by actually making them face the consequences of poor luck or bad decisions.

Neither of those is what I see happening, rather the reverse. If workers are left with so much of the relative risk from the failing economy and outsourcing via globalization, and if entrepreneurs get golden parachutes and big bonuses, who is it who is carrying the risks here? Hmh?

How Old Is Too Old?

Maria del Carmen Bousada has died at 69, leaving behind three-year old twin boys:

Beginning in 2005, Bousada underwent hormone treatments to reverse nearly 20 years of menopause and sold her house to pay for in vitro fertilization at the Pacific Fertility Clinic in Los Angeles.

Slender with dark brown hair, she told the clinic she was 55 — the facility's maximum age for single women undergoing the procedure. When her sons were born in December 2006, Guinness World Records said she was the oldest woman on record to give birth.

Dr. Vicken Sahakian, director and owner of the clinic, said Bousada falsified her birth date on documents from Spain.

When he learned of the deception, "I figured something might happen and wind up being a disaster for these kids, and unfortunately I was right," he told The Associated Press.

...

There is no U.S. law regulating the age of in vitro candidates, but Sahakian said his clinic won't take older women because "I would like the mother ... to basically survive until the kids reach 18."

...

Allan Pacey, secretary of the British Fertility Society, said the organization recommends that assisted conception generally not be provided to women beyond the natural age of menopause at about 50.

"The rationale ... is that nature didn't design women to have assisted conception beyond the age of the natural menopause, he said. "Once you get into the mid-50s, I think nature is trying to tell us something."

"I think many people would worry about providing fertility treatment to women in their 60s. I think as a general rule, to embark on pregnancy when you may not see your child go to university is potentially a very difficult situation."

So the article tells us that the main reason women shouldn't give birth so very late in life because they might die before the child is fully grown. It's not a bad argument.

Except that we don't use that argument when discussing men who sire children late in life. Take Rupert Murdoch. He had a daughter when he was seventy and another at seventy-two. It's not terribly likely that he will see either of them graduating from college. Yet I haven't seen articles pointing that out.

The argument that women are post-menopausal for a reason might have made a better case than the one this article adopted.

Interesting...

Pat Buchanan is making it so very obvious that you can say anything at all if you are a conservative dude in this country. For instance:

What they must do is expose Sotomayor, as they did not in the case of Ginsburg, as a political activist whose career bespeaks a lifelong resolve to discriminate against white males to the degree necessary to bring about an equality of rewards in society.


Sonia is, first and foremost, a Latina. She has not hesitated to demand, even in college and law school, ethnic and gender preferences for her own. Her concept of justice is race-based.

Verry interesting. So Pat thinks that justice is a zero-sum game and that in the absence of discrimination against white men they'd be naturally on top everywhere in the society. What with being much smarter and worthier than the rest of us.

I wonder if Pat remembers those times when being black and/or female got you locked out of lots of universities? It's not that long ago, and it certainly helped in making certain that 'white males' are the group from which most of the powerful are drawn. That does not mean that all white males are in power.

But what I found even more interesting is the way the post I linked to discusses Pat's comments: The bit about Justice Ginsburg is simply ignored and the rest of the post talks about race. That Buchanan addressed his barbed comment to women, first, somehow disappeared.

Nets Silent on Sexism of Anonymous Quotes Graham Used

So says Media Matters for America. Perhaps not silent altogether, but it sure is true that sexist assertions are one of those creatures which many pundits can't spot. Is it there or is it not there? How does one earn the reputation of a bully? How many people must call you that? And is there a difference between gals and guys in that? What can a woman do not to be called a bully? And a man?

The standards are different, you know, and because that different standard is still so widely accepted we sorta swim in the sea of sexism without noticing it.

You're GEORGEOUS!

I saw that misspelling recently and immediately thought that it would make a kewl new word (naming is power, after all): Anyone who acts like our previous president is gonna be called georgeous. Not quite sure how to pronounce it, so suggestions are welcome.

Today's Deep Thought

It occurs to me that the Republican questioners at the Sotomayor confirmation hearings confuse 'empathy' with 'sympathy.' It also occurs to me that focusing on whether she has empathy or not is a way to introduce some sexist stereotypes through the back door, so to speak. Women, bless the little dears, are too emotional to be judges!

Of course justice itself is personified as a woman. But that's neither here nor there as surely she wold think just like Lindsey Graham who is unable to be anything but neutral.

Just Because

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Picture by Doug, of Sasha. Music by the divine Nina Simone. Bless her.

The Mind Boggles

In Arizona, you can now take your gun into a bar which serves alcoholic drinks. But you can't drink alcohol if you do that. That's a concealed gun you can take into the bars.

I'm trying to imagine how that would work in practice. Someone walks in and orders a drink. Do you frisk them before filling the order? And what happens when the bar is full of drunks and you just take at face value that they are not armed?

The Audacity of Ross Douthat

He has written a column on the Pope's encyclical. The basic idea is that the Pope got a wonderful idea when he advocated combining income redistribution to the poor with no birth control, and that Americans don't have the audacity to think in such political aisle-crossing ways:

But Benedict's encyclical is nothing if not political. "Caritas in Veritate" promotes a vision of economic solidarity rooted in moral conservatism. It links the dignity of labor to the sanctity of marriage. It praises the redistribution of wealth while emphasizing the importance of decentralized governance. It connects the despoiling of the environment to the mass destruction of human embryos.

This is not a message you're likely to hear in Barack Obama's next State of the Union, or in the Republican Party's response. It represents a kind of left-right fusionism with little traction in American politics.

A "vision of economic solidarity rooted in moral conservatism"? Who is it that one has solidarity with, in that scenario? It's a useful thinking exercise, because ultimately what the Pope advocated is a system where power and resources are more equally shared among men. Men of all classes and races. But the role of women in this system really is as one of those resources that are shared, and banning birth control guarantees that the choice when to have children and how many to have will not be held by the women.

I'm exaggerating, naturally, to make the underlying point clearer, and that point is about power. Who gets to have more self-determination, more rest and ease, more resources. And who does not. It's a devil's contract the Pope is offering, because so many goodies for the liberals and progressives are included in it and the cost is so easy to ignore as it falls upon women.

I call it a devil's contract partly because I doubt that the Pope would ultimately support all practical income redistribution efforts (based on history of the Catholic Church) and partly because the reactions of so many liberals and progressives has been to say "Hey, the Pope is on our side!" But mostly it's a devil's contract because it makes any woman who argues against it look like someone who is willing to sacrifice all the poor of this world for her own selfish little reasons.

Thus, it is important to see that the encyclical is about the sharing of power among more men.

Dr. Regina Benjamin

Is president Obama's choice for the job of the U.S. Surgeon General:

When Hurricane Katrina wrecked the little clinic here in the coastal backwaters of Alabama, Dr. Regina Benjamin laid out medical charts to dry in the post-storm sun and hopped in a pickup truck to check on her patients.

When she had trouble treating the growing influx of Southeast Asian immigrants in the shrimping community because she could not understand them, she went to a nearby Vietnamese pool hall to find an interpreter.

Benjamin, 52, was nominated by President Barack Obama on Monday to be U.S. surgeon general, pledging to take her fight from a rural, impoverished outpost to the top tier of American medicine so that "no one falls through the cracks."

She said she would combat preventable diseases. Her father died with diabetes and high blood pressure, her only brother of HIV. Her mother died of lung cancer because as a girl "she wanted to smoke just like her twin brother," an uncle now on oxygen.

"I cannot change my family's past. I can be a voice in the movement to improve our nation's health care and our nation's health," Benjamin said. "I want to be sure that no one falls through the cracks as we improve our health care system."

Pushed by the diverse patient mix of Bayou La Batre — white, black and, increasingly, immigrants from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos — Benjamin has emerged as a national leader in the fight to close gaps in health.

She became the first black woman and the first doctor under age 40 elected to the American Medical Association's board of trustees, and in 2002 became the first black woman to head a state medical society.

"For all the tremendous obstacles that she has overcome, Regina Benjamin also represents what's best about health care in America, doctors and nurses who give and care and sacrifice for the sake of their patients," Obama said in the White House Rose Garden.

She sounds like a fighter and someone in touch with the health needs of the poorest Americans. I haven't been able to find out about her opinions on issues such as reproductive choice and women's health care issues in general.

Please Welcome

Xan. She has kindly agreed to write on this blog, mostly on Saturdays but also whenever the muse strikes her. She is wise and wonderful and an asset to this community, and I'm very happy to have her here.

The Wild, Wild West of the Web

It's a place where guys in cowboy hats twirl their guns and shit, right? Or a place where nobody knows you're a dog or a giraffe or a minor snake goddess. Everybody is totally equal! Totally. Except, of course, in what they get offered to look at:





This is what I found on the front page of Huffington Post. The story linked to this picture was ranked the most viewed on the site, though if you clicked on the link attached to the pictures you could also vote on men in skimpy clothing. But that's just to make it look gender-neutral which it is not. After all, the semi-nekked guys don't get to be on the front page.

Huffington Post wants to make money and advertising money is in clicks. And what gets clicked is bodies of chicks. By dicks? I'm getting carried away here, but let me just add that I would have thought Huffington Post has female readers, too. I guess their clicks don't have the power.

Sotomayor Confirmation Hearings

Begin today. Jill has a good write-up on some of the Republican talking points. I'm going to pay attention to differential treatment: Whether her treatment in these hearings passes the sex-reversal rule of Echidne. Just think of her as Simon Sotomayor and translate whatever is being said into those terms. If what you get sounds likely then she has not been treated differently because of her gender, always assuming that the issue discussed has not already been transmogrified by such concerns.

As a possible example of the latter, some conservatives have argued (truthfully or not) that Sotomayor lacks certain social skills. Whether such skills are ample among the eight male Justices of the Supreme Court isn't of interest to anyone, perhaps because only women are supposed to be nicey-nicey.

Word Salad

This time in a headline I read over the weekend:

College culture wars: Campuses seek balance.

How do you seek balance in a war? And what, exactly, is the culture people wage war over?

You may know that I hate (hate!) that term "culture war." It's such an odd combination of two different words, both now with muzzy meanings.

Take the word "culture." Many people think that it's about books and music or about which fork to use to eat jellied crab puffs or about something not truly important. Yet in this particular context that word hides and distorts issues of justice, freedom and respect. But because many who write about the so-called culture wars are spectators to them the whole term has taken that spectatorish feeling. Then one can sigh and mutter about the importance to get past such irrelevant crap.

At the same time, culture wars are all about women's rights and lives and about the rights and lives of gays and lesbians. Culture wars are about 'traditional family', about power relationships inside it and ultimately even about money. Because a wife in a traditional family will not have the same earnings capacity or rights as a husband.

To call the debates over all that "wars" places a false equivalency on the debating sides and eradicates the history which we all share and which is not a history of equal treatment of all people. Note also that one side (guess which) in the debate wants to reduce the lives of the other side, whereas that side only fights in self-defense. "War" is a bad term for something like that. "Occupation" might be a better one.

Sunday Puppy II

Same puppy as last Sunday. Picture by Doug. Expression by Sasha.

How It Is Done

Roger sent me a link to Pharyngula discussing how gender studies are sometimes popularized so that the meaning is turned upside down in the juicing-up process.

It is an extreme example of the type of bad popularizations. But I have seen the same done in a milder form many, many times, and I have written about that here and elsewhere. It's as if the plot develops in the journalist's mind first and then the bits are added in a way which supports that plot. And where do we get our plots if not from myths, stereotypes and popular culture?

Still very bad, naturally.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan

The final form of the law which regulates the personal relationships of Afghanistan's Shia minority still doesn't look terribly good for women:

The women's rights activist Wazhma Frough, who was involved in the review, said that conservative religious leaders had pressured the Justice Ministry to keep many of the most controversial clauses.

"There have been a few little changes, but they are not enough," she said. "For example, if the wife doesn't accept her husband's sexual requirements then he can deny her food."

According to civil society groups, the law, which regulates the personal affairs of Afghanistan's minority Shia community, still includes clauses which allow rapists to marry their victims as a way of absolving their crime and it tacitly approves child marriage. The law sparked riots in Kabul. Hundreds of Shia women took to the streets in protest. They were attacked by mobs of angry men who launched counter demonstrations outside the capital's largest Shia madrassa.

It is due to be ratified by parliament, which first passed the legislation in March with hardly any debate.

It strikes me that the creators of this law appear to view marriage as a labor contract: In exchange for food give sex! But the particular labor contract seems pretty one-sided as the payments to the worker (the wife) are limited to bed and board, whereas her duties appear whatever the employer (the husband) deems fit.