What's Sauce For The Gander...

Doug in the comments linked to a column by Natalie Angier in the New York Times. The column is worth a post all its own, because of this:

Small wonder that many Darwinian-minded observers of human mating customs have long contended that serial monogamy is really just a socially sanctioned version of harem-building. By this conventional evolutionary psychology script, the man who skips from one nubile spouse to another over time is, like the sultan who hoards the local maidenry in a single convenient location, simply seeking to "maximize his reproductive fitness," to sire as many children as possible with as many wives as possible. It is the preferred male strategy, especially for powerful men, right? Sequentially or synchronously, he-men consort polygynously.

Women, by contrast, are not thought to be natural serializers. Sure, a gal might date around when young, but once she starts a family, she is assumed to crave stability. After all, she can bear only so many children in her lifetime, and divorce raises her risk of poverty. Unless forced to because some bounder has abandoned her, why would any sane woman choose another trot down the aisle — for another Rachael Ray spatula set? Spare me extra candlesticks, I'm a one-trick monogamist.

...

Yet in a report published in the summer issue of the journal Human Nature, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder of the University of California, Davis, presents compelling evidence that at least in some non-Western cultures where conditions are harsh and mothers must fight to keep their children alive, serial monogamy is by no means a man's game, finessed by him and foisted on her. To the contrary, Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder said, among the Pimbwe people of Tanzania, whose lives and loves she has been following for about 15 years, serial monogamy looks less like polygyny than like a strategic beast that some evolutionary psychologists dismiss as quasi-fantastical: polyandry, one woman making the most of multiple mates.

Doug also jokingly wonders if this refers to some loose piece of feminist research, and of course it's hard to know without reading the actual research. But if research consisting of following a tribe for fifteen years, recording the number of marriage-like relationships and recording the numbers of children which survive past the crucial age of five is loose research, what the fuck should we call all those ask-the-American-undergraduates-to-rank-pictures-of-desirable-women evo-psycho pieces? So loose that the universe and our brains fall through it?

Let me calm down a bit there. Whatever the quality of this research might be (and I will check if I have time), at least it actually measures reproductive success. The importance of this cannot be overstressed. Practically all the studies I have seen speculate about the reproductive success of men who cast their seed around widely, while not offering actual evidence. Likewise, very few studies address the complaint I've made many times that getting a woman fertilized does not equal having produced a fertile adult offspring. Before that is possible the pregnancy must result in a live birth, the resulting baby must be fed and kept safe all through the next ten plus years. Only then can we measure the reproductive success in the sense of the genes being passed on.

So what were the findings of this study? Here:

In her analysis, Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder found that although Pimbwe men were somewhat more likely than their female counterparts to marry multiple times, women held their own and even outshone men in the upper Zsa Zsa Gabor end of the scale, of five consecutive spouses and counting. And when Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder looked at who extracted the greatest reproductive payoff from serial monogamy, as measured by who had the most children survive past the first five hazardous years of life, she found a small but significant advantage female. Women who worked their way through more than two husbands had, on average, higher reproductive success, a greater number of surviving children, than either the more sedately mating women, or than men regardless of wifetime total.

Angier emphasizes that the results are preliminary. It will be most interesting to follow future studies of this data set.

Noted In Passing

And only because the great state of Massachusetts (or Sodom and Gomorrah, if you like) has never had a Senator with girly parts. Never. But Martha Coakley is planning to run for the seat Edward Kennedy vacated. Not sure about her chances, however.

Public Enemy Number One: Echidne

Did you know that? And did you know that you are most likely every bit as frightening and dangerous, hmh? Certainly that's the case if you support feminism. Yes, my dears, we are the new Bonnie and Clyde of this great country of ours, speeding down sleepy suburban streets, rifles under our garter belts, ready to kill the traditional American family.

I really liked where that paragraph was going. Now it has to come down to earth which means that I have to add that I'm talking about the ultra-radical Talibanic Republican candidate for governor in Virginia, Robert F. McDonnell. He was trained in Regent University (where Jesus would go if he was somehow born fundie, wealthy and white in this country), and in 1989 wrote a thesis on the Family:

He argued for covenant marriage, a legally distinct type of marriage intended to make it more difficult to obtain a divorce. He advocated character education programs in public schools to teach "traditional Judeo-Christian values" and other principles that he thought many youths were not learning in their homes. He called for less government encroachment on parental authority, for example, redefining child abuse to "exclude parental spanking." He lamented the "purging of religious influence" from public schools. And he criticized federal tax credits for child care expenditures because they encouraged women to enter the workforce.

"Further expenditures would be used to subsidize a dynamic new trend of working women and feminists that is ultimately detrimental to the family by entrenching status-quo of nonparental primary nurture of children," he wrote.

He went on to say feminism is among the "real enemies of the traditional family."

Actually, feminism IS an enemy of the traditional family, if the word "traditional" refers to a male-dominated theocratic family without love or joy. Feminists want to replace that with a real family, of equality and mutual support and such. Or at least I want to do that. But yes, I'm aftah you, Mr. and Mrs. Traditional-Family-Values.

Now, twenty years is a long time, and perhaps Robert F. McDonnell has changed his mind on these weighty issues altogether. That sort of thing CAN happen, especially in an election year when one needs to appeal to fence-sitters and people who live in reality. And lo and behold! Mr. McDonnel indeed backtracks on some of his utterances:

McDonnell said in his statement that he is "fully supportive of the tremendous contributions women make in the workplace. My wife and daughters work. My campaign manager in 2005 was a working mother. I appointed 5 women to my senior staff as Attorney General."

I'd like to now more about his conversion experience. How did he move from his 1989 views to his present admiring stance? Did it hurt at all? And what are his current views on us frightening feminists?

That Cause-And-Effect Thingy Again...

I've written before about the importance of not assuming causality in studies which only find correlation, and I plan to write more about the oh-so-common misuse of simple correlation between two variables as somehow the Final Word On Something when the situation might be much more complex and full of sneaky omitted variables. Today's topic is related to that one but also serves as an example of some other difficulties that one stumbles upon in interpreting empirical research.

Sounds like fun, eh? I can't make it simpler because I'm fatigued (says she while reclining on her recamier). Here's the news that provoked all this:

No vacationer plans on getting sick, but many do fall ill, and seriously. All too often they land at hospitals that are anything but temples of healing.

In the popular sitcom Royal Pains, ritzy folks in the Hamptons hire a concierge doctor to tend their ills rather than an inept local hospital.

In reality, it's no comedy. A USA TODAY analysis finds two dozen hospitals near popular travel destinations, as compiled by the National Travel Monitor, have death rates among the worst in the USA. A separate analysis shows that one of every four hospitals with high death rates for heart attack, heart failure or pneumonia — 94 of 402 — are near state parks.

The quoted article recommends that travelers do some checking before picking a particular travel destination. But here's the problem with this interpretation: A hospital could have higher death rates for the very reason that it's close to a large tourist attraction. Tourists, by definition, are strangers to the place, far from their own doctors and their medical records, and that combination is unlikely to improve the outcomes of any illness attacks they may have.

This isn't necessarily the case, of course. It could be that the discussed hospitals just have worse outcomes, even when they treat local people. But in general outcomes are only meaningful if we control for the types of patients which enter the hospital. If those patients are, on average, high-risk cases then even an excellent hospital can look bad in the outcome statistics.

Once Upon A Time

I often find fairy tales appropriate for understanding American politics. Take the current health care reform. To see what really is taking place there, read the following fairy tale:


Mouse as the Cat's Tailor

A cat walked along the road carrying a large bolt of cloth under its arm. A mouse going in the other direction asked the cat:"Where are you going, cat?" "To see my tailor," the cat answered. "I need a new coat."

"Let me sew it for you" said the mouse. The cat handed the bolt of cloth over to the mouse who went to work on a coat. (Now, what you need to know here is that the mouse knows nothing about tailoring.)

A week later the cat came to pick up his new coat, but the mouse said:"Er, the coat didn't quite work out, but I could make you a nice pair of pants instead." The cat reluctantly agreed.

A week later the cat came to pick up his new pants, but the mouse said:" Er, the pants didn't quite work out, but I could make you a nice vest instead." The cat reluctantly agreed.

A week later the cat came to pick up his new vest, but the mouse said:"Er, the vest didn't quite work out, but I could make you a nice cap instead." The cat reluctantly agreed.

A week later the cat came to pick up his new cap, but the mouse said:"Er, the cap didn't quite work out, but I could make you a pair of mittens instead." The cat reluctantly agreed.(Yes, I know. The cat is stupid.)

A week later the cat came to pick up his new mittens, but the mouse said:"Er, the mittens didn't quite work out, but I could make you a handkerchief instead." The cat reluctantly agreed.

Does it remind you of anything? Try changing the 'cat' to 'the Obama administration', the 'bolt of cloth' to 'the initial health care reform plan' and the 'mouse' to the Republican opposition. Note that we started with a coat and are now down to a hankie! And the cat/Obama administration is still willing to go back for more cutting of the cloth!

What doesn't quite fit the current health care fight is the end of that fairy tale:

A week later the cat came to pick up his new handkerchief, but the mouse didn't have it made and neither was there any cloth left at all. So the cat ate the mouse, and ever since that time cats have hated mice.

In reality, we are most likely to end up with nothing. It's pretty unlikely, now, that the final public option would be strong enough to matter. And without strong public regulations (banning cherry-picking of all types, say) and a public alternative in the marketplace, the whole proposal is nothing. Sad, isn't it?

But then the Republicans have been using other fairy tales most successfully: The Sky Is Falling! The Sky Is Falling! The Sky Is Falling!

How do you prove it is not?

Plumber's Cracks

Are perfectly OK, but women who have jeans low enough to reveal the beginning of their butt cracks are headed for lives of indignity, irresponsibility and self-loathing.

These words are not from some Taliban playbook. They are from a book by an American wingnut, Christopher Caldwell, who writes about the problems with European women's freedom and the beginning of the era of Islamic Europe:

This is why Caldwell refers to poverty-stricken Muslim enclaves as "the strongest communities in Europe" — strong, that is, in the context of a pitifully weak post-religious and post-nationalist Europe. "Islam is not the second religion of Europe but the first," he says, because it has maintained its "vital energy," while there is nothing left to European Christianity but a superficial "lifestyle." He even ends up agreeing with Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, that Europe's "materialist civilization" is "on the verge of collapse." Caldwell feels more at home with Muslim values than with the values of contemporary Europe — as, he says, would Dante. And Caldwell also values women's chastity more than women's autonomy because chastity (not to mention virginity) "can further dignity, responsibility, and self-respect." You may think that burqas and niquabs demean women, he ironizes, but what about "jeans that cinch halfway down the bum crack"?

It's always refreshing to find a wingnut honest enough to admit that he'd love to have his own Taliban-movement here at home. Women properly sequestered! Uteri carefully covered! Dignity and self-respect blossoming everywhere among women!

Except that I have never seen the chain of logic spelled out on all that properly. For instance, once we get all those horny women off the streets, will there be no demands for porn, no demands for sex, no demands for extramarital affairs? Once all women are chaste, what the fuck will men do for a fuck? And if covering up is the way to dignity, responsibility and self-respect, why not advocate it for all the wingnut men, including Christopher Caldwell?

But I forgot. Of course women are different from men and of course the topic of how women should behave is a legitimate one, because the future of the Western culture depends on it! The topic of men's behavior is not a legitimate one, and men may behave as they wish, in Caldwell's world. They may even do their utmost to persuade women off the glorious street of chastity! And if they succeed in that, it's the women's fault.

More generally, I love the circularity of the anti-feminist wingnut theme in the wider story of why Yurp Will Fall To Islamic Extremists:

The licentious and irreligious Europeans are what will cause the end of Europe As We Know It. In particular, European women, selfish creatures as they are, refuse to breed in adequate numbers, because that would hamper their enjoyment of nasty infertile sex, foreign vacations, BMWs and other such incredibly common aspects of European life. The evil European women also refuse to stay at home with the children they have not produced.

These are the reason why Islamo-Fascists will win! The New Europe will be a place where women will be forced to breed, to stay at home and to cover up! And the European women deserve all this, because they have refused to breed, to stay at home and to cover up to prevent it!

See the problem with these types of arguments? Well, one problem. The other one is the general misuse of statistics in pieces like these. I also get the feeling that very little actual travel in Europe is required before a wingnut writes a book bashing a whole continent.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan

The turnout of women voters in the elections was miserable. That's not a bug but a feature, of course:

Although no official turnout figures are available and the election results are not yet final, election monitoring groups and political activists from Taliban-plagued provinces report that in dozens of insecure districts, almost no women voted. Nationwide, they say, women's participation was much lower than in either the 2004 presidential or 2005 parliamentary elections.

The sense of eroding political rights for women did not begin with this election. In the past several years, Taliban attacks on prominent women have sent a powerful message to others who dreamed of entering public life. In the southern province of Kandahar alone, a female legislator, a women's affairs official and a female prosecutor were gunned down by terrorists. Others have received constant threats, travel with armed guards or rarely visit their constituencies.

...

"Things are reverting, and it's because of a mix of insecurity, economy and culture," said Soraya Sobrang, a physician and member of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. "For a few years when security was better, women could participate in public life and the new constitution gave them political rights. But then the attacks started, and people were warned not to send their daughters to school, not to send their wives to work. All their new rights came under threat, and nothing really changed in their lives."

Now, Sobrang said, many Afghan women have lost hope.

"We have lost a lot of the ground we made. Women still face forced marriages, still work in the fields, still depend on men who beat them every day," said Sobrang, who voted on Aug. 20 in a very short line of nervous, unsmiling women. "We can give a card to a woman and tell her to vote, but that does not protect her from danger, and it does not give her any real rights at all."

The losing of hope is a feature, too, of course, because apathetic women are easier to keep at home or working the fields. Neither are they especially eager to rise up and demand their rights. So it goes.

I wish I had something more optimistic to write on this topic. But as long as Taliban values reign in Afghanistan, women there are going to have rights at most equivalent to those kind people here give to their dogs: the right to go out but only when accompanied and so on.

Outraged and Offended by Isotoner (by Liz)

Phila's excellent post yesterday on Fay Weldon asked the question, "Who wants to be outraged and offended and tense all the time?"

This is exactly how I felt this week while discussing the case of the Isotoner employee who was fired for taking unauthorized breaks to pump breast milk. Not only did her employee fire her, but the Ohio Supreme Court upheld the firing. Read more about it here http://www.sconet.state.oh.us/rod/docs/pdf/0/2009/2009-ohio-4231.pdf.

An excerpt, "According to the trial court, “Allen gave birth over five months prior to her termination from [Isotoner]. Pregnant [women] who give birth and chose not to breastfeed or pump their breasts do not continue to lactate for five months. Thus, Allen’s condition of lactating was not a condition relating to pregnancy but rather a condition related to breastfeeding. Breastfeeding discrimination does not constitute gender discrimination."

The case itself is disturbing enough. But the reaction to it is equally disturbing. Most people I know hadn't heard about it. Of course, the news cycle has been dominated by Senator Kennedy all week, but when I did mention it to people, I did not get what I felt was the appropriate level of shock, outrage, indigantion…or, oh I don’t know…something, anything.

So here I will admit my weakness. When I hear about cases like this, and I feel alone in my reaction to them, sometimes I wonder just what Phila wrote, "Who wants to be outraged and offended and tense all the time?" Is it easier just to go along?

Okay, moment of weakness has passed. I am outraged, offended and tense about this case. And I am willing to stay that way as long as necessary.

I say, better to be outraged, offended and tense all the time, than to be less than who I am.

The Aspirations of Women (by Phila)

One of the worst things about living in a misogynist society is that capitulating to it can seem like a relief. Who wants to be outraged and offended and tense all the time? Why shouldn't you just accept things as they are, and make up for whatever disappointment you feel, or abuse you get, by praising yourself as a "realist"? Especially given the financial rewards that tend to accrue to women who portray a bemused acceptance of traditional roles as Teh New Radicalism?

That seems to be the logic behind Fay Weldon's new interview in the Daily Mail, in which she hails female subservience as an act of hard-headed realpolitik:

At work, gender should not come into it. Women are right to refuse to make the coffee, but when you get home I'm afraid you have to make the coffee.

'It's such a waste of time trying to tell your husband to pick up the socks or clean the loo. It's much easier just to do it yourself.'

Feminists might disagree, but that's merely because they took the ideal of equality too seriously.

As for feminism, Weldon said: 'Life is much better, because you are not dependent on the goodwill [!] of men. But the trouble is, the battle became too fierce, and the whole culture encouraged women to believe that men are stupid, useless creatures who are the enemy.

'But men nowadays aren't s***. They're actually much nicer.'

Except for treating women like domestic servants, that is. But that's the nature of the beast, as it were. Why fight it? After all, if you make a man unhappy by nagging him, he'll simply run off with someone else...someone who understands and follows Weldon's Eternal Truths. (And don't say "good riddance." Men who won't clean toilets are the best kind, because they're authentic. Who wants a man who acts like a girl?)

If you want to get ahead, you need to approach romance as a business, understand the laws of supply and demand, and remember that the customer is always right. Feminism is admirable to the extent that it has allowed Fay Weldon to speak frankly about sex without being ducked in the nearest pond. But when it runs up against biological determinism, male privilege, and the basic assumptions of capitalism...well, it's time to step away from the abyss, and return to First Principles.

'Women want boyfriends to be like their girlfriends, fun to go to the pictures with, but men are not like that. They want sex and they grunt. If you really want a man to be nice to you, never give him a hard time, never talk about emotions and never ask him how he is feeling.'

Weldon, I presume, is intelligent enough to know that other types of relationships are not only possible, but are happening all around her. But so what? Why split hairs, when you can take a God's-eye view of the matter, and make a categorical imperative of one's own compromises and resentments? Why commit to a difficult political struggle, when you can simply announce that God or evolution made it unnatural for men to clean toilets, and that trying to change this, for the benefit of women and men, is as pointless as trying to divert Niaraga Falls with a teacup?

One thing that's especially irksome about all this is that Weldon is not just spouting regressive nonsense out of spite, but also deploying it as a promotional tactic, for reasons that have as much to do with the structure of British journalism as with her own psychological difficulties with the basic demands of feminism. Like many people who share her ideas, she's using a powerful and essentially sympathetic cultural apparatus to advance her "daring" views, and thus to increase her own visibility relative to other novelists, while ignoring the role that this very apparatus, and the machinations of people like her, play in the formation and reinforcement of regressive attitudes. It takes a huge amount of contrivance and artificiality to portray this as authentic communication, just as it does to portray men who "want sex and grunt," and women who clean up after them with a light heart, as authentic men and women.

That said, journalism has not yet forgotten its obligation to tell both sides of the story. Here's a brief summary of "conventional" feminism's response to Weldon's claim that it's boring, unnecessary, and insufficiently enthusiastic about faking orgasms:

Critics accuse her of losing touch with the aspirations of women.

Harsh words, indeed. If only there were some way of figuring out who's right.

Friday critter blogging (by Suzie)

The color of this yellow warbler shouts: WAKE UP. Maybe it's an early bird.

Another fine photo brought to you by Peter.

Looking down on the South (by Suzie)

If you're from the North, don't insinuate that you're better than Southerners. I say this gently to my Yankee friends and allies who may not realize they are acting like colonizers talking about the backward locals, or urbanites making fun of hicks.

And, yes, a Southerner can use the term “Yankee” without having the Confederate battle flag on the back window of her pickup.

This post stems from one Saturday on Texas textbooks, in which a couple of people made fun of Texas, and one said:

If anyone ever has to pass a test to get a job, I hope that all of their competitors were "educated" in Texas.
 We need an amendment to the Constitution that allows [the] majority of the voters across the country to vote a state out of the union.

Secession was a popular joke during the Bush years. The idea was that the blue states would secede, taking with them everything worthwhile, leaving the red states to suffer. The assumption seemed to be that everyone in the red states thinks alike. That has never been true. Although McCain carried Texas, for example, Obama got 43.8 percent of the votes. (Here’s an interesting article on secession talk in recent times.)

The idea of secession, by some wealthy, white Southerners, didn't go over so well more than a century ago. Some people still talk about “preserving the Union” as if it is a holy alliance ordained for eternity.

Opposing slavery can be a purely moral decision; preventing areas of a country from seceding is political and economic. If the South had had nothing to offer the North, the North might have thought “good riddance.” We see this in world politics, in which the U.S. intervenes when its economic interests are at stake, but does far less when there’s no issue with oil or military bases, for example.

Some people don’t understand the extent of slavery in the North, or how white Northerners benefited from Southern slavery, even after it had been abolished in their own region. Some think opposing slavery was the same as supporting equal rights and opportunities for African Americans. Perhaps they think that economics played no part in abolition in the North. If so, they should read this.

Righteous Northerners could have invaded, liberated all enslaved people, invited them north and then let the South secede. Or, they could have refused to buy anything from the South, or transport its goods, until slavery ended. But that would have hurt their industries, which needed the South’s resources, made cheaper by the forced labor of slaves. To some degree, it parallels the situation today in which a lot of people hate to hear about bad labor conditions, including human trafficking (i.e., slavery), but not all of them are willing to part with cheap goods.

As a white Northerner, if you want to feel superior because of slavery, check the complicity of your family. (If you want to know about my family: My parents were Yankees who moved to Texas for my father’s job a year before I was born.)

A new book by a Harvard professor and a Washington Post journalist notes “that the majority of white Southerners opposed secession, and a significant number fought for the Union.” Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer say the Confederacy resembled a totalitarian government.

As in the Vietnam era, some Southerners were forced to fight or had few other opportunities or knew little about the politics of the conflict. They also may have fought to protect their homes. Think of Iraq: A person can dislike his leaders and their policies, but he may still fight against what he considers an invading force.

The following from History Central gives further insight into why a number of white Southerners didn’t support secession, but still became embittered.

Most Southern white families did not own slaves: only about 384,000 out of 1.6 million did. Of those who did own slaves, most (88%) owned fewer than 20 slaves, and were considered farmers rather than planters. Slaves were concentrated on the large plantations of about 10,000 big planters, on which 50-100 or more slaves worked. About 3,000 of these planters owned more than 100 slaves, and 14 of them owned over 1,000 slaves. ...

By the end of the war, the South was economically devastated, having experienced extensive loss of human life and destruction of property. Poverty was widespread, and many resented the many Northerners and Southerners who took advantage of the needy in the South as the war came to an end. These conditions made it more difficult for the nation to heal the wounds which its union had suffered.

Reconstruction was necessary, but it was an occupation, with some Radical Republicans viewing the South as territories, not states. Colonizers may believe they are bringing better values to the colonized, or they may use that as a cover for other motives. In Afghanistan, some Republicans talked about freeing women from Taliban rule, and some women’s lives did improve.

Speaking of women, I noticed that gender often was absent, as I looked for links for this post. Reference was made to rights for African Americans, without mentioning that black men gained more rights than black women. No one noted that it was men who started and fought the Civil War. “Their” women were involved, but had few rights.

It makes sense to apply postcolonial theories to people of color in the U.S. who want to rebuild group identities. But it’s not surprising that many white Southerners also want to reclaim pride, including those who like to see themselves as both rebels and Rebels. Here’s a profile of the man who has raised a 50-by-30 Confederate flag in my county.

In the tension between urban vs. rural, industrial vs. agricultural, some white Southerners see themselves as more genteel, with stronger moral values. But they vote Republican, and they bother me in a different way than Northern Democrats who treat me like an honorary Yankee.

I have a Midwestern friend, a professor, who adopts a Southern accent whenever she wants to impersonate an ignorant person. During the Bush years, it drove me crazy when Northern allies used his ties to Texas and his accent as markers of ignorance and incompetence. Pronunciation of English words varies greatly, and the rules are full of exceptions. Bostonians who pronounce “car” as “cah” know that there is an “r” on the end. To learn more, ask a linguist. Here’s another take on the subject.

I told a white Texan friend what I was writing this week. She said, “I feel like I’ve had to fight this all my life. It’s a prejudice that people don’t really acknowledge.”

Song stuck in my head: Joan Baez’s cover of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.”

The God of Hatred

You might want to listen to preacher Anderson while you do your nails or shave or something, but make sure the sound is low, for the safety of others. Here's why:

Chris Broughton, the man who brought an assault rifle and a handgun to the Obama event in Arizona last week, attended a fiery anti-Obama sermon the day before the event, in which Pastor Steven Anderson said he was going to "pray for Barack Obama to die and go to hell", Anderson confirmed to TPMmuckraker today.

Anderson also said Broughton had informed the pastor about his planned show of arms-bearing, but "he planned out the AR15 thing long before he heard that sermon," delivered Sunday August 16 at the fundamentalist Faithful World Baptist Church in Tempe, AZ.

This is the second example of the gun-toters at the Arizona Obama event tied to the violent fringes of American life.

"I don't obey Barack Obama. And I'd like Barack Obama to melt like a snail tonight," Anderson said in the sermon.

The sermon, which was titled "Why I Hate Barack Obama" and also contained virulent anti-gay themes

The sermon can be heard at the linked site. The anti-Obama rant starts at about 12:11, though all of it is interesting to listen to, while you think about the idea of prayers in schools and the ethical superiority of religious people and other such topics. I couldn't stop imagining preacher Anderson dancing around in a straitjacket when he tells us that he wants Obama's teeth broken before Obama is melted like a snail or an embryo.

I guess I'm a hardened feminist. I was truly surprised to find several guys upset and unable to listen to this Sermon Of Hate, but then they are not used to hearing stuff like that all the time the way I am, or at least not used to hearing about how much someone hates them and why God decreed it that way.

In any case, Anderson is a nutcase, but he has his church and his tax-deduction (I assume) for the spreading of his message which today is: God. Hates. Liberals. And. Fags. Also, his god hates lots of people, especially violent people, and that's why preacher Anderson preaches violence and hatred. He serves his god by offering himself up as the sword that will smite. Or some such shit.

Mmm. The God of Hatred. Do you think that what Anderson does here just might be interpreted as incitement towards violence aimed at the president of the United States? And what should be done about that?

The Betsy McCaugheys And What To Do About Them

Betsy McCaughey is a conservative expert on health care reform and on why trying to do anything will Kill Your Granny And Get You Treated by Stalin in a Long Cold Corridor Smelling Of Fish Heads While Armed Guards Watch. It's hard to figure out where she got her training in health economics but never mind. The point about Ms. McCaughey and so many other media personalities like her is that their false utterances mostly go uncorrected.

Why is that the case? I have pondered the problem oh-so-many-times after reading some new piece of 'research' about how women can't navigate because they have no navigation gene and that's because they didn't have to learn to navigate, what with staying around the home-cave in the prehistoric eras while the menz were out navigating after the dinosaurs. I'm not exaggerating much here, and any self-respecting evolutionary biologist should rise up and ask why such 'research' is ever taken seriously. But they don't.

The ones I've known well enough to ask tell me that it's not their job to correct nutters, that they don't get rewarded for the corrections, that the nutters live inside their own little fortresses, never send their manuscripts outside it and that they run their own little journals where the peers doing the peer-reviews are other nutters. Or so I translate the more polite answers I get. And of course nobody gets promotions or tenure in the academia by correcting bad popularizations of research, especially when it's in another field. And the nutter field is, by definition, separate from other fields.

Hence the reason for the unchallenged status of all those anti-woman Evo-Psycho pieces.* But surely the same arguments cannot be used when it comes to Ms. McCaughey? After all, health care reform is not a field only studied by nutters?

Sadly, I think that they can. The goal of most academics is to be taken seriously as earnestly objective researchers (who want to get tenured and then promoted). Challenging McCaughey in public might make the challenger look biased, too, and that's not good inside the ivory towers (except where the ivories are from mammoths, of course). So in a very odd way the demand for academic objectivity is also the reason why it's so very hard to get proper criticism of political mouthpieces out into the popular media. Paying people for doing that might help, but even then you have to find someone tenured and with a full professorship. Tough, that.

We need websites which report on the accuracy and quality of controversial popularizations of research, along the lines of political sites which already do this. Getting those sites going would be in the ultimate interest of academics, because too much crap flowing out of those ivory towers will stain them.
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*I use the term Evo-Psycho to describe certain types of evolutionary psychology only, viz. the kind which starts from JustSo stories about some mythical prehistoric past and then manipulates data to get support for those stories without looking at alternative explanations or the quality of the data or the appropriateness of the methods used.

The Silly War On Feminism

I have been reading DoubleX, the Slate site intended to cover women's issues, to catch up after my vacation. It's a ball, sweeties, that site, because the idea is to juxtapose feminism with anti-feminism and to let women choose: Want your handcuffs off or with rubies? Or emeralds? Who would ever NOT want to wear handcuffs? Jewelry is a Girl's Best Friend.

This is so edgy, hawt, provoking and kewl. Imagine a site like that discussing the status of any other historically oppressed group! It. Just. Does. Not. Happen. Which is something you should mull over for a bit.

To give you a flavor of the anti-feminist arguments, Katie Roiphe (she once wrote about date-rape as being just sex you regretted later on) writes about having a baby in a piece with this title:

My Newborn Is Like a Narcotic

Why won't feminists admit the pleasure of infants?

Emily Bazelon writes for the other side on this issue and quite well. But to even create such a straw-woman in the first place! (I know Roiphe most likely didn't pick the title of the piece. But someone at DoubleX did.)

I call this a silly war on feminism because it is silly. Did you ever hear about those large demonstrations where feminists marched with placards stating "Babies are Ugly"? Neither did I, because the pleasure of babies was not something feminism ever addressed. What Roiphe really writes about is her view that biology-is-destiny (though only for women): Women like babies, men do not, men want sex so better call rape just bad sex. So why not state that in the title, if you want edgy?

For another example, an earlier piece about etsy.com, a site which sells arts and crafts, tells us that it's mostly women who sell there and you can't make a living that way (if you could, men would sell there). And all this is the fault of feminists. Yup. The title of that piece is:

Etsy.com Peddles a False Feminist Fantasy

No, you can't quit your day job to make quilts

Once again, a straw-woman is hanged in that piece. Feminists never have argued that you can make a good living on something like etsy. But note that the author of this piece doesn't give us any evidence about the sellers having quit their day jobs. Most of them may indeed have day jobs! That's one of the advantages of the Internet, you know. And if they don't have day jobs it's most likely not something they decided on just because etsy.com was born.

The piece could have addressed a real feminist question of importance: Do we educate girls to understand that they need to have skills which are properly rewarded in the labor market? And if we don't do that, how will they support themselves in the future? If they wish to work in a field which pays poorly, do they understand the consequences and the way their options are restricted? Who will support the family should they want one later on?

Incidentally, the Bible People tell women not to have careers outside the home but that a bit of apron-pattern selling is perfectly AOK on the side. Perhaps DoubleX could have addressed how that is a feminist dream, too? Or nightmare, as the case might be.

Here I go again, a humorless feminazi ranting and rampaging. I guess I do that because I really, really love infants, including baby girls, and I don't want to think of the kinds of lives those tiny, tiny humans can expect to have in most places on this earth. I want baby girls to have full human lives, the same as baby boys, and silly wars on feminism are not doing anything for them.

On Those SAT Scores

The new summaries of SAT scores by gender, ethnicity and income have come out. They are not that different from the past, even if the average scores for many groups have slipped a little. The tests are being changed over time and the population taking the tests is changing, too. For instance, recent immigrants are not going to score as well on something which is very culture-dependent than those who were born and grew up in the country. The larger the percentage of recent immigrants among the test-takers, the lower the average scores will be.

The average score for girls/women is lower than for boys/men for the American SATs. The reasons for this discrepancy have been debated, especially given that girls do better on other criteria which predict college success, but one of those reasons certainly is the fact that a larger percentage of female school-leavers takes the test when compared to male school-leavers. If those most likely to take some test first are the ones who expect to do well on it, then the average score will drop as more and more people from a certain group starts participating, always assuming that other reasons for greater participation (such as increasing income levels of families who only now can afford college for their children) are held constant.

That's why I found this statement a little puzzling:

•Average scores dropped 5 points for females and 2 points for males. While females represent more than half (53.5%) of test takers, their total average score (1496) is 27 points below that of males (1523).

There's a lot more to be written about the gender gap in the U.S. SAT scores. For example, the tests have been adjusted in the past in ways which raised the average male score and lowered the average female score and the experiences of other countries differ from the American one. But understanding the effect of more females taking the test is important.

More Travel Pictures: Gender Roles in Finland

You wanna see my pictures? I don't have them on the computer yet, but I can give you word impressions. They are mostly from that outer layer of the tourism onion: not deep insights at all but stuff anyone might notice visiting Finland, watching television and reading the papers there. My Finnish readers will correct me if I go astray here, I hope.

The first picture: Children. Many more small children everywhere, with their mothers, with their fathers, and so very surprisingly for someone who lives in the fear-the-pederasts world of today, often with other small children playing in the park or riding their bikes or walking their dogs with no adult in sight. Stores have play corners for children. One bank even had a play-bank area for kids. The local town where I stayed had at least five swing-and-slide areas within a one-mile radius.

It's hard to reconcile this impression with the assumption that fertility rates are lower there. And of course those rates are not lower than the rates of American non-Hispanic white families. Indeed, the Finnish birth rates are approximately at replacement levels. Whether this is desirable or not depends on your general world view, but it certainly suggests that having children is not something women are punished for. It also suggests that the society doesn't lock children away with just one supervising adult in the house. Add to this picture the knowledge of the long paid parental leaves and the picture suggests a certain child-friendliness which is likely to help women who want to have families and careers or jobs.

The second picture: Where The Women Work. Largely they seem to work in similar jobs to the U.S. so that the service occupations are predominantly pink-collared. But I noticed more female train engineers, bus drivers and also quite a few women in various road construction crews. How many women those traditionally male blue-collar jobs contain is something I should look up in the general statistics, but my first impression is that Finland has slightly less gender segregation at work than the U.S.. The composition of the current government leadership reinforces that impression: Power is more evenly shared by men and women. Note that it's not equally shared, however.

The third picture: Sexism. This picture is one which has undertones of older pictures, sepia-colored snapshots from my memory, mixed in with my fresh impressions. My apologies for the fuzziness this caused in the final picture.

Here's my theory about the nature of sexism across countries: Different societies rank the presumed nasty characteristics of women in different orders of importance. For instance, how much of a sexual temptress The Woman is varies by culture, and so do the views of the intellectual flaws of the Weaker Vessel or the importance attached to the Self-Sacrificing Motherhood.

In general, I argue, Finns have not viewed women as weak or as especially stupid. Rather, women have been most useful work-horses and have been seen as fully capable of doing almost any necessary task, though they have always been expected to first fill the traditional female roles. Because of the lack of the kind of messages girls in the U.S. used to get it has been easier for Finnish women to get the vote and to grasp the brass ring in some fields of endeavor, and this has not threatened the cultural definition of masculinity the way similar developments have done in the U.S..

That's my explanation for the greater equality of women in the Finnish labor force, in any case.

Now to the shadow side: The sexism in Finland is very much more openly about the female body, about its general availability to the male gaze and about The Cunt as something men should have fairly free access to. At least that's my take on what I saw. It's a little disconcerting to walk into a magazine shop and to find oneself facing The Largest Bare Tits in the Universe on the cover of a boyz' magazine, right next to a magazine about Sexual Slavery (I was kidnapped and made to serve six men and I loved it).

How these magazines make it when the Internet gives much more access to those gigantic tits I don't know, and I should point out that they were all on the top shelf in the store. Still, the naked female body is obviously public property in Finland, just as it is private property of men in some other countries. I didn't see naked men on the covers of magazines, by the way. In case you planned to ask.

Is sexism less common in Finland than in the U.S.? Hard to answer something like that, of course, given all the subcultures in the U.S. and the new immigrant cultures in Finland, but on the whole I'd answer in the affirmative. Still, I'd like to leave you with this scene: Echidne rummaging around in the Finnish equivalent of Target and coming across a stand of 'funny mugs.' One of them was called 'The Chauvinist' and the sides of the mug were covered with very sexist jokes about women. To balance that mug (imagine taking it out for your morning coffee at the office), another mug had a long list about Male Privilege. So it goes.

Edward Kennedy, RIP

I'm not the go-to-blogger on Senator Kennedy's list of achievements, but others come to my aid. He was a man who could have spent his life playing tennis or riding to the hounds but chose not to, and that alone deserves some respect.

It would be absolutely, stunningly wonderful if his passing could be honored by a better health care system for this country. This map shows why such changes are needed: Currently this country is the only wealthy country without any kind of public alternative in health care.





Added later:
You can honor Edward Kennedy's memory by signing a petition for a better health care system here.

Happy Women's Equality Day! (by Suzie)

The National Women's History Project says:

At the behest of Rep. Bella Abzug (D-NY), in 1971 the U.S. Congress designated August 26 as "Women's Equality Day".

The date was selected to commemorate the ... passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, granting women the right to vote. This was the culmination of a massive, peaceful civil rights movement by women that had its formal beginnings ... at the world's first women's rights convention, in Seneca Falls, New York.

The observance of Women's Equality Day not only commemorates the passage of the 19th Amendment, but also calls attention to women's continuing efforts toward full equality. Workplaces, libraries, organizations, and public facilities now participate with Women's Equality Day programs, displays, video showings, or other activities.

I'm stealing the NWHP's quiz, which is available as a PDF brochure. Test your friends!

1) In what year did women in the United States win the right to vote?
2) How many years of constant effort had supporters devoted to the woman suffrage campaign?
3) What suffrage leader was arrested, tried, and fined for voting in the 1872 election?
4) Which was the first state to grant women the vote in presidential elections?
5) Why were women arrested and force-fed in prison in 1917?
6) What was the margin of victory when the 19th Amendment was finally passed by the U.S. Congress?

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Here are the answers:
1) 1920
2) 1848-1920=72 years
3) Susan B. Anthony
4) Wyoming, in 1890
5) They were arrested for peacefully picketing the White House for women's suffrage.
6) Two votes in the Senate and 42 votes in the House of Representatives

Revisiting Agatha Christie (Now With A Feminist Awareness)

The house I grew up in had lots of classical detective novels, including most of Agatha Christie. I remember reading The Orient Express around a very, very young age and finding the solution truly shocking. They all did it! Over time I read all of her novels, I think. I spotted her intense hatred of the Other at some point, including that of Jews and anyone of another race as well as her contempt towards 'the lower classes.' Altogether she seemed to be a thoroughly unpleasant character, though one with good puzzle-making abilities.

During this summer's vacation I started re-reading old detective novels for relaxation (Carter Dickson, Patrick Quentin, Margery Allingham, Dorothy Sayers, Freeman Crofts, Edgar Wallace, Patricia Wentworth), and at some point I decided I could re-read Christie despite her general nastiness. That's how I ended up reading again Murder in Mesopotamia, The Pale Horse, Murder in Three Acts, Five Little Pigs and lots of other Christies.

What truly struck me was the way I had earlier totally overlooked her sexism, her great contempt towards her own sex and the number of demeaning references to women in general! Yet those statements were everywhere, sprinkled in sentences starting with "Women generally are foolish" or something similar. They were not at all difficult to find, and every single of the books I read had several of them (though I happened to read no Jane Marples).

Why was it so easy for me to see how describing Jewish bankers as oily and shifty-eyed (as Christie does) was disgusting and wrong while all the time nasty comments about women-as-a-group went somehow unnoticed by me?

Try Googling Agatha Christie with the term "racism". Then repeat with "sexism". You might find that I'm not the only person who is blind to her general contempt of women. Indeed, most societies are equally blind to it even today.

The point of these comments has to do with the quality of "mainstream." It is still acceptable to ridicule the female gender at a frequency unmatched with the ridiculing of the male gender and we are still often so used to it that we quite literally don't see it. But it must affect us.

Get The Granny! Or: This Is What I Came Back For?

You must have heard about the Death Book by now. If not, here's a nice discussion of it (shamelessly stolen from Atrios):





When we get communistimistic health care, some faceless bureaucrats will decide who shall die and who shall live. Horrifying! Not at all like the current system where the faceless market will decide who shall die and who shall live.

Frank Luntz, the Republican Mesmer, has given instructions on how to fight any change in health care, and those instructions boil down to: Make. Them. Scared.

What could be more scary than dying by someone killing you? That's why we hear this crap. Also because the wingnuts have nothing better than the discussion of living wills and the kind of stuff that we are all urged to think about in any case, such as when to resuscitate, whether to continue life as a vegetable (or a meatball?) and so on. And we do die in the end, my sweetings.

I'm not arguing that we should let nameless bureaucrats decide about death-and-life decisions (though the wingnuts do want to do exactly that with pregnant women, you know). I'm arguing that scaring us as if we were little children who fear monsters under the bed is what this is all about. No, a government-run health care system doesn't try to Get Granny. In fact, women live longer, on average, in those otherwise comparable countries which have such a system than they live here.

Echidne Goes Touristing

I have to get this out of me first, so apologies to all who are yearning for my usual man-hating posts (those due to me not being able to get laid, what with men running away from goddesses with snake bottoms and such).

So imagine me with a very gaudy Hawaiian shirt on, large binoculars around my face and a voice which speaks more loudly when someone doesn't understand proper Murkan. In short, what comes here are the equivalent of those travel pictures nobody else wants to see. Except that what I show you is good stuff, of course.

Onions are wonderful metaphoric vegetables. Often we only peel the outer layers off them and think ourselves the experts on some issue. But to really know something, you need to peel off all those layers until nothing remains. And then cry the tears onions cause.

If traveling is like peeling an onion, most of our traveling is tripping along the outer layers, perhaps dipping in about one layer's worth. Then we go home and tell our friends that we 'did' Paris or Africa or whatever.

It's not that those first impressions of a place wouldn't be interesting and fascinating and even true. But they will be almost always about weather, nature, food and similar issues. Nobody gets into the culture with a few week's trip to the place. A few months isn't enough, and not really even a few years. That has been my experience, in any case.

This trip was different, because I went back to a place of my birth. But I didn't just dive straight through the onion, coming out from the other side. In some ways I've been gone for so long that on some issues I still peel the top layers (how do these new toilets work?) while on some other issues (family) I'm in the heart of the onion. It's a very odd combination.

But what my recent experiences have taught me is the importance of culture. "Culture" here means all the different generally shared beliefs of a community, all the rules about behavior and who-does-what, all the little interpretations about what various types of behaviors mean. And an outsider, in her big tourist boots, walks straight through all those and smashes them to smithereens! Because you don't really see any of that from the outside.

Why am I writing about this? Probably partly because I think that much of writing on issues such as international feminism oversimplifies the question of culture. Cultures vary greatly even among people who are ethnically the same and have the same religion, and cultures vary greatly across the European Union. I'm going to try to keep this in mind in the future when I write (in, say, comparing women in the American South and in the Northeast). I have known this before in the intellectual sense but it's a whole different thing to 'know' it experientally.

The more important reason for writing about culture is that we tend to ignore it. A lot. Take some evolutionary psychologist (the bad kind): They assume no cultural differences, really. Sometimes they assume no culture at all. Or note how very often we just assume that the way matters are done in the good old U.S. of A. are how they 'naturally' are. Or note how very often 'cultural' issues are viewed as trivial and unimportant. Culture wars are just silly, at least if they are not about your rights to be a human being. But culture matters. A lot.

I'm Back. By Echidne

I returned last night to a loaf of bread in the kitchen. It's astonishing what a forgotten end of bread can do if you leave the kitchen windows ajar and if it's your average humid and hot August. Gives me hope for us weak-and-feared feminists, it does.

The mold had spread into all the rubber seals in the doors of the fridge and the freezer. Beautiful colors! Otherworldly. I was far too tired to do anything about them then and I still face that. Thinking of throwing the fridge out.

In fact, I'd love to throw the whole house out. Nothing like seeing beautiful Nordic design for four weeks to make you feel disgruntled with Snakepit Inc. So.

My deepest and most sincere thanks to Suzie, res ipsa, Hecate, Prometheus6, Xan, Liz and Skylanda. They kept the blog going, taught us something and didn't let anyone's brainz atrophy. Despite what George Bush did to the phrase, blogging is indeed hard work! And so I humbly thank all who were willing to step in.

It's been real (by Prometheus 6)

THE TRUTH

Accepting the truth is the only way to be able to change the truth. Accepting the truth is difficult sometimes. We often think things are other than what they are, and desire makes us search for evidence that something hidden will come to light and prove things were the way we expected them to be all along.

Meanwhile, had we just accepted events as they happened, unpleasant as they may be, we would have been freed immediately to work on changing things.

Choosing which truth to accept and which to reject is just as bad as rejecting all the truth. We accept pleasant truths and deny unpleasant ones. Or we accept unpleasant truths and deny pleasant ones - you know people that do that, don't you? Go on, tell the truth.

How do you know what the truth is, though?

It's easy, really. Much easier than most would have you believe. The only reason anyone would have you think otherwise is so that they can think otherwise and not be exposed.

Be awake. Pay attention. Ignore nothing that happens to you. Instead of acting as though things will turn out as you expect, give your best effort to make it turn out as you choose. And watch to see how it actually turns out, each action. You'll be wrong at first, because by rejecting the truth in the past, you learned the wrong ideas about how the world works. And it will be painful sometimes. But pain is as much a part of life as joy is...that's the truth.

And as you remain alert, as you stay aware, as you stop explaining away the difference between your expectations and events, you learn. And as you learn, the truth becomes clearer. And you feel strong enough to handle whatever pain comes to you.

But you're actually no stronger than you ever were. You just stop wasting your strength on the imaginary, unnecessary battles that result from denying the truth.

Frequently Asked Questions About "U-People" (by Prometheus 6)

Why do U-People romanticize the lower economic class?
Because we all know we can wind up in that class as a result of something stupid that's out of our control. We need something to look forward to.

Why do U-People complain about unfair treatment then turn around and try to treat others unfairly?
If you want to go north and find out you're going west, your original destination isn't north from where you are, it's northeast.

Why can't U-People just act like everyone else?
We do. We just do it in in a situation you don't recognize, so you don't recognize the results.

Why do U-People score lower on standardized tests if you're not stupider?
The standardized tests are best at testing conformance to the standard. The standard is a white male. As evidence, even white women score less well on the SAT than men with the same grades in college - or to phrase it differently, women get higher grades than men with the same SAT scores.

Either way, there's evidence that some factors relevant to both intelligence and success are missed by the standardized tests.

Why are U-People so violent?
As compared to what? Where is there a non-violent people?

Why do U-People always think everyone is a racist?
Well, everything in America is looked at through, measured in terms of, categorized and stored by race. So we know you have thoughts and opinions about us. Then we look at everything the society produces that depicts us. We consider that to be tangible evidence of the collective attitude. So now we know that the collective opinion of our race is negative.

This is a competitive disadvantage, and when, as a tactic, our abilities are immediately discounted to the degree that we can be made to fit people's preconceptions, we feel the tactitician and the one who executes the tactic is racist. When the tactic succeeds, we feel those who hold the preconceptions that were played on are racist.

Why don't U-People want to just accept the way things are and work to get ahead?
I need to use a metaphor for this one. Euro-American economic development has depended on extracting the value of the efforts of others. In the USofA, this has meant leveraging Black people. It's very much as if you had to get over a chasm using one of those teeter-totter arrangements Wile E. Coyote uses. . . you know, where you stand on one end of a lever, toss a heavy weight on the other end and you are catapulted forward. The USofA has used Black people as that heavy weight. The weight, in this case, has been the forced and spontaneous products of Black activity.

What we are offered now, at best, is an opportunity to toss some of our own people on the other end of our lever, to fuel our progress at the expense of others of our people.

This is not acceptable.

Why are so many of U-People in jail if you don't have criminal tendancies?
We have roughly the same proclivity to crime as everyone else. It's just that the crimes of opportunity are different for us, and you can't commit a crime without opportunity. The crimes of opportunity for us are the ones that scare the hell out of you. The crimes of opportunity for you seem to be forgivable because they're kinder and gentler (though its overall effect on the nation has been far more damaging than the muggings and such).

Beyond that, it's a truism that what you see depends on where you look. And since law enforcement officials have classified our very appearance as cause for suspicion (if we're hip-hop we're gang-bangers; if we drive a luxury car we're suspected drug dealers) they look at us a lot.

Gimme Them New-Time Texas Textbooks, Yeah! (by Xan)

So the story is all over the Innertubes here about the Texas Board of Education "advisory" committee which proposes to modify the requirements for the course on US History Since Reconstruction (warning, PDF) to require students "to identify significant conservative advocacy organizations and individuals, such as Newt Gingrich, Phyllis Schlafly and the Moral Majority."

Gearing up as I am for a possible career change into teaching, I say: Hell yeah. And the TX team doesn't go nearly far enough.

I want high school students to know about all those people just named. In addition to individuals, the board wants mention included of groups like the National Rifle Association. I propose they should add: the American Enterprise Institute. The Cato Foundation. The Conservative Citizen's Council(s). The Scaife Foundation (I think that's the name, this is sort of off the top of my head.) There are others.

This is actually good, serious teaching and good education. Who are/were the founders of these organizations? What are the groups' stated purposes and aims? Where does their money come from and where does it go? How often do persons affiliated with these groups appear on television or other media, and do those media disclose the "aims and purposes" of the groups or just state the name without context?

This could be a very good textbook indeed. And given the influence that Texas (and California) have, due to their populations, on textbooks all across the country, I may very well find myself teaching out of one of them one of these days.

Not in Texas though. Those people are nuts down there. Look who they let be on their state Board of Education. Look who they tend to elect to statewide office. (shudder.) Nearly reconciles me to living in Tennessee, it does.

Friday critter blogging (by Suzie)

My friend Kathi sent me this photo of her grandbunnies, BamBam (with the hat) and Mugu. An employee of Red Door Animal Shelter in Chicago created the background and the costumes.

Sexism & how we see animals (by Suzie)

Two female zookeepers had just finished tossing chunks of meat to three young lions as a man and woman watched. The man asked the zookeepers if the lions were treated differently than they would be in the wild. One responded incredulously, “People don’t throw meatballs at them in the wild.”

Man: “The male is clearly the dominant one.”
Keeper: “Actually, Iris appears to be.”
Man: “Yeah, but when that bird landed, the male showed a real mean streak.”
Keeper: “Actually, he’s very sweet, and we think he’s afraid of the birds.”
Man: “Well, God sure made males ugly. So, he had to give us something!”

“Weird ideas about gender?” I wanted to blurt out. Men calling males ugly strikes me as some attempt to prove their heterosexuality. It would be wrong to say that even a male of another species might be attractive.

These aren’t exact quotes, but they capture the gist of the conversation, which occurred at Busch Gardens in Tampa. It reminded me of a 2007 St. Petersburg Times series on Lowry Park Zoo, which, in turn, was reminiscent of Donna Haraway’s “Teddy Bear Patriarchy,” but not in a good way.

I could better understand a reporter turning in a quick story with sexist anthropomorphism, but Pulitzer-Prize-winner Thomas French worked on the nine-part series for four years. I realize that he was quoting others at times, but he chose how to frame the story, what to quote, who to quote, and whether to give them authority.

He discusses a female tiger and a male chimp, both of whom are dominant and won't mate with others of their species. But the tiger is called a diva. Enshalla doesn't rest or sleep; she "lounges." She doesn't clean herself; she "preens." She flies into "rages" against zookeepers. (How odd for a solitary, territorial carnivore.) She "toys" with males who try to "possess" her.

Her keepers understand the necessity of adding to the world's dwindling supply of Sumatran tigers. Still, they can't help admiring her invincibility. One keeper, a modern woman with modern ideas, takes great satisfaction in Enshalla's refusal to automatically concede to the male imperative. It makes this keeper happy that many of the female animals she works with are dominant.

"All our girls are like that here,” she says, smiling proudly.

As pleasing as Enshalla's independence may be, it poses another threat to her future. Feminism is a human invention, just like morality and ethics ...

French never explains why her own future would be in danger -- unless her inability to bear cute cubs made the zoo less interested in her. He doesn't examine whether the zoo's treatment of Enshalla, including its choice of males, affects her desire to mate. Instead, she is "coquettish," a "bitchy woman who doesn't know what she wants" or one who wants the new male tiger, Eric, to be "forceful" with her.

Finally Eric has had enough. He growls, clamps his jaws onto her neck and holds her down as he mounts her.

Afterward, Enshalla is described as so happy that she "luxuriates" at his feet. At least one Web site on tigers says the male grabs the neck of the female, not to hold her down, but to maintain the best position for mating. Enshalla may have rejected Eric initially for any number of reasons, not because she was a tease who wanted to be forced.

Some rapists think this way: It's natural for a man to take a woman by force, especially if she's flirtatious. She wants it, no matter what she says.

French muses about freedom and captivity, but never in regard to female sexuality. Females must submit for the good of all. Ellie the elephant gets put in a tight cage so that she can't resist artificial insemination. French acknowledges that this, and the subsequent birth, could be traumatic. A veterinarian adds what French did not ask; the vet says pregnancy will reduce Ellie's chance of getting cancer. But we aren’t told whether cancer is a greater risk than giving birth.

In comparison, French blames humans for the chimp's lack of interest in mating with other chimps. He doesn't say Herman is dooming himself or his species, and we have no idea if female chimps are frustrated that he won't submit to a "female imperative." Like Enshalla, Herman doesn't like male zookeepers, but French passes no judgment on him.

Herman wants female zookeepers to expose their breasts. Some refuse, but others -- ones that French identifies by name, quotes and seems to like -- think it's fine to do this to please the "gentle soul" since he has "no control over his impulses." A curator whom French greatly respects "does not make a big deal of Herman's quirks." French adds:

How many human females express similar sentiments about their husbands? Just let him have what he wants, and everyone can continue with their day.

Did female keepers feel any pressure to expose themselves, knowing their boss thought it was OK?

French describes a personality battle among the zookeepers, quoting men vs. women. The women who love animals as individuals see something of the animal in themselves, he writes. Meanwhile, the men "revel in the otherness of their creatures," ones who are dominant, skillful and efficient. Isn't it possible that the man who gets a tattoo of such a creature wants to see those qualities in himself?

At the end, French describes the killing of Enshalla, who walked out of a door that had been left unlatched. A vet shoots her with a tranquilizer. When she lunges for him, CEO Lex Salisbury fells her with a shotgun. Because she's still moving, he shoots her three more times.

Throughout the series, French describes Salisbury as the alpha male who dominates the people and animals at the zoo. He writes as if this is the natural order of things, as if male dominance is natural across all species. He never asks if a different management style, one that was more collaborative, might work better. But there was a happy ending of sorts. Salisbury resigned last year, amid an investigation.
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P.S. I enjoyed watching the black-and-white ruffed lemurs this week at Busch Gardens. In addition to looking like cat-monkeys, most are female dominant.

On Death & Dying (by res ipsa loquitur)

Did you read this story about how doctors tell their patients that they are going to die? A few rambling thoughts ....

But first, some background. When my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in the 1960s, her doctor told my father that it would kill her. That prognosis was deliberately withheld from her by both of them, but my mother was aware of her own body and the people around her. She knew something (bad) was afoot and the anxiety, frustration, and anger attendant in that knowledge informed every aspect of her -- and our -- existence. Eleven years later, when the cancer recurred, she was told that yes -- it would kill her, and relatively soon. This time, she withheld the prognosis: from her children. To state the obvious: it is extremely difficult to discuss death. Would it have been any easier if my father had been given the diagnosis?

So the feminist angle to this article ... What are the differences in what news doctors deliver and the way they deliver it -- to men vs. women today? Unfortunately, we only see one "patient" in the role-playing exercise: a female. If there are differences, are they informed by gender? Or social class? Wealth? Or age? Or whether the woman is a mother or childless? Look at the picture in the article: the five people accompanying the doctor are all female. What happens when doctor and patient are female? Do male nurses, social workers, counselers ever accompany the doctor? Watch the video accompanying the article. I bought what I consider some sexist assumptions to the table in assessing the performance of the residents. The female? Too clinical. Too dispassionate. The male? Unable to close the door on all treatment/hope. I'm sure they'll both get better at this. Maybe I will, too.

(I wonder if they role-play a patient who just gets furious at the terminal prognosis? I suspect that's what I'd do.)

Anyway: discuss.

Money Well Spent

You've probably already seen it, but there's a v interesting article in the NYT about how microloans -- given to women -- can improve not only the lives of the women's families, but can also empower those women within their own families. Truly, the personal is the political.

The article covers some territory that we've known for some time, but it's fascinating to see how the power structure within a family changes when women get microloans. Not surprisingly, In general, aid appears to work best when it is focused on health, education and microfinance (although microfinance has been somewhat less successful in Africa than in Asia). And in each case, crucially, aid has often been most effective when aimed at women and girls; when policy wonks do the math, they often find that these investments have a net economic return. Only a small proportion of aid specifically targets women or girls, but increasingly donors are recognizing that that is where they often get the most bang for the buck.

Investing in women is also a national security issue: Yet another reason to educate and empower women is that greater female involvement in society and the economy appears to undermine extremism and terrorism. It has long been known that a risk factor for turbulence and violence is the share of a country’s population made up of young people. Now it is emerging that male domination of society is also a risk factor; the reasons aren’t fully understood, but it may be that when women are marginalized the nation takes on the testosterone-laden culture of a military camp or a high-school boys’ locker room. That’s in part why the Joint Chiefs of Staff and international security specialists are puzzling over how to increase girls’ education in countries like Afghanistan — and why generals have gotten briefings from Greg Mortenson, who wrote about building girls’ schools in his best seller, “Three Cups of Tea.” Indeed, some scholars say they believe the reason Muslim countries have been disproportionately afflicted by terrorism is not Islamic teachings about infidels or violence but rather the low levels of female education and participation in the labor force.

If people who spend their time criminalizing abortion actually wanted to, you know, decrease abortions, they'd quit demonstrating outside clinics and start teaching girls to read, write, do math. Or giving them clothes to wear to school. Another Kenyan study found that giving girls a new $6 school uniform every 18 months significantly reduced dropout rates and pregnancy rates. Likewise, there’s growing evidence that a cheap way to help keep high-school girls in school is to help them manage menstruation. For fear of embarrassing leaks and stains, girls sometimes stay home during their periods, and the absenteeism puts them behind and eventually leads them to drop out. Aid workers are experimenting with giving African teenage girls sanitary pads, along with access to a toilet where they can change them. The Campaign for Female Education, an organization devoted to getting more girls into school in Africa, helps girls with their periods, and a new group, Sustainable Health Enterprises, is trying to do the same.

Read all the way to the end for the magical spell. ;)

Herstory

Is there a feminist poem that speaks to you?

She Should Run (by res ipsa loquitur)

Women's Campaign Forum creates an online tool you can use to suggest possible candidates to run for office: She Should Run .

/via Matt Yglesias

Documenting the obvious (by Prometheus 6)

Little safe haven for sexually assaulted LGBTQ victims
University of Oregon study finds barriers to seeking help, even from agencies and law enforcement

Being a victim of sexual assault and seeking help is difficult for anyone, but when the victim is lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and/or queer (LGBTQ) the thought of reporting a crime may well be laced with added layers of uncertainty and mistrust, according to a study in Oregon.

The study, appearing in the August issue of the journal Violence Against Women, found that 94 percent of respondents -- most of them identifying as LGBTQ in Eugene-Springfield -- think sexual violence is a problem, but just 72 percent agreed it is in their community. Eighty-seven percent of respondents also said that that sexual violence prevention tailored to the LGBTQ community is needed, and more than 60 percent felt local agencies and law enforcement were ill-equipped.

Of 130 participants, ranging in age from 15 to 71, 58 percent claimed to have been sexually assaulted. The participants were 83 females, 40 males, six who identified as transgender and one who did not specify sexual identity. Thirty respondents (23 percent) were gay, 20 percent were lesbian, 18.5 percent were bisexual and 18.5 percent were heterosexual; the remainder claimed to be in multiple categories or did not respond.

"The take-home message was that sexual violence is real and complicated for members of the LGBTQ community," said lead author Jeffrey L. Todahl, a professor of couples and family therapy in the UO College of Education's department of counseling psychology and human services. "There are additional barriers because of discrimination. It is hard enough to reach out to ask for help if you are sexually assaulted. This is compounded when you have to wonder if people in law enforcement, at a hospital or with an agency will think poorly of you because of your sexual orientation. An LGBTQ victim will ask, 'Will I be judged, and is your organization safe? If I can't trust you, I cannot get the help I need.'"

The study, drawn from a convenience sample rather than a random one, was part of a larger project funded by the Oregon Attorney General's Sexual Assault Task Force. Potential respondents were recruited through various targeted means, including through a listserv for sexual and domestic violence social service activists and providers.

In addition to the survey, four focus groups with a total of 14 participants (mean age 41) identified the biggest problem is low community awareness and support. Researchers found a "social ignorance of the existence of LGBTQ communities and limited open discussion of the sexual violence occurring within the LGBTQ community." Several focus group members noted that society in general -- and even LGBTQ members -- dismiss even the possibility that sexual violence occurs in the LGBTQ community.

When a sexual assault occurs, Todahl said, members of the LGBTQ community continue to be cloaked in fear of judgment. "LGBTQ persons live in an inherently dangerous environment and reasonably assume that they may be targeted, mistreated and blamed -- even by service providers, law enforcement and health-care professionals," Todahl and colleagues noted.

"They have to start with the assumption that I don't trust you," Todahl said, adding that "you" refers to organizations, police, friends and even family members who don't accept their lifestyle choices. They don't feel safe and worry that they will be quickly judged."

The study, he said, allowed LBGTQ members to voice their experiences. "And it provides a chance for us to explore a deeper understanding of the issue. Because of the discrimination they feel, they have to circle the wagons. They don't feel safe anyway. They have to protect the legitimacy of their sexual orientation. If assaulted by a member of their own community, they don't want it to get out because many people think there is something wrong with them as it is."

Based on the study, researchers learned that participants believe that sexual assault must be more clearly defined socially and must carry real consequences. "The general community needs to be more welcoming of people's sexual orientation," Todahl said. Participants also suggested that workers at agencies, from police to health care to social service agencies, be trained to better understand sexual assault and what it means to be a member of a sexual minority, he added.

LGBTQ members need to know what agencies are safe, Todahl said. Agencies should be re-evaluating such things as their names and the messages a name imply, and even what their intake forms look like. "Are they welcoming?" he said.

###

Co-authors with Todahl were his departmental colleague Deanna Linville; Amy Bustin of Sexual Assault Support Services, a non-profit organization in Lane County; Jenna Wheeler, a UO doctoral student in counseling psychology; and Jeff Gau of Abacus Research of Eugene.

About the University of Oregon

The University of Oregon is a world-class teaching and research institution and Oregon's flagship public university. The UO is a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU), an organization made up of the 62 leading public and private research institutions in the United States and Canada. The UO is one of only two AAU members in the Pacific Northwest.

Sources: Jeff Todahl, assistant professor of couples and family therapy, 541-346-0919, jtodahl@uoregon.edu; Deanna Linville, assistant professor of couples and family therapy, 541-346-0921, linville@uoregon.edu

A kind of stereoscopic vision (by Prometheus 6)

I once wrote

I sometimes think of the USofA like it's the planet Saturn: Black folks are the ring system, considered part of the planet by everyone that's interested, but not really. It's been suggested the ring system is the remnant of a solid body. In this metaphor, the African American Culture Wars is between those who want to reassemble the shattered moon and those who want to negotiate a soft landing on the planet. And the rings, the individual moonlets, continue the dance that ornaments the planet.

I like that metaphor so I want to work with it for minute.

This is how the USofA looks from the outside		This is how the USofA looks to Black folks.

I'd like to include a view of the rings as seen from Saturn, but all I could find was science fiction fantasy art.

Another All-Time Favorite (Posted by Hecate)

Little Summer Poem Touching The Subject Of Faith by Mary Oliver

Every summer
I listen and look
under the sun's brass and even
into the moonlight, but I can't hear

anything, I can't see anything --
not the pale roots digging down, nor the green
stalks muscling up,
nor the leaves
deepening their damp pleats,

nor the tassels making,
nor the shucks, nor the cobs.
And still,
every day,

the leafy fields
grow taller and thicker --
green gowns lofting up in the night,
showered with silk.

And so, every summer,
I fail as a witness, seeing nothing --
I am deaf too
to the tick of the leaves,

the tapping of downwardness from the banyan feet --
all of it
happening
beyond any seeable proof, or hearable hum.

And, therefore, let the immeasurable come.
Let the unknowable touch the buckle of my spine.
Let the wind turn in the trees,
and the mystery hidden in the dirt

swing through the air.
How could I look at anything in this world
and tremble, and grip my hands over my heart?
What should I fear?

One morning
in the leafy green ocean
the honeycomb of the corn's beautiful body
is sure to be there.

Picture found here.

My Hissy Fit (by Liz)

I know we've discussed it here this past week, but I am still fuming over the coverage of the Secretary of State's trip to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Hillary Clinton endured blatant, unchecked sexism as a presidential candidate. In addition to the intense scrutiny and partisanship any candidate faces, she was vilified merely for being female. And the sexism continues. Her sharp response to the Congolese student has been characterized as a temper tantrum, an eruption, a hissy fit, an outburst. How often does the media describe a man's behavior as a hissy fit?

Some of the more generous stories about Clinton's comments offer theories as to why she answered the way she did: jet lag, exhaustion, marital troubles, jealousy of Bill Clinton and VP Biden's international activities. The Secretary of State needs no excuse for her behavior. In my opinion, she demonstrated incredible restraint.

Several years ago, I was working as the head of product development for a U.S. company. I flew with a male coworker to a tradeshow in Germany to source new products. For two days, my coworker and I walked the tradeshow floor negotiating deals. As we approached each new vendor we both extended our hands to shake and exchange business cards. The majority of the vendors shook my coworker's hand and ignored mine. I passed out and collected very few business cards. Several vendors assumed I was the wife of my coworker. Even after I corrected one man, he refused to start a meeting with me until my "husband" was present. My response was similar to Clinton's.

I was not tired. I did not have jet lag. Nor did I have any marital problems. What I did have was a collection of sexist experiences over the course of my career that framed my response. I had been in too many board rooms where women were interrupted, ignored or asked to take notes, regardless of their seniority. I had seen female coworkers deflect sexual advances, fight for fair maternity leave and earn less pay than their male counterparts. So when I was dismissed that day in Germany, my response encompassed more than just the immediate situation.

Hillary Clinton has witnessed much more than I have. She flew to a country where a war on women is raging. According to the U.N., four hundred cases of rape are reported in the Democratic Republic of Congo each month. More than half of the displaced people in the country are women.

Around the globe, women are fighting for equal rights. The more privileged among us are struggling for workplace equality: fair pay and a shot at the corner office. The less fortunate are fighting for the most basic rights: for their safety and the safety of their children. Hillary Clinton sees these struggles every day. So when asked what appeared to be a sexist question in a country where women are in grave danger, I think a temper tantrum, an eruption or an outburst would have been perfectly justified. In fact, when you view Clinton's reaction through a broader lense, when you look at all of the experiences that framed her answer, I think her response was calm, cool and collected.