Blinders

David Broder wrote recently about how horrible it is that one election campaign has stooped to talking about fatness:

Every time you think politics has hit a new low, it finds a way to go lower. I thought we had reached the nadir last month when Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina shouted "You lie!" at President Obama while he was speaking to a joint session of Congress.

But then the New York Times caught me up on what has been happening in New Jersey. Campaigns there are rarely elevated affairs, but the current battle between Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine and Republican challenger Christopher Christie has sunk to new depths.

As the Times pointed out, a television ad for Corzine, "about as subtle as a playground taunt," shows Christie "stepping out of an SUV in extreme slow motion, his extra girth moving, just as slowly, in several different directions at once. In case viewers missed the point, a narrator snidely intones" that Christie, the former U.S. attorney for New Jersey, "threw his weight around" to avoid several traffic tickets.

...

This issue has no place in our politics.

I am still looking for my divine jaw somewhere on the floor. Not because what Broder writes wouldn't be relevant but because of the way he writes it. As if this focus on the looks of a politician are a brand new thing! Never attempted before, ever!

I guess one could call this male privilege, but I see it more as a nice set of blinders which you can put on before you go out, assuming you are an intrepid guy reporter. Those blinders cover up everything that was said about Hillary Clinton's thighs, legs or cleavage! They cover up the porn movies made with a Sarah Palin look-alike! I guess it is possible that no aspiring politician has ever made those slurs about a woman he was competing against, but his underlings certainly have.

Here Echidne goes again, writing about something trivial. Mmm. Have a piece of chocolate.

There's a deeper point here, of course, as there always is, and that is the way it's possible for some men to view the society as completely consisting of men. And, of course, oftheirwomen.

That double-sight explains why someone like Broder can truly NOT see how female politicians are routinely treated. It also explains something I found on a blog which discussed the old courtly love traditions, of young men expressing a forbidden love towards the wife of their liege lord, and how very dangerous this could be: to the young men. The wife of the liege lord was not an active participant in the story, and what the consequences might have been to her are irrelevant.

Or the way Pepys' "love escapades" were routinely viewed in the literature I read about them: As a sign of his irrepressible rogue nature, with a few wink-winks added to the treatment. Yet anyone who actually reads his diary finds that he pretty much forced servant maids and the wives of poorer men to have sex with him. Some of them may have been willing, of course, but none of them ultimately had the power to refuse him, and all this was very obvious to me on first reading. Perhaps because I would have been one of those servant maids, most likely, had I been born the same sex into the place and time of Pepys.

Perhaps all this bias is just a consequence of gender identification? I doubt that, because I can't really see myself ever writing about the politics or the culture or anything else as if men were almost nonexistent creatures. Though I certainly have my own set of blinders!

Go Read Melissa

On Rape Culture.

The Sleeping Beauty

On a bad day I believe that the fairy tale princess in the Sleeping Beauty story is the Ideal Woman of this culture:

She's seventeen, beautiful and asleep, only to be awakened by the prince who does all the actual work in the story by breaking through her hymen the thorns which defend the castle in a hundred-year slumber.

On a better day I realize that she can give me a blogging topic: The Ideal Traditional Woman Has No Agency!

The Sleeping Beauty doesn't choose the prince; she is chosen. Snow-White is also kissed (while a corpse herself) by a prince who then marries her. We are never told anything about how willing the princesses are to do this. The story of Cinderella isn't that much different, though she does want to go to the ball: The ultimate choice is not hers but belongs to the prince who picks whoever can fit the glass shoe.

The hero in traditional European fairy tales almost always gets the princess and half the realm as his reward, even when he didn't rescue her from the dragon. What the princess thinks of this all is unclear.

Yet these stories were told to all the children, including little girls. The message is obvious: If you are passive and long-suffering enough, good things will come to you! The Beast holding Beauty prisoner turns into a handsome prince, because Beauty obeyed her father. Things "happens to" the girls and women in fairy tales, with only a few exceptions. It is men and boys who MAKE things happen.

You can step outside the fairy tale world and still find the same norms. The Virgin Mary is the ultimate long-suffering, patient and passive woman. The eternal virgins promised to Muslim men in paradise don't seem to mind their lack of agency. Neither do all those wives and girlfriends in the he-man movie genre whose speaking roles consist of saying: "You need some rest, honey," while gazing at the hero with adoring eyes. Or the Quiverful wives who have relinquished their bodies to god and the starter key to those bodies to their husbands. A good woman has always been a modest woman, a woman who stays silent and long-suffering. A woman without many demands.

Some of this is probably a logical consequence of the way the Hero's Tale is told in most cultures. Such tales don't need uppity women walking into the scene, yelling and demanding attention, stomping their feet. It ruins the intended path of the Hero's Tale. But too many of the suffer-in-silence stories exist for this to be the whole explanation. It does look like women have been traditionally trained towards passivity. A certain kind of eternal sleep.

What Am I?

A futile question I ask myself all the time. But today I'm asking it for a different reason: It's a disguise for talking about what feminism doesn't much talk about.

This quest began with Phila's post below, about how we can scientifically prove that human mate-selection is done by women (nope, you are wrong about all those historically arranged marriages and the custom of punishing women who have babies outside marriage and the more recent custom of men proposing to women and so on) and that women pick their baby daddies on the day when they ovulate (late applicants will be turned away at the door).

Also, the selection takes place in a laboratory where undergraduate women look at facial images of men on computers. Well, at least that's what the studies consist of, the ones which we are told explain mate selection preferences. Then the researchers decide that the faces some number of women pick when ovulating are CLEARLY the faces of dominant males who engage in male-on-male competition! Something to do with large jaws, I guess.

And then all this is written into a story about how women on the pill are wrecking human evolution because they are less likely to pick men with the faces the researchers think demonstrate male dominance.

It's a lot of fun to read these stories and earnest investigations into the mysterious female bodies. Or it would be if the resulting interpretations weren't ultimately aimed at keeping me and others like me from ever able to answer that "what am I?" question, or even ever getting to formulate the question.

Yet to ask the "what am I?" question is to me a fundamental human right and one we still allow men far more often than women. (That is a deep statement, by the way, and you might want to think about it in terms of popular culture, fairy tales, songs, movies, books, religions and laws and societal norms.)

What a long introduction that is! If I had an editor it wouldn't be there much longer. But I am going to keep it because it tells you how intense my feelings are, how strongly I believe in the importance of following the pseudo-scientific discussions and how bitter I am when I bump into those very same arguments at parties in six months' time.

All this matters for the girls born today, you know. It is they who will grow up within a culture which lets stuff like this find its place into the small-talk departments of cocktail parties, church picnics, kitchen tables and bars.

So I go to other feminist sites to see what they say about any of the myriad pseudo-scientific gender studies that I fret over. And I find next to nothing*, on most days. This worries me. As I have mentioned before, religion, pseudo-science and the legal system are the three traditional legs of the stool on which misogyny sits, and seeing so little written about one of those legs is disconcerting.

Then again I start questioning myself: Perhaps the warnings I write are not needed? Perhaps everyone is one move ahead in the game? And, after all, there are smart writers responding to this stuff; only not so often on blogs.

At the same time, I think that the relative lack of feminist response to topics such as the one Phila took on reflects a problem with the current feminist emphasis on one end of the oppression scale (for lack of better terms): the oppressed. The more we focus on those who suffer from oppressions of all kinds the less we see the new oppressive tools being developed. Because that development takes place elsewhere and because any new tools appear relatively harmless to begin with. Something to ridicule, say.

My apologies for the muddled thinking above. I'm trying out some ideas in this post and welcome your views.
----
*For one of the few exceptions, Clarissa wrote about this topic.

Unnatural Selection (by Phila)

An article revealingly titled "Unnatural Selection" explores the possibility that the use of oral contraceptives is changing women's (natural) preference for domineering men, and their ability to land a mate (of the correct type).

Ovulating women exhibit a preference for more masculine male features, are particularly attracted to men showing dominance and male-male competitiveness and prefer partners that are genetically dissimilar to themselves....

The authors also speculate that the use of oral contraceptives may influence a woman's ability to attract a mate by reducing attractiveness to men, thereby disrupting her ability to compete with normally cycling women for access to mate.

So women who are on the pill lack the ovulating women's "normal" desire for aggressively masculine men, and are less attractive to men per se, and fail to choose genetically dissimilar partners who are more likely to get them pregnant? Obviously, this path to reproductive freedom is an evolutionary dead end.

"The ultimate outstanding evolutionary question concerns whether the use of oral contraceptives when making mating decisions can have long-term consequences on the ability of couples to reproduce," suggests Dr. Lummaa.

One way to investigate this theory, it seems to me, would be to study whether fertility problems are more common among couples who previously relied on oral contraceptives. Since the myth that oral contraceptives cause infertility is pretty widespread, a fair amount of attention has been given to this issue. And as far I know, the results have been entirely negative. (Granted, couples who use the pill may delay pregnancy until an age when fertility has decreased...but again, I don't know of any evidence showing that these older couples are statistically more likely to have fertility problems than ones who never used the pill).

As always, I'm concerned about the normative tone that prevails when this sort of research is described in the press. And I'm skeptical that these alleged "preferences" have the power and ubiquity that tends to be assigned to them. And I'm troubled that these stories almost never report the actual statistical incidence of the expected response; they simply issue blanket statements about what "ovulating women" prefer, as though the women who failed to conform to expectations were so completely irrelevant that there's no need to know how many of them there were. And of course, I'm irritated at the lack of any acknowledgment that the definition of research topics, the research itself, the subjects' responses, the researchers' conclusions, and the media's reporting all take place not in some anti-ideological vacuum, but within a social context of male dominance, misogyny, and heteronormativity.

In this case, I'm also curious about how closely you can compare the supposed mate preferences of women who are not on the pill to those who are, especially if they're avoiding contraceptives for ethical or cultural reasons. If a woman doesn't use contraceptives because she was raised in a conservative household, is she more likely to report a preference for traditionally "masculine" (i.e., socially dominant) men? Beats me. But like every other factor that influences the incredibly complex social phenomenon of sexual behavior, it probably bears looking into.

Putting all that aside, the main thing that interests me about this groundbreaking research is how it ties in with the finding that ovulating women were more likely to vote for Obama. Will women who are taking oral contraceptives show the same preference in 2012, or will they be more interested in, say, a Palin/Jindal ticket? Hopefully someone's working on this important problem right now, because as the author of the Obama study notes:

"There are some women who aren't going to change their beliefs whether they're ovulating or not, but people don't pay enough attention to a woman's changing cycle and how it might affect decision making."

NSFM: Tom DeLay does the tango (by Suzie)

NSFM = Not Safe for Meals. You may choke with laughter or anger or nausea.

Found: Some equity in healthcare, but not good news (by Liz)

I tuned into CSPAN2 last week to watch the women senators who spoke out on the Senator floor for healthcare reform. They were led by Senator Barbara Mikulski and her rally cry: "We the women of the Senate have fought for equal pay and equal work…and now we are fighting for equal coverage. We want equal benefits for equal premiums." Her colleagues went on to speak out against gender inequities in the current healthcare system including these facts:

- In nine states domestic abuse is considered a pre-existing condition- for the victim, not the batterer
- Having had a C-section, even if it was medically mandated, may be considered a pre-existing condition
- In many states, insurance companies can charge women more for coverage than they charge men
- Not all states are required to cover maternity care
- And, per Senator Stabenow, that the intent to adopt may be considered a pre-existing condition

Not much new here. If you've been paying attention, you've heard most of this already. But I learned something else--I found some fairness in the current system. Senator Stabenow reported that not only is being pregnant cause for automatic rejection of coverage from some insurance companies, so is being an expectant father. Not quite the gender equity I was looking for.

This and That (by Phila)

Cervantes on healthcare reform:

We have a bias toward action, toward doing something; we're all about being bold and decisive and heroic. And we have a lot of faith in technology and anything that wears the guise of science. But the shocking truth is, much of medical intervention is not based in science at all, is not driven by evidence, but by physician's intuitions and customary ways of doing things. And, let's bite the bullet and make this painful admission: doctors are paid to do stuff, and the more radical their actions, the more they are paid....

Social justice begins long before we even think about universal health care. Sure, if we had it our society would be more just than it is now but we would still have huge inequalities in health and life expectancy because of all the other inequalities that would remain, for which medicine does not have the answer.

Lilian Nattel on positive psychology:

About ten years old, positive psychology studies how individuals and communities can thrive. A reaction against psychology as the study of mental illness, it aims to redress the imbalance in understanding human nature and what makes us happy and healthy and peaceful individually and socially.

This reminds me of a book I read years ago: The Psychology of the Female Body by Jane Ussher. What she noticed while looking at studes on pms was that subjects were asked only about negative symptoms around their periods. She repeated the study with a change: she asked as many questions about positive symptoms as negative ones. To my surprise, she found that as many women were energized as more tired before their periods, as many were happier as angrier, as many felt more enthusiastic as felt depressed.

The questions we ask open doors to possibilities.

Alison Bashford on quarantine:

Historically, quarantine laws were the main way in which people’s movement over national borders was regulated. Almost all of the immigration acts that proliferated around the globe in the nineteenth century (which we still live with, every time we hand over our passport) were about quarantine regulations. Every immigration restriction act across the world, even now, always has a “loathsome disease” clause in it.

Dave Neiwart on the gun-show loophole:

Over the past year, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been sending out private investigators to gun shows around the country, focusing on locales where NYPD and other local law enforcement are seeing guns arriving from. And what they showed was incredibly revealing.

It shows the dirty little secret that everyone who attends gun shows with any kind of discerning eye can tell you: There are a lot of illegitimate transactions taking place at them -- and particularly a lot of sales of guns to people who could never pass a background check.

NTodd on Obama's Nobel prize:

[L]et's not lose sight of something in all the arguments about the Nobel: it's up to us to create the space for Obama to earn this.

We can do it by creating justice at home in the form of meaningful healthcare reform, marriage equality, and reduced consumerism. We can do it by supporting HR2404, calling for an exit strategy in Afghanistan, and HR3699, denying funds for an escalation. We can do it by accepting our personal responsibility as citizens and being engaged with our government.

The 2008 election wasn't just about Obama, about putting a man in office who would single-handedly repair things after 8 disastrous years. The Nobel Peace Prize is no different. So hear the calls to action and get to work.

Weekly Poetry Slam Tread

( Amc )

In memory of Mercedes Sosa, who made poetry so much more than words in a song or on a page.

Friday critter blogging (by Suzie)

Here is Cohen in a Hawaiian shirt, playing with Noah, a puggle, and his housemate Alli, of indeterminate ancestry. That's Clifford's tail in the righthand corner.

Cohen is a mix of Siberian husky and German shepherd. He lives with his brother Kota (short for Dakota). I do not know why Cohen was wearing a shirt or whether he keeps kosher.

Obama wins the Nobel Peace Prize (by Suzie)

I'm glad the Norwegian Nobel Committee uses this award to foster peace. After all, anyone who wins it should feel a great need to live up to it. An AP story reports:

The stunning choice made Obama the third sitting U.S. president to win the Nobel Peace Prize and shocked Nobel observers because Obama took office less than two weeks before the Feb. 1 nomination deadline. Obama's name had been mentioned in speculation before the award but many Nobel watchers believed it was too early to award the president.

A list of previous winners includes people who have spent their lives working for peace and justice, as well as various political leaders. Since 1901, five women have shared the prize, and six have won it solo, including Shirin Ebadi, who was listed as a man. (Does the media have any copy editors anymore?) I guess so few women win because we start so many wars, we implement so many unjust policies, and we rarely volunteer to help others.

The AP story quotes the Nobel committee on Obama:

His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population.

This does not bode well for women because men now make up the majority. Yes, men outnumber women, due to global discrimination against girls and women. Let's hope we get some leaders willing to challenge sexist attitudes, such as Hillary Clinton in Beijing. Although Obama appointed her Secretary of State, some people give him all the credit for international relations, while she gets a pat on the back for "having no trouble adapting to being a team player subordinate to Obama," as Wikipedia notes. Although Obama had been in the White House less than two weeks when he was nominated for the Nobel, Clinton's eight years in the White House doesn't count because she was only a wife who served tea.

For the Nobel, Obama beat out two women considered front-runners: Colombian Sen. Piedad Cordoba and Afghan physician and human rights activist Sima Samar. Please read their stories if you aren't familiar with them.

I wonder if the choice of Obama was related to what Echidne wrote earlier. A few more women have won Nobel prizes this year than in the past. Maybe committee members thought giving the peace prize to a woman would just be too much.

Hunting my rapist, Part 2 (by Suzie)

“What are you going to do after you track him down?” asked a friend in journalism who helped with the hunt. I emailed back: “I'm not sure. I joke that I'm like a dog chasing a garbage truck.”

I talked about the rape in last Friday’s post. Today, I want to give a snapshot of the search. I don’t recommend such a search for everyone. Not only can it depress you further, but it also may be dangerous if a rapist knows you’re tracking him.

Most people I contacted were helpful, and their caring helped erase much of my self-blame. One of his former colleagues emailed me:

This is a terrible event and I would love to find and
 prosecute
 the guy.

I learned from a rape crisis line that the statute of limitations had run out. I felt foolish calling after so many years, but a counselor assured me that I wasn’t the only woman who had tried for years not to think about her rape.

Although I had quoted X in a newspaper article, I later put his name in some locked compartment of my mind. When I found the old article and read his name, I had to fight feelings of panic. But I didn't stop.

Online white pages yielded his age, a wife’s name, his address and his telephone number. I called a couple of times, and left the most neutral of messages. He didn’t call back. What would he have said: He didn’t remember me? He thought I was either nutty or slutty? It wasn’t like he was going to beg my forgiveness.

An Intelius report gave his past addresses and his date of birth. Knowing where he had lived – on a major street I knew well – explained why I had been able to drive home drunk and/or drugged.

The details of his current house came from his county’s appraisal district. Because his wife’s name wasn’t on the deed, I searched civil court records and found she had died. From another county, I got the divorce records for a previous marriage. These records told me that he had no children.

I put in a public-records request at his old job, searched the archives of the local newspaper and the university where he had gotten his degrees, and finally got a photo of him from the state licensing board. The photo was taken at age 47, the same age I was when I decided to investigate him. He no longer appeared handsome – or professional. He held no power over me.

An investigator at the licensing board told me it was too late to file a complaint. By law, however, I was entitled to X's education information and his current place of employment, which was also a public agency. No complaints had ever been filed against him, according to the agency and the board.

His employer gave me his job title, contact information, resume and salary, which was surprisingly low. His degrees on his resume didn’t match the ones reported to the licensing board. I filed a complaint with the licensing board, and after many months, he was required to explain the discrepancy. The board didn’t discipline him, but they did tell him to give the correct credentials in the future.

Some readers may have hoped for a grand finale, in which I got justice. Sorry. Some may ask, as many of my friends did: “Why did you waste so much time and energy on this guy?” In my career, I often checked people’s backgrounds, and I enjoyed solving mysteries. In this case, as I pored over the mundane facts of his life, he became demystified.

I stuffed all my notes and documents in a folder marked “rapist,” and I filed it away.

------------------

On a rape-related topic: The House passed the bill that would add gender, disability, sexual orientation and gender identity to federal hate-crime legislation. The NYT coverage is typical in that it focuses on hate crimes against gays, with no discussion of gender. Apparently, male hatred of women never leads to crime. An AP story mentions statistics on hate crimes, without pointing out that these statistics don't include crimes motivated by gender. I've written about this before.

Question for the weekend (by Suzie)

If we're going to hell in a handbag, what kind of handbag is it? I'm thinking a fake Louis Vuitton.

Good News Thursday

The 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature went to Herta Müller:

An ethnic German born in Romania, writer Herta Müller has won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature. The 56-year-old, who emigrated to Germany in 1987, has made the trials of living under Nicolae Ceaus,escu's dictatorship a focus of her work.

In its citation, the Nobel committee wrote that Müller, "with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed."

Müller, a novelist and short-story writer, was considered by some to be among the top authors in the running for the award, although Amos Oz of Israel was the odds-on favorite of British wagering firm Ladbroke's.

She is the fourteenth woman to have won the literature prize. Her award means that this year's prizes have much less of a male dominance than has usually been the case, though they are most unlikely to reflect the actual population percentages of men and women.

I had an odd reaction to this piece of news and it's not one I'm proud about: My happiness in more women being recognized for their talent and work was somewhat marred by this niggling fear I felt. Or perhaps not fear but discomfort.

When I dug into it a little I realized that I was worried how anti-feminists would interpret such a "large" number of women suddenly winning Nobel prizes. A few you can sneak in without them coming out with lots of articles about how horrible feminists are and how undeserved any awards going to women really are, but this many in one year?

I'm not making this confession just because I hate having to read misogynistic screeds in general (and yet feel that I should read it in order to respond to it), but because it tells me something deeper about the struggle we are in and about my fears of the frequent backlashes against any progress women make. But we can't smuggle equality in during the dark hours of the night, after all.

A New Sex Offender Site

Oklahoma has a new law which requires all abortions to be listed on a public website:

The law (which you can look at here — it's HR 1595) mandates that a 34-item questionnaire be filled out by abortion providers for each procedure. The questionnaire doesn't include the woman's name or "any information specifically identifying the patient," but it does ask for age, race, level of education, marital status, number of previous pregnancies, and the county in which the abortion was performed, information which opponents of the bill argue would be enough to identify a woman in a small town. The questionnaire also asks about the mother's reason for the abortion, her method of payment, and even what type of insurance she has, as well as whether the fetus received anaesthetic and whether there was "an infant born alive as a result of the abortion."

The required information astonishingly contains nothing about the man who caused the pregnancy, but is probably sufficient for finding the identity of any woman in a smallish town. And that is its real purpose. That, and the idea of making abortions more and more cumbersome for the physicians to perform.

As Lynn Harris writes on Broadsheet:

It isn't unique for a state to post health data on its Web site. However, Oklahoma's requirements are by far the most extensive as such. The law's supporters claim they want this information to be made public so it can be used for "academic research," but according to the Center for Reproductive Rights, its collection method makes it useless for that purpose. (If a woman sees more than one doctor concerning her abortion -- primary care and abortion provider, say -- the data, collected each visit, will appear to represent more than one patient.)

The website really is about shaming the sluts. But it could also be used for making threats at women, including those with mistaken identities. Let's hope that the legal challenge to HR 1595 succeeds.

The United States Of Health

Comparing various measures of health across the American states can be informative. It can also be tricky, because such comparisons don't tell us why people in Vermont are so much healthier than those in Mississippi, say; just that they are.

Still, here are the most recent rankings from one study which has applied various health measures to the states. The healthiest states in 2007 were these:

1. Vermont
2. Hawaii
3. Iowa
4. Minnesota
5. Maine
New Hampshire (tie)

And the least healthy states in 2007 were these:

47. Nevada
48. Arkansas
49. Louisiana
50. Oklahoma
51. Mississippi

The article I link to notes that the least healthy states in general have many more uninsured individuals than the healthiest states, and that is true. They probably also have less access to health care facilities in the more concrete sense. But attributing all the health differences to differences in health care utilization is probably a big mistake, because the determinants of good health are complex and depend not only on health care use but also on general life-styles, incomes, education, pollution levels, crime and so on.

Take incomes, for example. Higher incomes allow people to have better nutrition, safer homes and health care. Higher incomes are also usually earned in ways which are less risky for the bodies in terms of accidents and occupational illnesses. It probably doesn't surprise you then that a ranking of states by medium income in the early 2000s looks almost exactly like that health ranking.

None of this means that the low-ranking states wouldn't be greatly helped by access to better health insurance. That's why it's so very odd that those are the very states which send the most backward politicians to Washington D.C..

Such Fun With Religion

PZ Myers writes about a new project of the infamous Conservapedia (the place where you can get your ultra-conservative worldview reinforced every day, instead of going to Wikipedia where you are turned into a little Maoist). This new project is -- wait for this -- rewriting the Bible to better match with today's wingnuttery! Here's the plan:

As of 2009, there is no fully conservative translation of the Bible which satisfies the following ten guidelines:[2]

1. Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias
2. Not Emasculated: avoiding unisex, "gender inclusive" language, and other modern emasculation of Christianity
3. Not Dumbed Down: not dumbing down the reading level, or diluting the intellectual force and logic of Christianity; the NIV is written at only the 7th grade level[3]
4. Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms: using powerful new conservative terms as they develop;[4] defective translations use the word "comrade" three times as often as "volunteer"; similarly, updating words which have a change in meaning, such as "word", "peace", and "miracle".
5. Combat Harmful Addiction: combating addiction by using modern terms for it, such as "gamble" rather than "cast lots";[5] using modern political terms, such as "register" rather than "enroll" for the census
6. Accept the Logic of Hell: applying logic with its full force and effect, as in not denying or downplaying the very real existence of Hell or the Devil.
7. Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning
8. Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story
9. Credit Open-Mindedness of Disciples: crediting open-mindedness, often found in youngsters like the eyewitnesses Mark and John, the authors of two of the Gospels
10. Prefer Conciseness over Liberal Wordiness: preferring conciseness to the liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio; avoid compound negatives and unnecessary ambiguities; prefer concise, consistent use of the word "Lord" rather than "Jehovah" or "Yahweh" or "Lord God."

I bolded the funniest bit. I can imagine a rewriting where Jesus throws back a few beers, carves another Ayn Rand picture on his biceps and goes out to kill lots of liberals while the all-male Christian followers cheer and fart and thump each other on the backs.

Not that any of that is needed for canceling emasculation, naturally. All that requires is to put women in their proper place.

I think the Conservapedia people should know that the Bible has already been rewritten for the needs of a particular political group: cats. An example from Genesis 1: the Bible in lolcat:

Boreded Ceiling Cat makinkgz Urf n stuffs

1 Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem.

2 Da Urfs no had shapez An haded dark face, An Ceiling Cat rode invisible bike over teh waterz.

3 At start, no has lyte. An Ceiling Cat sayz, i can haz lite? An lite wuz.4 An Ceiling Cat sawed teh lite, to seez stuffs, An splitted teh lite from dark but taht wuz ok cuz kittehs can see in teh dark An not tripz over nethin.5 An Ceiling Cat sayed light Day An dark no Day. It were FURST!!!1

6 An Ceiling Cat sayed, im in ur waterz makin a ceiling. But he no yet make a ur. An he maded a hole in teh Ceiling.7 An Ceiling Cat doed teh skiez with waterz down An waterz up. It happen.8 An Ceiling Cat sayed, i can has teh firmmint wich iz funny bibel naim 4 ceiling, so wuz teh twoth day.

For Jamie Leigh Jones

I have written of her case in the past, but here's a short summary with the reason for this post:

Today, the amendment offered by U.S. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) to stop funding defense contractors who deny assault victims their day in court passed the United States Senate by a vote of 68 - 30

Last Thursday, Sen. Franken introduced an amendment (S.2588) to the FY2010 Defense Appropriations Bill that would restrict funding to defense contractors who commit employees to mandatory binding arbitration in the case of sexual assault. The legislation, endorsed by 61 women's, labor and public interest groups, was inspired by the story of Jamie Leigh Jones, who watched the vote from the Senate gallery today.

Jones was a 19-yr-old employee of defense contractor KBR (formerly a Halliburton subsidiary) stationed in Iraq who was gang raped by her co-workers and imprisoned in a shipping container when she tried to report the crime. Her father and U.S. Rep. Ted Poe (R-Tex.), worked together to secure her safe return to the United States, but once she was home, she learned a fine-print clause in her KBR contract banned her from taking her case to court, instead forcing her into an "arbitration" process that would be run by KBR itself. Just today, Halliburton filed a petition for a rehearing en banc in the 5th Circuit Court, which means that Jamie's fight is far from over.

Good for Senator Franken! And good for us. No military contractor should be outside of the laws of all countries.



The vote distribution in the Senate is fascinating. The NAYS appear to consist of only Republican men. Those are the people who think that Jamie Leigh Jones SHOULDN'T be allowed to have her day in court but that the people who put her into a packing crate to stop her from reporting the crime are the ones who should decide on the credibility of her case. Funny how that goes, eh?

This offers one great example why having more Democrats in the Congress does matter for women's rights. Though Republican women might do, too.
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Links to the current story from Eschaton. For more of my posts on this topic, check here, here and here.

Wednesday Good News

Ada Yonath of Israel is one of the three winners of this year's Nobel Prize for Chemistry. She's the fourth woman to have won the prize. The last one was in 1964.

For why this is good news for women, check out my post below on the winners of this year's Medicine Prize.

Gender Politics! Grumble, grumble.

I watched a video interview of Leonard Cohen's opinions the other night. I searched it out on purpose, because there are hints in his lyrics that not all is OK with Leonard and Women. Women must be spelled with a capital W, because we are a mythical beast for Leonard, one he can adore or despise, put up on a pedestal and turn into something that only exists in the context of his love. (I still like many of his songs and want to stress that he's most likely a lot less objectifying than many famous male singers of the 1970s era.)

In the middle of the long interview Cohen talks about the difficulty of writing lyrics in a time which is all about gender politics and other kinds of politics and some extreme form of political correctness. He skates glibly around whatever he actually intends to say, as any good marketer would, but I suspect that he does not care for feminism.

All this set me thinking why other times would not have been about gender politics. Is it gender politics ONLY when women fight back, so to say? Read the Bible and you find gender politics, read the Koran and you find the same. Read old law books and you find them again. They have always been practiced, of course, and part of the rules of those politics traditionally has been NOT TO NOTICE THEM.

That's pretty important, I think. It's still true that the usual way to move across gender-based rules in a society is not to really question them, not to really notice them. That may be why the noticer and the questioner get bashed. Then it's those people who are seen as practicing gender politics.
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My apologies for not noting down when the relevant bit comes on the video. I want to stress again that I like Cohen's art and I'm not singling him out in any particular way, just using the interview to point out how we frame matters in the culture.

Tonight, on David Letterman...

Suzie has already written about the case, but the basic message bears repeating: Bosses harvesting their subordinates for sex is almost always a bad idea.

What happens if the boss proposes sex and the underling refuses? Will the underling be later punished for that refusal in the form of fewer raises or promotions or even a speedier firing? And what will an underling thinking about all this do when such a question is popped to her (or even to him)?

It's that dratted power-over stuff again. I understand that not all cases are like that. I also understand that people can fall in love or in lust all across those rungs in power ladders. But there it is, the basic reason why Letterman should have taken the trouble to go out to singles bars or something (when he was still single, that is). And no, this is not all about sexual morals in some old-fashioned sense of the term.

Trivial Question Of The Day

How many have found this site blocked as pron? (Must write vewy cawefully...) I've now been told about my new-found status by two people. (For this honor, I'd like to thank Ares who is an asshat,...)

The Scorched Earth Party?

That would be the U.S. Republican Party, according to two articles I recently read. Paul Krugman, from whom I stole the title of this post, writes about the transmogrified Republican Party in his recent column:

How did one of our great political parties become so ruthless, so willing to embrace scorched-earth tactics even if so doing undermines the ability of any future administration to govern?

The key point is that ever since the Reagan years, the Republican Party has been dominated by radicals — ideologues and/or apparatchiks who, at a fundamental level, do not accept anyone else's right to govern.

Anyone surprised by the venomous, over-the-top opposition to Mr. Obama must have forgotten the Clinton years. Remember when Rush Limbaugh suggested that Hillary Clinton was a party to murder? When Newt Gingrich shut down the federal government in an attempt to bully Bill Clinton into accepting those Medicare cuts? And let's not even talk about the impeachment saga.

The only difference now is that the G.O.P. is in a weaker position, having lost control not just of Congress but, to a large extent, of the terms of debate. The public no longer buys conservative ideology the way it used to; the old attacks on Big Government and paeans to the magic of the marketplace have lost their resonance. Yet conservatives retain their belief that they, and only they, should govern.

Earlier, Neal Gabler wrote something similar when discussing right-wing political beliefs as a religion:

The tea-baggers who hate President Obama with a fervor that is beyond politics; the fear-mongers who warn that Obama is another Hitler or Stalin; the wannabe storm troopers who brandish their guns and warn darkly of the president's demise; the cable and talk-radio blowhards who make a living out of demonizing Obama and tarring liberals as America-haters -- these people are not just exercising their rights within the political system. They honestly believe that the political system -- a system that elected Obama -- is broken and only can be fixed by substituting their certainty for the uncertainties of American politics.

As we are sadly discovering, this minority cannot be headed off, which is most likely why conservatism transmogrified from politics to a religion in the first place. Conservatives who sincerely believed that theirs is the only true and right path have come to realize that political tolerance is no match for religious vehemence.

My mind linked the two theses together, to come up with this:

The Republican base prefers their own rule to a destroyed country which they in turn prefer to the rule of the Democrats.

There are certainly Democrats who have corresponding (reverse) preferences, but those are never the Democrats in power. That group is sorta jello-like and wobbly, so as not to come across as bipartisan. (Imagine a fight of sharks against blobs of jello...)

This may not make much sense, but I'm trying to see how Krugman's and Gabler's arguments go with the oft-heard argument that "the left" should not start behaving like the right, should not become intolerant just to fight back. But what IS the tolerance of intolerance? Karl Popper, to the pink courtesy phone, please.

I do believe that the articles I have quoted above are right when they state that the Republican Party has not just drifted to the right but leapt there with all their might (while throwing the money bags over, first, of course). That's the way they stopped being a permanent minority: By enlisting populist policies of the lowest common denomination (fear and hate the Others!) and by energizing the fundamentalists. Those are the tigers they now ride. Seems like they are stuck up there, for the time being, because the tigers are hung-g-ry.

These developments are not completely inexplicable. Neither is the Democratic Party free of blame in all this. But I still think that the muddy middle is not large enough, interested enough or informed enough to make a real difference in these politics of division.

How I'd Like To Live

Like this, except with less stuff.

It's not going to happen. Like all junctions in life, once you took the turn marked "Sally Army Furniture: Excellent Quality Available Only in Depression Brown" you are kinda stuck and will not be able to throw everything out and start again. Also, where would my spiders live if I let all that light in?

But it's always fun to dream about a different life.

Good News Monday

The three winners of the Nobel Prize in Medicine include two women:

Three Americans won the Nobel prize in medicine on Monday for discovering how chromosomes protect themselves as cells divide, work that has inspired experimental cancer therapies and may offer insights into aging.

The research by Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Carol W. Greider and Jack W. Szostak revealed the workings of chromosome features called telomeres, which play an important role in the aging of cells.

It's the first time two women have shared in a single Nobel science prize. Over the years, a total of 10 women have won the prize in medicine.

My congratulations to all three winners. And a big cheer for the two women among them, because it does matter for all women. Prejudices and perceptions about women as a group are made less harmful by news such as these. It's important to understand that, and I have failed to explain it adequately in my posts. I'm not writing about uppity women and such just because I happen to be a goddess. The toolbox of anti-feminists consists of the same old rusted swords, and one of these is all about the presumed intellectual inferiority of women. It's presumed, by the way, however many times one refutes the argument, but actual examples do help to quiet the murmurs a little.

It's very sad that Joan Robinson died before having a chance to receive the Nobel Economics Prize, by the way. But then of course she couldn't get a full professorship until she was well in her forties. So the world HAS changed.

And What Did She Think Would Happen?

That's what I wanted to know after reading this excerpt from an interview with Sandra Day O'Connor:

Retired Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor says she regrets that some of her decisions "are being dismantled" by the current Supreme Court.

O'Connor, who generally has avoided questions on the substance of the court under Chief Justice John Roberts, made the observation during a wide-ranging and unusually candid panel discussion over the weekend.

Asked how she felt about the fact that the current court had undone some of her rulings, the nation's first woman justice responded, "What would you feel? I'd be a little bit disappointed. If you think you've been helpful, and then it's dismantled, you think, 'Oh, dear.' But life goes on. It's not always positive."

O'Connor, appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1981, was a moderate conservative who often brokered compromises among justices and across ideological lines.

Since she retired in 2006, the court has become more conservative and retreated from some rulings in which she crafted consensus, including on abortion rights, campaign finance and government race-based policies.

After all, Justice O'Connor IS part of the reason why we have an Attila-The-Hun Supreme Court right now. With proper apologies to Attila, of course, who might not have been as conservative as Scalia and his clones are.

Today's Proverb Worth Translating

Like rowing a water-logged boat against the current.

That's a description of having to deal with someone who is all glum and grumpy and down in the dumps. Such as me on my bad-fangs days.

Lecherous Letterman (by Suzie)

This column talks about CBS talk-show host David Letterman, the alleged victim of an extortion attempt. (I stuck in "alleged victim" because that's the descriptor often used for women in sex crimes.)

This scandal threatens to make painful personal incidents public in a major way for a celebrity who has tried hard to keep his private life private.

But a famous boss having sex with subordinates isn't a private, none-of-our-business affair. It raises questions about whether women felt pressure to have sex with him to keep, or advance in, their career. The NYT reports:

Several longtime associates of Mr. Letterman said he has a long history of pursuing relationships with employees, dating to his first days on television on NBC in the early 1980s. At that time he was known to frequently date interns and other young women connected to his show, one associate said.

Weekly Poetry Slam Thread posted by Anthony McCarthy

Post your fresh poems on topical or other subjects, your encouragement or disagreement with what gets posted on the comments.

Feel free to start us off, I’ll post my first one later today.

Losers (by Phila)

In response to the survey that Echidne discussed a few days ago, Mona Charen says it's not surprising that stay at home moms tend to have lower incomes and fewer opportunities:

We knew that women with lower levels of education and skills make the decision to raise their own children rather than seek a low-paying job that would barely cover the cost of childcare. That's not news, and it's not stupid either.

These women aren't "stupid" for staying at home once they realize that they can't break even by working full-time, let alone get ahead? Good to know. Hooray for the land of opportunity.

As if that weren't diabolical enough, Charen cites survey results that suggest many working mothers would like to spend more time with their children, but can't afford to, as evidence that women's throbbing biological urges are trumping the false consciousness of feminism:

Only 28 percent of full-time working mothers rated their parenting as a 9 or 10 on a 1-10 scale, compared with 41 percent of part-time workers, and 43 percent of at-home moms. A strong majority of working mothers (60 percent) say they would prefer part-time work, but only 24 percent achieve this....

Is it so threatening to acknowledge that when women have small children at home, they are less likely to want an 80-hour-a-week job?

It's not threatening at all; it's logical. What's threatening is the idea that this says something about the essential nature of women, as opposed to people who have to work themselves half to death in order to get by.

I love the part about asking overworked mothers to rate their parenting...it's a bit like breaking people's ankles, and then asking them to rate their ability to dance the Charleston. It'd be interesting to see how stringently fathers who work full-time assess their own abilities; my guess is that they might not be quite so hard on themselves. (As always, what's ignored in this argument is the extent to which fathers are at liberty to "opt out" of basic household responsibilities women's work.)

Tellingly, Charen objects to focusing on the working poor because it suggests that "only losers stay home with the little ones." Since these "losers" have no real choice in the matter, their so-called decisions can't really be presented as opting out. Therefore, to understand what the statistics are really saying, we need to ignore these outliers, and refocus our attention on the wealthier, more educated women whose choices actually matter.

The reason they matter is not just that they have money, though that certainly helps. In wingnut-speak, "educated" tends to mean "indoctrinated with unnatural ideas like feminism." If your goal is to detect the rejection of cartoon "feminist" values among uppity career women, it doesn't make much sense to look for it among the disadvantaged.

The best part is, the fact that some women can afford to stay home magically becomes an argument against childcare programs that might enable "losers" to acquire more education or additional skills, and possibly even escape poverty.

Perhaps the true source of anxiety about so-called "opt out" moms is that they tend to undermine a key liberal shibboleth; that the state must provide "quality" childcare in order to do justice to women. If even well-educated, high-earning moms who can afford the best daycare choose to stay at home instead, it rattles.

Sure. If some high-earning moms choose to stay home, even though they can afford the best available childcare, why on earth would anyone want to provide affordable childcare to women who are working 80 hours a week? Let alone to losers who are below the poverty line? If our best and brightest have no need for childcare, what possible use could it be to their social inferiors? Having chosen the "traditional" option from an untraditionally wide range of possibilities, their lives instantly become an object lesson to the underclasses: biology is destiny, and you can't "do justice to women" by expanding their access to childcare, or paying them a living wage, any more than you can do justice to goldfish by housing them in a birdcage.

Hunting my rapist, Part 1 (by Suzie)

I was raped 29 years ago, and I got the most comfort from hunting the guy down. I’ve been thinking about that this week, as I read quotes criticizing the pursuit of Roman Polanski. When I read that his victim wanted charges dropped, I thought about how time influenced my own attitude in the opposite direction.

At 21, I didn’t understand that what happened to me was rape. It was 1980, and “date rape” would be coined later that year, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, although the phrase would take a while to catch on.

He was 32, a handsome professional in the mental-health field. How could I have gotten so drunk on a couple of drinks that he had to carry me into his bedroom? I had cried so hard that my body shook; I cried so hard that he finally stopped without coming. What a baby I had been!

I told few people what happened. Apparently, I did write a former college roommate because I still have her response: “That psychologist gives me the creeps! Can’t he be disboarded or something. What a jerkass, taking such advantages!” Her reaction was common at the time: There were creeps and jerks who took advantage of women. But few used the word “rape” if there was no physical force.

I never thought of going to the police. Even now, very few men get convicted of the rape of an acquaintance, especially when there are no injuries. It’s not surprising that prosecutors dropped charges of forcible rape and sodomy, and let Polanski plead guilty to statutory rape in 1978. I doubt he would have been prosecuted if his victim had been 18. After all, if a psychiatrist who examined Polanski could blame a 13-year-old for being provocative, what chance would a woman have in similar circumstances?

Years passed, and I put my “incident” – as the media might call it – out of my mind. I wrote about the issue of date rape, and I felt sad for friends who didn’t consider their rapes to be real rapes for one reason or another.

Eventually, I began to examine my attitude toward my own rape. I had interviewed the man when I was a newspaper intern, and he worked in a hospital psychiatric unit. He asked me out on a date and suggested we meet first at his apartment, where he offered me drinks. If I drink too much, I feel sick to my stomach – not like that night, where I felt good at first, and then distant. Much later, I would experience that feeling again before surgery.

My rapist would have had access to drugs. But what if he didn’t drug me? What if I said yes? I can’t remember what I did or didn’t say. Then the avenging angel on my shoulder reminds me that his unit dealt with people who were impaired by alcohol or drugs, as well as those who were mentally ill. Surely, he would have recognized when a woman was impaired. Surely, he had been trained in the concept of informed consent. If he meant well, why didn’t he stop as soon as I started to cry? When I was still clearly intoxicated, why did he put me in my car and let me drive home to another city? Why did he not call to make sure I got home safely or to see if I was OK?

Because he was a rapist.

I can only imagine what Polanski’s victim thought all these years, as people questioned her honesty. In 2006, when a therapist suggested I come to terms with the rape, I did what any good (former) journalist would do. I decided to investigate.

Next Friday: Let the hunt begin!

ETA: Some people think I'm defending Polanski. I'm not defending him or any rapists. Nor am I under the delusion that the attitudes of the 1970s have disappeared. For those interested in what I've written previously about Polanski, go here and here, and wait for the pages to load.

Friday bird blogging (by Suzie)

Sometimes I wish I could fly away.





(This is a great blue heron, by my friend Peter.)

Grow A Pair

I heard someone urging someone else to do just that, and that made me wonder what I should grow if I ever were similarly urged. A pair of horns? Bigger divine breasts? A pair of auxiliary eyes in the back of my head? Long corner teeth? Legs instead of a snake tail?

That saying has to do with testicles, of course, and the assumption that testicles equal courage and bravery. Some people use ovaries the same way, such as "that takes ovaries!" or talk about brass ovaries when a woman comes across as daring. But those sayings are slow to change, alas.

Speaking of acts of courage, bravery and possibly foolhardiness, you may have followed the fuss over Representative Alan Grayson's comments on the Republican health care plan. If not, here's a quick catch-up course:


The initial move:





Grayson apologizes (not):





Grayson on CNN:





Hmm. I wonder if he would care to have my children? They're easy as they come out in egg form.

More generally, of course, I'm not sure that rudeness ultimately works. But the Republicans were the ones who suggested the Democratic proposal included death panels and such.

On Opting Out, Again...

The opt-out revolution is what the New York Times invented some years ago, or so I recall. The idea is that highly educated women with wealthy partners opt out of careers in order to stay at home with their children. Note that we are not talking about poor women, or women who have to work to feed those children, or about Any. Kind. Of. Men.. Only about uppity women who have decided no longer to be so uppity.

Here's why this particular trend-making matters to feminism. Let me provide you with the extreme version of what a real opt-out revolution by educated women would mean, one which would truly reverse the trend so far:

If that revolution applied, colleges and universities might ultimately reinstall gender quotas in the sense of a maximum number of women allowed in law schools, medical schools and veterinary schools. After all, those are occupational degrees, and degrees which are today subsidized by the general society in various ways. If women are less likely to ever use their degrees, would they be allowed to be the majority of the students? What about all those poor men they exclude from the education which the women will never even use?

And how many middle-income parents would really consider re-mortgaging their houses just to pay for their daughter's Mrs. degrees? This is an argument that was not at all rare in the past. Indeed, I know a woman in her forties whose parents told her that they would not pay for her college degree as she'd just get married. The money would be wasted, yanno.

Likewise, once potentially powerful women were no longer interested in paid child-care and such, women who really, really need subsidized and good childcare will have fewer advocates, and all those powerful decision-making positions in the society would have far fewer qualified female applicants.

We'd probably also get back all those housewife jokes.

Those are the reasons why the invented trend is about the wealthiest of women, by the way, and not about mothers in general. It is the most educated and wealthiest who, after all, are closest to the top rungs of the societal ladders. If they can be kept away from the top ladder, so can all women and all women's issues. Besides, "opting out" is an incredibly clever way to make childcare once again something that only women do and something that really should be done by a woman alone at home for her own children. Since many women can't afford that option, they can then hate on the women who can and we can have mommy wars and the rest of the society can just chug along without worrying about any of that female crap.

So much for explaining the wider framework of all these weirdly breathless trendlets that the New York Times likes to stuff down our female throats. The widest framework of all is of course the one which assumes that it's up to mothers to take care of their children and of course they have a choice in how they do it but every choice is also wrong.

But they really should have more children and that shouldn't cost the society any money and they really should be at home taking care of those children. On the other hand, that we have so few Nobel Prize winning women is because women are more interested in their children and their families and that's really very admirable but don't come to us complaining about where all the woman award-winners are. If women make the choice of staying at home, they have only themselves to blame for not making the big bucks or the great inventions!

So I'm ranting here. It does a goddess good sometimes. I'm ranting, because we refuse to see that bringing up children is a time-consuming and necessary task, and at the same time we also demand that this nonexistent task (!) be done silently, quietly and without much money by mothers, and they are the ones to bear almost all the costs of this. If these mothers then point out that they can't be in two places at the same time we ask them to make a Sophie's Choice and to chuck out one part of themselves altogether. With very little empathy for those making that choice because they are rich enough to afford it.

Anyway. Here's the impetus for this rant:

A first census snapshot of married women who stay home to raise their children shows that the popular obsession with high-achieving professional mothers sidelining careers for family life is largely beside the point.

Instead, census statistics released Thursday show that stay-at-home mothers tend to be younger and less educated, with lower family incomes. They are more likely than other mothers to be Hispanic or foreign-born.

Census researchers said the new report is the first of its kind and was spurred by interest in the so-called "opt-out revolution" among well-educated women said to be leaving the workforce to care for children at home.

Too bad that they didn't design the sampling frame so that they could answer that question, by the way. To find out the characteristics of SAHMs doesn't tell us the reverse: What percentage of the women with children in each social class are SAHMs. It could be that the original Census data does that answer, but they are not telling us what it might be here.

Gah. I really, really hate this topic. It's classist, essentialist and a major example of how we reverse everything about a topic so that we can bash on one group of women (usually either wealthier SAHMS or wealthier mothers in the labor force) while ignoring vast groups of women altogether. And all men, most naturally.
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To understand my irritation a little better, read, say, the comments attached to this post. Then multiply reading comments like those by a thousand and you might get where I sit. The topic disintegrates into woman-blaming and anger and then turns into mummy wars.

Echidne, All Sand-Papered

That's what happens when you read rough shit every day. You get a sore skin, even under all these snake scales. That's what happened to me concerning the Roman Polanski case and that was one reason I didn't want to write more about it. The other reason was that I already did write about it, and what I wrote was very fine, indeed. Even rather path-breaking. Honest.

But it took enormous amounts of intellectual and emotional energy out of me and so I'm exhausted and my eyes ain't shining the way snake eyes should and my goddess tiara is askew on my poor bald head. And what I wrote will have exactly zero impact on the general conversation about Roman Polanski.

That will remain the same old merry-go-round where the same arguments pass by and have zero impact on the next argument passing by:

Was the mummy the real guilty party? Was poor Polanski trapped? Think of his horrible life before: his wife murdered his parents lost in the Holocaust! The lawyers made a deal and reneged! He was right to flee! But he fled and broke the law! He admitted guilt! But was the mummy the real guilty party? Was poor Polanski trapped...

I have followed so many of those in the recent days.

But of course child rape is never acceptable. Here is the statement I have supported:

The Women's Media Center (WMC) calls on the media to focus their coverage of Roman Polanski's recent arrest where it belongs: on the crime he committed, the rape of a child. Originally indicted in 1977 on six felony counts, including rape and child molesting, Polanski and his attorneys reached a deal in which he pled guilty to having "unlawful sexual intercourse" with a 13 year old girl. He fled the country when it was reported that the judge in the case was going to give him more time than the 42 days served which had been agreed to in the plea bargain.

Because the Grand Jury minutes are unsealed and publicly available, there is ample information for anyone wishing to investigate the facts. Despite this, numerous mainstream media outlets have chosen to depict the Polanski case as somewhat unresolved, hinging on a "murky" issue of consent. These outlets represent the case as clouded by the victim's forgiveness, prosecutorial misconduct, the family's alleged opportunism, and other elements of the story which have no bearing on the key fact that the case is about the rape of a child.

Too often, the media is complicit in misrepresenting or silencing the victims of sexual assault. The Women's Media Center calls on the media to report the unfolding story of the Polanski arrest and possible extradition with clarity and specificity. The rape of a child is at the heart of the case. That is not disputed, and should not be represented as subjective.

Carol Jenkins,
President, Women's Media Center

None of this rant is to be taken as a blog policy, by the way. I'm eagerly looking forward to Suzie's writings on the topic and people are naturally free to discuss it as much as they wish.

I've Got Nothing

Just some old bad poems. Sorry that they aren't funnier. I promised a cheerful post today and now I'm blocked. Heh:


Life

Your right foot on the right side
of the abyss
Your left foot on the left side
of the abyss
The abyss looks up your dress.


Love

Like a red woolen cloak
Around your neck
Tight
You shall choke

Writer's Block?

Loquacious. The word for the day, meaning what I'm not much in person and what I'm very much in writing. Except today, perhaps, given that I don't want to write about the Polanski case and yet I feel I should. A teaching opportunity lost? Well, my readers don't need it, being smart and erudite already, and some others won't learn in any case. Is that depressing or what?

To return to the Word Of The Day, I wonder if using like a thousand words over and over counts as loquacious? Because that's what I do, pretty much.

What I'm Listening To Right Now

This:

So Much For Democracy

A conservative rag is now discussing a what-if? non-violent military coup as a way to solve the "Obama problem:"

America isn't the Third World. If a military coup does occur here it will be civilized. That it has never happened doesn't mean it wont. Describing what may be afoot is not to advocate it.

Then the author goes on to describe it in great degree, including all sorts of reasons why it might be a Very Good Thing (in a deranged world, natch) for the military to take over the government of this country.

Nuttery of the nth degree, of course. But that's no reason to ignore it.

More on Senator Ensign's Comments

For preliminaries, read the post below. Essentially, Senator John Ensign (R-NV) argues that the United States health care system works better than those of any other comparable nations if we first take out car accidents and violent deaths.

There's some method to his madness, and it goes like this:

What is it that health care "produces"? If we can't give the output some measure, how do we know if the costs of a particular system are too high or not? Indeed, the whole discussion of high health care costs is always juxtaposed with the idea that the system isn't somehow producing what those high costs would make us expect.

Here's the deep-level problem: It's very, very difficult to measure the output of the health care system. Ideally we'd like to do that by measuring the health improvements or the prevention of worse health, for every single patient, and for both physical and mental health. Researchers do try to do this, but mostly they resort to something much cruder and ruder. Often this has to do with measures of mortality or morbidity. The reverse of these would of course be good things, and to the extent we can tie them to what the health care system does, we get a rough performance measure, right?

That's where Senator Ensign steps in. His point is that average life expectancy measures (which capture mortality in reverse) are very sensitive to anything that kills people at young ages. All such deaths cut off all those extra life years the average person would expect to have.

Because the United States has an excess death rate at young ages, when compared to other economically similar countries, the U.S. life expectancy figures look worse. That this excess death rate is due to factors (driving and violence) which are not something physicians and nurses can easily influence might mean that the system here isn't functioning too badly at all! Indeed, according to Senator Ensign, it functions just great (though uninsured Americans might disagree).

What he fails to state is that other mortality figures also show the United States in a bad light, and these are measures which cannot be explained away in the same way. The most important of these is the infant mortality rate (deaths of children up to the first year of life), and this rate has been shown to be fairly easily influenced by health care.

The whole topic of how to measure the output of health care is a large and cumbersome one, and soundbite-type discussions do it a disservice, sigh. At the same time, it's so very easy to draw a few pieces of data out of a political top hat and to come across as convincing. You do that by setting up straw-people left, right and center, and then you set them on fire.

The source of Ensign's ideas appears to be a study which controlled for traffic accidents and violent deaths but did not control for average incomes in a country. You get partial results with partial controls.

Ensign on Gun Accidents And U.S. Health Care

This video really is quite hilarious:





I'm going to talk about Senator (R) Ensign's intended point later on, but let me first clarify what "gun accidents" are: Homicide. Of course gun accidents might also be included, but what he really talks about is violent deaths caused by guns of all types. It's not that Americans are somehow so clumsy when cleaning their rifles that they die like flies out of that. We are talking about intentional killing of people with firearms.

Ensign doesn't want to say that, because it would make the U.S. sound bad. Neither does he draw the obvious conclusion from the car accident death rates, which would be to have more public transportation. Fighting for something like that is not a Republican Thing.

Hence my guffaws when I watched the video. The topic itself is a serious one, but I'm rolling on the floor laughing when I hear a Republican defend the current health care system by saying that it works real well in a country where people drive recklessly and kill each other anyway.

Four Women

Nina Simone, one of the geniuses of this world. There's much to think about in this song.

And Where Was The Mother? Hmh?

I got an "aha!" experience last night while reading various stuff about Roman Polanski, to acquaint myself with the story about the drugging and rape of a thirteen-year old which lies behind the topic du jour in the American popular media. You want to go AHA!, too, you do, and I will show you how we can all do it.

But first I have to step back a little, to the previous case du jour, that one about the lead singer of the old band The Mamas&The Papas, John Phillips, whose daughter, MacKenzie Phillips, recently argued that her father had raped her one night when she was nineteen, and that they had later commenced a "consensual" adult incest relationship which lasted almost a decade.

I first learned about the whole story on Eschaton comments threads. It didn't take very long for someone to ask: "And where was Michelle when all this supposedly happened?"

Someone else then helpfully explained that Michelle Gilliam, one of John Phillip's four consecutive wives, was not the wife du jour when the presumed rape took place, nor the biological mother of Mackenzie. That let her off the hook!

So who should be strung on that hook instead? MacKenzie's mother, Susan Adams, who was John's first wife? Or Geneviève Waïte, his third wife, the one who was actually married to him at the time the presumed rape happened? Where did MacKenzie actually live? In short, which of the many available mother-figures is the one we should really hold accountable for the rape she accuses her father of?

I'm not certain if I had gotten enlightened without a case like that one, where there are so many possible mummies to choose from! Because the case showed me how women are always partially responsible for crimes committed against their children by others. Even when the child is already legally an adult! Miraculous, really.

That this happens a lot is pretty clear to me. If it's not clear to you, let me give you two recent quotes from articles discussing whether Roman Polanski should be extradited to the U.S. to face charges on "having sex" with a thirteen-year old girl many years ago. This one:

But there is more to this story. The 13-year old model "seduced" by Polanski had been thrust onto him by her mother, who wanted her in the movies. The girl was just a few weeks short of her 14th birthday, which was the age of consent in California. (It's probably 13 by now!) Polanski was demonized by the press, convicted, and managed to flee, fearing a heavy sentence.

And this one:

And it ought not to matter that Polanski is a gifted artist. In fact, it ought to be held against him. He seduced -- if that can possibly be the word -- the 13-year-old Samantha Geimer with all the power and authority of a 44-year-old movie director who could make her famous. If this did not impress the girl, it must have impressed her mother. She permitted what was supposed to be a photo shoot.

Bolds are mine.

This is all fascinating. Note that I'm not arguing that children shouldn't be kept safe. They certainly should. Indeed, we should only dole out good parents to all children, if it only were possible.

But I can't help seeing a very odd pattern in these stories: It's as if the accused rapist is just like a fox who was allowed into the chicken coop because a very careless and bad farmer left the door open! Nobody expects anything better from the fox, but the farmer should have known better!

So we look at all those mummy-figures who should have protected young women from the natural assaults of fox-like men, and we blame them for leaving the chicken coop door ajar.

Did you get any AHA!s yet? If not, here is the one I got. From the Wikipedia page on Nastassja Kinski :

At 15 Kinski began a romantic relationship with director Roman Polanski

This is a different young woman but the same Roman Polanski, note. Is it now Kinski's mother whom we should blame if fifteen is deemed a bit young for such a romantic relationship?

It goes like this: A fox goes around, raiding a chicken coop after a chicken coop, and we go on blaming the keepers for forgetting to close the doors. If you focus on each case separately it sort of makes sense. But once you see the overall pattern it does not make sense. At all.


----
Thanks to kmareka for links to the Kinski Wikipedia page and the HuffPO piece.

And Now : A Message From Your Friendly Religionist

Pope Benedict has given a speech about Europe's need to stick to "her" Christian roots. Some snippets:

"Man needs to be liberated from material oppressions, but more profoundly, he must be saved from the evils that afflict the spirit," Benedict told the crowd from under a white canopy beside a 40-foot-high stainless steel cross. The German-born pope spoke in Italian, and his words were translated into Czech.

...

In his traditional Sunday Angelus blessing, Benedict urged the crowd not to forget their "rich heritage of faith."

"Maintain the spiritual patrimony inherited from your forebears ... guard it and make it answer to the needs of the present day," he said.

All that smell of manly aftershave might be the fault of the translation? Nope. I've stopped being so damn nice and always giving everyone the benefit of the doubt. Pope Ratzi doesn't even see the other half of humankind. I bet he secretly thinks of "Christians and their wives," for example.

Still, those red shoes are cute.

No clemency for Roman Polanski (by Suzie)

Roman Polanski was arrested yesterday in Switzerland, which plans to extradite him to the United States. He fled in 1978 to avoid prison, after pleading guilty to unlawful sex with a minor, a 13-year-old whom he had drugged, who said she told him no. He had pleaded guilty to avoid a rape charge.

The Associated Press and other media seem sympathetic to him. As Elizabeth Switaj writes:

To read the news reports, ... you would think that his arrest was the injustice, rather than his crime ... As usual, when a wealthy man is held accountable for such crimes, rape apologism comes to the fore.

Foreign ministers for France and Poland say they will ask for clemency. But why should we give a pass to a child rapist, just because he has remained a fugitive for decades, thanks to rich and influential supporters. He has never taken full responsibility for what he did.

I've written about his case before.

ETA to take out the incorrect stuff.

The Need for Critical Mass (by Liz)

There's a great body of research showing the need for a critical mass of women, at least 30 percent, in leadership. The data exists for Wall Street, academia and politics. There is strength in numbers. Critical mass shifts a group's influence from "special interest" to representative. It gives a voice to the underrepresented. It is the point at which groups can move from survival to growth. And yet, despite this data, women make up just 17 percent of the U.S. Congress.

People ignore data all the time. I understand that. But how can you ignore this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Jj6pqajvB8

Senator Debbie Stabenow's response to Republican Whip, Senator Kyle of Arizona, last Friday is a perfect example of why we need more women in politics. Apparently Senator Kyl doesn't understand that maternity care is not a women issue. Prenatal care, ultrasounds, safe deliveries and postnatal care benefit all human beings, not just the females. Yes maternity care is critical for mothers. But it's also critical for fathers and babies -- both little girls and little boys. Sure, many men get that. But for those who don't, we need more women like Senator Stabenow to enlighten them.

On a related note: With permission from the Goddess, I want to invite you to visit http://www.helloladies.com/ starting Oct.1. I will be posting a story on maternity leave there this Thursday.