The New Career Choice For Women: High-End Prostitution!

Did you ever read Freakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner? I never did, what with being an economist-n-all. Anyway, these gentlemen have written a new book, called Superfreakonomics, and the Internet is abuzz with the way they discuss global warming in it. As in "wrong". But few are probably going to feel that there's anything wrong with the way they discuss prostitution:

There is one labour market women have always dominated: prostitution. Its business model is built upon a simple premise. Since time immemorial and all over the world, men have wanted more sex than they could get for free. So what inevitably emerges is a supply of women who, for the right price, are willing to satisfy this demand. But what is the right price?

Sudhir Venkatesh, a sociologist at Columbia University in New York, spent his graduate school years in Chicago, embedding himself with a street gang that practically ran a South Side neighbourhood. Along the way, he became an authority on the neighbourhood's underground economy, and began collecting data on the local prostitutes.

Knowing that traditional survey methods don't necessarily produce reliable results for a sensitive topic like prostitution, Venkatesh hired trackers to stand on street corners or sit in brothels with the prostitutes, directly observing some facets of their transactions and gathering more intimate details from them as soon as the customers were gone.

Most of the trackers were former prostitutes — an important credential because such women were more likely to get honest responses. Venkatesh also paid the prostitutes for participating in the study. If they were willing to have sex for money, he reasoned, surely they'd be willing to talk about having sex for money. And they were.

It turns out that the typical street prostitute in Chicago works 13 hours a week, performing 10 sex acts during that period, and earns an hourly wage of approximately $27. So her weekly take-home pay is roughly $350. This includes an average of $20 that a prostitute steals from her customers and drugs accepted in lieu of cash.

Their income of roughly $18,000 a year is next to nothing compared with what even low-rent prostitutes in Chicago earned 100 years ago. A woman working in a "dollar house" took home the equivalent of about $76,000 today annually, while prostitutes at the Everleigh Club, the city's top brothel, could earn the equivalent of about $430,000.

Why has the prostitute's wage fallen so far? Because demand has fallen dramatically. Not the demand for sex. That is still robust. But prostitution, like any industry, is vulnerable to competition.

That competition, dear ladies, is you giving it out for free! So let's return to the beginning of that quote: " Since time immemorial and all over the world, men have wanted more sex than they could get for free. So what inevitably emerges is a supply of women who, for the right price, are willing to satisfy this demand. But what is the right price?"

So why would the supply of "free" sex have risen? What is so different from the new generation of women,eh? Are they rather stupid, not to realize that you'd make more by charging for fucking? Or let's put it in reverse: Why was the supply of "free" sex so much less in the past?

Levitt and Dubner don't seem to answer these questions for us (at least in the above excerpt I found). But they are very important questions, after all, and their answers have something to do with the way societies punished women who "supplied" "free" sex. You can still get stoned for it in a few places on earth.

By not answering these questions Levitt and Dubner make it sound as if men would always want more sex than they can get "freely", whatever the societal setup. Yet the amount they appear to get has risen over time, and in theory, at least, it's possible to imagine a society where the "supply" of "free" sex would be enough to cause the prostitution markets to die out.

Is it really true that prostitutes in the past earned so very much? Even those at the bottom of pay scale? The excerpt above compares today's street prostitutes to prostitutes who worked from brothels in the past. Were there no street prostitutes in those days of yore? The point I'm trying to make is that we need to compare like with like, and I'm not sure if the above comparisons really are of that type.

Never mind. Levitt and Dubner discuss a study of today's street prostitutes and their lives and then skip happily over to interview one high-end prostitute who is making loads and loads of money! In fact, the more she charges, the more customers she gets, and the more she earns with less work! It's totally TEH career of the future for us wimminz. Note that we are not talking about street prostitution here, nope. We are talking about competing with the Trophy Wife markets:

About this, Allie is probably wrong. Although she views herself as similar to a street prostitute, she has less in common with that kind of woman than she does with a trophy wife. Allie is essentially a trophy wife who is rented by the hour. She isn't really selling sex, or at least not sex alone. She sells men the opportunity to trade in their existing wives for a younger, more sexually adventurous version — without the trouble and long-term expense of actually having to go through with it.

For an hour or two, she represents the ideal wife: beautiful, attentive, smart, laughing at your jokes and satisfying your lust. She is happy to see you every time you show up at her door. Your favourite music is already playing and your favourite drink is on ice. She will never ask you to take out the rubbish.

...

Street prostitutes like LaSheena might have the worst job in America. But for elite prostitutes like Allie, the circumstances are completely different: high wages, flexible hours and relatively little risk of violence or arrest. So the real puzzle isn't why someone like Allie becomes a prostitute, but rather why more women don't choose this career.

That's the puzzle. Levitt and Dubner don't even TRY to answer that puzzle. It's something about the mysterious women, refusing to supply sex for good money, when they should. They are probably too stupid to realize that they could do that instead of getting married as trophy wives. Which is just prostitution under another name.

Levitt and Dubner don't actually properly tell us why Allie's profits rise as she raises her prices. It must be that she is exerting market power, as if she had a local monopoly in sex-for-money. But it isn't really sex she appears to be selling as much as "trophy-wifeness": The proper way for a wife to act. Or that's what Levitt and Dubner hint at.

It's all pretty fascinating. Like picking up a rock and looking at the slimy critters wiggling all over each other. Because ultimately Levitt and Dubner are arguing that women sell sex and men buy it, even when we talk about marriage. That means that if you pay a woman enough, she will act as a proper trophy wife. Or she should act that way. Or something like that.

And high-end prostitution is completely vanilla. No customer ever wants to hurt the prostitute, no. They bring wine and gift cards! They are harmless married dentists or stockbrokers! They just want to enjoy a moment when women act like they should act at home, too.

Let's go back to that first excerpt, about men always having wanted more sex than they could get free. There's no actual evidence for that, but never mind. Let's set up something similar but in reverse:

Since time immemorial and all over the world, women have wanted more romance than they could get for free. So what inevitably emerges is a supply of men who, for the right price, are willing to satisfy this demand. But what is the right price?

But such a market has never existed, to my knowledge. Why would that be? Worth thinking about, this one. It also links to the whole attitude of Levitt and Dubner.
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The picture above was selected to draw attention to the way women's legs are used in the linked excerpt to the chapter on prostitution.

How To Get A 24-Hour Migraine With Frequent Vomiting

Easy-peasy! First spend several hours on the Psychology Today site, where you find the misogynist Satoshi Kanazawa preaching us on the evils of feminism and how Barbie is an evolutionary construct! No-one there argues back to his ideas. He doesn't allow comments and there's no other blog written by someone critical of his ideas.

And no-one there appears to know (or care) that the study his recent book (Why Beatiful People Have More Daughters) is named for was completely faulty: We don't actually know why beautiful people have more daughters because most likely they do not.

You could stop at this point, naturally, if you weren't obsessive-compulsive or something. But that would have been too easy, so you slip-and-side onto a Men's Rights site, because of a quotation you find where someone says that Kanazawa has proven, completely and finally, how men MUST be the bosses of wimminz.

The Men's Rights sites vary a lot, from truly ghastly (kill-all-women) to pretty ghastly (menz-do-everything-better). This one (which I'm not going to link to) is interesting because it has a whole lot of articles which you can read to find the theoretical underpinnings of what they are to believe. Those articles, for instance, tell us that the gender gap in wages doesn't exist at all. In fact, women earn more than men for the same work! Eat that, you silly feminist economist.

As an aside, that's one of the major problems of the Internetization of all these debates. People now accept different studies as the troof, and hence the debate has become pretty much impossible. How could I debate those MRA guys when they already believe that a) women earn more than men, b) the problem with rape is mostly false accusations and c) feminists are in power in this country? If I give them studies which disprove those things they won't find them in their short list of Approved Sources. The end of the story.

But this particular site wasn't just about those common topics. I followed one long thread from the beginning to the end, because it consisted of lots of visitors who actually tried to talk with the local denizens.

The odd thing is that I started with much empathy for some of those denizens: They were clearly men who had been horribly hurt by something in their lives and who had chosen to generalize from that hurt to all women. Even some of the nasty comments seemed to be based on hurt. It seemed as if they believed that white heterosexual men truly were the oppressed in this country! At any moment a PC policewoman could walk in and take them to jail for rapes they didn't commit.

But as the discussion continued, something odd turned up: Yes, they argue that women are in power in the United States, and that is wrong. But the desirable state is not equality. Nope. It is men who should be in power, because Satoshi Kanazawa and Steven Pinker have proved that to be the only possible arrangement. In short: what these Men's Rights Activists thought men's rights consist of is the right to dominate women.

My empathy had disappeared into a puff of bad air by this time. Then the migraine and the vomiting.

Food For Thought -- But You Shall Puke

Broadsheet, the women's blog at Salon.com, reported on this New York Times article:

Somalia's hardline Islamist group al Shabaab has publicly whipped women for wearing bras they say violate Islam by constituting a deception, north Mogadishu residents said Friday.

The insurgent group, which seeks to impose a strict form of sharia Islamic law throughout Somalia, amputated a foot and a hand each from two young men accused of robbery earlier this month. They have also banned movies, musical ringtones, dancing at wedding ceremonies and playing or watching soccer. [ID:nL9050633]

Residents said gunmen had been rounding up any woman seen with a firm bust and then had them publicly whipped by masked men. The women were then told to remove their bras and shake their breasts.

All that is horrible. Then check out some comments to the Broadsheet post:

At Least Have The Common Decency

To give them poles to twirl around on.

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It Is Now Officially The Most Breastisis-Obsessed Week EVER On Broadsheet

What's up with the lack of linkage or pics, though?

I wanna see Somali ladies shaking their titties, too...

Maybe it's over here?

http://worldmusic.nationalgeographic.com/

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Show Us YOUR Tits, Tracy!

Stop teasing us with stories about Somali ladies' sweet jubblies! We wanna see the Broadsheet bazookas!

Compassionate and empathetic these guys are not. Neither do they have anything useful to say, though it's of some interest that they are essentially engaging in sexual harassment.

I have recently spent some time on various science-y sites, reading posts by professors of anthropology and such. They get comments almost as bad. It's enough to WAF: Write As Feminist.

Weekly Poetry Slam Posted by A Mc

Post your poems on this thread, don't be shy.

News From The Wingnut Front

I know someone who watches Fox News all day long, every day. She tells me stuff! For instance, the contraceptive pill is terrible because it disrupts evolution by making women not pick dominant men! And all studies show that only working women are unhappy and it's the fault of feminists!

Those of you who read this blog regularly know where these ideas come from. But they sure change so as to be unrecognizable before they are fed as "facts" at Fox. And then they are plugged back into the popular culture, and you will come across them one day. Funny how that works.

Gender & homelessness (by Suzie)

I pretended to be homeless for three days and nights in June 1989. I knew this was not the same as being homeless. I question the ethics of it now, but as a reporter covering housing issues, I wanted an insider’s perspective.

Some people eyed me with concern because I was slender and salable as a prostitute. Poor and/or homeless people offered to share food. On the street, it helps to have strength and some reserve fat.

I had gone undercover with Joel, who managed a program for the homeless mentally ill. I wouldn't have gone out alone. Women who don’t already have a man often hook up with one on the streets to help protect them from other men. Many get swept into prostitution. After all, a single woman on the streets is synonymous with prostitution. Think “street walker” or “woman of the streets.”

I was no prize. I was dirty and I stunk. There was no shower, no toothbrush and no “sanitary products.” I happened to be on my period that week, and the best I could do was stuff toilet paper in my underwear. The first day, a man told us we weren’t going to find any work or shelter.

“Honey, the only way you’re going to make any money is on your ass.” He then put an arm with crusty sores around my shoulders and told Joel: “I’ll give you $20.” Although disgusted, we laughed off his suggestion, to avoid conflict. He then offered to sneak me into his flophouse. “I won’t molest you,” he promised. Yeah, right.

No one we encountered thought sex work was empowering. At a Salvation Army office, an older woman who worked as a maid assured me: “There’s nothing wrong with hard work.” She suggested I try a day-labor pool.

At a church shelter, Joel and I got a hearty meal after a long sermon. At bedtime, men and women were separated. Joel slept on a pew, while I claimed an old mattress on the floor. The bathroom in the women’s area had a sign: “Women Only! If you don’t know which you are, male or female, ask the staff.”

I spent the next two nights at a Salvation Army shelter. I had to obey various rules, and I had little privacy, but the food, hot showers, washer and dryer, clean clothes and clean sheets felt luxurious.

We were rousted out before dawn to work. At a labor pool, I got a job as an assistant to a maid at a pricey hotel. The maid reassured me that I could do this work; I didn't have to remain homeless.
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Women are more likely to be poor, and yet, the great majority of people who live on urban streets, especially those who sleep outside, are men. To avoid the streets (or, more accurately, predatory men), many women stay in overcrowded or unsafe housing or with abusive families or mates.

I’ve written before about public spaces, asking: Which public? Some women, whether homeless or a professional on her lunch break, may feel uncomfortable in places where men hang out – and for good reason.

When people talk about helping the homeless, don’t forget women who live in bad conditions but are not visible to passers-by.
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Next week, a friend will write about the connection between domestic violence and homelessness.

Friday critter blogging (by Suzie)

This is Noah, the puggle puppy, contemplating Clifford's tail. My Ginger walks with her tail in the air, like a lemur. If it's cold or rainy, she tucks it under, if it were a furry thong.

I've always wished that I had a prehensile tail, like a monkey.

Question for the weekend (by Suzie)

The topic is underwear. I was curious if every girl and woman knew that they would end up with fewer stained underwear if they wore black ones during their period. (I'm not counting cultures in which women don't wear underwear or don't wear black ones.) The question arose because a friend had not received that wisdom.

When I searched the font of all knowledge, I saw she must be the only one because there were various disquisitions on "period underwear." The Frisky, for example, had a photo of a butt in red underwear (No! No! It's too hard to match colors.) and this comment:

Typically, girls wear sexy underwear at all times because, even if we know no one is going to see them, we just feel better about ourselves when we know we look pretty underneath.

My new questions: Is it possible for a woman to feel good about herself without wearing sexy underwear? Is the Frisky satire or a sign of the apocalypse?

Even scarier was Answers.com answering: "What does it mean if a girl wears black underwear?" The first response mentioned the utility during her period. Then there was this:

... when a woman wears black underwear, they planned that ahead, which means they wanted you to see it, wheter it be a bra or panties, they intended for you to see it, whether that means before intercourse, or just whenever. I think it's safe to say if a woman is wearing sexy underwear, and she is showing it to you, she already planned this out. I'm not saying if a woman has on black underwear it means you're going to get laid, but it's not too far fetched to think that that is a possibility. Mind you this is all from personal experience.

Does this make you want to wear large white underwear?

Today's Funny

This is Mr. Savage and a caller who thinks that Savage's rants should be valid material to use for a college paper.
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For more funnies, go here. I guess I should attach a wingnut warning to these. The kind which despises us wimminfolk.

And Here We Go Again..

Yet another series by a guy writer on the topic of those unhappy wimmen. This time it's Russel Bishop telling women that what makes them unhappy is trying to compete with the boyz:

My theory as that over the past 40 years, as American society exited the "Father Knows Best" or "Leave It To Beaver" mentality of the 50's and 60's, we seem to have increasingly equated success and fulfillment with jobs, career advancement, position title, bank accounts, and other symbols of success. If you were one of those statistical women who took on job, career or economic goals as your "symbols" of success, you just might have wound up sacrificing what mattered most in hopes of greener pastures at the other end of job, career or economic goals.

What if you won the race to the top: a better job, increased paycheck, more "toys" than the boys? Did you bargain for all that comes with it? Did you anticipate the sacrifices you would have to make to get there? How are those trades looking now?

Pardon me while I bang my head against the garage door.

Just to a reminder, the initial study which started this diarrhea flowing found a small increase in the number of women reporting that they were not too happy, when compared to studies forty years ago or so. The study establishing this was unable to find any one group of women which would have caused this increase. IN PARTICULAR, STAY-AT-HOME WIVES WERE AS LIKELY TO REPORT INCREASED UNHAPPINESS AS WOMEN IN THE LABOR FORCE. Yes, that's worth shouting about, even though nobody on Huffington Post hears it.

So you begin with a finding that having a job is not the reason why women's unhappiness might have risen? Never mind! Let's pretend that it IS the reason! Then let's pretend that all the women with jobs have them only in order to die in the corner office! Nope, they are not working to earn money. They work to compete with the boyz, and what makes the boyz happy makes the wimmins unhappy. So the wimmins should return to the world of "Father Knows Best." Even though that was a television series, not real world.

This is so fucking inane (and yes, I know I shouldn't write that word). Don't read the comments thread if you want to keep your sanity. Though I award my louse medal for this comment:

I've read enough evolutionary psychology to know that nature's purpose for women is to bear children and raise them. However, I wouldn't go so far as to say that means they must obey nature's command and deny their hearts. But, I do question whether wanting to compete with men in everything and making themselves miserable in the process is really their heart's speaking or the constant nagging of the feminists in society who people should have stopped listening to almost immediately after they opened their mouths in the 60's.

I know I'm shouting into a barrel and nobody will hear. It's much more fun and exciting to debate the question whether women should stay at home or not. Never mind that nobody is offering a wage for that or health insurance or retirement benefits! Never mind, either, that the happiness of one Mr. Russell Bishop seems to be inextricably intertwined with that premise or some similar one.

I do admit wondering why HuffPo puts up guys to write on the topic of women's happiness, by the way. Especially as these guys certainly have an axe to grind.
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You should also read this post of mine, while we are on the topic of what constitutes a failure of feminism. And Barbara Ehrenreich's take on the whole hullabaloo. Thanks to AndiF for that link.

Errr. Not Quite What I Had In Mind

When it comes to wanting equal treatment of men and women in fashion. Check out this photograph on latest men's fashions and the associated text.

But suppose that fashion actually did start treating men as inanimate dolls, too. Would this ultimately work to make fashions more human-friendly? By making more people aware of the impossibility of walking or working or breathing in those clothes?

An interesting question. Alas, men lack the training to accept fashion rules.

The Man Who Bit The Dog

I have seen a great increase in those kind of news stories: the unusual, the extreme, the shocking!, probably because the traditional media is fighting for its survival and one way to get lots of eyeballs is by posting on scandalous and weird stuff all the time. But this is dangerous, because the more something is discussed in the news the more it starts looking like a representative case. The average or the norm, even! Then we might change our lives based on that belief.

The obvious example of the dangers of this approach is the way strangers waiting to abuse children are now feared all over the country, quite out of proportion to the actual risks, and this has much to do with twenty years of media focus on every single awful and disgusting and frightening case. Note that all of the known cases get media attention, but our brains replace that with the idea that what we see is just the tip of some incredible iceberg.

Likewise, if you want to bash a government program, you will draw our attention to any foolish examples that might be derived from that. Once those foolish attempts get enough publicity we start believing that all the parts of the program are like that. Even if the foolish examples are the only ones that could be found after much digging, and even if they don't exist at all.

This trick of picking the most extreme examples of something and then pretending that they are representative examples is a common one. I see that employed by anti-feminists all the time, for example.

Meanwhile, in Pakistan

I watched the videos attached to this article a few days ago, and I always assumed that the mother of the schoolgirl they portrayed was dead. It turns out that she is not dead. If you have time, watch the videos first and only then read the story. Much food for thought there.

That Was Then...

The New York Times front-paged these thoughts about Roman Polanski a few days ago:

At the end of "Manhattan," the celebrated movie romance from 1979, a teenager played by Mariel Hemingway delivers some good news to the 42-year-old television writer, portrayed by Woody Allen, with whom she has had a long-running sexual affair.

"Guess what, I turned 18 the other day," said Ms. Hemingway, in what was framed as a poignant encounter. "I'm legal, but I'm still a kid."

That was then.

Roman Polanski's arrest on Sept. 26 to face a decades-old charge of having sex with a 13-year-old girl stirred global furor over both Mr. Polanski's original misdeed and the way the authorities have handled it — along with some sharp reminders that, when it comes to adult sex with the under age, things have changed.

Manners, mores and law enforcement have become far less forgiving of sex crimes involving minors in the 31 years since Mr. Polanski was charged with both rape and sodomy involving drugs. He fled rather than face what was to have been a 48-day sentence after he pleaded guilty to unlawful sex with a minor.

But if he is extradited from Switzerland, Mr. Polanski could face a more severe punishment than he did in the 1970s, as a vigorous victims' rights movement, a family-values revival and revelations of child abuse by clergy members have all helped change the moral and legal framework regarding sex with the young.

This is the beginning of an article on the Polanski case by Michael Cieply. It's a little bit startling, and if you didn't find it so, read it again. Cieply starts by giving us a scene from a Woody Allen movie, a love story between a very young girl and Woody Allen (of course). He then compares this with the rape-and-sodomy charges Polanski faced in the 1970s and sorta concludes that the two are basically the same thing! Rape and sodomy charges are just like "sex with the young!" Or at least they were that in the 1970s. Except that Polanski was charged with rape and sodomy 31 years ago, not yesterday, and rape of thirteen-year olds was not A-OK even in the 1970s.

Good News Tuesday, Again

Ellinor Ostrom became the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics! I'm doing a Snoopy dance in her honor, even though she sort of snuck into the field from political science.

She shares the prize with Oliver Williamson. What the two share is a focus on nonmarket solutions in economics:

The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded on Monday to two American social scientists for their work in describing the numerous relationships within a company or among companies and individuals that shape market behavior.

The prize committee cited Elinor Ostrom, 76, at Indiana University, and Oliver E. Williamson, 77, at the University of California, Berkeley, for work done over long careers. Ms. Ostrom is the first woman to receive the economics prize in the 41-year history of the award. She is a political scientist, not an economist, and in honoring her, the judges seemed to suggest that economics should be thought of as an interdisciplinary field rather than a pure science governed by mathematics.

"This award is part of the merging of the social sciences," said Robert Shiller, a Yale University economist. "Economics has been too isolated and too stuck on the view that markets are efficient and self-regulating. It has derailed our thinking."

This award means a lot to young female economists who can now dream further. It made me all weepy, to be honest.

Book Learning

Paul Krugman wrote about the importance of public education as one reason for the American economic success. The demise of that same education is beginning to bite:

If you had to explain America's economic success with one word, that word would be "education." In the 19th century, America led the way in universal basic education. Then, as other nations followed suit, the "high school revolution" of the early 20th century took us to a whole new level. And in the years after World War II, America established a commanding position in higher education.

But that was then. The rise of American education was, overwhelmingly, the rise of public education — and for the past 30 years our political scene has been dominated by the view that any and all government spending is a waste of taxpayer dollars. Education, as one of the largest components of public spending, has inevitably suffered.

Until now, the results of educational neglect have been gradual — a slow-motion erosion of America's relative position. But things are about to get much worse, as the economic crisis — its effects exacerbated by the penny-wise, pound-foolish behavior that passes for "fiscal responsibility" in Washington — deals a severe blow to education across the board.

I'm not so certain that education was the main engine of America's economic rise. The very large domestic markets had something to do with it, too, as did the vast natural resources of the country. But education certainly didn't hurt that cause.

The reason I titled this post "book learning" is that Americans do tend to have contempt towards academic learning in general. It's not regarded as necessary (not like college sports, say), and it's viewed as some sort of elitism: as if you rejected your social class by going to college. Or something like catching an infectious disease. The wingnuts don't want to educate their daughters or sons (and especially their daughters) because they might actually start thinking differently, and thinking differently is A Very Bad Thing.

This is weird. If education is so unimportant, how can it be so powerful and dangerous at the same time? Yet these two ideas seem to be the engine in many of the recent changes in education.

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.
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*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.

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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.