Releasing Frustration (by Phila)

Japan has one of the lowest teen birth rates in the world. One reason for this, I'd assume, is that Japanese teens tend to delay having sex longer than teens in many other countries.

All the same, the Japanese health ministry hopes to go further and fare better, and so they've commissioned a research study that apparently ties loss of virginity to skipping breakfast.

In a study of 3000 people, those who did not regularly eat breakfast in their early teens said they lost their virginity at an average age of 17.5, versus an overall average age of 19 for all Japanese.

Those who had a morning meal when they were younger had their first sexual experience at 19.4 years.

The study...concluded that a stable home life discouraged early sex.

"Those unhappy with their parents - such as for not preparing breakfast - may tend to find a way to release their frustration by having sex," said Kunio Kitamura, head of the Japan Family Planning Association who led the research.

Putting aside the issue of correlation vs. causation, the number of bizarre assumptions here makes my head swim. First, of course, there's the definition of "a stable home life" as one in which teens are waited on (by an otherwise unoccupied parent of unspecified gender), instead of being provided with food and taught to prepare it. Second, it's assumed that these teens became unhappy with their parents as a result of missing breakfast, though they might just as easily be refusing to eat because they're already unhappy with their parents (or for some other reason entirely, like scholastic stress). Third, sex is portrayed as some idle pastime like playing with matches, to be indulged in when one is bored or frustrated or resentful. Give teens something better to do, and sexual thoughts will scarcely cross their minds.

"If children don't feel comfortable in their family environment, they tend to go out."

To be fair, I haven't seen the study itself, and this article probably doesn't paraphrase it very well, especially given the language and cultural issues.

But taken simply as a layperson's description of research that may or may not be ludicrous, it's a good example of what I see as the ideological flipside of pop-science writing about Evolutionary Psychology. In the popular press, mating and parenting instincts tend to be all-compelling urges against which progressives and feminists struggle in vain, while sexuality tends to be a sort of pathology that's imposed on innocent teens from outside...often by an alleged breakdown in precisely those traditional family roles that EP has made holy. You must transcend biological urges as a teen, and you can't transcend them as an adult.

You wouldn't think we could have it both ways. But somehow, we manage.

H.R. 3962 Passed. Some Collateral Damage.

The House bill on health care reform passed. This is good news. The Stupak amendment was accepted. That is the collateral damage. Or the necessary compromise to get better health care for all (except for the collateral damage).


No Republican voted against the Stupak amendment. Isn't that something? I'm beginning to see a pattern here, what with only Republicans voting against the right of gang-rape survivors to sue. But of course several Democrats also voted for the amendment.

As is required, I'm of course pleased to see the House bill pass.

Saturday Reading Material And Some Eye Candy

The eye candy first: Pippin (I can see my mouse from here!) by FeraLiberal.

Then the reading/watching material:

The Stupak amendment. Offered by your pro-birth Democrat, Mr. Stupak, who will never need abortions.

Wal-Mart offers swine flu advice while still punishing workers who are sick and stay at home.

Exploding tits in China (link thanks to sharl).

Weekly Poetry Slam Thread

A continuing experiment posted by AMc

On Sgt. Kimberley Munley

Based on current information, she is the officer who took Nidal Malik Hasan down:

The police officer who brought down a gunman after he went on a shooting rampage at the Fort Hood Army base was on the way to have her car repaired when she heard a report over a police radio that someone was shooting people in a center where soldiers are processed before they are deployed abroad, authorities said on Friday.

As she pulled up to the center, the officer, Kimberly Munley, spotted the gunman, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, brandishing a pistol and chasing a wounded soldier outside the building, said Chuck Medley, the director of emergency services at the base.

Sergeant Munley bolted from her car and shot at Major Hasan. He turned toward her and began to fire. She ran toward him, continuing to fire, and both she and the gunmen went down with several bullet wounds, Mr. Medley said.

Whether Sergeant Munley was solely responsible for taking down Major Hassan or whether he was also hit by gunfire from another responder is still unclear, but she was the first to fire at him.

Sergeant Munley, who is 34, is an expert in firearms and a member of the SWAT team for the civilian police department on the base, officials said.

Such a courageous act saved lives.

Last night the following exchange took place on Eschaton comments threads:

this female MP was the first responder

What does her gender have to do with it??????
Hecate, Runnymeade Conspirator | Homepage | 11.05.09 - 9:29 pm | #

everything, because it shows that woman can't fucking kill someone when they have to.
BURP | 11.05.09 - 9:30 pm | #

Trolls will be trolls, you might mutter. But it's still worth pointing out that Sgt. Munley is a trained firearms expert, an experienced police officer and a SWAT team member, yet many still judge her first as a woman, and attribute to her their stereotypes about how women are.

I have thought about that a lot, starting with the phrase "throws like a girl." To throw in that particular manner has to do with not being trained to throw. Indeed, many such sexist comparison compare an untrained woman (in, say, fighting skills) with a trained man. This is faulty thinking in general but it is also extremely disrespectful of people (men or women) who ARE trained to act a certain way in emergencies.

Love letters (by Suzie)

I learned to love love from a mother who romanticized romance.

The following is stolen from an email I wrote some years ago to a man who thought I was intense. I'm out of town today, but I wonder how others have struggled with Heterosexual Love in the Time of Patriarchy. TMI warning.

Academically, everything I
 touched turned to gold. But I was so afraid that I wasn't attractive that, when I started to have sex, I learned as quickly as I could how to please
 men. I thought I could be the best at love and/or sex, as if it were an
 intellectual pursuit.

And yes, a lot of men have found me too intense, but then they end up
being drawn to the fire, and they crash their cars or call me drunkenly in
 the middle of the night. When a man protests I'm too intense or passionate, I know he's mine;
 it's only a matter of time. He's like a fish flopping in the bottom of my
 boat, protesting, "You'll never catch me."


When a man says he likes intensity, I know I will lose him. It's very
hard to sustain that over time. My experience is that intensity can smolder, flaring up occasionally, but it can't exist like the
blue tongue in the flame forever.

Tonight is the birthday of a man I loved, and I've been rereading emails to him:

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

"You do so much for me, give me so much, and I
still misbehave. I have all these wonderful experiences and, instead
of being satisfied, I want more. I'm like a damned child, lying on the
 floor, crying.

"I'm sorry I bit you."
--------------------------
"I long to see you at different times and in different places. I want to see how your expressions change, how your body moves. I am like Monet, who painted haystacks over and over, because they were different in different light.

" 'Have restraint,' I am told. 'Wait for him to make a move. Don't
burn yourself out.' But how do you tell a fire: 'Don't burn so brightly.' I would rather someone walk away from me because I was too intense, I
 was too much, I was too much myself, than because I was trying to be
something I'm not: a woman who follows the rules."
----------------------
"In class, my least favorite grad student started the
discussion by saying how much she hated this week's readings. I blurted out how much I loved them and how I had read them to my lover.
If only I had had a little to drink, if only the lights had been a
little lower, I would have talked about your scent and your taste.
'I have hung his clothes from my bedposts so that his presence will surround me,' I would say. 'In the afternoons, if I nap, his
shirt blindfolds me, and I inhale him. When he
crawls into bed, I warm him.' "
----------------------
"(After my mother's death.) I wish I could inhabit a
rational world of philosophy. Last night, in my 19th century French
book, I was reading about debates over whether men embodied the
rational and women the emotional. I wanted so much to be rational, to
hold up my end of the bargain, even though I know the either/or debate
is a trap.
I wish I didn't have to be student and friend and lover as if nothing has changed.
Damn, the crying is back. This must be some version of the flu, in
which, instead of sneezing and vomiting, one just cries and cries.
 I need to pull myself together and read a book on lesbians for
 class. It would be easier if I loved you less. (I'm referring to both
the crying and the lesbians.)"

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

"Here is a quote from one of the authors I'm reading: 'After years of considering my body little more than an unruly nuisance, I found
myself wanting to yield up control over it, to learn what it had to teach me, to experience the willing or grateful surrender of "I" to
 flesh.' "
-------------------
"Twilight, and the palms are dark, silhouetted against a lighter horizon.
How do I wean myself off wanting you?
 I don't listen to music when I'm reading for school, but still, there are sounds, the mechanical hum of the machines that surround me,
the faraway traffic that sounds like rushing water, someone laughing
or crying in the distance.
Distance defines my night.


"All week I have wagged my tail to please people. I have smiled and nodded my head in class when I wanted to lay it down on the table and sleep.
I wonder if I exist only as the reflection of what other people
want."

Friday flower blogging (by Suzie)

The Stoopid. It Burns

So I read about yet another list of Great Books:

The trade publication Publishers Weekly likely wanted to provoke discussion with its annual list of the year's best books, but not like this. In its issue of Nov. 2, Publishers Weekly compiled its PW Top 10, a decidedly subjective ranking of the best fiction and non-fiction published in 2009, including the biography "Cheever: A Life" by Blake Bailey; the novel "Await Your Reply" by Dan Chaon; and the graphic novel "Stitches" by David Small. But as The Guardian reports, the ranking has drawn protests from a women's literary group, which notes that there are no female writers on the list.

No female writers at all. Now that is conclusive proof that women cannot write, whatever tests seem to suggest about our verbal talents, and nope, there was absolutely no bias in the selection process:

In her introduction to the year-end lists, Louisa Ermelino, the reviews director of Publishers Weekly, wrote, "We ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz," adding: "It disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male."

This is so stupid it's almost incandescent in its glorious stupidity. Unless none of the reviewers saw the title pages of the books they certainly could NOT ignore the gender of the author. It's usually pretty obvious from the name written there in fairly large letters. Have we learned nothing from all those studies which demonstrate that the gender of the supposed author of something DOES affect how the piece (interpreted widely here) is evaluated?

Gah. The only way a selection like this could truly ignore the gender of the author is if all books were submitted for review without any identifying information.
---
It is worth noting that a woman, Hilary Mantel, won this year's Man Booker Prize for Wolf Hall. Other good books written by women are suggested in the comments thread of the quoted post.

An Alien Post

How would an ethical alien from outer space see the way we analyze violence? Some types of violence are analyzed to the bones (no pun intended), with all sorts of experts chipping in. Other types of violence (trigger warning for the links which follow) are analyzed very little, and this is usually the case with stories where the victims are mostly women. It is as if the sex of the victim is explanation enough.

We simply assume that these things unfortunately sometimes happen to women and spend very little time in trying to understand the killer's/killers' motives. In other cases we do spend time trying to understand what made someone commit such heinous acts, and ultimately this is so that future events of the same kind could be avoided.

Why the different treatment?
----
Added later:

Astonishingly, I now have an actual example of the analysis that follows violence which is not specifically against women:

Before making judgments about the shootings at Fort Hood, a thorough investigation needs to take place, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said Thursday.

"It is imperative that we take the time to gather all the facts, as it would be irresponsible to be the source of rumors or inaccurate information regarding such a horrific event," Cornyn said in a statement.

"Once we have ascertained all the facts, working with our military leaders and law enforcement officials on the ground, we can determine what exactly happened at Fort Hood today and how to prevent something like this from ever happening again," he said.

My Blogday Week Post IV

This is part of the continuing celebration of my sixth anniversary in blogging, where I re-post some of my earliest contributions. The one below has to do with some news about women in management not wanting the brass ring, after all, and probably reflects the early mutterings of the "opt-out" phenomenon:

On Glass Slippers and Ceilings


Cinderella's foot fitted the glass slipper and so she married the prince and lived happily ever on. At least in fairy tale terms. But imagine how uncomfortable glass shoes would be, how easily they would crack and splinter around your unprotected feet.

In some ways that's what women in business management wear every day. Their slippers are made of all sorts of contradictory materials: assertive, but not too much so or you'll be called bitchy, nurturing, but not too much so or your capabilities are suspect, just-like-the-guys but not too much so or you'll be called a ballbreaker. That these slippers crack and splinter is to be expected. That they cut the wearer's feet is not surprising.

So what does this have to do with glass ceilings? Glass ceilings are nice, they let us gaze at the sun rays or the moon and the stars, and pretend that there's nothing between us and these vast upper reaches. But of course there is. The glass is there.

Or is it? The corporate glass ceiling is supposed to keep women out of higher management; all they can do is to gaze at the stars. But now some say that there is no glass ceiling that would prevent women from flying straight up and getting a comet named after themselves. Instead, the reason for few women in leading positions is said to be.... Guess. If you are even one tenth as old as I am, you have heard this before.

Well, the blame belongs to the women, of course. They don't want the brass ring hard enough to grab it. They don't want the long hours. They want to be with their children, and to write poetry or ride a horse. They want to go to Africa to cure hunger. Women are just different.

Hmmm. Different from what? Men, of course, you thick-headed goddess.

Aah! That's why they don't fit into the public sector; the public sector was built to fit men's desires. Well, this is really interesting: why doesn't the public sector reflect the desires of both men and women? Why doesn't the fact that children must be taken care of by somebody, that families must at least meet once and a while, that human beings might need to write poetry or ride horses or cure hunger; why don't any of these things affect the way the jobs and the labor market are structured?

Why is a good manager one who has no life outside the job? Who thinks that managers are equally bright and energetic in their sixteenth consecutive work hour as in their first eight? Do you want important economic decisions made by people who don't remember what their children look like, or who haven't smelled at a flower or played a game for fun for decades?
Never mind if they are men or women, I'd shudder if humans took the division of labor to such extreme degrees.

What I see through my divine sight, are glass mountains on which people slip and slide in their glass slippers. Only those who also have glass hearts thrive. Too sad.

The glass ceilings are still there, of course. That so many deny their existence is because they are not there all the time. When some people look at the stars, they can feel the breeze and sense the raindrops, too. They know that the road is open. When others look up, they see the stars but they also see gates and locks, tree houses with "No girls allowed" signs, preachers telling what good motherhood is, coworkers looking at you askance when you are pregnant and tell that you are coming back, husbands 'helping out' but not knowing if the fridge has milk or what the pediatrician's name is. These people don't imagine things.

It's not as bad as it used to be. Families are more democratic, employers are more open-eyed and many men do their fair share at home. But turning the looking-glass back to face nothing but the women, each alone and separately, is a very cruel thing to do. Women are neither evil step-mothers nor Cinderellas, and the story doesn't reward the one who fits the glass slippers.

Very Bad

From the New York Times:

At least one gunman killed 12 people and wounded 31 in a shooting on Thursday afternoon at Fort Hood in Texas. Military police killed one shooter, who had two guns, and at least two soldiers are in custody.

Lt. Gen. Robert W. Cone, the commanding officer at Fort Hood, the largest active military installation in the country, said the base was in lockdown as military authorities, with the help of the Federal Bureau of Investigation investigate the rampage.

"This was a terrible tragedy," said General Cone, speaking at a news conference Thursday afternoon. "Stunning."'

An Army spokesman, Gary Tallman, said that the dead gunman was an Army major. A law enforcement official identified the him as Malik Nadal Hassan.

My Blogday Week Post III

This is another six-year old post, from the babyhood of my blog. It's a glance into my life as a goddess and tells you about my visit to see Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love. She was in the big leagues while I was nothing but an idol of the snakes. How things change!

I hope you enjoy this little reversal:

Pornography Goes Mainstream


Did I ever mention that retired gods and goddesses may sometimes take human form? Aphrodite has chosen to become an eighty-year old widow living in Florida. She adores Mickey Mouse, neon pink golf carts and polyester pant suits. She was really fed up with her long reign as a sex goddess, and wanted a more active life. I stopped by recently. We had a ball.

She took me to this new Viennese tearoom for women. They served exquisite little pastries, and the place was packed with 'dite's cronies. After we were served our cappuccinos, the waitress told us to help ourselves to all the tidbits on the center table. Can you believe this? The cakes and pastries were daintily arranged on the reclining still form of a gorgeous naked man? He was a real cupcake!

I reached out for a canape in his left armpit and watched his pupils dilate. His eyes moved to point at the large painted sign which warned against any bodily interference with the 'model'. So we could only look, not touch. And look we did.

I asked the waitress if the tearoom had had any problems with meninists protesting against their use of a male platter. She laughed and said that all publicity was good publicity. Besides, everybody knew that meninists had no sense of humor. We all agreed that we really respected and admired men, especially this lovely studmuffin!

When we were replete with cakes and the platter covered but with crumbs, 'dite took me back to her condo to watch some daytime soaps. I kept nodding off on the couch until she turned the channel to Oprah's show. The day's topic was "Getting in Touch with Your Inner Erection". It seemed to consist of some man flogging his book on 'bagel dancing'. The gyrations and contortions around a bagel suspended from a string in the ceiling were supposed to make men fit and better in the marital bed. I started feeling slight bouts of indigestion. I'm not a prude, as any of you may check on the Google, but this was just getting to be too much.

Men are people, too, after all. What was going on? Had 'dite interfered with earth's essential vibrational frequency? She adamantly denied having anything to do with these sexxee developments among men. Supposedly men had just collectively decided that titillating women was sex-positive and healthy. As proof 'dite mentioned a newspaper article about men's athletic wear stores in Paris. To drum up more business, these stores had hired coaches to teach men how to remove their jockstraps in an alluring fashion. One young man was quoted as saying that he had never before really understood how important it was to remove the football socks before rather than afterwards. The store had hung up framed sayings supposedly by Simone de Beauvoir: "The high time of the day on the sports fields is not when a man suits up but when he takes it all off for his woman."

I did mention to Aphrodite that according to the article there had been protests by some men's groups outside the store. She waved this detail away with her tennis-braceleted arm and pointed out an ad in a magazine I was leafing through as further proof of the same trend in sexual liberation. The ad was selling sweatshop-free underwear for men, but the pictures were extremely revealing crotch shots from below.

"Sort of pornographic, don't you think?" I asked. She nodded. "Porn has gone mainstream now. Care for a round of golf?"

-----------

I have slightly played with the truth in recounting this story. If you insist on the more politically correct but boring facts, here they are: Sushi served on a naked female, pole-dancing on Oprah, Parisian strip-tease lessons for women who buy underwear and American Apparel's ad for women's panties.

Sexxeee Men

The Halloween costume thread below has an interesting discussion about what kinds of outfits might be sexy for men to wear, and a more serious discussion about what heterosexual women might find sexy in men in general. And I mean looks, here. We are talking superficial, sisters! We are gonna objectify in a big way!

Sorta kidding (though I know I'm going to get yelled at for this post and I deserve it). But anyone who spends much time on unmoderated political comments threads will find out that women's bodies are discussed a lot, men's bodies not so much (unless I'm present and doing reversals), and everybody then assumes that women aren't at all interested in the way men look in general, just in their pocket-books (usually) or their soulful minds (sometimes). The corollary is that men don't have to try to dress for their partners at all. The deeper corollary is then that the society demands all that pleasing from women and not from men.

I AM interested in the soulful minds of people, including men, and in brains and in kindness and in good ethics and good window-washing skills. But this doesn't mean that looks wouldn't be a nice plus. Or rather, I think that there are certain looks (not necessarily the ones that the popular culture assumes) which I admire and feel drawn to, and I suspect that this might be true of other women, too.

So the real point of this post is not to objectify men but to see what it is that heterosexual women might find visually pleasing in men in general. Because the popular culture (and evo-psychos and so on) keep telling women that women don't care about youth and looks and good bodies in their partners it may be hard to go past that to see whether we actually might have some preferences.

Of Special Interest: Wimminz

You wouldn't think that women could be viewed as a special interest group, given that we are the majority. But that's how the game is played in politics. Wingnuts hate us (they hates us, my precious), and the Democrats would prefer us to be really really quiet. And not to cost them any money whatsoever. Or so I think tonight.

And these are the reasons:

First:

Consider what happened when the subject of women's preventive healthcare services came up in the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (HELP) in July, after the minimum benefits package had already been determined. Because some essential care for women wasn't included in the list, HELP committee member Senator Barbara Mikulski proposed an amendment that would require the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) to stipulate that basic women's health services would be covered. The language said nothing about abortion, referring only to "preventive care and screenings."

Yet the voting on the amendment went exactly along pro- and anti-choice lines. The amendment passed by just one vote, with all the committee's Republicans as well as Pennsylvania Senator Robert Casey, an anti-abortion Democrat, voting against it. The committee's discussion of the amendment was dominated by Republicans' worry about the possibility of government money winding up in the hands of Planned Parenthood. Since there is no similar language included in the just-released House bill, the only hope for requiring full coverage for these essential services now lies with the Senate.

Second:

Adding insult to injury, birth control isn't on the list of essential services insurers are required to cover in a basic plan. Thanks, House and Senate! Probably another nod to the religous right, who also hate contraception.

There is something mean-spirited about all those who voted against the amendment. Or there would be if one assumed that women are citizens and taxpayers and not ovens or aquaria for future fetuses. The latter interpretation seems to fit the worldview of Republicans and conservative Democrats. Some Republicans would even let gang-rape go unpunished, just to retain the sanctity of business contracts.

And Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) is going to work his ass off to make sure that no abortion coverage will be available in the planned insurance exchange, even if it would be funded from private sources. But then Mr. Stupak is never going to be mistaken for an oven, just as Mr. Reid (who wants to have conscience clauses in the plan) is never going to find that his pharmacy prescriptions will not be filled because he is an aquarium.

There are good things in the basic list of covered services for women, too. Pap-smears and mammograms might be covered, for example, and when I have calmed down and accepted my second-class-special-interest status again I shall write about those, too.

Glenn Beck, The Go-To Gossip Guy

He is hilarious, natch, and also now the King of the Traditional Media or some such thing, because you have to react to everything he says and he makes money for the Republican Organ (pun intended) which is also called Fox. Once you have that circle completed (from nutcase to pay-attention to money), the problem is also circular.

At the same time, there is something seriously sob-producing about a country which focuses on Beck and his emotional utterances. If he were a woman nobody would take him seriously, because he is all about sobbing and weeping and exaggerating and passing on gossip and hearsay of the hairiest kind.

Now he is on a hunt for communists, Marxists and Maoists inside the Obama administration and outside it, too. Anyone who has ever met a real meatspace Stalinist, for example (which I have) finds her or his brain go at some Twilight frequency when Beck talks about serious communists. Real Stalinists, for instance, are frightening people. Beck would run very fast indeed if he ever met one. It's a lot less frightening to accuse milquetoast centrists of red-hot Maoism.

I'm not sure why I bother writing any of it. I still suffer from the Excessive Sanity Syndrome which makes it hard for me to admit that what matters is Scandal! Sensation! Superficiality!

TRIGGER WARNING. Rape As Evolutionary Adaptation. TRIGGER WARNING.

I'm reading about the slaughterhouse found inside the house of a convicted rapist:

Police say a rapist living in an Ohio home where several bodies have been found has been charged with five counts of aggravated murder.

Cleveland police spokesman Lt. Thomas Stacho (STOCK'-oh) says 50-year-old Anthony Sowell was also charged Tuesday with rape, felonious assault and kidnapping.

Police recovered the bodies of six women last week from Sowell's home. A Cleveland television station reported Tuesday that two more bodies were removed from the home.

No, it is not good to read about such things. But the recent discussion in a comments thread here about how rape is about sex and about desperate men wanting to pass their genes on should ALWAYS be brought up when these cases come into the public eye. Always.

My Blogday Week Post II

I'm celebrating my sixth blog anniversary this coming Sunday and in its honor want to repost some of the very first stories, the better ones. This is about terrorism and women and I think it shows well my ability to see the future about Iraq. It is also relevant, because just yesterday someone said that thing about one man's terrorist being another man's freedom fighter, and while we are supposed to see the woman being embraced in that the reality is that there are no freedom fighters for women:

Women and Terrorism


The BBC's World Program asked listeners to send in their definitions of a 'terrorist'. The answers were what one expected, ranging from the definition of a terrorist as someone who targets civilians to someone who is called George W. Bush. But one definition really stood out:"One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist."

These are men who define terrorism. Terrorism is something that might bring them freedom or terror. But for women? Granted, there are women terrorists, and women do experience the effects of terrorist activity as much as men do. But are there freedom fighters for women? Do terrorists ever work for women's causes?

I can't think of a single cause like that. The early British suffragettes came the closest, but even they stopped their violence at property or their own bodies. If freedom fighters ever fought for women, it was most likely in the sense that they fought for the right of previously oppressed men to have free access to their 'own' women or to bar other men from such access. Some women must have benefited from such movements, but this was not the intended effect.

Iraq is an interesting example. Under Saddam Hussein, Iraqi women first gained additional freedoms and rights. More women attended the university and there were women in his government. Later, some of these gains for women were sacrificed when Saddam courted the religious muslims and launched an islamization program. Yet women in Iraq are still more literate than in any other Arab country.

The liberation of Iraq may change this. The new freedom fighters there want an Islamic society. Some want obligatory veiling, and there are arguments about whether education is a good thing for women under Islam. The lawlessness makes going out into a major adventure for women, and there are news about kidnapping and rape. So who there is fighting for the women? Who really cares about the fact that women are the majority of the Iraqi population, with something like ten percent representation in the Provisional Council?

The answer is that very few people care about women. The status of women in Iraq is low, and determined by both traditional culture and certain ways of reading the Islamic law and the Koran. Who are outsiders to decide that things should be different for them? Yet outsiders decided that other things in Iraq were unacceptable, however much they, too, were based on tradition and religious precedent. Women just don't matter, very much.

Women don't matter awfully much in the greater terrorist wars, either. Their importance is as symbols: symbols of western decadence as the semi-naked women cavorting on our tv screens in the west, symbols of eastern backwardness as the totally shrouded shapes cowering in the corners of their hidden rooms in the east. Or as reversed symbols: the independent, self-confident western woman vs. the modest, pure eastern woman. Yet it's all about symbols.

In the wars of terrorism most real women are in the middle, in the mined no-man's land where they are possible victims for both sides. The war goes on over their heads and sometimes through their bodies. They are the ultimate definition of collateral damage.

Most women don't think this way, you might say. That's probably true. It's hard to get much constructive thinking going when the media bombard you with one false message after another, when daily life is enough to pull you down, when to realize that you ARE collateral damage would demolish your whole world view. So yes, most women don't think this way.

That's the unfair thing about being a goddess. We goddesses see through the smoke and fog and scraps of flying bombs right through to the truth. Sometimes.

Today's Light Bulb Post

As in one lighting up inside my skull. I was reading about food stamps and poverty among children, and then I came to this conservative interpretation of the findings that about half of U.S. children will be on food stamps at least once:

Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, a Washington think tank, says the study design and survey data are solid. But he says the findings are neither surprising nor troubling.

"That's effectively like saying that at some point in a 20-year period, a parent would be unemployed for a month or so," Rector says.

"There's no evidence that even consistent poverty in the U.S. produces a nutritional risk," he says, noting that rich and poor children tend to have about the same intake of protein, vitamins and minerals.

Do you see where I'm going here? The wingnuts usually tell us that being poor is fun: lots of singing and dancing and watching cheap televisions and owning cell phones and getting enough food. If that is the case, why not apply strong income progression in all taxes? That way the rich can become happy, too, and the rest of us can get health care and education covered from those tax receipts.

A Little Lady Blogger Signing In

It's that time of the year again, the time when we find to our utter surprise that there are more men than women blogging on Important Matters (note the careful definition of those), and then we speculate on Innate Differences which make women incapable of blogging when in fact nobody at all is stopping them! Or we wonder why girls can't take the malicious trolling as well as guys can take it!

So hard to be cheerful and lady bloggerish and kind and understanding about that, because I have been on this merry-go-round several times in the past. Indeed, I feel my fangs growing longer and demanding the blood of idiots.

How the f**k do you do lady blogging? Do you spray the keyboard with Chanel 5 first? And does that keep the trolls at bay, hmh? Do you put up a picture of yourself with cleavage? The Mother Jones story does suggest that both of these things are required for women to blog. The poor little things.

I'm being unfair. The piece itself (on why men are the majority of some type of bloggers) is not bad and does address a few important questions (though not others, such as whether mommy bloggers were sampled in the study). But honestly. Why do we have this silly conversation over and over again? And if we truly want to do something about getting more women into blogging, why not do a really careful study of all bloggers? We might begin with the study which shows that female pseudonyms get more harassment on the net than male pseudonyms.

Sigh. Now that post was a big FAIL. I can't do lady blogging.
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Added later: It seems that the original study was focused on political blogs, where "political" was defined to exclude feminism? That's what I have heard. If true, this means that I don't count in the statistics, for instance, despite the fact that I write a lot on politics. Well, pretty much everything I write is on politics when the term is widely defined.

My Blogday Week Post I

This blog turns six next Sunday, and in its honor I'm going to republish some of my very first posts. I used to edit in those days! Also, I took the goddess role more seriously.

Here is an excerpt from one of the very first posts. It is on Mummy Wars and still pretty relevant. The bit I reproduce here gives you my theory of what drives those wars (other than the spectators eating their popcorn while watching with enjoyment):


The human cultures have a biased view of women. Mostly, men are seen as individuals, but women are seen only partially as individuals and largely as members of an amorphous mass 'womanhood'. Think of actors: male actors are not asked the sorts of questions that women actors are, about how they cope with combining family and career, about how they stay beautiful. Men are asked individual questions about their acting choices and lives. Women are asked largely 'woman' questions (how do you compare to other women?). And so on.

So all humans, to some extent, see women as a mass and men as individuals. If these humans happen to be women themselves, they will partly view themselves as individuals, but also keep asking themselves how they compare to others in the mass 'women'. All other women then affect their self-esteem; others' choices affect how right our choices look. If a woman stays at home with the children and another one works outside the home but also has children, their choices are not seen as independent of each other. One woman affects the other, her self-esteem and the society's judgment of her 'goodness'. And this effect goes both ways. A working mother will be blamed because she is not at home, a stay-at-home mother feels that her choices are made unimportant by the existence of women who appear to be able to both work for money and care for children. Thus, both feel exposed and criticized by the existence of the other's different life. Sisterhood? Not likely. But it doesn't have to be so.


There are two secret devices that cause the Mummy Wars. One I have already referred to: women's tendency to be treated as an undifferentiated mass of femaleness, both by men and by women themselves, when in fact we are all individuals with different temperaments, talents, limitations and life situations. The second one is the presumption that if two women make opposite choices, one of these choices must be wrong. This I call false duality. It is false, because we don't apply it to people's choices in general. Matt may choose to enter into engineering, Jessica into medicine. Yet nobody would argue that EITHER Matt OR Jessica must be right.

But when we talk about the 'female' kinds of choices, suddenly one choice must be right and the other wrong. This is because we see all women as essentially the same woman in this sphere, and therefore it appears obvious that one of the choices is better than the other. This is wrong, an example of false dualism, and it is false because all women are not the same woman.

These two devices also explain why women often have the tendency to be more judgmental towards other women than men. What other women do affects the self-esteem of the judging woman. What men do has no such effect in general cases, because the same false dualism is not applied to men.

So we women (I'll count myself here as one, to look less judgmental here...) are cruel to our sisters, we keep them in line, because if we don't do so, our own self-image might shatter. This is all so sad and all so unnecessary. If we could only climb over the obstacles of regarding womanhood as one amorphous lump and of making snappy falsely dualistic judgments we could actually approach some idea of realistic sisterhood, lower our weapons in the Mummy Wars, pack up our armor and go into life.

Let the audience watch the empty arena, or get a life, too.

A Health Care View From The Other Side Of The Pond

I was looking for something else when I came across this short piece from 2006 on what ails the U.S. health care system, written by a British health economist. You can tell it's not by an American economist, from the very first paragraph:

The American health care systems perform impressively, producing what they are designed to deliver: cost inflation, inefficiency, and inequity. At regular intervals, local pundits declare that the outcomes of the incentive structures in the constituent parts of the systems are unacceptable, usually emphasising that "the nation cannot afford to spend 16 percent of GDP on health care". Such "insights" ignore the fact that inflation is a consequence of the systems' perverse incentives and that improved control of expenditure inflation would oblige physicians, nurses, hospitals, and the pharmaceutical industry to moderate their lifestyles.

Bracing, isn't it? Even if you disagree with the views given in that piece, they certainly should be discussed in our grand health care reform debate. At least as often as the views of those who tell us that any public option means long waits in gray corridors and treatment with horse medicine by fanatical (and bewhiskered) bureaucrats wearing Stalinist uniforms.

Not sure why I had to add bewhiskered there.

Between life and death (by Suzie)

Tonight, some Pagans will celebrate Samhain, "a time when the boundaries between the world of the living and the world of the dead become thinner, allowing spirits and other supernatural entities to pass between the worlds to socialize with humans." Other cultures around the world also remember ancestors and departed loved ones at this time.

I work with sarcoma patients, many of whom have metastatic disease, and sometimes it feels like we inhabit the borderlands between life and death. To capture that feeling, I wrote the following poem, which was published in "Something Close to Beautiful: Poems of Disability" by the Inglis House Poetry Workshop. It describes a CT with contrast.

Scans

Scan me.
Can you read the dis-ease?
Drink will reveal me,
the white-chalk taste
lining a crime-scene body.

In goes the needle.
Shoot the dye into my veins.
Shoot the die; I’m on a roll.
I’m in a role.
Radiate me, read me,
an illuminated book.

I’m told, “Hold your breath.”
I think, “I have been.”
In the stillness I hear the whir
of a thousand wings,
angels dancing on the point of a needle.
“Breathe.”

Shadows and spots
mark my fate
on a film, just a film
between life and death.
I can see through it;
I can see the light behind it.

Dancing With Demons

I saved this wonderful story for today because it is Halloween scary. Sadly, it was so scary that it was removed from the website. But that will not stop me from sharing it with you:

CBN.com – Halloween—October 31—is considered a holiday in the United States. In fact, it rivals Christmas with regard to how widely celebrated it is. Stores that sell only Halloween-related paraphernalia open up a few months before the day and close shortly after it ends. But is Halloween a holiday that Christians should be observing?

The word "holiday" means "holy day." But there is nothing holy about Halloween. The root word of Halloween is "hallow," which means "holy, consecrated and set apart for service." If this holiday is hallowed, whose service is it set apart for? The answer to that question is very easy—Lucifer's!

Lucifer is a part of the demonic godhead. Remember, everything God has, the devil has a counterfeit. Halloween is a counterfeit holy day that is dedicated to celebrating the demonic trinity of : the Luciferian Spirit (the false father); the Antichrist Spirit (the false holy spirit); and the Spirit of Belial (the false son).

The pumpkins? They are symbols of the devil's titties! I added that bit, but not this:

The key word in discussing Halloween is "dedicated." It is dedicated to darkness and is an accursed season. During Halloween, time-released curses are always loosed. A time-released curse is a period that has been set aside to release demonic activity and to ensnare souls in great measure.

You may ask, "Doesn't God have more power than the devil?" Yes, but He has given that power to us. If we do not walk in it, we will become the devil's prey. Witchcraft works through dirty hearts and wrong spirits.

During this period demons are assigned against those who participate in the rituals and festivities. These demons are automatically drawn to the fetishes that open doors for them to come into the lives of human beings. For example, most of the candy sold during this season has been dedicated and prayed over by witches.

Now why did they remove something this wonderful? The article even spells out what goes on in Halloween parties:

The word "occult" means "secret." The danger of Halloween is not in the scary things we see but in the secret, wicked, cruel activities that go on behind the scenes. These activities include:

* Sex with demons
* Orgies between animals and humans
* Animal and human sacrifices
* Sacrificing babies to shed innocent blood
* Rape and molestation of adults, children and babies
* Revel nights
* Conjuring of demons and casting of spells
* Release of "time-released" curses against the innocent and the ignorant.

Another abomination that goes on behind the scenes of Halloween is necromancy, or communication with the dead. Séances and contacting spirit guides are very popular on Halloween, so there is a lot of darkness lurking in the air.

Hecate talks about her long days of hexing all the candy, by the way.

Boo!
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The picture is not about dancing with demons, but it sorta fits very well with the medieval values of that story, don't you think?

Halloween Edition Poetry Slam Thread posted by AMC

An Afternoon Presence

The cat slowly stretches in the sun,
In the late fall afternoon,
Stands, reaches
And sharpens her claws
On a lichen covered stone,
On an unkept grave,
Of an unfamiliar family.

Then the wind flattens the grass.

Marvelous and hairy women (by Suzie)

I have pale skin and black hair, a bad combo in a culture that mocks women with “too much” body hair. I have tortured myself with hair removal because I don’t have the strength to transgress in one more way.

I’ve shaved, plucked, bleached and endured electrolysis. Now I have a little machine that pulls out hair by the roots. This pains my conscience as well as my body. By conforming, I make it that much harder for women who don’t.

Because of all this, I read with interest an article condensed from the new book "The Marvelous Hairy Girls: The Gonzales Sisters and their Worlds." Merry Wiesner-Hanks, a distinguished professor of history, writes about the daughters of Petrus Gonzales in the 1500s. He and his offspring had

a genetic abnormality now known as hypertrichosis universalis, which meant much of [their] body was covered with hair. They were not mocked or shunned but were welcomed in the courts of Europe, spending much of their lives among nobles, musicians, and artists. ...

When people looked at the Gonzales sisters, or their pictures, they saw beasts or monsters as well as young women, but this was also true when they looked at most women. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, whose ideas were still powerful in the sixteenth century, had described women as imperfect men, the result of something wrong with the conception that created them—their parents were too young or too old, or too diverse in age, or one of them was not healthy. Nature always aimed at perfection, and Aristotle termed anything less than perfect “monstrous”; a woman was thus “a deformity, but one which occurs in the ordinary course of nature.”

Echidne is covered with scales. But how do the rest of you feel about body hair?

Friday critter blogging (by Suzie)

Ginger is dressed up for Halloween. Because her ancestors came from Mexico, she might prefer to celebrate the Dia de los Muertos. I wonder if she ever thinks about her mother, her puppies and other dogs no longer in her life.

By the way, she's sitting on my new couch, which someone was going to take to the dump.

(Trick) question for the weekend (by Suzie)

For women dressing up for Halloween: Are you going as a sexy witch or a sexy animal or a sexy vampire or some other sexy something or just a woman wearing sexy stuff that she usually doesn't wear?

For men: Are you dressing like a woman because a man pretending to be a woman is so laughable? And why aren't you wearing something sexy?

(I already went to a big party where I dressed like a butterfly because I found some great wings at Goodwill. Unfortunately, I kept batting people in the head with my wings all night.)

Today's Article Juxtaposition

Thanks to moonbootica, who noticed these two stories on Whirlpool. First, the company got stimulus funds:

Whirlpool Corporation today announced that it is the recipient of stimulus funds as part of the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Smart Grid Investment Grant program.

The grant of $19.3 million over a two year period - which Whirlpool will match
with its own investments - will help the company accelerate its work to
deliver to consumers smart appliances that can connect with the smart grid.

Second, Whirlpool is moving a refrigerator plant out of the U.S.:

Calling for U.S. leaders to repeal trade agreements and for citizens to buy goods made in America, current and former employees of Whirlpool rallied outside the company's Evansville factory Tuesday.

Drivers passing by on U.S. 41 honked to show support for the protestors, who stood on the highway's legal easement to not trespass on company property. Their message appeared on a number of signs, bearing the words, "Property Tax Cuts for Whirlpool = Job Loss," "Whirlpool to Welfare" and "Whirlpool Abandoned Us."

Bill Robertson, who has worked at the plant for 16 years, braved the rain that afternoon to make drivers aware of what he considers the consequences of buying products made in foreign countries. Those habits largely led to Whirlpool's decision to close its Evansville factory by the middle of next year, putting about 1,100 people out of work, Robertson said.

The company plans to stop making refrigerators there, as it has done for more than 50 years, and move that work to a plant to be built in Mexico at a cost of about $55 million.

Funny how that goes.

On Reversals

I am planning a post on othering in the context of gender relations for next week. You can get ready for some of the themes by checking how you react to this story in the news:

Hundreds of people have attended a wedding in central Somalia between a man who says he is 112 years old, and his teenage wife.

Ahmed Muhamed Dore - who already has 13 children by five wives - said he would like to have more with his new wife, Safia Abdulleh, who is 17 years old.

"Today God helped me realise my dream," Mr Dore said, after the wedding in the region of Galguduud.

The bride's family said she was "happy with her new husband".

Mr Dore said he and his bride - who is young enough to be his great-great-grand-daughter - were from the same village in Somalia and that he had waited for her to grow up to propose.

"I didn't force her, but used my experience to convince her of my love; and then we agreed to marry," the groom said.

What was your first emotional reaction to the story? And did you view it from the side of the groom (good for the old boy!) or the bride (poor thing)? Or neither?

This may not be the best possible example. Let's try another one from some time ago:

A 107-year-old Malaysian woman has said she wants to get married again, for the 23rd time, as she fears her husband wants to leave her, says a report.

When Wook Kundor married four years ago to a man 70 years her junior their wedding photos made regional media.

But now she fears her husband will not return home after completing treatment for drug addiction in Kuala Lumpur.

She told reporters she felt "lonely" without her husband, ahead of the Muslim feast at the end of Ramadan.

How did your emotional checking go there? Was it the same as with the first story?

Go Read Katha

She has a very good post on women in the labor force:

The Shriver report's central point is a truism of women's history: women's social, economic and political power is directly related to their presence in the workforce. The gains of the last forty years--in political representation, reproductive rights, education, combating violence against women--would never have happened without the steady and massive increase in the number of working women and the transformative effects of all those paychecks. Some might be tempted to spin the magic 50 percent to suggest that feminism's job is done. First it was dead because it was a failure; now it's dead because it was such a success.

Maybe too much of a success. As Reihan Salam worries in his article "The Death of Macho," "The problem of macho run amok and excessively compensated is now giving way to macho unemployed and undirected--a different but possibly just as destructive phenomenon." If 78 percent of those who have lost their jobs in this recession are men, that must mean women's gains are coming at men's expense, right? Actually, no. Women may have a bigger slice of a shrunken pie, but because the labor force is still quite gender-segregated, mostly they are not competing with men for work. The top ten jobs for women are, in order, secretary, nurse, elementary- and middle-school teacher, cashier, retail salesperson, health aide, retail supervisor, waitress, bookkeeper and receptionist. Men have lost more jobs than women in the recession because the ax has fallen more sharply in heavily male fields like construction and manufacturing than in female ones like healthcare and clerical work. As economist Barbara Bergmann wrote in an unpublished letter to the New York Times, "An important reason for the failure to reduce the gap between women's and men's average wages is that little progress has been made in reducing gender segregation in jobs that do not require a college degree." Interestingly, according to the Wall Street Journal, on the professional end of the workforce, where men and women are more likely to have the same or similar jobs, as many women as men have been laid off.

Katha is right about the extent of gender segregation* at work in occupations which don't require graduate degrees. It is greater than similar segregation measures between any ethnic groups you care to mention. In short, women are concentrated in traditionally female occupations, men in traditionally male occupations. The latter pay better but are currently experiencing greater job losses. That work is so segregated by gender is part of the reason why requiring equal pay for equal pay doesn't really close the gender gap in earnings that much.

But what I really wanted to write about is the beginning of the above quote: How women's labor market participation directly correlates with women's political and economic power.

It does, and some of the reasons are fairly obvious. For example, having a paycheck gives one more say in the family and more respect in those societies where women's unpaid labor is invisible or taken for granted, and having economic resources means that women can leave dysfunctional marriages or contribute towards a political cause or otherwise affect their own lives more.

But there are other ways in which this correlation might work. Men and women working in the same office or factory makes them share experiences, grievances and goals. A traditional society offers few general (as opposed to intra-family) opportunities for this and may even juxtapose the interests of men and women. Work and schools are places where the sexes can meet as individuals. Well, in an ideal situation.

Finally, the presence of women in the labor market should mean that firms and the wider society can no longer ignore the traditional work women have done but must adjust work so that this work, too, gets performed. This is not quite taking place in the United States. More pressure is needed.
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*This segregation may or may not be voluntary. That depends on how one views the reasons that people have for ending up in a certain job category. Note also that gender segregation in jobs does not, in general, mean that women are physically as segregated from men. Men might work in the same office or factory, just not under the same occupational title.

The House Health Reform Proposal

Here it is. It includes a public option:

Paving the way for a crucial vote on healthcare legislation in the next two weeks, the compromise unveiled by House Democratic leaders would create a nationwide government-run insurance plan but omit what many liberals consider the key to cost control.

According to senior lawmakers and aides, the so-called public option in the new compromise would not dictate what the plan can pay hospitals, doctors and other providers. Instead, the federal government would have to negotiate rates with providers, much as private insurers do.

Pelosi and her lieutenants made that concession in hopes of winning over conservative Democrats. Many of those lawmakers fear that payments based on lower Medicare rates -- the formula Pelosi originally supported -- would not be enough to sustain providers in rural areas.

Senior Democrats said that the concession represented real progress.

"Most of you all thought the public option was dead," said Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee and a Pelosi ally. "Rumors of its death were greatly exaggerated."

The bit about the abortion coverage will be fought over endlessly as we all know:

The House bill also will include a complex mechanism for limiting the use of taxpayer subsidies for abortion services: Insurance companies that offer abortion coverage would be required to segregate funds received from consumers from subsidies provided by the federal government.

That provision has come under fire from many lawmakers who are opposed to abortion rights, and Democratic leaders continue to work on ways to resolve the issue, according to one senior aide who requested anonymity when discussing the negotiations.

TRIGGER WARNING!!! Truly Disgusting. TRIGGER WARNING!!!

This:

Rape and robbery charges were filed this afternoon against four suspects in the gang rape of a 15-year-old Bay Area student who struggled against her attackers as more than a dozen people passed by but did nothing.

The girl was repeatedly raped, beaten and eventually robbed Saturday night at Richmond High School after she left a homecoming dance, according to police. The crime has sparked outrage and focused national attention on Richmond, a city of 104,000 northeast of San Francisco. City of Richmond

Manuel Ortega, 19, was charged with assault by force likely to produce great bodily injury and rape with a foreign object while acting in concert, said Dara Cashman, Contra Costa County senior deputy district attorney.

She said three minors were also charged but declined to release their names. Two of them, 15 and 17, were charged with rape with a foreign object while acting in concert. A 16-year-old was charged with robbery and rape by a foreign object while acting in concert, Cashman said.

All four suspects were also charged with special enhancements that could result in life sentences if they are convicted, according to Cashman.

In fact, the people did not just pass by and do nothing. Some of them joined in the fun:

As hundreds of students gathered in the school gym, outside in a dimly lit alley where the victim was allegedly raped, police say witnesses took photos. Others laughed.

"As people announced over time that this was going on, more people came to see, and some actually participated," Lt. Mark Gagan of the Richmond Police Department told CNN.

That quote comes from a piece which speculates about why it took so long for someone to call the police. The Kitty Genovese effect was mentioned and so was the idea that teenagers have brains like crocodiles might: incapable of making judgments or feeling empathy for the victim. What wasn't mentioned at all is whether these teenagers were male or female. Neither does the piece discuss the misogyny evident in all this or what has gone wrong in a society where this happens.

P.S. It was a female student who called the police.

Music For Tonight

In Peshawar

Over a hundred people have died in car bombings which coincide with Hillary Clinton's visit to Pakistan. Most of the dead are women and children, and though this is seen as a horrible attack on innocent bystanders it is important to remember that from the militants' point of view it is not at all so:

A representative of a shopkeepers association in the area in Peshawar said he and others had received threats from militants to ban women from shopping in the market.

The car bomb exploded between two narrow lanes of Meena Bazaar and Kochi Bazaar, an area frequented by women. Most of the bodies were charred and mutilated beyond recognition, making it difficult to identify the victims and estimate their number.

A senior minister, Bashir Bilour, said Tuesday night that the death toll, which had climbed through the day as the extent of the carnage emerged, had risen to 101. According to witnesses, as many as three clusters of shops on narrow lanes and passageways collapsed in the explosion, and fires raged out of control.

Hours afterward, people were still trying to dig bodies and survivors out of the rubble, witnesses said, and white smoke wreathed the wrecked buildings. Sahibzada Anees, the deputy coordination officer in Peshawar, said most of the dead were women and children, adding that some of the wounded were in critical condition.

I have nothing more to say.

More On Women And Health Insurance

That most health insurance in the United States is tied to employment is known to have several problems. For instance, this makes it harder for people to become entrepreneurs, even if they have great ideas, because entrepreneurs must get their insurance from that individual insurance market at a higher price. It is also harder to change jobs in general if the new firm you are considering doesn't offer the same benefits as your current employer.

But here's how this might affect women over and above the general effect:

First, if those individual insurance policies discriminate against women (see post below) then starting your own firm is even more expensive for women than it is for men.

Second, the fact that family health insurance is tied to full-time work might have odd repercussions. Think about a couple with a baby. They want to cut their hours of work to spend more time with the new arrival. But if each of them cuts the hours by the same amount they might be left without health coverage for the family! So the likely outcome is that only one of them will cut those hours and that the one doing it is the one with the lower earnings etc..

That is usually the woman, and the long-run consequences of that are something I have written about many times before (lower future earnings, more difficulty in getting promotions later on, lower retirement income).

The Egg Americans

Colorado is going to try to have them, again:

A version of the anti-abortion initiative soundly defeated by Colorado voters in 2008 is making its way to the 2010 ballot, this time reworked as an "egg-as-a-person" initiative.

This new version would move the legal definition of a person further back into the reproductive cycle, granting cells the full spectrum of citizen rights. Opposition groups, including Colorado genetic and fertilization researchers, say the law would have spiraling consequences, that it would put women at risk and freeze current work in medicine and reproduction.

zygote

Colorado Right to Life and Personhood USA, the groups behind proposed Initiative 25, are undeterred by the fact that Coloradans voted against the test-run amendment last year by a margin of three to one. The new amendment is even farther reaching, moving the initial marker for the beginning of life from "fertilization" to "the beginning of the biological development of a human being."

Personhood Colorado Director and the initiative proponent Gualberto Garcia Jones told The Colorado Independent that the change was made "to be more comprehensive in our definition of a person" and was not done to make it more appealing to voters.

"It's intended to account for human beings who may be created through asexual reproduction in laboratories and used as raw material for research, organs, or stem cells. Fertilization would not have properly applied to asexually reproduced humans, but even asexually reproduced human beings have a definite biological beginning," Jones explained.

I keep thinking of that old ad: "Let Go Of My Eggo." Then I try to imagine all the laws that would have to be amended to treat Egg Americans right. Surely there would have to be some sort of surveillance of women's wombs to know if Egg Americans are threatened? What if a woman drinks in a bar? She might, just might, be giving alcohol to a minor. How can we know if we don't do a pregnancy check at the door?

And then all those women who work in adult environments might be guilty of taking a minor to places where they are not allowed to be. Every miscarriage would lead to a criminal investigation.

It's the old problem: We would suspect that there are people inside some people but not inside other people. These babushka dolls are not going to have men as the outermost layer and their rights will not be reduced but all fertile-age women just might be carrying an egg American inside them! It's not possible to enforce the rights of Egg Americans without making women into containers.

That is the odd aspect of the pro-birth debates: They argue for more rights for Egg Americans and therefore by necessity less rights for their containers. Yet none of this seems to affect the rights of men at all. That may be why I find it so distasteful to watch two men debate abortion on television or to read the opinions of Mr. Something-Or-Other (coughSaletancough) as THE expert on abortion. He has nothing at risk there, you know.

A Hoax?

That was my first thought when I read through this post (via Eschaton):

I just received an email (from this guy's PR outfit) with the subject line:

President Obama's Attacks on Free Speech Opposed by Most Americans, Zogby/O'Leary Poll Finds

Here's one of the "questions" asked in the poll, tailor-made for Fox News Channel:

Federal Communications Commission Chief Diversity Czar Mark Lloyd wants the FCC to force good white people in positions of power in the broadcast industry to step down to make room for more African-Americans and gays to fill those positions. Do you agree or disagree that this presents a threat to free speech?

This would serve as an excellent example of biased polling if it were true. Is it from an actual poll? I have no idea, but it is listed in this file (which is chock full of bad polling examples). Now why would Zogby be involved in something which would kill its reputation forevermore?

In any case, the O'Leary reference is to Brad O'Leary, a right-wing consultant who specializes in Obama bashing.

Why Women Need The Public Option In Health Care

Here are the reasons:

1. Individual health insurance policies are allowed to discriminate against women in many states in the sense that women pay more for identical policies (this is called gender rating). Two extreme examples: a 25-year old woman can be charged as much as 84% more than a 25-year old man for a policy which does NOT cover maternity care, and a 40-year old woman who does not smoke can be charged more for an identical policy than a 40-year old man who smokes. And maternity care is rarely covered.

These are the markets in which we are supposed to seek coverage today if we are not qualified to be covered under an employer group plan.

2. What about those group plans? They can charge different average premia based on the number of women firms hire, provided that the states have not made that practice illegal. Thus, firms in traditionally female dominated fields may be made to pay more for the very same package of health insurance than firms in a traditionally male dominated field.

What is going on here? The dry statistical explanation for gender rating is that women consume more health care than men, as a group, until a fairly advanced age, and because it is not possible to tell which women the high consumers are, all women are charged more. (After a certain age men's consumption increases and even exceeds women's average use levels. But soon after that point Medicare takes over and Medicare does not practice gender rating! Interesting, eh?)

Looked at in another way, every individual woman is sorta "punished" for women's higher medical care use, because the statistics assume that she is going to have the average use pattern of other women like her.
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Link via Southern Beale

On Ovens

I have been reading pro-birth sentiments about women. Women who have abortions were too lazy to use birth control, too weak to say no and too vain to carry the pregnancy to birth. A baby is the proper punishment for all these ethical failings! Men don't appear in those screeds at all, except as the saviors of unborn babies. I guess women get pregnant all on their own, inbetween botox treatments and trips to the mall, and they abort a pregnancy because it is inconvenient. "Inconvenient" is a word that crops up a lot.

But mostly the screeds are about life beginning at conception (what about all those fertilized cells in freezers?) and about the woman being a sort of oven which is to bake the babies until they are nicely done. Once the babies are out of the oven they are forgotten by the pro-birthers. But the ovens are not!

It really is all about who controls the ovens and who controls reproduction.

On Free Snacks

This blog has none, sadly. But some time ago Senator Landrieu from Louisiana told us that there is no free lunch in health care, either:

Asked specifically about polling data showing the public option with strong national support, the conservative Democrat added, "I think that when people hear 'public option,' they hear 'free health care.' Everybody wants free health care. Everybody wants health care they don't have to pay for. The problem is that we as government and business have to pick up the tab, and as individuals. So I'm not at all surprised that the public option has been sold as free health care. But there is no free lunch."

It is of course true that there is no free lunch. Resources are spent to make that salad and that omelet and those resources are not then available for other uses. The same basic arguments apply to health care.

Where Landrieu goes wrong is in her assumption that we don't already grapple with the same dilemma. When an uninsured person goes to the ER, who pays for that visit? Take a few guesses and you will probably be right on all of them. Some of the costs will be passed over to the government, some to the charges insured patients pay.

On The Public Option

I have not written much about the public option in the health care reform debate, mostly because discussing a formless ghost is pretty pointless, and a formless ghost is what the public option has been so far. Until we know who is allowed to join it and under what conditions we can't really tell what its effects would be on access or the costs of health care or the general competition in health insurance markets.

Now Harry Reid has brought out a Senate version which includes a public option with a right for individual states to opt out of it. I'm not sure how that would work in detail and those details do matter. But I can already imagine the pressure the individual insurance industry would put on states to opt out. It also looks to me as if the states most likely to opt out right now are the ones with the most uninsured, and that would be pretty bad. On the other hand, no state has opted out of Medicaid, so perhaps no state would ultimately opt out of the public option, either.

Today's Silly Thought

I like broccoli. It's like a cabbage with a college degree.

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Gah. Mark Twain said it first about cauliflowers.

Pussy, Pussy, Come here!

It is not a cat I'm calling but Pussy Galore. A column on marital infidelity among athletes and sports commentators defines the enemy as Pussy Galore, and it would be very odd if those big burly men were waging a war on kittens. So it's probably the vagina with its frightening appendices that is the danger of he-men everywhere. It causes them to lose their jobs, their sports and their families, And All That Must Stop:

There are moments in our history when common sense forces us to change the rules in deference to a unique, unprecedented force of nature.

In the aftermath of ESPN baseball analyst Steve Phillips' sordid affair with Monica Lewinsky II, we can no longer deny the inadequacies of America's current relationship rules as they pertain to the battle against Pussy Galore.

It's time to change the rules of the game.

There's been too much carnage. She shredded Rick Pitino's reputation. She pushed Josh Hamilton off the wagon. She sweet-talked Charles Barkley into driving drunk. She hoodwinked Dirk Nowitzki into falling in love with a fugitive.

And now a 22-year-old slump-buster has apparently cost Steve Phillips his marriage and his credibility to analyze baseball.

It's not right. A little off-the-books nookie should not infringe on man's ability to discuss bats and balls in October.

Enough is enough. It's time we had an adult conversation about Ms. Galore and her ability to ruin lives, careers and reputations. We have given her this power and it's obvious she's abusing it.

If we don't soon take action, she threatens to bring down our democracy and wreck the overtime budget of ESPN's human resources department.

Bam! Pow! Take that, you horrible pussy.

I love this so much that I want to do a reversal, about Dick Peter, that horrible enemy of all womankind and all the havoc he has created. But the writer of that piece would never get it. In his world the vaginas walk on two feet while gunning for men in a war of destruction. Poor penises just rise and fall on their own accord, innocently.

So what is the solution to the pussy war? To allow for male infidelity, naturally:

Yes, I said it. It's time for change we can really believe in, a relaxing of sexual monogamy laws for men. Our antiquated system nearly cost us a president. And now, just days before Halloween and in the middle of a terrific American League Championship Series, it has cost us John Kruk's wingman.

...

Let's redefine marriage by putting sex in its proper place. Reproduction should remain sacred between a married man and woman. Sex should be enjoyed between consenting, mature adults.

I say a moderately famous man earning between $250K and $500K a year should be allowed a mistress he can see weekly, one week-long, $8,000 vacation he can take with his mistress and five strip club nights with his boys a year.

A moderately famous man earning between $500K and $1 million a year should be allowed a mistress he can see weekly and every other weekend, a 10-day, $15,000 vacation with his mistress, a $1,500-a-month, fully-furnished apartment for his mistress and seven strip club nights with his boys.

Any man earning more than $1 million a year should come and go as he damn well pleases.

How sweet to have an income-gradient on the number of Pussy Galores a man can have! It could be because they all have to be paid for.

Indeed, the whole column is so sweet and delicious! I rarely come across an explicit contemporary view of the world where women have no say over anything while the success of men greatly matters! Indeed, the guy compares us to steaks! Steaks:

Man is most happy when he is free to experience her pleasure in her varied forms, textures and styles of dress.

I like steak. Capital Grille is my favorite steakhouse. I could eat at Capital Grille seven nights a week. But, especially when I'm traveling, I like to experience different steakhouses. My occasional trips to Shula's, Morton's, Ruth's Chris and Smith and Wollensky in no way infringe upon my undying love and support of Capital Grille. In fact, shortly after I've digested my meal at a different steakhouse, I'm reminded just how much I love Cap Grille.

Consequently, if a man can afford a no-disease, no-pregnancy occasional night on the town without it affecting his financial and lovemaking responsibilities at home, as mature adults we must reach the point where we can allow this without breaking up the family or running a man from political office/off the set of a popular TV show.

I don't want to be a steak. Perhaps boiled eyeballs of a cod?

My fingers itch so hard to reverse all this, because such a reversal would not only treat all men as dicks but also tell married men that it's up to other women or some weird public opinion to decide whether their wives can be unfaithful and how many pool boys or gigolos they can have. But it really would be a waste of my time.

So just enjoy the piece while reversing it in your mind.

PC World on the Pepsi Amp App (by Liz)

As you probably know, I am neither as brave nor as wise, as our goddess Echidne. While she boldly explores the comment sections online, I avoid them at all costs. After all, I can hardly handle the stories themselves. In conducting research for Hello Ladies, I came across a troublesome article in PC World magazine.

But first some background: Recently, Pepsi released an iPhone app for its energy drink Amp called “Before You Score." The app was designed to help men "score" by providing pick up lines and other useful tidbits for 24 different types of women. You know, those categories we all fall into: business woman, tree hugger, married, twins. And, the app encouraged men to brag about their scores using social media tools like Facebook and Twitter. It prodded them to share details. Following an uproar on blogs and Twitter, the company eventually pulled the app.

JR Raphael, PC World writer, said in an article entitled, "Sex and Smartphones: 5 Apps Edgier Than Pepsi's 'Amp Up'," the app was pulled when people complained of "stereotyping and sexism." He's wrong. It wasn't just the stereotyping --it was the encouraging men to brag about their conquests. That's more than sexist. That's irresponsible and potentially dangerous in a rape culture.

Then he goes on to write, "The objections to Pepsi's app included claims that it objectified women and turned sex into a game. The people lodging these complaints, I have to assume, have never picked up a copy of Men's Health or Cosmo (or watched a single movie made since 1967)." So is he saying that because women have been objectified for years, we shouldn't get upset at any new offense? I believe he is.

Raphael implies, by comparing the Amp app to other apps that remind men when their girlfriends are menstruating or that provide texts to help men "chat with the hottie whose number you got," that women are just humorless and opposed to anything sexual. But Raphael is comparing merely stupid apps with a potentially dangerous app. Reminding men to send email to their dates is very different than telling men to "raise your expectations" with regards to scoring. According to his byline, Raphael "swims in satire." I failed to get the humor in his post. But, oh I forgot, I am humorless.

To be fair to PC World, they ran another piece on the Pepsi app. This one by David Coursey, "Pepsi Removes "Amp Up" iPhone App, Humanity Rejoices," was encouraging. Coursey says, "Complaining about this application isn't just "political correctness," it's wanting to live in a world where men and women are treated equally and with respect." And Coursey is not being sarcastic.