Obama's Afghanistan Speech

I fell asleep at 7pm yesterday so didn't actually watch the speech. But I did read the transcript which is available here. The short summary is 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan.

Writing about Afghanistan and Pakistan from the military angle is not something I do a lot. There are better experts for the topic. But once in a while I want to write about the reasons why I don't write about it. Heh.

First, neither Afghanistan nor Pakistan is a stable country in the way we usually define that term, and that is crucial to remember. Pakistan is a volatile place, for example. Afghanistan is really a group of tribal areas, with Kabul stuck up on top like a cherry on a cake, and the tribal areas are not under the control of whatever president might sit on the cherry. The role of tribal ties and the role of religious ties must be kept in mind when discussing concepts such as democracy. Likewise, the role of women as property. Corruption is endemic in both places and governments don't work very efficiently for the many poor.

All this means that nation building is most likely doomed and that importing some Western form of democracy is also probably doomed. Or so I think. Anything that would truly change circumstances would have to start inside those areas and with extensive education. That the Taliban groups attack schools in general and girls' schools in particular is therefore quite logical. That's where real change could be born, though income redistribution is also necessary.

Second, the analysis of this speech and the whole Afghanistan question ultimately depends on whose interests we are focusing on. Is it the interests of the United States? The world? The populations in those areas (including the women)? This point seems pretty obvious, but most of the debates I've followed tend to mix it up too much.

Third, what is "victory" in Afghanistan? To get out of there with our skins intact? Obama now discusses allowing those Talibanis into the government who respect the human rights of others. Perhaps such creatures could be found if women are not defined as human, but all this sounds to me like preparing the stage for leaving Afghanistan as we found it, though with more dead people: The country taking the bottom or near-bottom position in every kind of list of economic well-being or health. And how does Pakistan relate to all this? It is Pakistan, after all, which supported the Taliban, and it is Pakistan which has nuclear weapons.

Finally, I agree with Obama that the mess in Afghanistan is not his fault. But he is the one who must find an adequate broom for the clearing operations. Whether 30,000 extra troops is that broom remains to be seen.

More On Religion

Since I seem to have gone on a religion streak, check out this cartoon. It links to my previous post on religious freedom and also the way the Catholic bishops have been pushing the Stupak amendment. It's also very funny.

Earthly Fertility Figurines

Reading with care is a useful activity. Consider this writeup of an exhibition concerning an early European culture in the Danube Valley:

Before the glory that was Greece and Rome, even before the first cities of Mesopotamia or temples along the Nile, there lived in the Lower Danube Valley and the Balkan foothills people who were ahead of their time in art, technology and long-distance trade.

For 1,500 years, starting earlier than 5000 B.C., they farmed and built sizable towns, a few with as many as 2,000 dwellings. They mastered large-scale copper smelting, the new technology of the age. Their graves held an impressive array of exquisite headdresses and necklaces and, in one cemetery, the earliest major assemblage of gold artifacts to be found anywhere in the world.

The striking designs of their pottery speak of the refinement of the culture's visual language. Until recent discoveries, the most intriguing artifacts were the ubiquitous terracotta "goddess" figurines, originally interpreted as evidence of the spiritual and political power of women in society.

Bolds are mine, dear reader. You may have heard about Marija Gimbutas who wrote several books on her theories about these small female figurines. She saw them as evidence of a Mother Goddess religion. But that's not the view this article seems to support:

An entire gallery is devoted to the figurines, the more familiar and provocative of the culture's treasures. They have been found in virtually every Old Europe culture and in several contexts: in graves, house shrines and other possibly "religious spaces."

One of the best known is the fired clay figure of a seated man, his shoulders bent and hands to his face in apparent contemplation. Called the "Thinker," the piece and a comparable female figurine were found in a cemetery of the Hamangia culture, in Romania. Were they thinking, or mourning?

Many of the figurines represent women in stylized abstraction, with truncated or elongated bodies and heaping breasts and expansive hips. The explicit sexuality of these figurines invites interpretations relating to earthly and human fertility.

An arresting set of 21 small female figurines, seated in a circle, was found at a pre-Cucuteni village site in northeastern Romania. "It is not difficult to imagine," said Douglass W. Bailey of San Francisco State University, the Old Europe people "arranging sets of seated figurines into one or several groups of miniature activities, perhaps with the smaller figurines at the feet or even on the laps of the larger, seated ones."

Others imagined the figurines as the "Council of Goddesses." In her influential books three decades ago, Marija Gimbutas, an anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, offered these and other so-called Venus figurines as representatives of divinities in cults to a Mother Goddess that reigned in prehistoric Europe.

Although the late Dr. Gimbutas still has an ardent following, many scholars hew to more conservative, nondivine explanations. The power of the objects, Dr. Bailey said, was not in any specific reference to the divine, but in "a shared understanding of group identity."

All the bolding is mine. I wanted to point out the contradictions in those paragraphs, beginning with the possibly "religious" context of the figurines, so carefully qualified, and then quickly moving to the argument that the sexuality of the figurines invites an interpretation of them as earthly and having to do with fertility. But of course that interpretation is carried out by people who live today, not by members of the old civilization itself. In that it shares all the problems of Dr. Gimbutas' theories.

I also find it hard to see why non-divine explanations are necessarily any more conservative than divine ones. They leave the purpose of the figurines undefined, true, but at the same time they have nothing much to say about the greater prevalence of female figurines. Are they indeed just earthly fertility symbols, prehistoric porn, if you like? If so, why are they found in graves and shrines? How would such figurines be interpreted if they were mostly male?

Now I'm all irritated. In my opinion Gimbutas' theories reach too far from the available evidence. But I see almost the reverse taking place in this writeup.

On Religious Freedom, Deeper

You may have read about the Swiss referendum which banned any further construction of minarets. Mosques can be built but not those tall towers attached to them. Although this particular clash may not be about religion at all, I can't help noticing that the god on the two sides is presumably the same one, given that both Islam and Christianity are Abrahamic religions. Together with Judaism they worship a male god who created everything! All without women!

No wonder then that women have traditionally been sequestered in the house of this guy god. They still sometimes are, or are not allowed in at all or must sit behind a curtain. The people speaking in that house are still overwhelmingly men.

I'm fully aware of the religious freedom (or lack of it) aspect of the minaret referendum and its other consequences. But it's hard not to see the deeper lack of religious freedom in the choices many women are offered, simply by accident of birth. We tend not to get upset about a church which worships the father and the son. And yes, I'm also fully aware of a more sophisticated interpretation of the divine as beyond our puny social markers.

Still, I have a deep visceral desire to at least once visit a house of worship for a goddess. I imagine it as a circular building of great beauty, with bright mosaics and flowing water and a silence which enfolds. A safe place and one which is respected by all.

I can see it in my mind but doubt that I will ever see it in reality.

Political Framing And the Health Care Reform

I was going to write something about the reform itself but I'm exhausted right now and so will only write on whatever takes my fancy. And this time it's the following quote:

"Kentuckians want to know how spending trillions of dollars we don't have on a plan that raises health insurance premiums and taxes on families and small businesses is good for healthcare or for jobs or for the economy," McConnell said.

Who knows what Kentuckians really want? Politicians always second-guess groups: Americans want this or that. The idea is to make the reader or listener believe that she or he is wrong if not agreeing with that general statement.

And what about all those trillions of dollars we don't have? It never stopped the Republicans from supporting wars abroad when the president was a Republican. Never mind if the reform actually doesn't cost that much. The propaganda would be the same in any case.

The taxes, as you note, never fall on individuals living alone or on large businesses, only on families and small businesses. The Democratic framing talks about working families instead of families but otherwise agrees. It's quite sad how nobody cares about all those millions of people who live alone.

This quote is a little different but still part of the propaganda framing:

"This is the latest report to confirm that the current healthcare reform proposal fails to bend the healthcare cost curve," said Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for America's Health Insurance Plans, an industry lobbying organization .

Why not just say that it fails to slow down the rise in health care costs or fails to reduce the costs? What's so clever about the bending of the cost curve, and which of the many possible curves (total, average, marginal and short- or long-term for each) are these guys talking about? Given that even the estimation of those curves is tricky, why talk about the bending of the curve?

Snapping Your Toes

Can you do that? Like clicking your forefinger to your thumb, except with the big toe and the one next to it. And can you clap with one hand? (Use the fingers to clap at the ball of the hand.)

I spend too much time on thoughts like that...

The Three Echidne Posts You Should Read

Now that was mean, because this post is all about the minor irritation I get from all those headlines:

8 Essential Sites for Cyber Monday
9 Low-Fat Holiday Desserts
Top Doctors Spill 10 Big Health Secrets
10 Commandments You Should Not Break

Every time I go to the supermarket for food I see the women's magazine covers at the checkout: Seven Ways To Drive Your Man Crazy! Ten Perfect Diets! Grrr.

Why all that fascination with numbered lists? Is it because those are about the easiest headlines to make if one wants to tie together lots of pretty unrelated bits?

I shouldn't complain, because my headlines tend to have nothing to do with the posts themselves which makes me cry when I try to search for something in the archives. They are mostly just clever goddessy quips.

Another Invisible Elephant

I feel like an idiot always pointing out the elephant sitting on the couch and merging with the throw pillows so very well that nobody else sees it. In this case it has to do with the fact that the state of Massachusetts, the Sodom and Gomorrah of all liberalism, has never sent a woman to the U.S. Senate. NEVER.

We don't discuss this, just as we do not discuss the fact that there has never been a female president of this country. Even feminists don't discuss this, except to point out that ofcoursethey'dloveawomanbut...there's something too wrong with the particular candidate.

And it is hard. I admit that. Perhaps Martha Coakley is not the candidate one should vote for. Perhaps Hillary Clinton wasn't the candidate, either. But somehow we manage to discuss all that without really discussing the fact that women are not in power in the highest places of this country. Some feminists argue that focusing on the top doesn't help, that we must focus on the bottom rungs of the society only and help the women there. That way the whole edifice gets turned over.

That would be lovely, except for the fact that the social hierarchies are anchored at the top, not at the bottom. They are like upside-down houses and if you want to dig into the foundations you need to do that at the top of the edifice, odd as it may seem.

Then there's the argument that just voting for women isn't necessarily good for feminism and I agree with that. But note that just voting for liberal guys may not be good for feminism, either, and they should be held to at least as stringent a measuring rod as the women are. I do feel that they get a pass, even from feminists, whereas women are taken apart and checked out with a magnifying glass. Bad choices in the past? Scrap her! No experience? Scrap her!

None of this should be taken as an endorsement for Martha Coakley. My aim is to point out the context in which we discuss female candidates, a context which pretends that the playing field has always been equal and that there is no special value in electing more women in general.

Sexxxy violence (by Suzie)

Because I live on a small outer planet, I just heard about the controversy over Adam Lambert kissing a man on the American Music Awards. Feminists have decried the homophobia of his critics. An example is Jos at Feministing.

Bitch Magazine comments on an earlier Details article in which he’s photographed with a naked woman as a prop. Carla C. at Blonder and Thinner takes him to task for his comments to Out magazine.

But I wish more people were talking about the lyrics to the song he performed. In “For Your Entertainment,” he tells someone that she misread him. He asks if she knows what she got herself into. He says it’s going to get rough for her. He’s going to hurt her. He’s in control, and there’s no escape. He’s going to hold her down, make her scream, force her to take the pain and the pleasure.

Why did I choose female pronouns when Lambert says he’s gay? Because in the video he released, women predominate. (His debut album is selling well.) Maybe he also likes sex with women, or maybe he just uses them for commercial purposes.

Most people will understand the video and the AMA performance as BDSM. But I found the lyrics chilling because they sound so similar to what many rapists say, including rapists who actually believe women enjoy being forced. In a society with so much male sexual violence against women, we don’t need another man showing how much the ladies love it.

No Rationing?

I bet you have heard the wingnut argument that health care reform will introduce rationing to the U.S.! Faceless bureaucrats deciding over your life-and-death! Having to wait in dreary waiting-rooms smelling of dirty socks and prison food! Forever!

You may also remember me writing that every single health care system rations. Some do it on the basis of triage and waiting times, some do it on the basis of money, some on the basis of whom you know. All have some combination of each of these.

The point is that the current U.S. system rations care, too, and it does most of it on the basis of ability to pay:

John is a sawmill worker from Yamhill County, Ore., where I grew up. He was a foreman at a mill, he felt strong and healthy, and he had very basic insurance coverage through his job. On April 18, he was married, at age 23, and life was looking up.

Ten days after the wedding, he was walking in his backyard carrying a neighbor's dog — and he suddenly blacked out. That led, after rounds of CAT scans, M.R.I.'s and other tests, to the discovery that the left parietal lobe of his brain has a cavernous hemangioma. That's an abnormal growth of blood vessels, and in John's case it is chronically leaking blood into his brain.

John began to have trouble walking and would sometimes collapse. He developed spasms and restless leg syndrome, he began to use a cane, and his mind suffered.

"He forgets stuff a lot, he bumps into things," said his new wife, Esther Brodniak. "But he keeps things light. He jokes about it."

Perhaps the worst is the pain — blinding, incapacitating headaches that have left him able to sleep only in short intervals. He vomits daily when the pain surges.

"The pain is constant," John said. "It's a 7 or 8 on a scale of 10, and then it hits the high peaks and makes me vomit."

With John unable to work, he lost his job — and his insurance coverage. Esther had insurance for herself and for her two children (from a previous marriage) through her job building manufactured homes. But she couldn't add John to her plan because of his pre-existing condition.

Without insurance, John has been unable to get surgery or even help managing the pain. When he collapses or suffers particularly excruciating headaches, Esther rushes him to the emergency room of one hospital or another, but an E.R. can't do much for him. One hospital has told them not to come back unless he gets insurance, they say.

Esther used up her family leave time to look after her new husband. "Then I went back to work, and he fell several times," she said. "I told my boss that I had to quit. Taking care of John was more important than building someone else's house."

John has been rationed out of the system. Indeed, his new family has been rationed out of it, too, because Esther had to take up the nursing care John was denied.

My point is not to argue that everything in, say, a publicly controlled and funded health care system would be peachy. But let's not pretend we don't ration right now and let's not pretend that it has no dire consequences.

Saturday Silly Statistics Lesson

Via Ritholz.com, we learn that at Fox News the slices of a pie can add up to more than the total pie! Now that is not only fair-and-balanced but also miraculous.





A bar chart would have been more suitable...

In The Kitchen, Yapping

Some post-Thanksgiving humor for you. We all know that a woman bossing a man is funny whereas the reverse is as gods and nature ordained. And no god will make Glenn Beck take the number 2 position behind a chick:





There it is, in a nutshell, that invisible elephant of the hilarity of fighting "natural" gender hierachies. And yes, I know that an elephant doesn't fit into a nutshell but Beck's brain is too small for a better simile.

If you feel a sense of deja vu again, you are quite correct. This pachyderm sat around many television studios and lounged about in liberal blog comments threads during the Democratic Primaries. It's not just Sarah Palin that it follows.

Definitions of sexism & racism (by Suzie)

When the word “racism” gets mentioned, I bet a lot of people think of Klansmen in white hoods. “Sexism,” however, seems to conjure up a smarmy guy telling a bad joke.

Merriam-Webster online defines sexism as

1: prejudice or discrimination based on sex ; especially : discrimination against women
2: behavior, conditions, or attitudes that foster stereotypes of social roles based on sex

It defines racism as:

1: a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race
2: racial prejudice or discrimination

Sexism isn’t defined as a belief that gender determines traits and capacities, perhaps because that belief is widely accepted among academics, religious leaders and others. Even if they don’t say men are superior, many assign more highly valued traits to men. Consider this gauge of mainstream thought: The media routinely quote experts explaining why men and women are different, with no rebuttal. They wouldn’t do a similar story on race without quoting someone who disagrees.

Some social scientists describe “hostile sexism,” “ambivalent sexism” and “benevolent sexism.” Hostile sexism is akin to “women are all manipulative sluts.” Tekanji on Finally, a Feminism 101 Blog explains that benevolent sexism involves a “good” stereotype, such as: Women are more virtuous than men. But this can backfire. When a woman doesn’t act virtuous, she may face more criticism than a man would. The example for ambivalent sexism is stereotyping that appears neutral, such as pink for girls and blue for boys. (These terms also apply to racism.)

The Feminism 101 blog says most sexism is unintentional, born out of ignorance. If so, a close second has to be sexist statements made by people who think feminists take ourselves too seriously, want special treatment, are not really oppressed or blame men for everything. (The same can be said about a lot of racist remarks.)

It’s tempting to think hostile and intentional bias is worse than unintentional and benevolent bias. But it depends on the impact. Certainly, a man who kills a bunch of women or a white who kills a bunch of people of color is worse than a poor, elderly, white man who means well but says offensive things from time to time.

On the other hand, a hostile guy who intentionally says rude things doesn’t cause as much damage as a prominent politician who means well but acts in a detrimental way that affects millions.

To complicate the matter further, there are many people, notably academics such as Abby Ferber, who consider all whites racist. She wrote in the HuffPost:

Part of the problem is that we think of racism as an individual quality. We see racists as nasty people who march around with white hoods burning crosses. But this [way of thinking] actually reinforces racism. We need to shift from using "racist" as a noun, to an adjective. The reality is that white folks are racist; how can we grow up in this culture and not internalize racism?

The task that faces us is not to try and identify who is or is not a racist, but to examine the many invisible ways in which racism and white privilege pervade our lives, our views, our assumptions, and our opportunities. The question is not are we racist, but are we anti-racist? What are we doing to recognize and undermine racism and privilege as it shapes our life, day in and day out? We need to strive to make racism more visible, more conscious. Only once it is conscious can we work to undermine it.

I assume that people who believe this also believe that all men are sexist, although I hear that less from academics popular now. It also follows that women internalize sexism and people of color internalize racism.

On a Racialicious thread (not reacting to Ferber), Marge Twain said:

To continue that analogy, all women are sexist too, even though they are not the beneficiaries of sexism. It’s not hard to look around and find women who have internalized the message of their own inferiority, who seek to blame rape-victims or who participate in slut-shaming or believe women and not men are the natural care-takers. Being female doesn’t excuse me from needing to check my own sexist assumptions.

Saying all whites are racist and all men are sexist helps rally the troops, in an us-vs.-them fashion, but does little to guide our actions. I agree with Ferber that actions are what matter.

We need to look at the intention and impact of individual actions, instead of thinking that all acts of bias are equally bad. I’m not saying we should disregard lesser sins and focus only on the most horrific acts. But I tire of name-calling (except when I'm doing it, of course).

We should continue to examine belief systems and structural inequities. We’ve got to stop the media from publicizing, without criticism, theories or beliefs that gender determines traits and capabilities.

What do you think?
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Next month I’ll discuss power + privilege and institutionalized bias.

Friday garden blogging (by Suzie)

This is a fountain at the Atlanta Botanical Garden. The water appeals to me as Florida enters its dry season.

Happy Thanksgiving Day

Jen has made a list of things to be thankful for. I'd add the removal of the global gag rule to that list. But that would still be a fairly U.S. centered list, and I'm sure you can add other things which elicit gratitude.

Here are a few nice things:


1Watt's Stub dreaming:





Doug's Sasha all grown up:





Michelangelo's statue of David from a different angle:

Meet Tucker Max

Don't shake hands with him, though. He is a wannabe comedian and a real fried-in-the-c*m woman-hater. Jaclyn Friedman wrote about him last September:

Tucker Max thinks that "all women are whores" and that "fat girls aren't real people" -- and those are some of his family-friendlier observations. So why do so many women love him?

If you're not 19 and don't regularly scan the best-seller list, you may need an introduction to the Max oeuvre. Max, a hedonistic folk hero to his fans, got his start in 2002 when, egged on by a friend, he started a blog detailing what he calls his "life as a self-involved, drunken womanizer." The site now gets more than a million unique visitors every month. It has spawned a book, "I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell" -- more than 100 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list -- and his exploits have been adapted for the big screen in a movie opening this week.

Max and his growing audience share an unabashed focus on three basic adolescent obsessions: bodily functions, drinking toxic amounts of booze and "scoring." The women in his stories are insulted, tricked, coerced, traded and discarded. One conquest is vomited on and videotaped without her consent.

The author is now in the midst of a 31-city film tour, attracting sold-out crowds at every location, just as he does on college campuses across the country. And according to Max, his audiences are nearly always at least half female.

These women are not reluctant dates dragged there by men exacting revenge for being forced to sit through the "Sex and the City" movie. They are die-hard fans, willing to do almost anything to get their hero's attention. For one fan at a recent stop in College Park, that meant using her mouth as a receptacle for a male audience member's chewing tobacco. Another female fan sought out Max, slept with him, and then tattooed an explicit sentence commemorating the event just below her hip bone, thus earning the Holy Grail of any Maxite: an original Tucker Max blog entry featuring her.

This is Max's magic trick: The Amazing Max Mistreats Women and Makes Them Love Him For It! It's also his ultimate defense against critics, one that he has repeatedly deployed after the protests at some of his recent tour stops, insisting, "I am still waiting for a protester to answer the question: 'If Tucker hates women, why does he have so many female fans? Why is half of each screening women?' "

I shall return to those questions a bit later, but first I'd like to share a few more Tuckeresque examples with you:

For those unfamiliar with Tucker Max: he has a website, and has published several books, the most well-known being "I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell." Recently he wrote and produced an ill-fated movie by the same name. Quotes are offensive, and promote rape and violence. Examples include "I'm going to get you so drunk you can't consent," "Your gender (women) is hardwired for whoredom," and "Get away from me or I'm going to carve a fuckhole in your torso." Some people find it funny – some find it offensive.

...

Students wrote statements, read speeches, and actively debated the issue. Those in favor of the event re-iterated that students had a choice to attend the event, and that Tucker Max was not to be taken seriously. Those against it found it hard to believe that statements saying women Max finds unattractive are "generally just so annoying that you have to actively restrain yourself from kicking her in the crotch and stomping on her throat until she drowns in her own blood. There is no insult too mean or crude for her, and basic human rights do not apply to her," could ever be construed as anything but misogynistic violence, and objected to the fact that the fund that brought Tucker Max to campus came from tuition money.

Did you know that Hitler was a vegetarian and liked dogs?* There's always two sides to everything. Even misogyny might be perfectly acceptable if it is funny enough. Besides, women are not a minority so hating on them is fair game as one Johns Hopkins student (I believe he is a student) stated it while writing about a recent Tucker Max event at the college. There are days when even a goddess despairs about this get-women-to-be-treated-like-human-beings shit.

To return to the questions Tucker Max posed in the above quote:

"I am still waiting for a protester to answer the question: 'If Tucker hates women, why does he have so many female fans? Why is half of each screening women?' "

Jaclyn gives several answers to these questions, and I only want to add a few observations:

Let's begin with those questions themselves. Suppose that Tucker's audience consisted of all men. Would those men be there because of all that juicy misogyny? He seems to think so, if his counterargument has any weight. That's a very scary idea in itself, you know.

Next, note that misogyny is not just something men might be infected with. Women can be misogynists themselves. Just think of the Aunties in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Or of some conservative female pundits who tell us that women shouldn't have the vote. Female misogynists hate other women.

But a different explanation for Tucker's female fans seems more likely to me, and that is the way we women often learn to regard the cultural messages about women as applying to other women, not to us. It's they who are the sluts, the bitches, the c*m-buckets, the whores. We are on the other side, laughing at the jokes with our boyfriends who would never regard us in those terms. Besides, we are cool and can laugh at raunchy or objectifying jokes with the best of the boyz.

Or it could be that the real explanation has to do with human beings as social creatures. We want to be accepted, we want to belong, and if the price of inclusion is to be bullied or despised, we sometimes even swallow that. This is not something special about women or girls, by the way, but about all humans.

Whatever the explanation for this particular phenomenon, misogyny is part of the popular culture of this country. Sometimes it is foregrounded, sometimes it is just an irritating background hum. Where Tucker's particular version differs from that background hum is in its explicitness: Men are callous hunters and women are stupid prey animals. If the prey gets caught it's her own fault:

Max is fond of telling women that "men will treat you the way you let them" -- in other words, if you've been used, abused or assaulted, you must have done something to invite that behavior.

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*I was told that this is not true. But he did praise his mother!

A Campaign Opposing Violence Against Women

This is a campaign by the UN Secretary General by men and aimed at men and boys around the world:

The UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has unveiled a renewed campaign opposing violence against women.

He says about 70% of women experience some form of physical or sexual violence from men.

Ban Ki-moon said men must teach each other that real men don't violate or oppress women.

The 14 men currently in the network include Spanish PM Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Do watch the video at the link if it doesn't trigger you, because it shows the global nature of the problem.

I want to write a proper post on this topic later on because it deserves one. For now, I notice that my Google news page gives articles which redefine the topic right off the bat.

Some Holiday Thoughts

Well, pre-holiday thoughts. (If you don't read this in the U.S. you may not know that tomorrow is a big holiday here, called Thanksgiving. It has something to do with the death of turkeys.)

I have noticed in the past that my readership figures drop about a week before large holidays, especially Thanksgiving and Christmas. That seems pretty natural, given all the hassle holidays cause and the need to travel and to prepare for them. But then I started wondering if there might not be a difference for those who are in charge of most of the work for creating the festivities. If you cook for Thanksgiving you won't have much time to hang out here or elsewhere on the blogs. The same is true for any other major eating holiday. So do you do the cooking for your family or friends?

Sperm In Her Hair

The picture below shows Mark Halperin's The Page before it was removed. Mary Landrieu is photoshopped to have sperm in her hair, based on a 1998 romantic comedy. It's a joke, I guess, but I don't get the joke.





Neither does Media Matters get the joke:

Maybe Halperin thought it was really clever to echo a scene from a late-90s romantic comedy, but it isn't. The image and all that it suggests -- yes, her hair is supposed to be held up by semen -- isn't supported by any facts provided by Halperin in his post. The page to which he links doesn't have anything to do with semen, romantic comedies, or hair gel. In fact, it's a statement from Sen. Mary Landrieu's (D-LA) Communications Director "on motion to proceed timing" on the Senate's health care reform bill.

In other words, it's part of a broader, sexist right-wing narrative that the U.S. Senator from Louisiana is, as Glenn Beck put it yesterday, "a high-class prostitute" engaged in "hookin'" -- all because she lobbied Senate leadership for expanded Medicaid funding for Louisiana in the Senate health care bill in what was characterized by the media as an exchange for her "yea" vote to proceed with floor debate on the bill.

Such political deals are routine, as far as I understand the game. But women who participate in them? They give blow jobs and end up with sperm in their hair which is very funny if you are a guy journalist with the emotional age of twelve.

That's not quite right, either. This whole trend is nastier than just adolescent humor, because it applies both the nudge-nudge-wink-wink (buying sex is just dandy) and the filthy-whore (selling sex is disgusting) ideas at the same time.

Twilight

I have read neither the Twilight books nor seen the movie which means that I shouldn't write anything at all about the topic. But honest, vampires and werewolves as male sex objects for teenage human girls??? Isn't this taking the idea of the "bad boy" a bit too far? Or is this all a much deeper and nastier parable about what it means to be a woman in this world?

Carmen Siering reviews the series from a feminist angle:

But while Twilight is ostensibly a love story, scratch the surface and you will find an allegorical tale about the dangers of unregulated female sexuality. From the very first kiss between Edward and Bella, she is fighting to control her awakening sexuality. Edward must restrain her, sometimes physically, to keep her from ravishing him. There are those who might applaud the depiction of a young man showing such self-restraint, but shouldn't the decision about when a couple is ready to move forward sexually be one they make together?

Meyer insists that she sees Bella as a feminist character, since the foundation of feminism is being able to choose. What Meyer fails to acknowledge is that all of the choices Bella makes are Meyer's choices—choices based on her own patriarchal Mormon background. In Breaking Dawn, the latest book in the series, Meyer finally allows Bella's subordination to end as she takes her proper place: in the patriarchal structure. When Bella becomes a wife and mother, Meyer allows her to receive her heart's desire—to live forever by Edward's side, to be preternaturally beautiful and graceful, to be strong and be able to defend herself.

Edward is a vampire, so I guess the ending means that Bella becomes one, too? And then has vampire babies? But that's not how vampires are created, you know. And they drink blood. Or has that changed, too? Are vampires now cuddly vegetarians who sip tomato juice while helping the poor?

The Manhattan Declaration

Somehow that phrase makes me think of grown pale-faced men in mohawks doing a war-dance on the island of Manhattan. Sadly, that's not quite what the Manhattan Declaration is all about, though a war-dance it well might be. It's the latest statement by various conservative Christians about what they are all about: No abortion, no same-sex marriage and lots of rights for religious people to determine how the society is organized:

The Manhattan Declaration is billed as "A Call of Christian Conscience," drafted and signed by Catholics, evangelicals, and Orthodox Christians, an "ecumenism" celebrated by its promoters as evidence of its far-reaching appeal. The document targets reproductive freedom (enemy of the "sanctity of life") and LGBTQ equality (enemy of the "dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife") as foes of Christians' religious freedom. It's a new document but an old canard. And it's proof that the culture wars are not only not over; there hasn't even been a truce.

The Declaration's drafters and signatories view it as an act of "conscience" and religious devotion, not politics, yet they threaten unspecified civil disobedience if the law fails to yield to their theocratic fantasies. But if the document is so disassociated from current political events, why did it need to hit the streets with a splash at the National Press Club? The festivities took place just steps away from where the D.C. City Council was considering gay marriage legislation subject to threats from the Archdiocese of Washington, and where the Senate was poised to break a threatened filibuster of floor debate on its health care bill, which the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops called "the worst bill we've seen so far on the life issues."

The list of signatories include all sorts of high-and-mighties (mostly guys, natch, including Dinesh d'Sousa):

Religious leaders signed a pledge Friday announcing that they won't abide by laws that support gay marriage or abortion. Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput and Focus on the Family's Founder James Dobson and President Jim Daly joined 125 other conservative religious leaders from Colorado in signing the so-called Manhattan Declaration. The declaration comes amid the contentious national health care debate that has featured Catholic Bishops prominently and in the wake of hate crimes legislation passed earlier this fall that drew staunch opposition from evangelical leaders, who argued it might prevent them from preaching against gays. The signatories of the Declaration (pdf) vow to ignore any laws that contradict their worldview.

The list of Colorado signatories also included Fr. Joseph D Fessio, founder and editor of Ignatius Press; Rev. Michael J Sheridan, Bishop of the Archdiocese of Colorado Springs; and John Stonestreet, executive director of Summit Ministries at Manitou Springs.

The Manhattan Declaration is well worth reading carefully. It has three parts. The first condemns the "culture of death" which has to do with the desire to ban abortions and euthanasia but remains silent about the desire to kill people in wars or through economic and political measures, the second condemns all other types of marriage but that between one man and one woman, with hints about how the woman was made out of the rib of the man and how he deserves honoring by her, and the third is all about the rights of religious people to refuse any laws which don't respect god's laws.

These are then linked to biblical texts, selectively picked, given that the Bible doesn't actually condemn those polygynous Old Testament patriarchs or say anything about abortion.
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Today's Fresh Air interviews Jeff Sharlet on the Stupak amendment.

To Expound On The Obvious?

One of the weirdest things about blogging is that I never know if something I write about is totally obvious or if it might have some value for others. So I pretty much write about everything inside my divine head and watch to see which things drop into the abyss and which do not. But often I do feel a bit silly doing this. Like now, for example.

The (probably obvious) point is that different groups of "the oppressed" are not necessarily on the same side in political debates, and to automatically assume that they are can lead one into trouble. For one example, men who are oppressed on ethnic or racial grounds can easily see their own fight for equality as a righteous one but at the same time regard women as people who should be oppressed on religious or cultural grounds. Not seeing this can lead to cases where a person works for the rights of a group which then would like that person to have fewer rights.

Feminists discuss some of this when addressing racism within the movement. But the same arguments also apply in reverse. And in many other cases.

I Know What I Like...

The following video may have been edited to emphasize the know-nothing side of Sarah Palin's supporters. Or perhaps not; many people are politically uninformed. The media should take the most blame for that, because if they don't provide adequate comparisons of rival politicians' views, who will? The politicians themselves have no interest in doing that.

Nail My Boobs To My Ears?

Something almost as good is available now! A surgery which installs an internal bra, one which prevents that most awful of all possible outcomes: sagging. And the risks are not really that great:

Surgeons make two tiny cuts less than a centimetre wide underneath each breast.
Silicone cups like the ones used in a traditional uplift bra are then are then inserted around 1cm below the skin.

Then surgeons fit fine straps made from a strong material that will hold the bra in place without it sagging These are attached to the ribs between the breast and the shoulder with a pair of titanium screws.

Then they are stitched to the cups and everything is tightened to lift the breasts into the desired position.

How about internal underwear for men, too? Like a silicone jockstrap inside the skin? Bolt it to the hip bones with some titanium screws, and you are all good to go.

Sigh. I guess this might be no more dangerous than silicone breast implants.
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Link thanks to AA.

Echidne The Ignorant

Please educate me about the master plan of the Democrats in Congress. I'm a naive goddess, after all, and find it tricky to understand how these political games are played.

Here's the problem I have: If I was selling a house my real estate agent (realtor) would tell me to ask a certain price for it, with the full understanding that the final price would be lower than my initial asking price, unless the demand side of the market was much more desperate than we had estimated. So if I wanted, say, 160,000 for the house, I'd set an asking price of 190,000. Right?

Then move to what the Democrats did with the HCR and reproductive choice: They began with the Capp amendment:

In an attempt to try to find a compromise for dealing with abortion services in the legislation, I offered an amendment that would essentially continue this ban - even though I personally oppose the Hyde Amendment - that was supported by Energy and Commerce Committee Members whose records span the pro-life and pro-choice spectrum. Our hope was that we could continue the current ban on federal funding for abortion so the issue wouldn't bog down the overall health reform legislation.

In terms of my example, this would be the 190,000 dollars? But what did the Democrats actually want to get, then? And why did it look as if the Stupak amendment came as a big surprise to them? It sounds to me as if they asked 160,000 dollars and expected the other side not to bargain over it at all. Now that is unlikely, given that we are talking about experienced politicians here, and this makes me wonder if the Stupak amendment indeed was the price the Democrats thought they could get.

Back To The Fairy Tale

I wrote about the health care reform last August, using this fairy tale as the metaphor:

Mouse as the Cat's Tailor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do you prove it is not?

Sometimes having goddessy powers of prediction is so very sad. The tailoring has continued since August, and we are very close to the hankie stage, but even that is not sufficient. The cat will go on thinking that even a small piece of the initial cloth is worth getting back. Perhaps the public option could go?:

Now, there are many people who look at this and say that the bill(s) under discussion are so anemic that they're maybe not worth fighting for at all. And that's certainly a legitimate opinion. But I think there's another question. Considering how down to the wire this is, is it really worth holding up everything else contained in the bill when the point of contention, the public option, is as measly as it is?

And so it goes.

Supermoms (by Liz)

Once again I am reminded what a bad, bad mother I am. My poor children -- I shudder to think how much of their adult life and paychecks will be spent on therapy because of me. What is my offense this time? I never regained my figure after giving birth.

Returning to a pre-pregnancy body is the ultimate achievement for the modern mother. I know this to be true because the media told me so. Splashed across international blogs, magazines and newspapers everywhere last week was the headline news that supermodel Heidi Klum had returned to her pre-pregnancy body weight just five weeks after giving birth. I read about it at iVillage, Reality TV News, Growing Your Baby, The Huffington Post and The New York Daily News. I even read about it on TheWashingtonPost.com and CNN.com (via People Magazine). As bad as the news made me feel about myself, I was relieved to see the mainstream finally covering "women's issues."

It's been five years since my last labor and delivery and I'm no MILF, but maybe I can redeem myself. Luckily, there are resources available to me (who says women's healthcare is lacking?) like WebMD which has a post called, "Get Your Body Back After Pregnancy: What Every New Mom Must Know."

Stupid me, I wasted my time when the kids were babes reading the sites for evil mothers—the ones that discuss breastfeeding vs. formula, finding a daycare and returning to work. Alas, I will never hear my husband say the words that Seal, Heidi's husband, shared with Celebritybabies.com about his beautiful wife, who by the way, just took his name:

“She is the person that can pretty much do anything and I’ve got used to that within a few months of marriage…she’s the woman, she can do it all.”

Oh to be a supermodel and a supermom.

Take Your Hope Where You Find It

I choose to take mine from these news:

Invoking the memory of Edward M. Kennedy, Democrats united Saturday night to push historic health care legislation past a key Senate hurdle over the opposition of Republicans eager to inflict a punishing defeat on President Barack Obama. There was not a vote to spare.

The 60-39 vote cleared the way for a bruising, full-scale debate beginning after Thanksgiving on the legislation, which is designed to extend coverage to roughly 31 million who lack it, crack down on insurance company practices that deny or dilute benefits and curtail the growth of spending on medical care nationally.

The spectator galleries were full for the unusual Saturday night showdown, and applause broke out briefly when the vote was announced. In a measure of the significance of the moment, senators sat quietly in their seats, standing only when they were called upon to vote.

In the final minutes of a daylong session, Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., accused Republicans of trying to stifle a historic debate the nation needed.

"Imagine if, instead of debating whether to abolish slavery, instead of debating whether giving women and minorities the right to vote, those who disagreed had muted discussion and killed any vote," he said.

The Republican leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said the vote was anything but procedural — casting it as a referendum on the bill itself, which he said would raise taxes, cut Medicare and create a "massive and unsustainable debt."

At least we are going to get a debate. Compare that to the last time the health care system of this country was changed in a way which truly benefited the patients, and you have to go back almost fifty years, to the beginning of the Medicare and Medicaid programs. Even with all that is wrong with the reform proposals (and much is wrong with them), to even have such proposals is worth a little optimism. President McCain would never have introduced health care reform (because you can afford health care if you can afford five houses).

So yes, I'm pleased to see these news. I'm also furious about the way women's health care needs are treated. But the underlying reason for that despicable treatment is not just cowardly or calculating politicians. The real reason is that a large number of Americans do believe in women's second-class status. Christian fundamentalists are quite explicit on that score. Anyone spending time on the Internet finds that anonymity breeds expressed contempt towards women, that there are many more avid misogynists than one might have guessed in those innocent pre-Net times, and that even various types of humanitarians or lefties often turn hesitant when women's issues crop up.

All this means that the work I do on this blog is still needed, though of course it feels like an ant trying to lever off a mountain.

Poetry Slam And General Flea Market

Subbing for Anthony McCarthy today. Please use the comments for your poetry, thoughts and topics you'd like to talk about. Even recipes (for food, love or life).

Mapping Job Losses

This animated map of the growth of U.S. unemployment figures is fascinating in a horrible way. (Via David Derbes)

Question for the weekend (by Suzie)

Have you had the H1N1 (a k a swine) flu? I went to an internist yesterday who said I probably had a flu of some sort and gave me Tamiflu. She explained that a good test to determine H1N1 costs $300, isn't covered by most insurance, and thus, few people get it.

Naked women as sport (by Suzie)

ESPN's "Body Issue" arrived free in the mail last month. (In other words, I got it whether I wanted it or not.) The inaugural issue had six covers of naked athletes, four female and two male. It's amazing how women have come to dominate sports coverage.

I happened to get the magazine with Sarah Reinertsen on the cover, wearing only her prosthetic leg. Women with disabilities often have been considered uninterested or incapable of sex. Reinertsen looks capable of anything. She gazes directly at the camera. Her pose – sitting with arms and legs crossed – is relaxed but still coy because she’s covering her breasts and pubic area. The great majority of the magazine’s readers are men, and for many, she will be an object of desire. Women with disabilities have won the right to be objectified.

Inside the magazine are other unclothed athletes, both men and women. In some photos, the nudity makes men appear more fierce and the women more vulnerable. The women are less likely to be flexing their muscles and more likely to be smiling. Several of the captions stress femininity, such as the one that notes Olympic shot putter Michelle Carter gets her nails and hair done before competition.

I want more coverage of women's sports, but not if the athletes have to get naked, look sexy or prove their femininity.

There's value in portraying women of different sizes, shapes, colors, abilities, etc. For me, however, the real freedom will come when women don't have to be attractive to feel valued.

Strong, athletic women do present an alternative image to extra-skinny fashion models. But none of the women photographed compete in burkas; readers who follow them as athletes already knew they had strong bodies.

ESPN's Body Issue is being compared to Sports Illustrated's Swimsuit Issue. The Body Issue is much better. At least, it's about sports.

Friday critter blogging (by Suzie)

This is Xena and Logan in Lisa's house in Anchorage. Let the fur fly!

Snorts

I never get my head around the fact that so many Americans worship Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. They are not even in the list of approved goddesses and gods, not even in the subcategory of interesting monsters.

Now they are telling us that the new mammography recommendations are a commie plot to start rationing. Sigh. If that were the case (it is not) I guess they'd admit that the 40-plus million uninsured are a capitalist plot to keep on rationing on the basis of how much money people have?

The reason I'm snorting about this is because both Rush and Glenn would qualify for the Misogynists Hall of Fame should such an august edifice exist. But as the long-term memory of their adulators appears to be about ten seconds they can suddenly turn around and to pretend concern for the poor wimmenz.

The Senate Plan Not Quite So Stupak

I have not yet had time to go through the Senate health care reform proposal as it applies to reproductive health, but others suggest that it's better than Stupak. Well, almost anything is better than Stupak.

Silly Polling

The new CNN poll asks this question about health insurance coverage for abortion:

Generally speaking, are you in favor of using public funds for abortions when the woman cannot afford it, or are you opposed to that?

The answers are 67% opposing the use of public funds and 37% favoring their use.

This question is then used as a lead-in to the following:

The health care reform bill that narrowly passed in the House of Representatives on November 7 included tight restrictions on the use of federal money for abortion coverage. Abortion rights activists strongly oppose such restrictions.

"Roughly one in five Americans who oppose the House health care bill do so because it is not liberal enough," said CNN polling director Keating Holland. "The abortion issue may be one reason why. But for most Americans, potential restrictions on abortion may not be a deal-breaker."

Now, that's just plain silly. The question about public funding is irrelevant as the Hyde amendment already covers that bit (unless we are planning to overthrow that?). What the Stupak amendment would do is expand the Hyde amendment. The CNN poll respondents were not asked about that at all. To draw conclusions about an irrelevant poll is...irrelevant.

Then there's this question:

Now think about women who are covered by private health insurance plans that are paid by private individuals or employers with no money from the government involved. Do you think private insurance plans should cover some or all of the costs of an abortion, or do you think that women who want to get an abortion should have to pay the complete costs of that abortion out of their own pockets?

Forty-five percent of the respondents stated that health insurance should cover some or all of the costs. Fifty-one percent stated that the woman should pay all the costs herself. This difference is within the poll's sampling error (which suggests that the sampling error is pretty big).

Note that these women "want" to get an abortion. They don't "need" one. Note also that there is no option to say that the man who got her pregnant should pay some or all of the costs or that his health insurance plan should do that.

Neither are there any questions about whether private insurance plans should cover Viagra or the treatment for injuries caused by sky-diving or surfing or snowboarding. It is only abortion which is deemed worthy of these types of carelessly formulated questions.

Thank Stupak!

As I've mentioned before, the Stupak amendment expands the reach of the Hyde amendment. It would also make it a permanent law. It is very odd to find a Democratic Congress doing more damage to reproductive rights than the last eight years of Bush, very odd indeed.

Two research papers (one by George Washington University Medical Center and one by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation) discuss some of this and the potential consequences of the Stupak amendment on women who need abortions for medical reasons without those reasons qualifying immediately as life-threatening. For example, the pregnancy itself may have turned into a high-risk one, something else may have happened during the pregnancy (say, a car accident) or the woman may suffer from a chronic condition (such as Type I diabetes) which makes abortion medically recommended.

But if a physician will not call the case life-threatening, the costs of such an abortion would not be covered for anyone on public insurance or for anyone who receives federal subsidies. Indeed, the insurance exchange itself is unlikely to offer coverage for medically necessary abortions, because of the small size of the market for one specific procedure and the Stupak requirement that the abortion rider must bear all its own administrative costs.

You find that worrying? I do. Note that currently women on Medicaid are limited to the same menu of covered abortions, but states have the right to decide to add coverage for medically necessary abortions, and seventeen states have done so. It is unclear whether this practice could continue under the Stupak amendment.

Medically required abortions are currently covered in most employer-provided health insurance plans. Whether this would still be the case in Stupak's world is unclear, but there would certainly be some pressure towards making all policies eligible for the insurance exchange and that could well mean that medically necessary abortions would no longer be included.

The research papers are well worth reading through if you don't mind getting ever more worried. I did, but mostly I got very angry. The anti-choicers have created laws which refuse to cover abortions even when this results in great pain and suffering of the pregnant woman, as long as she doesn't drop dead right there and then. And note how carefully risk to life is defined as only coming from physical health problems. Never mind what mental health problems a woman might suffer from, birth she must give. All this is so that the sluts can't get away with "convenience abortions." That's how the anti-choicers view women.

So thanks, Stupak, for making me face that fact about you and your brethren (mostly brethren).
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Link to the Kaiser paper via Rheality Check.

What I'm Reading And Watching

1. This article on the new mammography recommendations is well worth reading for the additional information it gives us.

2. Trigger warning: A Danish campaign aiming to make people more aware of violence against women doesn't work very well. It's never a good idea to make violence into a game in which you score more points for each slap, even if at the end you are told you are an idiot.

3. Living on one dollar a day: How women around the world cope. Here is one of them:





You can help here.

Are You Manly Enough for Your BVDs?

Masculinity is a fragile and serious business. You can find out if you are a real guy in this promotion from an underwear manufacturer. To get the whole flavor of it, answer that you are a model and not a guy and see what kinds of questions you get. Then go back and start again a different route.

What's interesting about this (and the other promotions on that site) is that the way to prove masculinity is by denigrating various feminine stereotypes. That's what I mean by the fragility of masculinity, as it is often defined in the popular culture. If you answer wrong, you fall into the deep and slimy well of womanliness.
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Thanks to hmj for the link.

What Not To Write About

You might not know this, but every blogger quickly learns which particular topics cause fights and arguments and lots of anger at the blogger. As fights and arguments and anger mean more hits, some bloggers always add those topics when the traffic is slow. Other bloggers (coughgentlegoddessescough) hate writing about those topics because the arguments are like a fog of old farting and never clear completely.

The list of explosive topics for feminist bloggers is slightly different than for, say, progressive bloggers in general. And no, I'm not going to give you the list because that would get the yelling started. But one of those topics certainly is the way Sarah Palin is treated in the political media and on various political blogs. The debate on her is predictable: Some (poor dear) feminist blogger points out that her treatment contains large chunks of sexist smearing. Then others note that Sarah is trading on her sexuality so she deserves the sexualized responses. Or that she's too stoopid for words and has such horrible politics that we really should dump everything possible on her head. Including misogyny, whenever appropriate.

And that's where things get ugly. It's nearly impossible to separate Sarah-Palin-hating from Sarah-Palin-as-female-hating, and that offers a nice opening for any closeted misogynist to exercise his or her inner demons without getting caught doing it. Ultimately the whole topic turns into free-for-all about tits and power and shit, and the only valid conclusion is that we are far from an equal world when it comes to getting and using political power.

That's why I'm not writing this post.

To Screen Or Not To Screen

The new mammogram recommendations have caused a lot of arguments. This is not unexpected at all, because the earlier recommendations sure did sell mammograms as the way to beat breast cancer, and now we are all supposed to do a 180 degrees turn! But the truth is that a mammogram is a form of screening, given to a large number of women, with the intention of finding early cases of breast cancer and with the assumption that such early cases would lend themselves better to the current types of treatment. Those still consist of cutting, poisoning and radiating, by the way. It's important not to forget that our abilities to treat cancers of all types really are pretty medieval.

Screening is not treatment. To do it at all is based on the hope that early detection raises the odds of survival. This has been shown to be true for cervical cancer and the pap test and also for colon cancer screenings. But the most recent evidence suggests that breast cancer screening is less effective than previously thought. As I mentioned in an earlier post, researchers now suspect that mammograms capture a lot of tumors which might either disappear on their own or never grow much, while missing the very aggressive tumors which develop very rapidly. It is the latter types which are reflected in the mortality statistics:

A recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) pointed out the evidence for this. Breast cancer statistics for women in the Unites States has not shown a reduction of advanced breast cancers being diagnosed, despite the widespread use of mammography.

One would expect that if mammograms diagnosed breast cancers earlier and women were then treated for these cancers, over time there would be a reduction in the diagnosis of more advanced cancers from the "successful" screening. But this is not the case. Advanced cancers continue to be diagnosed with greater than expected frequency.

What makes discussing mammograms so very tricky is that the topic of screening can be approached from two very different points of view.

One of those is the way a survivor of breast cancer would approach it. She had a mammogram, a tumor was found and treated, and she is alive. To then learn that other women are told not to get the mammogram sounds blasphemous to her. Horrible, even. At the same time, perhaps her cancer wasn't the type which progresses very rapidly? Perhaps it wasn't the early screening that saved her life? Or perhaps it did. We just don't know at this stage, because we don't have the ability to look at a tumor and classify it based on how dangerous it is. That is the research that should be carried out now, by the way.

The other angle is to approach mammograms from the point of view of screening large population groups in order to find cases of some disease. When statisticians analyze screening proposals they want to know how many cases can be found if a certain number of people are screened. Remember that screening costs money, both for the health care system and for the people who have to travel and spend time in order to be screened. Even if screening does find cases of a disease it might not be worth doing. To give you an extreme example, suppose that we could save one life by having every American screened for some rare disease. Should we do this? How much money are we willing to spend to potentially save that one life? Then remember that there are many, many other diseases which are rare but which could be screened for in the same manner. If we decided to carry out all possible types of screening the costs would be astronomical.

The choice to pay for screening (by both individuals and the society) is ultimately a value judgment. But resources are not infinite. If money is spent (by both individuals and the society) in one type of screening, it is not available for other types of screening or for other types of prevention or treatment. These are the reasons why something like mammograms deserve careful scrutiny:

Dr. Diana Petitti, vice chairwoman of the task force and a professor of biomedical informatics at Arizona State University, said the guidelines were based on new data and analyses and were aimed at reducing the potential harm from overscreening.

While many women do not think a screening test can be harmful, medical experts say the risks are real. A test can trigger unnecessary further tests, like biopsies, that can create extreme anxiety. And mammograms can find cancers that grow so slowly that they never would be noticed in a woman's lifetime, resulting in unnecessary treatment.

Over all, the report says, the modest benefit of mammograms — reducing the breast cancer death rate by 15 percent — must be weighed against the harms. And those harms loom larger for women in their 40s, who are 60 percent more likely to experience them than women 50 and older but are less likely to have breast cancer, skewing the risk-benefit equation. The task force concluded that one cancer death is prevented for every 1,904 women age 40 to 49 who are screened for 10 years, compared with one death for every 1,339 women age 50 to 74, and one death for every 377 women age 60 to 69.

These figures don't tell us whether mammograms should be recommended for various age groups or not. What they do tell us is that we are saving more lives by screening older women, or, in reverse, each saved life costs less in that age group. If our measure of outcome was years-of-life saved the arguments might change.

The reason for the heated debates has to do with the clashing of these two approaches. The recommendations are based on the second approach (the system-wide, dry and statistical) and the reactions largely on the first approach (the voices of individual women). Note also that the new recommendations leave no active role for women themselves, until the magical age of fifty. Even breast self-examinations are no longer recommended! It's as if you are to sit and wait for the day when you might find a lump in your breast. This is very bad psychology, if nothing else.

Add to that the fairly sudden turn-around in the whole policy, and it's no wonder that many women ask if this is just another way to cut back on health care costs at the eve of the reforms (though it's good to remember that the treatment of well women is a big business in general (remember hormone replacement therapy) and that the screening industry certainly wants to go on existing).

It must be clear to you by now that I'm not going to answer that question in the title of this post, except for all that helpful academese above. But ultimately I want effective treatment, not discussions about how to get people burned, slashed and radiated earlier.

It's About Equal Opportunity

Reproductive choice, that is, and Jeffrey Toobin gets it in his excellent New Yorker article. All of it is worth reading but especially the end:

But, as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg observed not long ago, abortion rights "center on a woman's autonomy to determine her life's course, and thus to enjoy equal citizenship stature." Every diminishment of that right diminishes women. With stakes of such magnitude, it is wise to weigh carefully the difference between compromise and surrender.

Indeed. The usual approach of pro-birth debaters is to begin with the assumption that a selfish and lazy and slutty woman gets herself pregnant and then decides to abort so that she gets away with the inconvenience of being pregnant. Honest. That's how the arguments mostly go. The pregnancy is parthenogenetic! The women "gets herself" pregnant, and abortion is just something she wants in order to stay slim and because it's convenient. Mmm.

An equally common anti-choice approach is to start from the idea of killing born babies and then go backwards, to show that women who abort a pregnancy indeed are cold-blooded killers. I debated a troll like that recently. He (yup) posed the question whether I'd be OK with a woman changing her mind in the ninth month of pregnancy and aborting a perfectly healthy fetus. And obviously if I wasn't OK with that he'd then repeat the same argument backwards until we'd arrive at the point where the egg "got itself" fertilized. Well, that was his plan, but he hit a problem which is my religion: echidneism. (That's the one where I'm the goddess, you worship me and buy me chocolates and act nice.)

We echidneites believe that the soul is in the sperm. So every nocturnal ejaculation is a mass murder, and all anti-choice demonstrations should be under guys' bedroom windows. With big signs showing the lovely faces of little sperm!

Why can't I stay serious, even with a topic like this? Let's try again. Let's apply this trollie's approach but from the other end. Suppose that we start with a fifteen-year old girl (a virgin) in El Salvador, a country which does not allow abortions under any conditions, not even if the pregnant woman will die, not even if she was gang-raped. Never.

If this girl gets raped on her way back from school she might become pregnant by force. Then she would have to carry the pregnancy to term, even if that meant she could no longer go to school. If the pregnancy threatened her life, too bad. The fetus comes first!

How can she protect herself from this? You might mumble that going out in El Salvador is dangerous in any case, and perhaps she should just stay at home. Who needs education, after all? Women should stay at home. Or she could ask her (Catholic) parents to put her on the contraceptive pill? Of course many pro-birthers in the U.S. argue that the pill itself causes abortions!

If all that is too extreme for you, consider that this girl will probably be propositioned by boys and young men. "Once won't do it!" "I swear I'll pull out in time!" "I'll never leave you if you get pregnant, I swear." "You don't love me if you won't do this." And so on.

If she gets pregnant, the boyfriend most likely disappears, her family might kick her out, her school might kick her out. And her dreams have died.

Every fertile woman living in a world without perfect birth control is vulnerable in this way, dancing on an invisible tightrope. To have access to a legal and affordable abortion is nothing more than a safety-net under that tightrope, and if we remove that safety-net we remove equal opportunities for men and women. It is ultimately that important for a woman to be able to choose the timing of her pregnancies.

Such Refreshing Honesty!

Peter Beinart's piece (a few days old, thanks blondie for the link) is truly like a breath of fresh air, invigorating, testosterone-laden fresh air. He lays out in detail the reasons why the Democratic Party started losing power:

Yet it was that big, ugly Democratic Party that from Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson pushed through Social Security, the Wagner Act, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Tennessee Valley Authority, Food Stamps, Head Start, Medicare and Medicaid (with occasional help from the then-extant progressive wing of the GOP). Some of the Democratic bigots opposed these economic reforms, to be sure. But others backed them; they genuinely wanted to curb the savagery and chaos of unfettered capitalism. They just wanted to preserve white, male supremacy too.

This was the devil's pact that defined the Democratic Party for more than three decades, until the civil rights and women's movement forced party leaders to choose. They reluctantly chose racial and gender equality, and so the racists and the misogynists drifted away. The Democratic Party became culturally liberal: pro-affirmative action, pro-choice, and smaller, since the old racists and sexists, now repackaged as racial and sexual conservatives, flocked to the GOP. Starting in 1968, Democrats began consistently losing the presidency. And in 1994, the realignment finally trickled down to the House of Representatives, and the Democrats lost that, too.

So what to do? What to do? The only thing to do is to lure the racists and sexists back, and that's exactly what Beinart argues has happened. It began with the game to get pro-birth Democrats elected in conservative regions of the country and it continued with the netroots movement:

But had big-tentism been merely a strategy by Democratic leaders, it would have failed. Just as important was the emergence, in the Bush years, of a new liberal grassroots—the "netroots"—which is generally hostile to single issue litmus tests, especially on culture war issues. While prior generations of liberal activists had often rallied under the banner of gender equality or civil rights, the netroots demanded that those causes be subsumed within a larger progressive agenda. And they showed a particular affinity for candidates willing to challenge corporate power—even candidates like Virginia's James Webb and Montana's Jon Tester, who sometimes ran afoul of liberal cultural orthodoxy.

Yah! (That's a troll-shout of complete agreement, by the way.) Beinart calls people who believe in racial and gender equality "cultural liberals" and, boy, do they have to take their medicine:

For cultural liberals, it was ugly. They had better get used to it: Big parties are ugly. But if you want to rebuild the American welfare state, there is no alternative.

The Education of Echidne! I haz now been educated in what it means to be a Democrat and what a big tent means: It's got a white-boyz-only sign at the door. As blondie points out in the comments, that's a surefire way for Democrats to become a minority party again. But whatever.

Beinart does sound like a single-issue Democrat. You have to understand that all these policies are ultimately about power: who has it, how it is acquired and how it is protected, and who has power over others. Beinart seems to think that it's sufficient if poor men get more economic power. That they get to keep and grow their power over women, for example, is perfectly AOK with him. Because the latter power is somehow not real, does not affect women's daily lives or their ability to make a living. It's just cultural liberalism, like wearing only black frocks and going to art exhibitions. It's not about the daily life of women everywhere, including poor women, but more like a frill around the neck of your Thanksgiving turkey.