Fear of Filibuster by Anthony McCarthy

Barack Obama’s first year has many lessons and raises a few questions, most of them involving the home of melodrama, the Senate. One of the interesting things that became obvious is that the tough, cool, in control, Obama, has a pathological fear of losing a Senate vote. Time after time he has backed down and abandoned positions for fear that the Republicans + 1 nominal Democrat would defeat a proposal that got a majority of Democratic votes there. Health care is the quintessential example. Assuming he was paying any attention at all to the bad acid trip on that issue, at some point he must have realized that it was political as well as policy insanity in progress.

I wonder if what we were actually seeing wasn’t Barack Obama’s and Rahm Emanuel’s macho inability to risk losing something in action. That the risk of looking temporarily like a loser on behalf of Obama’s core consistency, of going down fighting on our behalf was something their sens of manhood couldn’t take. To many here, that wide spread sign of male neurosis will be very familiar.

What would the political risk of losing a really great healthcare bill be? One with the very popular public option, the tax on the wealthy to pay for it, the protections against denial of coverage, the medicare buy in, or any other combination of benefits to The People? What would have happened is that they would have at least tired to do the right thing and failed. That would have made the political problem the Republicans and the virtual Republicans with a D after their names. The problems of that are far, far lower than the ones from what was done. Just politically, you’d think that there would be enough Senate Democrats who would prefer the cover of blaming Republican-Lieberman than looking like the fools and punks they do now.

I think we are witnessing the political liabilities of having macho guys in charge of things. Instead of risking a loss over their promises to us, they tried mightily to get anything, even something that would end up destroying the idea of just, rational health care policy and the Democrats chances in elections, so they could claim a victory, make a pretty speech and pretend that what they had done wasn’t an immediate and devastating loser.

Rahm Emanuel has always traded on his tough guy image, of his being a political wise guy. Apparently it has worked for him up till now. But this last year has shown that he’s a total phony. He only goes for those he believes are weak or who have no option but to give in. He figures that’s the base of the Democratic Party. Apparently he figures that we are invested in some kind of protection racket, which last Tuesday should have shown, we aren’t. If Barack Obama doesn’t share that MO, he’s given us no reason to suspect otherwise up till now and he’s about run out of time to show one.

The alternative theory is that they were crooked from the start and never intended to produce a real health care bill. The jury’s still out on that question too.

The problem gets worse every week, it hasn’t gone away. It is the real big boy on the block that will end up making Obama and his administration, the Democratic Party and the United States the ultimate loser.

Ezra Klein’s idea for how they could possibly rescue this disaster is worth thinking about. If something like that isn’t done, they should kill the stinking thing by making the Senate vote on a something having at least the appearance of a real bill. At least that would give real Democrats in the House some cover. They should take the incredibly stupid mandate without a public option out of it or the Republican-Liebermans will get credit instead of blame.

And Even More On Holding Hands

Suppose that I want to kill someone and you want that person to live. What is the compromise in this case? To hurt the person quite a lot but not to death? And who appears to have "won"?

The example is an extreme one and I am not, so I'd never actually want to kill someone. But its point should be obvious: Sometimes a compromise is not a compromise. And far too often in politics it is the Republicans who want to kill motions. If the Democrats compromise with that they get...what?

The HCR proposal is a good example of something that goes along with my first paragraph. The Republicans don't want any reform at all. They want to sabotage it. To add their suggestions into the proposal is exactly like ending up with a wounded person in my example. Or even worse: The Republicans refuse to vote for the compromise that has been created, and then the wounded person is the Democrats' fault, even though they wanted the person not to be hurt at all.

And what shall we do with the badly wounded person now?

Then The Sudden Falling Apart

Glenn Beck tells us that all women are psychos.





I find him pathetic. But he is a wingnut boy and some of them at least adore him. So I want the wingnuts to own him and his comments. And I want advertisers to know whom they are still supporting.

You should do your own reversals on that to see how sexism is not taken seriously in this country, though I very much doubt that a similar comment about men made by a woman would be taken as just a joke, too.

The end of the video clip introduces us to Scott Brown and his daughters.

We Are Gonna Hold Hands!

Yet again:

President Obama plans to create a bipartisan commission to make recommendations to Congress on ways to reduce the federal budget deficit under an agreement reached Tuesday night at the White House.

The agreement is tentative, pending consultations between Congressional leaders and some House and Senate lawmakers. Some details remained in flux.

But according to people familiar with the deal, in principle it commits Democrats to work with Republicans to do what they have not been able to do for a decade through the regular process: compromise on spending cuts and tax increases to produce reductions in annual deficits that, under George W. Bush and now Mr. Obama, have reached the highest levels since World War II.

Note that odd phrasing: "to do what they have not been able to do." Who is the "they" in the sentence? I read it as the Democrats. But what about the Republicans and their total lack of bipartisanship?

I have absolutely nothing against real bipartisanship, but that does not consist of Republicans refusing to vote for the HCR proposal they managed to influence so as to make it into a soup with just a few good bits of meat. Honest, bipartisanship is like any other relationship. If your needs don't get met at all and if your partner always abuses you, what should you do?

----

Added: More comity.

Some Light Entertainment

Kill for Jesus:

Following an ABC News report that thousands of gun sights used by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan are inscribed with secret Bible references, a spokesperson for the Marine Corps said the Corps is 'concerned' and will discuss the matter with the weapons manufacturer.

...

However, a spokesperson for CentCom, the U.S. military's overall command in Iraq and Aghanistan, said he did not understand why the issue was any different from U.S. money with religious inscriptions on it.

"The perfect parallel that I see," said Maj. John Redfield, spokesperson for CentCom, told ABC News, "is between the statement that's on the back of our dollar bills, which is 'In God We Trust,' and we haven't moved away from that."

Said Redfield, "Unless the equipment that's being used that has these inscriptions proved to be less than effective for soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and military folks using it, I wouldn't see why we would stop using that."

A spokesperson for the Army told ABC News that the Army was looking into the procurement "to see if anything is amiss here. We are still checking."

...

Trijicon confirmed to ABCNews.com that it adds the biblical codes to the sights sold to the U.S. military. Tom Munson, director of sales and marketing for Trijicon, which is based in Wixom, Michigan, said the inscriptions "have always been there" and said there was nothing wrong or illegal with adding them.

Munson said the issue was being raised by a group that is "not Christian." The company has said the practice began under its founder, Glyn Bindon, a devout Christian from South Africa who was killed in a 2003 plane crash.

Now you can go and debate this with fundies...

What all this made me ask is what percentage of the equipment providers to the U.S. military just happen to be firms owned by fundamentalist Christians? I doubt there is any way to find that out but it would be a fascinating research topic. You know, given all that fuss about affirmative action and so on.

A Letter To My Congressional Representative by Anthony McCarthy

Dear Congresswoman Pingree,

The 60th Senate vote is gone, not to return, and there is this year and two more of the Obama administration to get through. It’s been a pretty bad first year with him, with him having a solid majority in the House and a larger majority in the Senate than, I believe, any President has had within my lifetime. That those majorities contain a fair sample of Democrats of convenience and not of fact, has been used by the Obama administration for an excuse to break promise, after promise to their base. That base, those of use who worked tirelessly and gave more than we could afford to elect Barack Obama and Democrats, are betrayed. In one of the more stupendously stupid moves in recent political history, the Obama team has burned its base, its grass roots and its allies in the pursuit of an unavailable bipartisanship and the magical 60th vote in the Senate. I could point out the political cowardice and treason that comes with making nice to your opponents by betraying those you asked to support you, but it is amazing that anyone would have to.

Ted Kennedy’s seat was lost on Barack Obama’s watch in one of the most Democratic states in the country, a state he carried comfortably a little over a year ago. The idea that the Obama team systematically throwing away Ted Kennedy’s legacy this past year has nothing to do with that, that they have been too close to his stands on issues to win in a state that kept him in that seat for more than four decades is a clear and obvious lie in service to continuing sell outs. No surprise that on this conservative Democrats and the corporate media are in agreement. What is surprising is to hear noises from the Obama administration to that effect.

But this isn’t a letter to the White House, which seems to be oddly deaf to those guilty of having supported the president. This is a letter to you, a progressive Democrat in the House of Representatives. As the Obama team have been busily selling out and burning their base, they’re also burning your base. That was the real lesson of the disaster in Massachusetts for Democratic office holders, the policies of this president are destroying the party.

I’m only a voter, a Democrat, one of many hundreds of thousands who have given up an enormous amount or toil, money and honor to put you and the president in office. You both owe us, you are up for election this year. You have weeks at most to turn this around and you’re going to have to take bold action in opposition to Barack Obama’s team to do it. Without that, you will be complicit in handing this country back into the hands of the Republicans.

I’m beyond caring if Rahm Emanuel or some other member of the administration calls up and yells at a Democratic member of Congress. I’m tired of seeing the progressive caucus in ineffective compliance with policies your constituents oppose.

The progressives in the House and Senate have to take a lesson from other political minorities that have gotten their way. You have to hold your nose to study them but the Dixicrats and their successors, today, Republicans and Blue dogs, achieve their ends through united obstruction. The success of the strategy is clear as can be by their success over the past year. Pleasing them is the easy road the Obama administration has taken and it is what will put it out of office baring a miraculous turn around. Frankly, I see little sign of that without House progressives mounting an obstinate resistance. Given the present realities in Washington, the destruction of the foundations of the Democratic Party, it is the role forced on you.

I have no Senator, the so called “moderates” from our state who the Obama administration have shamelessly pursued as they snubbed us don’t even listen to us. I’ve got you. You are my last hope at saving this party, this country, and so much at stake around the world. If something hasn’t changed by Spring, I won’t be expecting it to.

Yours truly,

On Ted Kennedy's Seat

I have read so much rubbish on this topic. So much. I might as well add my own rubbishy thoughts to the pile.

First, and foremost, Massachusetts already has universal health insurance. The HCR is not offering people there anything but extra taxes for some.* See the problem?

Second, the economic situation is horrible and incumbents are always blamed for that.

Third, both Coakley, the Democratic machineries and the Obama administration played this one terribly.

Fourth, this does NOT mean that Massachusetts has turned wingnutty or that people there even realize what a Republican Senator means for the state. The last one they had was in the early 1970s and that was a very different Republican Party.

I'm writing this before the final results are out (though Brown looks to be the winner), but if there are lessons to be learned from this I sincerely hope that they are about real problems in the campaign and not about the gender of the candidate. Because I'm like that.
---
*Ken Houghton in the comments pointed out that I'm wrong about that and linked to this:

Last week, Jack Sullivan at CommonWealth Magazine’s CW Unbound blog did a smart job responding on the substance. On a pure financial basis, the national bills would be a huge boost for Massachusetts. Federal tax credits could replace much state spending for Commonwealth Care, enhanced Medicaid reimbursements would relieve pressure on the MassHealth budget, and new Medicare drug assistance would allow us to save much of our Prescription Advantage budget. For the overall state economy, the effect is even more positive. The federal bills include new tax credits for small businesses, a large ramp-up in health research, and strengthened federal support for Community Health Centers, medical education, and other areas that play to Massachusetts’ strength.

So I retract the tax bit. What remains is the fact that Massachusetts already has near-universal health insurance.

Arrogance Is A Ballroom Dance, Part 2

Part 2, because I wrote on this topic earlier. Noni Mausa sent me a related post on the topic. A snippet or two from it:

I get email from a good former student, applying for a job and asking for a recommendation. "Sure", I say, "Tell me what you think I should say." I then get a draft letter back in which the student has described their work and fitness for the job in terms so superlative it would make an Assistant Brand Manager blush.

So I write my letter, looking over the student's self-assessment and toning it down so that it sounds like it's coming from a person and not a PR department, and send it off. And then, as I get over my annoyance, I realize that, by overstating their abilities, the student has probably gotten the best letter out of me they could have gotten.

Now, can you guess the gender of the student involved?

Of course you can. My home, the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, is fairly gender-balanced, and I've taught about as many women as men over the last decade. In theory, the gender of my former student should be a coin-toss. In practice, I might as well have given him the pseudonym Moustache McMasculine for all the mystery there was. And I've grown increasingly worried that most of the women in the department, past or present, simply couldn't write a letter like that.

This worry isn't about psychology; I'm not concerned that women don't engage in enough building of self-confidence or self-esteem. I'm worried about something much simpler: not enough women have what it takes to behave like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks.

...

Now I don't know what to do about this problem. (The essence of a rant, in fact, is that the ranter has no idea how to fix the thing being ranted about.) What I do know is this: it would be good if more women see interesting opportunities that they might not be qualified for, opportunities which they might in fact fuck up if they try to take them on, and then try to take them on. It would be good if more women got in the habit of raising their hands and saying "I can do that. Sign me up. My work is awesome," no matter how many people that behavior upsets.

Some in the comments to the quoted post did point out that women who act like self-aggrandizing jerks don't get a pat on the back but a kick in the backside, more often than not, and studies have shown this to be true. So the act of being a jerk might not pay as well for women as it still seems to pay for men.

This does NOT mean that women shouldn't go through their recent acts of self-promotion (or the lack of those) to see how they can do more. After all, when we use fairly objective standards of achievement women do well. It's in the subjective standards that the problems arise, though of course any sexist responses are there, too.

This post and my earlier post are both linked to the invisibility of women, something I wrote about in my Why-Feminism-Is-Still-Needed series. I see that invisibility all over the Internet, in various odd forms. I don't think that just yelling loudly "Hey! I'm here, too!" will work as the total answer but it's a start.

FOF: Fear Of Feminism

I used to be a closeted feminist. This means that I was for the goals of feminism: equal opportunity and equal valuation of traditionally male and female spheres of activity, studied feminist books and saw myself as a feminist. But I was a quiet little mouse feminist for many long years. Closeted, tightly.

Why was that? The answer is fear. I feared the consequences of opening my mouth and actually saying something feminist. If I ever said anything, it was after careful calculations of the likely level of violence among my listeners, the likely number of rejections and how many others might support me. And what I said was phrased very carefully and neutrally (passive voice is great there). So I didn't make much of a difference.

That's what fear does to you, especially in settings where you know the world isn't going to change just because you opened your mouth. In economic terms: the benefits (for me) of speaking up were slight, the costs (for me) potentially quite large. And that's how it goes, of course.

But that anger had to go somewhere, so I swallowed it, and swallowed anger makes a girl nasty. Honest. It's much better to speak up and to create new webs of connections for the ones which were broken and to learn good self-defense against the violent ones and so on. Once you come out of the closet there's no way back!

I think this qualifies me to write about the Fear Of Feminism, the fear of being labeled as a man-hater or trouble-maker, the fear of being rejected. The desire to accept the results from the long and hard work of feminism (which accrues to all women, by default) without having to do any of that hard work myself. Now wouldn't that be the best of all possible worlds? Sigh.

In reality feminist change doesn't just happen. In fact, if we all stay silent and quiet what we get is anti-feminist change. And that's a scary thought.

Let's define Fear Of Feminism. It strikes me as several different things, depending on which group of people we are looking at.

Some MRA groups, the wildest and hairiest ones, truly seem to fear feminism, calling it pure evil, though they also think feminists are in power everywhere, that men are always hapless victims and that the only proper arrangement of life is all men on top, all women at bottom. So I'm not going to talk about their FOF much here. Or the FOF of utter misogynists.

Religious fundamentalists fear feminism because religious fundamentalism always seems to require the total appropriation of women's personhood and the turning of all women into property. Kind and gentle and maternal property, but property, nevertheless. Those people should fear feminism, because feminism really is about women's humanity and women's personhood.

Some supporters of pornography fear feminism because of its inconvenient questions about whether the porn they so enjoy is actually what women might enjoy, too, and because of the insistence that women are not sextoys.

I was never a member of any of those groups. My FOF group was the common one, being afraid of the backlash I'd experience if I truly spoke up about something. That's a big group, even today, and much of it is just a reflection of whom we really fear: It is not feminists, but those who are in power, whose approval we desire and whom we also ultimately fear. Don't step out of the herd if you don't want the predators to single you out!

Do guys go out with gals who are openly feminist? What happens to your promotion chances if you inquire about the treatment of women at your place of work? If you intervene in street harassment do you get harassed even worse? These kinds of questions are real questions. It's safer to hide behind the burly (?) shoulders of past feminists, to grab the fruits of their work with both hands and to stay safely silent. Except that silence never kept anyone safe.

That is not an exhaustive list of all the various ways FOF happens. It also takes milder forms such as the trick of laughing at feminists as if they were feminazis, truly marching on in their steel-tipped boots towards world domination, or the trick of defining feminists as ugly women who can't get laid. These are examples of "othering," and feminism has been "othered" most efficiently, so that it's even hard to think of the actual definitions of feminism when one hears the word.

When I see the word in the headline of an article I know that the article is probably going to be either about the exorbitant demands of a few women or about the many failures of the feminist movement.

Then there is the other type of FOF: Fear Of Women. Surprisingly often the two go hand in hand. For instance, a post could go on ranting about how horrible feminists are, trying to take away men's jobs, and then seamlessly move onto the horrors of stay-at-home wives taking their husband's earnings. Indeed, the Fear Of Feminism is very often just hidden hatred of women in general, and that's worth noticing, for those who still think that silence is a good shield.

When we fear feminism, what is it that we really fear? Given the ease with which individual feminists or groups of feminists are attacked in the media it is not feminists that people are afraid of, ultimately. Indeed, even other feminists feel quite brave enough to attack feminists. And feminism is pretty powerless as movements representing roughly half the humanity go.

Food for thought.
---
This post had several parents but reading this made me think and then visiting MRA sites made me think even more. Incidentally, I also noticed how men can write about the horrible treatment of women and not get attacked. More food for thought.

The Congressional Gender Gap

Ta-Nehisi Coates asks, concerning the dearth of women in the U.S. Congress:

Dana's point about women who "want the job" got me thinking about an old debate. How many women really want the job? Are there fewer women looking to have a career in politics than men? If so, why? Are they being discouraged, either actively or passively? Is politics, at least as it's in American, gendered in such a way as to attract male candidates?

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

Ah. Much better. Here's what I wrote in 2008.

The Worst Defense Against Sexism...

Is that the person so accused can't be a sexist because he (usually he in this context) has women in the family. Honest. Please, journalists, don't use that one in the future, for the obvious reason that it is an inane defense. Thanx.

Surprisingly?

An article on women's lives in Syria discusses the greater freedoms of women in the capital and juxtaposes it with the more traditional and confined lives of women elsewhere in the country. Then this:

Surprisingly, in patriarchal societies like Syria, it is often mothers who reinforce discrimination against women.

They tell their daughters, "You cannot do that, you are a girl!" or "You have to respect your brother, he is the man. What your brother says goes!"

For girls like Zainab, it is quite normal to do things their family's way. Any other way seems quite impossible.

I'm not sure who would find that surprising. First, it is the job of older women, after all, to bring up the children and to make sure that they will be safe in the society they are going to live in. A woman doing things which women "don't do" will be punished much more harshly later on. A woman not understanding that she is not powerful will be slapped down much more heavily later on. Those are just facts.

Second, anyone born into a sexist society will learn to regard it as "just the way things are" and the herd instinct will reinforce all those rules. Who wants to be the first person to raise her head above the herd when the vultures of norms, laws, rules and anti-woman religion hover above, ready to swoop?

Third, there are women who are like the Aunts in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, women who prefer the small amount of power they are given in that hierarchical system. We can all name several of that type in the U.S. media, but such women seem especially necessary to me in a society which is mostly sex-segregated.

For Martin Luther King Day

A day of service. That sounds like a wonderful idea to keep and to extend to those other Named Holidays.

Remember the Bush Administration?

I know that it's all of a year in the past, but I'm sorta getting irate at the way people forget all about the architects of our current problems and think that putting them back into repair-work is the way to go:

Of all the claims Rove made, one in particular caught my eye for its sheer audacity and shamelessness -- that congressional Democrats "will run up more debt by October than Bush did in eight years."

So, let's review a little history:

The day the Bush administration took over from President Bill Clinton in 2001, America enjoyed a $236 billion budget surplus -- with a projected 10-year surplus of $5.6 trillion. When the Bush administration left office, it handed President Obama a $1.3 trillion deficit -- and projected shortfalls of $8 trillion for the next decade. During eight years in office, the Bush administration passed two major tax cuts skewed to the wealthiest Americans, enacted a costly Medicare prescription-drug benefit and waged two wars, without paying for any of it.

I'm not pleased with the way the health care reform is going, but my displeasure is very much associated with the bits the conservatives managed to get in (via that misplaced one-sided bipartisanism of the Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress) and with the bits the insurance industry managed to get in. A Republican administration would not have even tried to reform health care! Why do people forget that?

And I very much doubt that the Republicans would have tried any kind of stimulus package, either, except for that old cut-taxes-for-the-rich bit.

I understand that people are angry at the economic situation but why on earth would they want those responsible for it back in power?

Naked Politics

There's a double standard about that, don't you think? Scott Brown can have naked pictures from his past and it doesn't cause much of a stir at all but a woman politician? Probably the end of her career.

A quick PSA on charity and the Haitian earthquake (by skylanda)

Give, and please.

Americans are tenacious defenders of the notion that charity can somehow replace justice. This does not make us particularly popular around the world, but it does make us notably generous when the lightening bolt of sudden tragedy unleashes from the sky and strikes down at one unfortunate spot or another on the surface of this tragedy-rife everyday planet. Now is not a particularly opportune time to quibble about what caused greater morbidity and mortality: the shaking of the earth, or the entrenched poverty of a nation put down by years of colonialism, post-colonialism, and rank racism that makes the difference between a seven-point-something earthquake in California that typically causes the death of a few hundred and a similarly scaled shaker in Haiti that causes the death of a tens of thousands. Now is just the time to open the wallet and give.

So, a quick PSA on the topic of giving at times like these: every time an earth-shaking tragedy strikes (9/11, the Boxing Day tsunami, Katrina, this earthquake), involved NGOs open up their fundraising drives for specific donations to the cause. And donations pour in for that cause alone. Everyone wants to imagine their ten dollars going to that specific Haitian orphan, that particular New York firefighter, that exact stranded family on a New Orleans roof. It's noble. It helps the cause. It brings in the cash.

I am here to beg you, please, when you give a donation, to whomever you give: check that box that says “wherever most needed.” Every time disaster of this nature strikes, people rush to give to the specific cause, and NGOs like the Red Cross (with its internal and international branches) see their coffers empty out of donations to the causes that continue day and night regardless of what’s happening in Haiti: everyday floods and fires on US soil, the ongoing catastrophe in Darfur, routine training of citizens and providers in basic and advanced life support. These things do not stop because Haiti got hit; but the donations do. The Red Cross got crucified in the press after 9/11 for diverting an excess of funds from well-meaning people from direct 9/11 causes into programs that suffered because of the diversion of routine donations into the 9/11 fund; these programs continued to be vital regardless of what happened in New York that day, just as they continue to be vital no matter what happened in Haiti this week.

Please, please imagine that your donation is going where it is needed. Some will go to Haiti. Some will go to Darfur. Some will go to the family down the street who will be sheltered by the Red Cross when their house burns in the middle of the night. It’s all good, ya know.

Also? If you’re thinking of donating, please put Paul Farmer’s Partners in Health at the top of your list. PIH has been doing ground-breaking grassroots health care in Haiti for a couple of decades now (particularly around complex long-term HIV and TB care), and they are probably the best equipped NGO to understand the landscape of need on the ground in Port-au-Prince and the highlands. They aren’t as flashy or known as the Red Cross, but they are among the best at pulling communities together to the task at hand. And an immense, terrible task it will be in these coming months.

Cross-posted from my infrequently-updated blog, Loose Chicks Sink Ships.

Don't forget Haitian women (by Suzie)

I know people want to give any way they can to help Haiti. But let's not forget that gender plays a role. Here's an excerpt from the Madre, which has long worked in Haiti:

Because of their role as caretakers and because of the discrimination they face, women have a disproportionate need for assistance. Yet, they are often overlooked in large-scale aid operations. ... It is not enough to ensure that women receive aid. Women in communities must also be integral to designing and carrying out relief efforts. When relief is distributed by women, it has the best chance of reaching those most in need. That’s not because women are morally superior. It is because their roles as caretakers in the community means they know where every family lives, which households have new babies or disabled elders, and how to reach remote communities even in disaster conditions.

Like Madre, the Global Fund for Women has a crisis fund, but also is looking to the future. When I had money, I donated to both of these nonprofits and highly recommend them.

RHRealityCheck has a great round-up about aid, Haiti and women. The Soroptomists also have a paper on how disasters affect women, and I've written on this topic before. I'm leaving town, but feel free to add links in comments about other nonprofits working on the different needs and skills of women.

In The Year 1910

A law society had a meeting and one of the sections was about:

"distinguished panel of gentlemen from the legal field will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of women in the areas of communication, negotiation, mediation, arbitration, organization and women's overall management of their legal work."

Mmm. Except the year was 2010! Don't faint, dear ladies. And under no circumstances ask yourself if you should do some kind of replacement there, such as replacing "gentlemen" with "Anglo experts" and "women" with "Latino lawyers!" Don't do that.

To be fair, the gentlemen decided to change that section description a bit and also decided to add a few lady lawyers to the panel. So all is well.

Behind a Pose Behind a Pose by Anthony McCarthy

Having, somehow, successfully limited my contact with the fluff anti-feminist scribbler, Caitlin Flanagan, I’d missed her attack on school gardening programs in California until I read this analysis by Meg White.

It would seem, in short that Flanagan has determined all by her self that it is demeaning for children to learn how to grow their own food, applying relevant school subjects to the project. It’s touching to see someone concerned with the pollution of pure geometry by the vulgarity of using it to make a garden bed, I hadn’t realized how utterly Platonic the anti-feminist backlash was before reading her article in The Atlantic.

As Meg White notes, other critics of the article have noted that Flanagan’s main premise, that the program is an example of white privilege, seems to spring full born from her own mind since she doesn’t seem to have interviewed any of the “Hispanics” her meat space concern trolling pretends to speak on behalf of.

Flanagan is praised by this food blogger (who appears to despise what he calls the "eaterati") for her iconoclastic piece, which supposedly "asks questions, levels criticisms, doesn't settle for blind acceptance."

But did she ask questions? As Andrew Leonard points out in Salon.com, "Flanagan's concoction is just that; a fantasy made up out of thin air. In her entire 3,500-word article, there is no indication that she talked to a single Latino in Berkeley who might have misgivings as to the merits of elementary and middle school kids spending a mere hour-and-a-half a week tending a garden."

Yet Flanagan keeps returning to this notion that the existence of a school vegetable garden makes a mockery of those immigrant workers who slave away in the produce fields of California. She wildly imagines an assimilation novel, The White Man Calls It Romaine, in which the children of illegal immigrants are sent by their teachers back into the fields to do the same manual labor that broke their poor parents.

Leaving aside the patronizing, I’d say mildly racist, implication that Latinos in the United States would be unaware of the word “romaine”, the entire article is riddled with the sloppiest thinking I’ve seen in that magazine.

As others have pointed out, the alternative to growing your own garden is buying produce in a super market, of the kind that Flanagan praises

As it happens, I live fewer than 20 miles from the most famous American hood, Compton, and on a recent Wednesday morning I drove over there to do a little grocery shopping. The Ralphs was vast, well-lit, bountifully stocked, and possessed of a huge and well-tended produce section. Using my Ralphs card, I bought four ears of corn for a dollar, green grapes and nectarines (both grown in the state, both 49 cents a pound), a pound of fresh tortillas for $1.69, and a half gallon of low-fat milk for $2.19. The staff, California friendly, outnumbered the customers, and the place had the dreamy, lost-in-time feeling that empty American supermarkets often have.

Where the heck Flanagan imagines that food to have come from if not from laborers working for corporate farms is anyone’s’ guess. You don’t get prices like that without someone getting the short end of the deal and when it’s a farmer hiring migrant workers, the farmer isn’t going to voluntarily be on the end of it. That there is all the world of difference between growing your own and your communities food and working as a laborer at the lowest possible wages and worst conditions that the bean counters can get away, eludes the New Yorker-Atlantic thinker.

I think that, as in all her work I’ve seen, Caitlin Flanagan is her own subject matter, everything reverts back to her, everything is predetermined by her attitude. Or at least by the shtick she has cultivated. She’s not much different from John Stossel, when it comes down to it.

I think she has a fundamentally elite view of farm work as degraded and demeaning when the only things that are degraded and demeaning about it are the work conditions and the pay. If those produced a secure middle class income, safely and humanely, farm work would be preferable to many other jobs to a lot of people. There are plenty of white collar workers who have given up their old, almost always better paid, jobs in order to farm. Not all of them white, liberal and stereo typically air headed. You don’t stay in farming on the basis of unreality, though it can get you through the kind of life in letters that Flanagan chose for her second career.

More, though. She is a specimen of the kind of spokesman for the establishment who poses as an opponent of an imaginary elite that supposedly really runs things. Their targets are not especially powerful, feminists, Alice Waters* , the movement to improve nutrition and education, and the wrongs they address are innocuous, when not exaggerated to the point approaching fiction. The corporate-establishment POV they promote is presented as the real, common-sense, common man consensus. I’d be hard put to name a single main stream magazine or news paper that doesn’t provide these hacks with full employment.

* Extraordinary, that someone who has worked in the food business would be condemned for taking an interest in the public schools. I'm not holding my breath for Flanagan or her ilk commenting on corporate chiefs who gain some positive PR through some gesture in that direction.

Professionals Playing Pretend In The Time of Small Government by Anthony McCarthy

This is a real situation that I found out about this week.

An eighty-year-old woman has the care of her 18-year-old granddaughter, she raised her. The reason that she has care of her now is because the young woman is, as used to be said, profoundly retarded and her parents aren’t in the picture. The grand daughter’s “IQ”* has been reported to be somewhere around 40. Despite this, the granddaughter is fully mobile and is always in danger of wandering off. It’s impossible for her grandmother, who is, eighty, after all, to keep control of her. There have been some rather troubling signs that someone might be having sex with her. The granddaughter doesn’t understand what sex is but is attracted to men.

The grandmother is afraid of her grand-daughter becoming pregnant and has been trying to arrange for her to be sterilized. The granddaughter has no idea what pregnancy is and is, obviously, unable to take care of a child in any circumstances.

From what she has been told, she has the legal authority to make the decision since her granddaughter can’t. However, she has not been able to find anyone who would be willing to do it and has met with opposition from the social work establishment. She has been told by at least one of them that “She might want to have a baby someday”. Remember, this is a young woman who doesn’t know what pregnancy is and who can’t dress herself unaided. Yet the medical-social-work people pretend that this is something she’ll decide when the only one who actually would be exercising informed choice in the matter is some creep who seduces a woman with the intellectual abilities of a toddler.

So, the grand mother, who doesn’t even know who is going to take care of her grand-daughter when she isn’t around anymore (state programs are drying up completely), has to worry that she could have a baby to take care of within any given year and can not get the medical establishment to act to prevent that.

Anyone want to comment?

* IQ isn’t something I believe in but she seems to me to have the development of a two to three year old from what I’ve seen.

When Is Reporting Research NOT Reporting Research?

This may not be a trend as the current example is only the second one I've come across in respectable newspapers, but it's VERY BAD to report on a research that people cannot double-check. Today's example is from the Freakonomics blog and about who drives and who rides when both men and women are going to be in the same car:

I've been working with the American Time Use Survey, a great data set collected by the Department of Labor. The ATUS is chock-full of fun facts; for example, American adults report spending more than two- and-one-third times more time at gambling establishments than at museums.

The ATUS shows that women do indeed spend a disproportionate share of their in-car time as passengers — 29 percent. This is more than twice the share of men, who only spend 14 percent as passengers. This certainly suggests that when men and women ride together, men are behind the wheel.

Might issues other than gender per se be responsible for the gap? We can sort this out with more precision using regression, a technique that allows us to untangle the factors that we believe are causing a particular outcome.

Well sure. Except there's no link to the report! I guess we are supposed to a) either trust that the author is doing everything right or b) go and redo all the analyses with the original data. That kind of work usually takes a few months if you start from not knowing the data set.

I have no idea why something like this isn't an obvious no-no. The first example I found a few years ago was by a wingnut and all about how conservatives have more children than liberals and will take over the earth. I e-mailed the author, asking for links to where his research was available, and got an answer back stating that I can go and study the data myself!

Something like this must NOT be allowed to be common. It would be a real step backwards. Indeed, it would encourage made-up crap to be presented as real research.

On the topic itself: There's a lot of hilarity associated with the idea of the "battle of the sexes" (a most disgusting name, for obvious reasons), and writing about it is very good. Especially good if you can trivialize it! Another example here.

Yah.

There Really Was A Pact With The Devil by Anthony McCarthy

The fine Boston Globe columnist, Derrick Jackson, has a reminder that the real pact with the devil re Haiti was one which the United States, itself, made. It wasn’t done at a crossroads by moonlight and it wasn’t signed in blood. Not the blood of the men who made it, that is. It was just one in a line of gentleman agreements with evil that are the congenital disease that has plagued our country, part of the fully known and suppressed reason that bad things are done by those who pretend to the highest ideals.

Slavery was accommodated in the formation of the United States, the infamous 3/5ths and other provisions were part of the bribe paid to the evil of slavery in order for the deal to be sealed. When the slaves of Haiti threw off the French, the secular saint, Thomas Jefferson* didn’t have any problem, once again, putting aside his lofty rhetoric in order to protect the slavery that kept him and his acknowledged family in luxury. The line of measures that American racists from his time up to Rush Limbaugh have taken to make certain that the tiny country couldn’t develop into a black Republic are sparsely punctuated by less malignant, shortly lived, policies. Barack Obama, for obvious reasons, would not be expected to continue with the customary policy. While the horrible death and destruction of the earth quake can’t really be an opportunity, it could be an occasion to do something right. Jackson hopes in his column today that it might be possible in the next few years to try to repair what two-hundred years of crimes against that country have produced. If the government of the United States can’t fix a country of ten million people it’s no wonder that it can’t do much in Afghanistan or here. You have to wonder if that isn't intentional.

Derrick Jackson’s brief survey of how the United States can begin to live up to its pretended morality in respect to Haitians is worth thinking about.

* The Founders fetish is one of the intentionally promoted devices used to prevent us learning from the past.

Writing women's history (by Suzie)

Two Marys who shaped women’s history in different ways died this month. I’ve been thinking of them as well as the women who passed along the news to me.

Mary Daly supplied the language for a radical understanding of women in patriarchy. Some would say that Mary Ruthsdotter took the liberal route of educating people on women’s history, although I consider that radical in its own way.

Echidne wrote wrote about Mary Daly last week after her death. Later, I got an email from Edie Daly, who sent the following to her friends. (I'm using it with her permission.) Edie was not a blood relative, but there was a relation.

As we all age and deepen in our knowledge and wisdom, we think about those who directed our feet into paths we decided to follow. Mary Daly is one of those hags that directed my path to feminist thought and ethical action. It was her way with words, her Wicidary that made me think of my own language and the ways I choose to speak. Patriarchy is so much a part of our lives directed by our speech. Revolting Hag is what I am. Mary Daly gave me the words to re-shape my life. From Spelling, as in Casting of Spells, to uncovering and understanding all those oppressive words that we had integrated into our own self-doubt and internalized oppression. Words like Hag, Spinster, Crone, Heathen, Witch, are words that have immense power and energy. Words that we have now woven into the everyday fabric of our Be-Dazzling lives. She encouraged us to see what words are made of. How dis-ease, dis-cover, dis-closing, are constructed to do patriarchy's bidding.

Feminism doesn’t rely on a few prominent women, no matter how inspiring. It is the work of many people, such as Edie, pictured above.

In 1981, Edie opened a women's bookstore in Madeira Beach, Fla., and then co-founded a lesbian feminist organization called Women's Energy Bank (WEB), which held monthly salons for women for 24 years and produces a publication called Womyn's Words. In 2006, she donated WEB papers to the University of South Florida for its new collection of Florida Women’s History and LGBT History. Please read more about her life at that link. For the past five years, she has facilitated weekend workshops on Alternatives to Violence with women at a federal prison.

To that same history collection, I donated papers relating to the treatment of women at the Tampa Tribune and the coverage of women in the community. Some day, someone may be interested that a publisher at a major newspaper in the 1990s would still ask female reporters to stand up and twirl around so that he could see their outfits.

This week, I heard from another friend, Doris Weatherford, who “has been publishing books on women's history for twenty years.” I highly recommend them, but more important, she has won praise from Hillary Clinton.

Doris emailed to tell me that Mary Ruthsdotter had died. Mary had lived in Sebastopol, Calif., where she and her husband helped found a cohousing community. Recently, she had been supporting the National Women’s History Museum.

Mary was a founder of the National Women’s History Project, and you can read the history of her own life on that site as well as in her obituary. Her photo is on the right. She and the other NWHP founders persuaded Ronald Reagan to declare March as National Women’s History Month. In my career, I found that designation greatly helpful when I was trying to sneak some women’s history into the newspaper.

Women's history comforts me. I see how one woman influences many. When one dies, I know others will continue.

Bwahahah! Life Imitating A Cartoon Show

Remember this, from 2003?

Rupert Murdoch's Fox News Channel threatened to sue the makers of the Simpsons over a spoof news ticker, the show's creator Matt Groening has claimed.

Mr Groening said Fox News raised the unlikely prospect of suing a show broadcast by its sister channel, Fox Entertainment, because it wanted to stop the Simpsons parodying its famously anti-Democratic party agenda.

The alleged row centred on a parody of Fox News' rolling news ticker, which included headlines such as "Do Democrats cause cancer?"

Scroll forwards to 2010. Here's Rush Limbaugh on...you guessed it: "Voting Democrat Causes Cancer."



----
Cross-posted at Eschaton

On Scott Brown of Massachusetts

A wingnut in sheep's clothing?

On October 17th, 2001, Brown voted against a bill that would authorize "leaves of absence for certain Red Cross employees participating in Red Cross emergencies." The bill gave 15 days of paid leave each year to state workers called up by the Red Cross to respond to disasters. At the time, state workers called for such emergencies were required to use sick and vacation days.

This suggests an almost-stunning callousness. It's all the more galling that Brown knew it was going to pass -- 148 to 3 -- but opposed it anyway, just to make a point.

I shudder to think what Republicans would say about a Democratic lawmaker who cast a vote like this just a month after the 9/11 attacks

The Brown campaign has said the vote was about fiscal responsibility -- Massachusetts couldn't afford assistance for Red Cross workers who had volunteered with 9/11 recovery efforts.

That's not a bad line, I suppose, but here's my follow-up question: why, then, does Scott Brown recommend tax cuts now that the nation can't afford? Why would tax cuts for the wealthy be more important that help for 9/11 recovery volunteers?

Tax cuts. It's the Republican panacea for everything that hurts you, never mind that it was the Bush tax cuts and the associated free-market (read: jungle of the greediest and most reckless) ideology which brought us the current economic recession. I don't see the logic of voting the architects of the collapsing building to be the ones to fix it.


Cross-posted at Eschaton

Friday critter blogging (by Suzie)

A deer in the Virginia woods, by Julie Savell-McCandless.

The Default of Humans: Guys

I wrote about this odd phenomenon in my series on why feminism is still needed. Because of our tendency to view men as the default human beings, a conference offering only male speakers is seen as nothing unusual. A conference offering only female speakers would be described as... a chick fest, I guess. An example of the former type.

On Haiti

The situation is dreadful, harder than I ever imagined possible, because the port has been destroyed and so have essentially the few good roads to the capital. So has the Haitian government and many of the offices and warehouses of relief organizations which were already there. The UN has lost a lot of staff, for example. And the peace keeping troops appear to have pretty much disappeared as well as the Haitian police.

How to get aid in is therefore not only a problem of time and coordination and so on. It's a sheer physical problem, beginning with how to get it into the city, how to keep it safe and how to get it to all who need it. And time is of essence. Still, I hope that the different countries have a plan of coordination and a division of labor once relief work gets going. Without that I can imagine even further chaos.

Repeal The Hyde Amendment

This video makes the point very well:

So I'm Tidying Up The House

You know, basic putting-things-back stuff. I want to return a book to the living-room shelves which are heavily packed and behind a table sitting by the sofa. But to save time I also make myself a large mug of coffee to take back to my study afterwards.

There is nowhere to put the mug while struggling with the other books to make enough space for the one I am returning except the end table by the sofa. The mug goes there. Then I remember the varnish on the table is worn away and there would be RINGS! I quickly grab up the mug, the coffee flies and much of it hits the white linen pillow on the sofa.

The coffee is slowly dripping towards the other white linen pillow, behind the now-coffeed one, and I grab the top pillow with my right hand (the left one is still holding the bookcase vertical) and throw it blindly behind me, so as to save the still-virginal one.

I hear a crash. It's the vase on the coffee table in front of the sofa. It had water in it. Water everywhere!

I drop everything else and rush towards the kitchen for kitchen towels. I slip in the water now on the floor and fall on my butt. No harm done, really.

Not Under The Bus Day

An excellent take on women and the health care reform.

Coakley vs. Brown in Massachusetts

From Ms. magazine:

A new Rasmussen poll released yesterday shows Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, the Democratic nominee to fill the seat of the late Senator Ted Kennedy, holding a slim two point lead over Republican nominee State Senator Scott Brown. Massachusetts has not elected a Republican US Senator since 1972. Coakley and Brown will face off in a special election on January 19.

The poll show that 77 percent of Democrats support Coakley and 88 percent of Republicans support Brown. Among independent voters, Brown is leading 71 to 23 percent. Last week a separate Rasmussen poll showed Coakley leading by 9 points.

Brown's victory would be terrible for the country. To be honest, I'm smelling sexism behind those figures for the Independents. Massachusetts has NEVER had a female Senator in the U.S. Congress, after all.

Rush Gave At The Office

According to Rush Limbaugh:

"[W]e've already donated to Haiti. It's called the U.S. income tax"

Now here's an interesting quote that relates to this:

Among the many myths that exist about the federal budget, perhaps none is greater than the widespread belief that more than 10 percent of the federal budget is spent on foreign aid. The reality, of course, is far different. Even with the modest increases in recent years supported by both Democratic and Republican administrations and Congresses, the international affairs budget totals less than 1.5 percent of the federal budget.

Don't you just love generous people like Limbaugh?

Another Feminist Pet Peeve: Woman-Bashing Commenting

One unfortunate side-effect of spending so much time in the cyberspace is the amount of misogyny I have to wade through. I just realized today that I had a more optimistic picture of the average way women are viewed in this world before this era of crappy comments threads almost everywhere (though not on this blog, thank goddesses and gods).

Any article discussing women, gender relations or feminism is bound to attract the hateful comments, and by those I don't mean comments debating the contents of the article but comments about What Is Wrong With Women:

If women work outside the home they are climbing up someone's thighs to get promoted, they are bitches as bosses, they are over-emotional, they suffer from PMS, they nag, they only want to grab men's good jobs while forcing men to keep the bad jobs (evidently women have no bad jobs).

If women don't work outside the home they are lazy bitches who fritter away all the money their hard-working husbands make and who then take those same husbands to the cleaners while also denying them access to the children of the marriage, if any. Oh, and they nag.

And women, of all types, are sneaky, practice mental violence and exploit their victim-status to queen it over the men. And they nag.

Imagine if I wrote like that about men! I wouldn't do it, of course, because I don't believe in reverse sexism any more than the old-fashioned sexism, but I would never get away with it. Yet these guys do seem to provoke no real outrage. I have read comments like these on Huffington Post, attached to various stories at mainstream news sites, on YouTube (OK, I give you the fact that YouTube commenters seem to come from some kind of green algae society but the sexism in the comments following women performers' songs is stunning.), and now even at the website of the Finnish state television.

Yet the mainstream argument is that it is feminists who hate men!!! Are all those knuckle-draggers invisible? Yeah, I know that we are supposed to pretend that.

Men are not the only ones writing misogynistic comments, or at least not under male pseudonyms, by the way, and they read no nicer that way. The basic rule in all of them is to compare the worst possible examples of women's behavior to the best possible examples of men's behavior and to conclude that women are Just Awful. And naturally feminists are at fault because without feminists women couldn't steal men's good jobs or take them to the cleaners in a divorce and so on. This works really nicely in countries such as Somalia, by the way.

OK. I must add here that those comments are not the majority of comments in most places, that there are always at least one or two arguing for a more moderate view or even attacking the misogyny and that it's quite likely that in many cases most of the woman-hating comments come from the same keyboard. But still. If those comments are allowed to exist without proper response, what is the message?

People who comment on anything are not a random selection from the population and I know that. Most people, I hope, do not share the values of woman-haters. Misogynists are attracted to any article with feminist content like bees to pollen, and this makes nasty comments especially frequent to people like me who do research on women. But one might think that articles with feminist content should be equally attractive to feminists. So where are all the counter-arguments?

And those who mutter that misandrist comments also exist on unmoderated comments threads: Yes, they do. But their proportion is minute compared to the misogynistic ones. Neither are desirable and both should be moderated (preferably) or responded to.

How To Help People in Haiti

This page lists several relief organizations. Many have argued that the American Red Cross is a safe choice because most of the money will go to those who need it. Another one recommended is Médecins Sans Frontières though their website doesn't mention Haiti earthquake yet.

Today's Rant

If I had earned a cent for each word in all those very careful and moderate "letters to the editors"/"correction to your article, dear professor" letters I have written in the last five years I'd be one rich goddess. Humongously rich.

And that is why I wonder if anyone ever reads them. They rarely publish them, anyway, never answer me, and I imagine some overworked intern going through them as if she or he was skateboarding. That's most likely the reality.

Much of our pretense "discussions" in the media are just that: Pretense. What actually is published depends on who has the most power and money, and almost all of it is brought down to the lowest common denomination which is emotion. Or dreck.

Next time I get angry enough to pen one of those missives I will stop, take ten calm breaths and then send boils and worms to whoever made me angry. Probably equally useful.

Meanwhile, in Finland

The website of the state television system (a bit like the PBS but bigger) posted an article on men as the victims of domestic violence (link thanks to Timo who should also get the credit of pointing out that homicides were neglected and that the gender of the perpetrator was also neglected). The gist, as translated by me:

Men are the focus of gross domestic violence or attempted homicide in families even more often than women. The view of men as victims of family violence has been neglected.

Women are still more often the victims of homicides by their intimate partners than men. In mild physical violence women are also more often the victims.

Women are the culprits in gross domestic violence at least as often as men. According to Tilastokeskus, men are even victims somewhat more often than women even though the figures are close.

In 2008, 116 men and 111 women were the victims of gross domestic violence or attempted homicide, based on police reports.

My understanding of "gross" violence is that it involves some sort of a weapon and that "mild" violence only involves unarmed attacks, but this may very well be wrong. Though the source I use later in this piece does point out that strangulation or kicking might not fall under the category "gross."

Well, the floodgates opened in the comments thread: Feminists are evil, women have taken over the world, women are sneaky, evil and horrible creatures who never stop nagging and what can a man do then? Not all of the comments were like that, of course. There were a handful of very reasonable ones and a handful of the usual I'm-a-woman-but-women-are-bitches ones. Still, it was pretty disgusting reading.

Now, I'm not going to argue that women cannot be violent creatures, and I'm not going to argue that we shouldn't address all violence that might take place in families. But I got pretty suspicious of a story which so blithely skates across the actually completed homicides, as opposed to the merely attempted ones. Then I really LOOKED at those numbers the article gave. 116 men and 111 women? In a country of five million? Those figures are measuring some small fraction of all family violence. Why were they picked for special treatment when murders were not?

So I went digging. I found a report which might not be the most recent one as it ends with 2007. Here are the relevant bits from the summary, translated by me:

The case where a domestic partner kills a woman is the second most common type of homicide in Finland. Twenty percent of all homicides fall into that category. (My comment: The most common type, by victim classification, is the homicide of a young man outside the home by persons not defined by gender or relationship in the summary). Four percent of homicides are committed by women against their partners, six percent by parents against their children and six percent are homicides committed by other family members against other family members.

According to police records (i.e., reported crimes), 12% of all violence is domestic violence (9% aimed at women and 3% aimed at men).

According to police records, mild and basic domestic violence in 2007 had the following victims as percentages: 71% women-over-fifteen, 15% men-over-fifteen and 14% children. Gross domestic violence and attempted homicides had the following victim distribution: 50% women-over-fifteen, 42% men-over-fifteen and 8% children.

That report also has pictures showing the gender distribution of victims of mild, basic and gross domestic violence as bars. The vast, vast majority of this type of violence is concentrated in the basic and mild categories (check out Kuvio 8. for 2007, the gross cases are the bar on the right) The "gross" category is tiny in comparison but that's the one this article has decided to focus on.

All this suggests to me that the article was intended to be biased. And while not pointing out that "family violence aimed against men/women" is NOT the same thing as "female/male violence aimed against men/women" may not have been the job of the writer of the article, the fact, nevertheless, remains that the comments in the thread assumed that all the culprits of violence against men in households must have been women. This may not have been the case.

So what's the impact of pieces like this one, other than contributing to a lot of sexist rage in comments threads? I'm not sure. But I'm finally going to start reading all those files I have on partner violence so that I can write about the topic with the care you, my readers, deserve. Even the majority who never donate, sigh.

A Few Good Men

Nevada has had legalized prostitution for some time. I never realized that this didn't apply to male sex workers:

Brothel owner Bobbi Davis got the go-ahead Tuesday to hire what her website cheekily calls "a few good men."

Her Shady Lady Ranch is searching for "service-oriented" guys willing to become Nevada's first legal male sex workers.

"I personally feel, as do the many other women who have made contact with me since I started this, that this is a service whose time has come," Davis said in a letter to Nye County officials.

A county board's vote Tuesday affirming that Davis could offer "shady men" to her clientele followed months of rancorous debate among the state's legal brothel community. The industry, in its own peculiar way, is somewhat conservative: Considered an anachronism of bawdy mining camps by some Nevada newcomers, it often balks at change.

...

George Flint, longtime lobbyist for the Nevada Brothel Assn., has said that allowing male prostitutes could be the industry's Pearl Harbor. He has hinted that brothels possibly offering gay sex -- a choice each prostitute, as an independent contractor, would be free to make -- might sour some legislators on the entire brothel system.

...

"This is the first time in the history of the world . . . that men have been licensed to sell sex," Flint said Tuesday, his voice rising. "It's never been done!"

...

Davis figures that, even if it's a flop, adding men to her roster is worth trying. She has been inundated with more than 100 applications, she said, though she held off on hiring until she'd cleared all bureaucratic hurdles.

This is a topic I should handle only with a hazmat suit and a very long stick, because to give it proper attention requires a book.

That book would discuss the question whether ownership of women's bodies is public or private, and if the latter, whether it ever belongs to women themselves. It would discuss sexual violence, the question who has "the right" to have sex and the question whether bodies-as-property really lies behind the trade and kidnapping of women for sex work.

It would then study prostitution layer by layer, in the context of cultures and religions and time moving on. It would discuss the dangers of sex work and the stigmatization of sex workers and the question why the customers in these markets are so overwhelmingly male. Only then would the book ask under which conditions and in what type of a society would feminists think that having male sex workers as well as female ones would be egalitarian.

On Religion And Women

Nicholas Kristof quotes Jimmy Carter on the topic of religion-based oppression of women:

"Women are prevented from playing a full and equal role in many faiths, creating an environment in which violations against women are justified," former President Jimmy Carter noted in a speech last month to the Parliament of the World's Religions in Australia.

"The belief that women are inferior human beings in the eyes of God," Mr. Carter continued, "gives excuses to the brutal husband who beats his wife, the soldier who rapes a woman, the employer who has a lower pay scale for women employees, or parents who decide to abort a female embryo."

Mr. Carter, who sees religion as one of the "basic causes of the violation of women's rights," is a member of The Elders, a small council of retired leaders brought together by Nelson Mandela. The Elders are focusing on the role of religion in oppressing women, and they have issued a joint statement calling on religious leaders to "change all discriminatory practices within their own religions and traditions."

This is all excellent, of course, and something I've been preaching here for a long time. Well, except for the Elders bit. They haven't asked me to join yet. That will come, I'm sure.

But however wonderful it is to read these arguments it's pretty important to remember that the subjugation of women for some religionists is not a bug but a feature; the main reason why they buy into the whole program. The Taliban is not going to change its views on women holding jobs outside the home or on girls going to school any time soon.

What always scares me a bit is how very much the values of some American fundamentalist groups are a kinder, gentler version of those values. They don't ban women from holding paid jobs but they teach girls that women should stay at home and let their husbands worry about all public life. Neither do they burn girls' schools down but they think that perhaps their daughters should not go to college or prepare for a job in the labor force. Should the future marriage go bad the woman brought up that way has very few alternatives.

Echidne Goes All Cheerful And Optimistic!

I know that comes as a shock. I'm usually the goddess of gloom. But if I try really really hard I can even report on good tidings for women! And if not me, then other people.

For instance, Kathleen Sweeney, author of Maiden USA: Girl Icons Come of Age, listed recently several good and important changes which should make us cheerful. I'm mentioning only two of them here:

1. Girls are doing well in education wherever they are allowed to excel.

2. Millennial girls are "gaining technological fluency in ways that are eclipsing the
traditional gender divide in these areas."

That wasn't too hard, was it?

The Health Care Proposal, Again

This stuck in my eye while reading the Wonk Room:

As the Washington Post's Ceci Connely explained recently during an appearance on MSNBC, "one of the things I would suggest is not just how much we spend on health care because as a wealthy nation, maybe we want to spend a lot, but the problem really is we're not getting much bang for our buck. We're not getting our money's worth. And the real question about this piece of legislation is how much it will be able to improve the quality of care so that we start getting our money's worth."

It's not incorrect to want higher quality of care. After all, the three overall goals of any health care system should be the highest possible quality at the lowest possible cost to the largest possible number of the people it is intended to serve. That these three goals might sometimes be in conflict is pretty obvious. What should also be obvious is that the health care reform proposal now under discussion isn't really aimed at the first of these goals but the latter two.

Yes, it has parts which specifically aim to increase the quality of health care through greater use of technology, for example. But its main aim is in increasing access to care for those who are currently uninsured and its secondary goal is to contain costs (assuming that would be possible).

I'd Like That In Size Eight And Pink, Please

I once wrote about the odd way ideas often become commodities in this country (having to do with this post), something to be purchased or not, something which is expected to work and if it does not then we should get our money back. This is not wholly wrong, either, especially when it comes to judging the results of people who actually get paid to work on behalf of some idea because you can fire them, assuming that a sufficient number of others agree with you.

But it's a bad way of relating to an ideology. A really bad way: it breeds both passivity and a certain kind of permission not to learn what the ideology really means.

A better one would be to see all of us working together to make the world we would like to live in. Then none of us would be a disgruntled consumer.

Well, a goddess can dream.

Irrational Institutional Inequity, Incompetence and Injustice by Anthony McCarthy

So here’s the bottom line for all those exceptional middle-class and lower-class high school seniors who will doubt their own worth when the near-inevitable rejection letters arrive: The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in you. The fault lies in the system, and the system isn’t going to change, because it benefits the people it is designed to benefit - people who understand how much a real meritocracy would threaten their power.

Neal Gabler

The middle of last month there was a story that caught my attention, not least of which was due to the just below the surface outrage I detected in the usually unflappable BBC announcer. The report was about a study that had determined that hospital cleaners are more valuable to society than top bankers.

The research, carried out by think tank the New Economics Foundation, says hospital cleaners create 10 pounds of value for every 1 pound they are paid.
It claims bankers are a drain on the country because of the damage they caused to the global economy. They reportedly destroy 7 pounds of value for every 1 pound they earn. Meanwhile, senior advertising executives are said to "create stress".

The study says they are responsible for campaigns which create dissatisfaction and misery, and encourage over-consumption.

And it’s not just those at the top, but those who facilitate their destruction

Tax accountants are said to destroy 47 pound in value for every 1 pound generated.

Reading the article, considering the difference in what is produced by those in the lowest paying positions studied, hospital cleaning, child care, waste recycling and the highest paid, bankers, tax accountants, advertising executives, it’s not really that surprising that the people actually doing something productive are of more value to society than people who are involved in cheating, bilking and exploiting people.

As we are finding out with every revelation of the utterly corrupt financial system here and in Britain, the people who work there are, essentially, pirates who don’t produce anything.

As said, what got my attention wasn’t the obvious, if ironic findings of the New Economics Foundation, it was the attitude of the BBC news reader, who expressed his skepticism in a very good example of the Received Standard Accent common among educated Britains.

And here, in the land of alleged equality, it goes unremarked, largely, among the media and our elite that even as they lose gargantuan fortunes, driving the companies and banks they are hired to administer into the ground, we are told that the obscene salaries and bonus packages of crooks and idiots “MUST BE PAID TO RETAIN “THE BEST” PEOPLE”. This is clearly a self-serving lie of the elite, I can’t be the only person who would be willing to do their job of driving the entire system into collapse at a quarter of their compensation.

Almost as unremarked was that even as Barack Obama’s cracked financial team* was saying that they had to honor the contracted bonuses and salaries of the thieves and dolts who created the financial disaster, they showed no hesitation to screw contract workers in order to bail out the automobile companies, which had been driven into ruin by their own crew of executives.

The sheer idiocy of insisting on the system in place being anything but totally loony and a case of unarmed robbery in sheerest daylight can’t be anything but a learned response, as artificial as the accent of a BBC announcer. Where did they learn it?

Could it be in our elite universities from where so, so many of the crooks and pirates and idiots who have driven us into ruin received their credentials? Their license to steal? And I do mean Harvard and Yale, the Ivies, the elite universities and colleges of the English speaking world. How did these most august institutions manage to have such a prominent place in the education of our most corrupt and incompetent holders of wealth and power? Could it have something to do with the little remarked on fact that they practice a far higher level of affirmative action for the rich than they used to for purposes of ethnic and gender diversity?


Most of these assertions, however, are nonsense. Of course the odds are stacked against every applicant since the best schools admit only a fraction of them (less than 10 percent for most of the Ivies and just above 25 percent for selective schools like Northwestern and Emory), but as Daniel Golden demonstrated in a Pulitzer Prize-winning series for the Wall Street Journal and then in his book, “The Price of Admission”, the so-called best schools give heavy preferences to the wealthy; as many as one-third of admissions, he writes, are flagged for special treatment at the elite universities, one-half at the elite liberal arts colleges, and the number of open spaces for the non-privileged is reduced accordingly. As Golden puts it, the privileged take so many spots that the “admissions odds against middle-class and working-class students with outstanding records are even longer than the colleges acknowledge.”

I will probably revisit Neal Gablers’ fine column, a scathing indictment of the hypocrisy of some of our most respected universities. In the past I might have called them “institutions of higher learning”, but, looking at their product who are running our economy and who staff so much of the government, I doubt that’s true. It’s growing clearer that the primary purpose of our elite system is to maintain the elite and to train the banksters and those who lie on their behalf and maintain inequity.

* One of Barack Obama’s biggest tasks this year is to prove, conclusively that he didn’t pull a bait and switch on his strongest supporters . This is made necessary by his actions in the past year in three critical areas, the decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan, the capitulation to the Pharma-corporate health industries in the health care bill and, of course, the corporate thugs he has appointed to key financial positions and their retention as they do what anyone could have predicted they would have done .

I’m not sorry that I worked for his election, given what the alternative was but I didn’t expect to get someone who would hire and retain Timothy Geithner as we learn more about his time running the New York office of the Federal Reserve and the scandalous relationship the executives of AIG has had with offices and departments that just happen to be under his leadership. The developing evidence that office might have instructed AIG to withhold relevant but inconvenient information from the SEC has been, up till now, met with the odd claim that Geithner shouldn’t be held responsible for it because "These decisions did not raise to his level at the Fed. These are e-mails and decisions made by officials at an independent regulatory agency." Contrast that with Barck Obama taking responsibility for the failure to stop the underwear bomber from the, apparently, less exigent position of President of the United States.

It makes no sense for the President to accept responsibility for that while exempting Geithner from responsibility for a major decision in the relatively tiny office that he was in charge of. He should force his resignation if his office tried to suppress information as it seems it did. If Geithner won't resign, he should fire him. Publicly.

Someone needs to tell Barack Obama that his loyalty isn't to the members of his administration, it is to The People. And most of all he has an obligation to keep faith with those of us who supported him, whose votes he asked for, whose donations and time he asked for and took. He told us he would do better than the Republicans. He shouldn't expect to get more of it if he doesn't change his policy in a fundamental way.