How It Is Done. Or Popularizing Gender Research

A new study about the impact of shared parenting on mothers' self esteem could be picked up for a model of how these studies are so often popularized.

One starts with pointing out how women have been totally messed up by feminism, in some form or another:

Dads are helping out with childrearing more and more these days. The result can be both a boon and a letdown for super-moms, whose self-competence can take a hit when paired with husbands who are savvy caregivers, new research finds.

The findings reveal the fallout as women have entered the workplace in droves over recent decades, many of them leaving young children at home. One result is mothers have less time for care-giving. Past studies have shown working moms are torn between full-time careers and stay-at-home duties. And lately more diligent dads are helping out with the diaper-changing and other household duties.

But since mothers pride themselves on being just that - moms - their self-esteem can take a blow.

That's a beaut of a quote! Lots of loaded words all nicely together. Note the use of "fallout", like something from a nuclear explosion, and also the use of "torn" for women, "savvy" and "diligent" for men. And working mothers "leave young children at home," not working fathers!

If you stopped reading at this point you'd go away with what impression, exactly?

But of course the research didn't really use all those loaded expressions. It was the popularization. The usual next step is to summarize the study and introduce some more correct information about it. Here's what the lead author of this study says:

When mothers perceived fathers to be competent caregivers, the more time those dads spent solo with children, the lower was mom's self-competence rating. But when mothers considered spouses relatively incompetent caregivers, increased father-only time with kids was unrelated to mothers' self-competence.

As for why a mother's self-competence took a hit from perfect dads, Sasaki suggests pressure to keep up with societal norms plays a role.

"In American society, women are expected to take a main role in parenting despite increasingly egalitarian sex roles," Sasaki said. "Thus, we believe that employed mothers suffer from self-competence losses when their husbands are involved and skillful because those mothers may consider that it is a failure to fulfill cultural expectations."

Sasaki added, "Husbands do not suffer from self-competence losses even when their wives are involved and skillful because that is consistent with cultural expectations."

And what does the popularization suggest that we do about all this? Astonishingly, the women with jobs are not told to drop them:

The results don't suggest a stay-at-home mom is the answer. For one, the study showed work hours can boost a woman's perception of self-competence. And a father's care-giving was linked with a mother's marital satisfaction.

Here are some tips for working moms on how to juggle work and home.

I bolded those two sentences because they are so explicitly about gender politics. The problem is a problem for women and hence they are to juggle it. It's their fault, to begin with, because they shouldn't be having paid jobs and what do you expect then? So go and juggle.

That the self-esteem problems the study found might be because of societal norms in the first place is ignored. What is also ignored is that most people work because they need the money, and that goes for both fathers and mothers. But only mothers are to feel guilty about that.

Note that I'm not writing about the study here but about its popularization. I am not surprised to learn that women have role conflicts, given the extremely strong cultural messages about who is supposed to take care of children and the cultural approval of only certain kinds of mothering. It helps to be aware of those messages, I believe.
---
Thanks to res ipsa for the link.

Did I Ever Tell You This Story?

When I first got Henrietta the Hound, my now-angel dog, she was mentally pretty broken, what with having been abused and so on. She had very little self-confidence, despite her utter speed, beauty, wrestling skills and ability to dominate all other dogs (though most of them I only learned later).

Instead, she behaved like a Lady Dog, heeling perfectly, sitting perfectly, staying perfectly, with a robot-like competency in everything and matte eyes. For the first three months I thought she belonged to some breed which kept its tail between the legs all the time. Little did I know what was to come...

Anyway, the story is about the time when I started thinking that more desperate measures had to be taken to bring her back to some kind of normality.

I went running with her in the local park which is a large area with a jogging path, lots of trees and not so many people. As we were running along and all alone (though connected by a leash, naturally), I started singing to her: "Let's turn a switch! You are no lady! You are a frightening, frightening bitch!"

After a while I was bellowing: "We are two frightening bitches! Frightening bitches!"

Then I turned a bend in the path and came face-to-face with a group of rather stunned-looking joggers.

David Frum Is Sad

David Frum is a conservative thinker, married to a well-known anti-feminist conservative, Danielle Crittenden. Frum is often given as the inventor of the "axis of evil" term and in general he's the thinking man's conservative (heh).

Now he has written a fun piece on the wingnuts' defeat in health care, with bits like this:

Conservatives and Republicans today suffered their most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s.

It's hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the disaster. Conservatives may cheer themselves that they'll compensate for today's expected vote with a big win in the November 2010 elections. But:

(1) It's a good bet that conservatives are over-optimistic about November – by then the economy will have improved and the immediate goodies in the healthcare bill will be reaching key voting blocs.

(2) So what? Legislative majorities come and go. This healthcare bill is forever. A win in November is very poor compensation for this debacle now.

...

No illusions please: This bill will not be repealed. Even if Republicans scored a 1994 style landslide in November, how many votes could we muster to re-open the "doughnut hole" and charge seniors more for prescription drugs? How many votes to re-allow insurers to rescind policies when they discover a pre-existing condition? How many votes to banish 25 year olds from their parents' insurance coverage? And even if the votes were there – would President Obama sign such a repeal?

Yeah. Once something is given to people it is very hard to take it away. Still, I found it most interesting that Frum admits his preferred way of providing health care does offer the elderly only the hole in the donut, does regard being a woman a pre-existing condition and so on.

Happy Frum is not, right now. He's even grumpy about the Fox News. Fox was supposed to help the Republicans but now it seems like the Republicans are there to help Fox instead!





Oops. But then what do you expect when you believe in the power of corporations over the power of individuals?

How Women Fare In The Health Care Bill

Jodi offers a good summary of what is currently known about the impact of the new bill on women in general and on various groups of women in particular.

She addresses both those parts of the bill which have to do with reproductive health care and also those parts which are not particularly aimed at women but which will have a bigger effect on women than on men because women are more likely to fall into particular categories (the poor, the elderly).

She lists both gains and losses. Note that both of those are in comparison to the existing patchwork of systems.

Newsweek And Sexism

Picture from here.


An interesting piece by several women who work at Newsweek discusses the progress of women at the magazine since the early 1970s. They begin:

They were an archetype: independent, determined young graduates of Seven Sisters colleges, fresh-faced, new to the big city, full of aspiration. Privately, they burned with the kind of ambition that New York encourages so well. Yet they were told in job interviews that women could never get to the top, or even the middle. They accepted positions anyway—sorting mail, collecting newspaper clippings, delivering coffee. Clad in short skirts and dark-rimmed glasses, they'd click around in heels, currying favor with the all-male management, smiling softly when the bosses called them "dollies." That's just the way the world worked then. Though each quietly believed she'd be the one to break through, ambition, in any real sense, wasn't something a woman could talk about out loud. But by 1969, as the women's movement gathered force around them, the dollies got restless. They began meeting in secret, whispering in the ladies' room or huddling around a colleague's desk. To talk freely they'd head to the Women's Exchange, a 19th-century relic where they could chat discreetly on their lunch break. At first there were just three, then nine, then ultimately 46—women who would become the first group of media professionals to sue for employment discrimination based on gender under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Their employer was NEWSWEEK magazine.

What comes then? This:

Until six months ago, when sex- and gender-discrimination scandals hit ESPN, David Letterman's Late Show, and the New York Post, the three of us—all young NEWSWEEK writers—knew virtually nothing of these women's struggle.

...

In countless small ways, each of us has felt frustrated over the years, as if something was amiss. But as products of a system in which we learned that the fight for equality had been won, we didn't identify those feelings as gender-related.

...

Yet the more we talked to our friends and colleagues, the more we heard the same stories of disillusionment, regardless of profession. No one would dare say today that "women don't write here," as the NEWSWEEK women were told 40 years ago. But men wrote all but six of NEWSWEEK's 49 cover stories last year—and two of those used the headline "The Thinking Man." In 1970, 25 percent of NEWSWEEK's editorial masthead was female; today that number is 39 percent. Better? Yes. But it's hardly equality. (Overall, 49 percent of the entire company, the business and editorial sides, is female.) "Contemporary young women enter the workplace full of enthusiasm, only to see their hopes dashed," says historian Barbara J. Berg. "Because for the first time they're slammed up against gender bias."

...

We know what you're thinking: we're young and entitled, whiny and humorless—to use a single, dirty word, feminists!

...

Somewhere along the road to equality, young women like us lost their voices. So when we marched into the workforce and the fog of subtle gender discrimination, it was baffling and alien. Without a movement behind us, we had neither the language to describe it nor the confidence to call it what it was.

The whole article is important to read. What I wanted to do above was to summarize the very common story of how lots of women view feminism: The old fight was won and everything is perfect now. If it isn't perfect it's most likely you yourself who is at fault. And somehow the history got erased again, oops! Pointing out sexism makes you whiny and humorless, too, and everybody in this world has problems more important than yours.

Mmm. I should point out that the above paragraph is not written with sarcasm but with empathy and understanding. All of that has to do with the past victories, in a twisted way, especially in the area of jobs.

Outside the question of sexuality, the culture now does tell younger women that they can be anything they want if they work hard enough, though this suggestion is made before one enters the labor force or has any children. I suspect that the transition from college to the labor force is when some women hear that feminist alarm clock ringing. And ringing and ringing. It's ringing, because the job of making the world a fairer place was only begun and not finished.

But part of that odd rewriting of the history has always been the idea that all the necessary changes were successfully completed about forty years ago. Done! Old hat! This despite the millennia of gender-based laws and traditions!

Likewise, the history of gender tends to be scrubbed far too clean. Thus, we learn that "women were given the vote" in whatever year a particular country decided to kindly do so with not much on the women who were force-fed in prisons or threw themselves in front of horses for the cause of suffrage. To address those aspects of the history automatically introduces the fact that the vote was won against an opposition. And what did the opposition say? Did they just disappear completely, the way they do from official history? To this day the Ann Coulters of this world suggest that women shouldn't have a vote.

The point is that if the Second Wave of feminism won a few victories it certainly didn't kill all the seeds of sexism in the society. Why are so many writers drawing that corollary?

Enough of that. What IS the sexism these writers are talking about? It's not the obvious kind of being told that you can't be a writer because you are a woman. It looks much more of the "planet of the guys" type or "invisible women" type. Hence the magazine cover about "a thinking man", twice. Both men and women can be oblivious when it comes to the status of women as half of humankind.

Kudos to Newsweek for publishing an article critical of Newsweek.

One Simple Question About Health Care

Why would surgery on a broken ankle, however difficult, have a total treatment cost in excess of $200,000?


It is not that I don't know the answer to this question. But it is the length of a book and it has lots of political landmines, having to do with the equation between expenses and incomes. Ultimately, though, we cannot afford this price tag as a country (just compare it to the median incomes), and I don't see how the new health care bill would address this.
----
Added later: Yes, this is not the day to think such thoughts, and I AM mostly pleased that millions more people will get coverage. But the health care sector still suffers from a few chronic conditions and long-term treatment is indicated.

Added even later: This case is not intended to reflect the average costs of ankle surgery but to point out that if we have too many outliers like this they will pull up the average over time.

Gah. This is a really stupid post.

Dragged Kicking And Screaming Into The Century Of The Fruitbat

My sick sense of humor is a terrible personal flaw. After I read these impressive pieces about the new health-care bill, with the appropriate shivers down my spine and somewhat dewy eyes all I could think about was Terry Pratchett's funny fantasy world where people are always being dragged kicking and screaming into the century of fruitbat, even when that was the last century.

But what other response is appropriate to this?

Interviewed Monday on ABC's ''Good Morning America,'' McCain repeated House Republican assertions that the transformative legislation amounts to a ''government takeover'' of health care.

We didn't even get the public option! The health insurance companies are still exempt from anti-trust regulations! They get to have millions of new low-risk customers in exchange for a few limitations!

Who is it anyway who owns the health care system right now? Not the consumers, that's for sure, and not the non-consumers without any coverage.

And that's why I see McCain and others like him dragged kicking and screaming into the century of the fruitbat. They belong on Pratchett's Discworld.

So do some of the supporters of the bill. It's not the Greatest Thing Since Zippers And Sliced Bread, and neither is it Maoism or anything like that. It's something fairly middle-of-the-road, with some bad bits and some good bits in it. I hope that the good bits weigh more in the cups of the scale than the bad bits, but that all depends on the practical implementation of the bill and how well and rapidly problems in it are fixed.

The reason for Speaker Pelosi's picture is that she really did an astonishing job on this bill. Whatever one thinks of the contents of the bill, her performance was almost flawless in terms of the politics of persuasion.

More on Nazia Quazi

Nazia Quazi is the Canadian citizen held against her will in Saudi Arabia because her father has decided that she should stay there and the laws of Saudi Arabia give him all the power and her none. The Canadian government isn't doing much to help her.

As this is is about the most obvious example of patriarchy (the power of the fathers), it deserves feminist attention.

Tim Bousquet interviewed Nazia recently over the phone. You can read what she says here.

Something Came Up

and I don’t have time for writing this morning. In light of the softened presentation of the ugly Republican front thuggery in DC yesterday. Here’s something to consider by a little remembered philosopher who had a major effect on the thinking of Martin Luther King jr. and so on some of the most successful efforts of the left, to date.

In a very important sense the respectable class is the dangerous class in the community. By its example it degrades the social conception of the meaning of life, and thus materializes, vulgarizes, and brutalizes the public thought. Also, by its indifference to public duties, it constitutes itself the guilty accomplice of all the enemies of society. By this same indifference, too, it becomes the great breeder of social enemies; for only where the carcass is are the vultures gathered together. The ease with which self-styled good people ignore public duties and become criminal accomplices in the worst crimes against humanity is one of the humorous features of our ethical life.

In the application of principles to life there will long be a neutral frontier on the borders of the moral life, where consequences and tendencies have not so clearly declared themselves as to exclude differences of opinion among men of good will. Here men will differ in judgment rather than in morals. It is very common to exaggerate this difference into a moral one; and then the humorous spectacle is presented of friends who ignore the common enemy and waste their strength in mutual belaborings. This is one of the great obstacles to any valuable reform.

from The Principles of Ethics, by Borden Parker Bowne

Posted by Anthony McCarthy

How The Tea People Demonstrate

With violent imagery. These signs turned up today in Washington D.C. in a protest against health care reform:





Have a look at some of the other signs and then ask yourself if the opposition truly isn't about race or at least the desire to keep power in the hands it traditionally has belonged to.

And then there was this:

A staffer for Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) told reporters that Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-M.D.) had been spit on by a protestor. Rep. John Lewis (D-G.A.), a hero of the civil rights movement, was called a 'ni--er.' And Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) was called a "faggot," as protestors shouted at him with deliberately lisp-y screams. Frank, approached in the halls after the president's speech, shrugged off the incident.

Women Are The Only Ones Who Can Tell Us What The Stupaks Would Really Do by Anthony McCarthy

All of the “Greatest Generation” hype will soon, if it hasn’t already, reached the point of going over the top. Talking about it with my mother, who is a veteran of World War II, she said that she thought it was too much. She said she didn’t want to be seen only as the three and a half years of her life that were taken up with that service, proud though she is of it. She noted that she lived almost ninety other years and she thought there was a lot about those years that was important.

Other than the big names that have made it a feature of their show business careers, you can understand how the children of those people are trying to grasp onto parts of our parents who are rapidly dying off. To look at someone in their late 80s and 90s is to realize that what are called the implications of mortality are far more than merely implied. They are it.

The reason to study the past, to gather information from other peoples’ experience is to find ideas useful in shaping the future. Without that part of it, history and memoir are mere hobbies on the level of curio collecting.

There is a generation that is passing whose information is desperately needed and which couldn’t be more essential to planning for our future. The accurate memories of women who had illegal abortions in the period before it was legalized need to be more widely known. Abortion was never abolished in the United States, not by any means. It was common and available, though dangerous in most cases and ineffective in others. I remember more than one young women who were beaten by boyfriends hoping to induce a miscarriage. Ending pregnancies was a profession, like all illegal professions the qualifications of those practicing the profession went from the homicidally negligent and incompetent to qualified doctors practicing in hygienic conditions. There were a few doctors who risked professional ruin and prosecution to provide abortions. Ability to pay and connections to elite abortion providers was the deciding factor in which kind of abortion you had access to. Desperation to end a pregnancy had the effect of condensing the defects of the medical system into one area where it could be seen more easily.

As I hear the Stupak-Conference of Bishops side on abortion, that glaring lie is the one that needs to be hollered out until everyone has to deal with it. They aren’t trying to end abortion, they are trying to revive the abortion practices of the 1950s. Those are what will come back, with women dead, women injured, a flourishing trade in illegal abortion including the worst of the butchers of the past, women and ethical abortion providers always fearful of arrest. And there will be arrests and prosecutions. There will be prosecutors who vie with each other to prove themselves in this area, especially if the prohibitionists show their political power.

So, it is couldn’t be more important that we all hear the experience of women who had illegal abortions and those who provided them during the period when it was legal nowhere in the United States before that testimony is lost. The lies of the other side are eternal, they aren’t founded in experience, they aren’t written in pain and blood. If our side is going to be heard, it is that record that has to be taken down and forced under the noses of the media. If they’re going to insist on the she said-he said coverage of this issue, let’s force them to face the world that the other side is trying with all their might to recreate. In a sobering number of cases, the enemies of choice in abortion are also working to restrict contraceptive availability. Just as in the 1950s, the anti-abortion side seem to want to produce more of them.

Narcotics & craziness (by Suzie)

I’ve appreciated a good narcotic since I had minor surgery as a teenager. I was given Demerol. By then, however, I also had experienced a Demerol-addled, gun-waving neighbor. I joined his family for a trip through the West in an Econoline van fitted with old bus seats. In San Francisco, he threatened to shoot anyone who uttered a word. We kept quiet even when he took a sharp turn, one seat upended and three of us fell in a heap. Imagine seeing SF for the first time – in silence.

Decades later, after I was diagnosed with sarcoma, some friends asked if I could get medical marijuana. My standard reply: “I can get better.”

My jokes about narcotics troubled other friends. Even a casual mention of Vicodin would elicit concerned-parent faces and comments about the dangers of drugs. When I’m in pain, the last thing I want is a lecture as if I’d been held captive in a religious cult and never heard that narcotics could be addictive.

So many people are so worried about drug abuse that they forget the many blessings of narcotics. Can’t we hold both thoughts in our heads? Must we assume that everyone is, or will become, addicted?

Until I had my bladder removed last month, I was having recurrent bladder infections resistant to antibiotics. Vicodin helped me through. During my six-hour surgery, I was glad that I didn’t have to bite on a bullet or take a shot of whiskey.

Afterward, my Sufentanyl got yanked because I was itching like crazy. I then got Dilaudid. Forget the itching; I was just crazy. Dreams and reality mixed. Never again will I tell someone to relax into the drug, just float, let it take away the pain, etc. From Dilaudid, I got switched to Toradol, Ultram and finally Vicodin, my old friend.

I wrote this post drug-free.

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

More thoughts from the hospital: I had a peripheral line in my right wrist, an IV in my left hand, a long bruise on my left wrist where the arterial line had been; a hydra-like, triple-lumen central line dangling from my chest; a nasal-gastric tube with dark stuff that I thought was food going into my belly; a JP drain, like a little football, tethered to my abdomen; and a pouch glued to my abdomen, with two stents emerging from my stoma like sticky stamen, and a tube connected to a catheter bag. I felt like a marionette.

#

I like to sleep on my side. Try that when you’ve got an entourage of tubes that must move when you move. Because I was too weak, staff and friends used sheets and pillows to roll me over on my side. I felt like a beached whale.

#

Even if your hospital is terrific, schedule people to stay with you, at least until you can get up on your own. Even if you have caring family members, rotate them to reduce burn out. You may want a drink of water, or your TV remote may fall. You can’t call the staff all the time, and if you do, don’t expect them to come running unless you say you're bleeding from one of your lines, as happened to me.

#
Your caregivers can keep a diary, marking the date and time when stuff occurs. If you’re in a drug haze, a diary can help you make sense later. On my worst night, I got new medication to reduce the madness, and the nurse told me to give it 30 minutes to work. A friend had to keep reassuring me because time had stood still. Later, when I read the notes, I understood what happened.
#
For those tempted to argue with patients, remember: Who is crazier, the crazy person or the person arguing with the crazy person?
#
A patient loses so much control in the hospital. Let her make what decisions she can; don’t call her a control freak.
#

Reading get-well cards signed by a lot of people reminds me of the signatures in a school yearbook. Among all the get-well-soons, I expected to see “Have a great summer!” (But, hey, keep the cards and gifts coming!)

#

At home, I have a grabber so that I don’t have to bend down. I channel a friend from the cancer center who died a few years ago. His parents had had an ice-cream store on the boardwalk of Ocean City, Md., and he became an expert at the machines that lower a claw into a bed of prizes. What is my prize now? Getting dirty clothes off the floor.
#
While recuperating-through-working, I came across this quote from SARC, an unimpeachable source for sarcoma information: "You can’t get sarcoma from eating the wrong foods, making love, or from insufficient exercise." Let the party begin!

Friday critter blogging (by Suzie)

Wildlife biologist David Saugey took this photo of Rafinesque's big-eared bat (Corynorhinus rafinesquii), which he describes as a rare species found primarily in the Southeast U.S.

A song of contentment (by Suzie)

For me, this song captures contentment, the times when I feel like I have everything I need. I chose a video that captures Melissa Ferrick's excitement in concert. I saw her once but could barely move; the place was so packed with young women. You can find her tour schedule on her official site.

Oh Dear. Foot-In-The-Mouth Stupak

When sixty leaders representing 59,000 Catholic nuns came out in support of the Senate health care legislation, what did our Bart do?

He put his masculine shoe straight into his mouth:

Congressman Bart Stupak, D-Mich, responded sharply to White House officials touting a letter representing 59,000nuns that was sent to lawmakers urging them to pass the health care bill.

The conservative Democrat dismissed the action by the White House saying, "When I'm drafting right to life language, I don't call up the nuns." He says he instead confers with other groups including "leading bishops, Focus on the Family, and The National Right to Life Committee."

Bolding by everyone who reads that paragraph and then writes about it, pretty much.

Care to think of the differences between nuns and those other organizations? Well, nuns are wimminz, after all, though disguised. Those other organizations are guy groups. They are also not exactly in the Democratic Party. The Focus on the Family, for instance, has its rifle focus on independent women and egalitarian families and so on.

I found that statement shocking, because I didn't think he would come out in the open about his deep distrust and dislike of women in general. But he did do exactly that.

Then he complained about the bad treatment he has received. Nobody should call his house or harass his family. That is wrong and disgusting.

But Jodi points out that life under such harassment is the norm for some:

The Hill reports that "Leading a revolt against President Barack Obama’s healthcare legislation over abortion has been a “living hell” for Rep. Bart Stupak."

The telephone lines in his Washington and district offices have been “jammed” and he’s gotten more than 1,500 faxes and countless e-mails — most of which he says don’t come from his constituents.

The fight has taken a toll on his wife, who has disconnected the phone in their home to avoid harassment.

“All the phones are unplugged at our house — tired of the obscene calls and threats. She won’t watch TV,” Stupak said during an hourlong interview with The Hill in his Rayburn office. “People saying they’re going to spit on you and all this. That’s just not fun.”

Welcome, Mr. Stupak, to the daily life of reproductive health providers, who are subject to such harassment every day courtesy of your friends at Focus on the Family, National Right to Life, and the USCCB.

Do read Jodi's whole post. It's excellent.

Who Wears The Dress, Hmh?

I came across this story about the child abuse scandal in the Catholic Church:

With the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church spreading, a leading religious scholar said Wednesday that a greater female presence in the church hierarchy would have helped prevent the crisis from worsening.

You might guess what I thought at this point! But luckily I was wrong:

"It is clear that, statistically, women abuse much less than men. And in terms of reporting, are much more likely to (report abuse)," Serene Jones, president of the Union Theological Seminary in New York, told CNN's Christiane Amanpour.

"It would make a big difference if my Catholic women students at the seminary were in positions of power right now. This would not be handled this way at all," she said.

The piece describes a debate between two Roman Catholic* women about the desirability of women in the priesthood. That is a false setup, given that women have no say in the matter. It's a cowardly approach, really.

But sort of funny, because the two women happen to be named Smith and Jones. Like imaginary characters, you know. In any case, Jones is for women as priests, Smith is against, and expresses her opposition firmly:

Jones told Amanpour: "The fact that we insist on celibacy in the Catholic Church and that women are excluded, that double combination ... shows us a church that lives in a bubble."

She also strongly rejected the idea that priests have to be men.

"The majority of Catholics in this country (the United States) agree it is an archaic argument and it's one that is bound to oppress."

Smith was unimpressed. "Women can be Christ-like as well as any man, but we wouldn't choose a woman to play the role of Hamlet, right?"

Don't you love that Hamlet-comparison? Of course Smith bases it on the assumption that to be a priest one must be a man.

The other bit I liked a lot is where she argues that women already are included in the church hierarchy:

She added that women play a big role in the structure of the Catholic Church, holding 23 percent of the top "power positions" in the United States, 48 percent of the administrative positions and 80 percent of all paid positions.

Let's calculate a bit here. If women hold 23 percent of top positions in the U.S. church, what percentage do men hold? Could it be 77 percent? Even though men hold only 20 percent of all paid positions in the church (given that women hold 80 percent of those)?

This doesn't sound like women's empowerment to me. It sounds as if women do most of the work but very little of the leading.
---
This post is snarky for a very good reason (and started a lot snarkier). We have a church which routinely refuses to let women have power in the hierarchy, refuses to admit women into the priesthood, yet constantly tries to limit the reproductive choice of not only Roman Catholic women but all women.

And when do we hear any murmurs at all about possibly, just possibly, giving women a bit more power in the church hierarchy? When the church has made a total mess of something and needs someone to save its bacon. Women are of value only as instruments for something else. Like toasters.
---
*Thanks to Lynn in the comments for pointing out that Serene Jones is not Catholic.

Astonishing

This video is pretty astonishing to watch on several levels.

Ohmygod! Doctors Will Quit Under Obamacare!

This is what people who watch Fox News are told. Moreover, the study finding this appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine! Given that it's perhaps the most prestigious medical journal in the country, the findings must be true.

And the findings are frightening: Almost half of all physicians surveyed stated that they would either retire early or quit practicing medicine if a public option was implemented in the health care reform proposal. Not having a public option would cut those losses to just one-third of all physicians.

The end of the world is nigh! We must cancel all changes immediately!

Except that the study was NOT published by the New England Journal of Medicine, but by The Medicus Firm, a national physician search firm. That doesn't mean the study isn't a good one, of course.

To find out more about it I went to the Medicus site. I wanted to see the questions the study used, because it's well known that how one frames the questions will affect the answers. Just think of something in this vein:

"Would you quit practicing medicine if hordes of desperate patients suddenly crashed your office and demanded extensive treatments from you without any extra pay?"

Now that would be a very biased question. It's only presented as an example which demonstrates why having a look at the questions used in any study is important.

But I couldn't find the questionnaire, though I was invited to contact them for full results. Would those include the questions? I guess the only way to find out is to try them.

Did the people at Fox News do that? Do they know what the survey actually asked? These kinds of questions are boring but pretty important.

Happy St. Patrick's Day

I'm not going to discuss its history or anything political this time around (though I have done so in the past years). Instead, I'm wondering if coloring my teeth green would be suitable for tonight's festivities. And how to do it? I was thinking of a green mouth guard.

Do you wear green today?

CNN Needs Erickson To Have Diverse Voices

That's what CNN's Ed Henry said in a recent tweet:

For those Tweeting CNN shouldn't have hired @ewerickson as a contributor, seriously do you think a network should NOT have diverse voices

Let's recap some of the things this particular voice offers us in diversity:






And what about this bit from Erick's blog post in 2008 (thanks to Hart Williams in my comments for the link):

As the Clintons and their supporters continue their destruction of the Democratic Party, we see the latest salvo fired from the thighs of ugly nags.

From the nether regions that see no men, New York's National Association of Gals is out bashing Teddy Kennedy for endorsing Barack Obama instead of Hillary Clinton.

Bolds are mine. He is also needed to add diverse comments about former Supreme Court Justices as goat-f***ers.

Sigh. It's not the diversity of Erickson's voice that I protest here. It's the fact that he is an out-of-the-closet woman-hater and that detail makes no difference to the powers-that-be at CNN.

The Race-And-Gender Wealth Gap

You may have seen references to a study which found the average net worth of African-American single women to be about five bucks. That net worth refers to wealth, not income, and it is found by calculating the value of all assets a person has and then by deducting the value of all the debt the person has.

The study is available here (a pdf), and well worth reading through.* What you will find is a wealth gap between men and women in all racial/ethnic groups until some time after age fifty when the gap narrows or disappears or even reverses. I suspect the change around the age fifty has to do with inheriting wealth from one's own parents.

But this change can only happen if the person's own parents had accumulated wealth. That was much easier for whites than for African-Americans, largely due to overt racial discrimination in the past. That is one reason for the much greater race gap than gender gap.

The race gap in wealth is not all that is affecting African-American single women. If it was, African-American single men should have the same average wealth levels. But they have higher wealth levels. Thus, African-American women are hit twice.
----
*One caveat: I'm not sure about the sample sizes for, say, African-American single women. If they are small the results should be viewed as preliminary and the study as a pilot project.

Please Welcome Erick Erickson!

CNN has hired another wingnut to comment on politics: Erick Erickson. Here's what the CNN blog says:

Under Erickson's leadership, RedState.com has become the preeminent right of center community online. Prior to leading RedState.com, Erickson practiced law for six years and managed a number of political campaigns, and he currently serves as a member of the Macon, Georgia, city council. He studied political science and history and earned a bachelor's degree at Mercer University in Macon. Erickson also earned his law degree from Mercer's Walter F. George School of Law.

"Erick's a perfect fit for John King, USA, because not only is he an agenda-setter whose words are closely watched in Washington, but as a person who still lives in small-town America, Erick is in touch with the very people John hopes to reach," said Sam Feist, CNN political director and vice president of Washington-based programming. "With Erick's exceptional knowledge of politics, as well as his role as a conservative opinion leader, he will add an important voice to CNN's ideologically diverse group of political contributors."

I'm rolling on the floor laughing and my tummy hurts. This is so utterly deliciously funny. Oh dear.

"He will add an important voice." Bwahaha. Do you think he will use that voice to call a retired Supreme Court Justice a goat-f***ing child molester? Or might he call for the audience to rise up (over a dish-washing detergent) and to beat some politicians to a bloody pulp?

Those are the kinds of things our Erick has said in public. He is the gift that keeps on giving. But I'm not sure why Steve Benen overlooked his utterances on feminists. I have to fix that problem so that you all know what CNN in turn overlooked when deciding on this "important voice (pardon while I giggle again).

Here are two of Erick's tweets after the Tebow Superbowl ad controversy:






Those might be slightly abbreviated, given this take on the tweets:

Erickson, who is preternaturally good-looking, tweeted during the Super Bowl, "That's it?!?! That's what the feminazis were enraged over? Seriously?!? Wow. That's what being too ugly to get a date does to your brain."


Oh, and you know what else? They should get back in the kitchen! Yeah! "Thus ends the credibility of all pro-abortion groups. Thanks Mrs. Tebow for that. Ugly feminists return to their kitchens."

The conservative blogger, clearly determined to wedge every cartoon anti-feminist smear from the 70s into a great illustration of why booze and social media don't mix, continued "That's not smog in Miami. It's bras burning from the sheer stupidity of the pro-abortion crowd's reaction to the Tebow ad."

What will all those crazy, ugly feminists do next, to occupy all the empty time not spent on dates? What they do best: castrate.

"Next the feminist groups will lash out at all the commercials praising manly men. They'll trot out Lorena Bobbit to spade/neuter your man."

So funny. (And no. He is not good-looking unless you fancy slabs of beef with two tiny raisin eyes.)

Let's recap: CNN has hired a commentator who thinks that feminists should get back into the kitchen, who thinks that feminists are too ugly to get dates, who thinks that feminists all have castration shears hanging from their belts (that's only me).

Because he is an important voice! Bwahaha.

Where the Female Bloggers Are

Not at the meeting Speaker Pelosi organized for bloggers about the health care reform proposal:

I just got back from an on the record meeting for blogger with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Also present were David Waldman, Igor Volsky, Greg Sargent, Jason Rosenbaum, Ryan Grim, Chris Bowers, Brian Beutler, and John Aravosis. Aside from hearing a lot about parliamentary procedure that I think is being written about too much, and learning that having a woman Speaker of the House doesn't guarantee that any women will be at congressional blogger briefings, the main message was one of confidence: "I have faith in my members that we will be passing this legislation."

Perhaps women were invited but couldn't make it? I hope so because the alternative makes me think of Maggy Thatcher in many pictures of this type:





Mmm.

Taylor Marsh points out the same nonexistent female bloggers. She also links to a MoveOn video (though I can't see it marked as such), about how Democrats should vote on whatever the final health care reform bill might be. The video is pretty weird watching from the gender angle, too:





Why does any of this matter? Because of what has been offered up as THE compromise in the whole debacle: Further reductions in women's reproductive choice. To add insult to injury is neither smart nor kind. That's why I reallyreally hope that Pelosi invited umpteen female bloggers but they were all too busy to attend. The alternative would make me angry.

From Echidne's Mailbag

This piece on the adman and art director George Lois is interesting. It's about the history of feminism, in an odd sort of way.

Jaclyn Friedman writes about college policies when it comes to rape.

VT (thanks!) sent me a link to a website which sells a perfume named after me. The description is hilarious:

This was the divine and haughty Ekhidna, and half of her is a Nymphe with a fair face and eyes glancing, but the other half is a monstrous ophis, terrible, enormous and squirming and voracious, there in earth's secret places. For there she has her cave on the underside of a hollow rock, far from the immortal gods, and far from all mortals.

I'm partial to frankincense, actually.

Give Nazia Some Help

Katha Pollitt has written about the troubled situation of Nazia Quazi. She is a Canadian woman trapped in Saudi Arabia because of her father's acts and the patriarchal laws of that country:

For more than two years Nazia, an IT specialist who graduated from the University of Ottawa and holds dual Canadian-Indian citizenship, has been trying to leave Riyadh and go home to Canada. Her troubles began on November 23, 2007, when she entered Saudi Arabia with her parents on a visitor's visa. In Saudi Arabia, foreign visitors must have a sponsor, a local man who handles their paperwork. Nazia's sponsor is her father, Quazi Malik Abdul Gaffar, an Indian citizen who has worked in Saudi Arabia for many years. At some point Nazia's father clandestinely switched her visitor's visa to a more permanent visa--one that requires that he, as her sponsor, approve her exit visa. This he refuses to do. No exit visa, no departure. Worse, Nazia says he has confiscated both her Indian and Canadian passports and all her identity documents--driver's license, health card, credit cards and so on--and refuses to return them. She is trapped.

Nazia's father is not only her sponsor; he is also her mahram, or guardian, the male relative who in the Saudi system controls nearly every moment of a woman's life. As detailed in a 2008 Human Rights Watch report, under this system a woman must seek her mahram's permission to go to school, travel abroad, marry, open a bank account, hold a job, rent an apartment or even have elective surgery. (In June the Saudi government told the UN Human Rights Council that the guardianship system no longer exists, but HRW and the Saudi newspaper Al-Watan confirm that it does.) In effect, it makes women children for life--there are middle-aged Saudi women who are under the legal control of their own sons. Nazia's father thus has not only been able to force his daughter, through the sponsorship system, to remain in Riyadh; as her mahram he has total control of her life while she is there--even though neither Nazia nor her father is a Saudi citizen.

And there the situation stands. For some reason the Canadian government has been reluctant to help Ms. Quazi. The Human Rights Watch has taken up her case but so far nothing much seems to be happening.

It seems that all Canadian citizens are not created equal.

If you would like to help Nazia so that she can go home to Canada, contact the individuals Katha lists in her recent post.

On Misogyny and Misandry

Suzie's post below made me thing about man-hating vs. woman-hating, especially this bit:

Because of her depictions of men and penises, the Daily Beast says, Aurel Schmidt got tagged as a man-hater. "I was coming across a little feminist-y." To Yablonsky, Schmidt says, "I don't want anyone to accuse me of being a man hater, which I'm not." Schmidt must believe that her gender affects her success. After all, a man who made the same art wouldn't be perceived as a feminist man-hater.

The equal-sign between a man-hater and a feminist is always exciting for me. Why is demanding equal opportunities for women and equal respect for traditionally female spheres of activity the same as man-hating?

And why is that label so frightening? It seems to be frightening or at least something one has to defend oneself against. Yet even Rush Limbaugh can't be bothered to defend himself against the accusations of misogyny (except by joking that he likes Women's Movement, especially from behind).

All this teaches us about the society we live in, its customs and its power distribution. A fairly large dose of misogyny (locker-room talk about them c**ts and such) is regarded as normal, as average, and really giant doses of misogyny (ask me sometimes about my travels on men's rights sites and how much the consequent therapy costs) is labeled as deviant behavior, something to be ignored. Even I, a feminazi of the highest category, often skip reading comments threads full of woman-hating. Life is too short and I'm but one goddess.

But life doesn't seem to be too short for all those magnifying glasses which come out to detect man-hating, and odd things qualify for it.

My point is not that man-hating would be nonexistent. It's not. But it's rare when compared to woman-hating, and the latter is much more socially expected, ignored and even approved. Both men and some women engage in the latter but I can't remember ever seeing a man engage in the former (in the sense of saying really nasty things about his own gender) and the number of women I'd call man-haters is quite small, too.

As I'm an optimistic goddess I hope that the overall levels of misogyny are low, too. But it really is too culturally invisible for us to say for certain. Just go through some of the Great Works of Western Civilizations or the major books of the three Abrahamic religions and what you find is zero man-hating but plenty of woman-hating. In a sense we are all prepped to accept some woman-hating as normal.

Women Guilty Of Feeling Guilty? Conclusion: Reasons Are Genetic.

This is today's science topic. Or rather today's science popularization topic, because I wish to address this write-up of a Spanish study about the gender differences in feeling guilty:

Kim Moldofsky can feel guilt over just about anything — her children, stray cats, her work, her husband. "I am easily guilted," she told me, laughing.

Meanwhile, her husband, Brad, 41, remains blissfully guilt-free. "He is kind and caring but he can be more detached," said Moldofsky, a 41-year-old "mom blogger" and social media strategist near Chicago. "Sometimes I want him to get caught up in the emotion."

So, apparently, does a team of Spanish psychological researchers. In a reversal of Professor Henry Higgins' plaintive cry "Why can't a woman be more like a man?," it suggested that when it comes to guilt, men should be more like women.

Men are guilt-deficient, suggests the study, which was published in a recent issue of The Spanish Journal of Psychology. We lack "interpersonal sensitivity," while women suffer from destructive guilt largely imposed by society.

So women need support, while men need fixing. "This study highlights the need for educational practices and socializing agents to reduce the tendency towards anxious-aggressive guilt in women, and to promote interpersonal sensitivity in men," write the authors of the study, which was led by Dr. Itziar Extebarria of the Unversity [sic] of the Basque Country in Spain.

That's the summary of the study by the popularizer, one Brian Alexander, and it's sorta pre-flavored, to let you know what comes next.

And what does come next? Guess if he's going to say anything at all about ways to fix the excessive guilt feelings of women or if he's going on to discuss why men shouldn't be changed at all? I'll give you three seconds, my dear readers.

Yeah. He marshals three experts to discuss why men are the way they are, for genetic reasons. You are going to love these experts!

The first one is Christina Hoff Sommers. You might be familiar with her work which consists of feminist-bashing for the gal's auxiliary of the extreme right-wing in the U.S.. She's not a geneticist, though. She's a right-wing philosopher, famous for writing a book so endearingly entitled The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men. Of course Ms. Sommers thinks that the Spanish study is guy-bashing.

Here's the next expert: Simon Baron-Cohen! Hilarious:

In his book "The Essential Difference," the Cambridge University neuroscientist Simon Baron-Cohen (cousin of Sacha of "Borat" fame) wrote: "The female brain is predominately hard-wired for empathy. The male brain is predominately hard-wired for understanding and building systems."

If you don't find that hilarious, you should know that Baron-Cohen actually has no direct evidence for that assertion, what with us not knowing about the genes underlying empathy and so on. I don't think he's a neuroscientist, either, at least based on the Wiki description of his education. His serious research is in autism.

I have read The Essential Difference and can't take it seriously. He has several chapters on how he imagines prehistoric sexual division of labor, all off the top of his head. And his theory about women being all empathetic and men all systemic thinkers is just a new wrapper on the old theory that women are emotional and men are intelligent. Besides being based on a false dichotomy (yes, Virginia, you can be both! Or neither! And that's true for Virgil, too!), it is based on a questionnaire with biased questions. I have blogged about him here and here, for instance.

But wait! The popularizing Mr. Alexander actually interviews someone who might be a real expert: Elizabeth Shirtcliff, a psychologist and behavioral endocrinologist. Now we are going to learn exactly which genes are responsible for the excessive guilt of women and the lack of guilt in men! Here she comes:

The answer is yes, explained Elizabeth Shirtcliff, a psychologist and behavioral endocrinologist at the University of New Orleans. The fact is, men are supposed to feel guilt less intensely because men are, generally, less empathetic than women. It's the way evolution made us. But few people want to talk about it in those terms.

"Unfortunately, this is controversial," sighed Shirtcliff. "Anytime you talk about gender differences there are politics involved." For example, she said, "it does not fit with our modern egalitarian view we want to raise boys with."

Oops. That's not quite what I thought I was going to learn here. I thought it was going to be all about hormones and genes and shit. Instead, I'm being told that an egalitarian view isn't a good one to raise boys with. What would be better, then? A feudal view? A patriarchal view? A Taliban view?

That's my summary of Mr. Alexander's piece, though of course you should read all of it. What's most astonishing about it is the 180-degree turn it takes from the research it supposedly popularizes, not only in terms of arguing for a firm genetic explanation (which we cannot prove with today's evidence) but also (and this is more revealing of the underlying values) in terms of completely ignoring the idea that women might actually feel bad about all the guilt. Somehow that dropped into the Memory Hole, real fast.

But of course you have to do that if the differences are completely rigid and if they have nothing to do with the culture or the environment, naturally. You also have to equate empathy with "feeling excessive guilt."

I probably should add the usual warning: I'm not arguing here for the absence of some average genetic differences in the two genders when it comes to empathy, say. I'm pointing out that it is an open question, not something which various weirdly-picked experts can pronounce on. We simply do not have the data needed for such pronouncements.

I also don't like the simple erasure of all societal effects on such differences. For instance, the expectations in most societies are very different for men and women when it comes to who is responsible for children and how well they turn out. If women are held to much higher standards in that field then excessive guilt might be a fairly logical response (given the scarcity of supermoms). Likewise, traditionally women have been held responsible for the survival of marriages.
-----
Link to Alexander's piece by kms.

Austin art & music (by Suzie)

Austin artist Mark Goad created this vintage-style movie poster to accompany a screenplay sent to a Los Angeles producer. Mark and the screenwriter are my friends, and I'd love to see a movie made about the WASPs, the Women Airforce Service Pilots.

I wrote this in December and meant to post it, but then my sister arrived in town, blah blah blah. I found it labeled "draft" in Blogger. I went looking for it after Echidne posted last week on the WASPs. Click on the artwork to see more details.

If any of you are in Austin this week, check out Mark's fourth annual Red River Art Party 4-11 p.m. Friday and 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Saturday at 94 Red River St. In addition to his art, there will be comedy and music, including Cookie McGee, Hoodygoode, the Jessica Shepherd Band, Lisa Byrn, Ledaswan, Loretta Callens, Jennifer Mansfield Peal and the debut of Katherine Dawn's all-female band TX LadyBugs. Listen to Jennifer's "Ballad of Susanna Dickenson," about the woman and her baby who survived the siege of the Alamo.

Although near the South by Southwest (SXSW) events, this party isn't officially sanctioned. It's free, but donations will be accepted for the screenwriter, who chose to remain anonymous in this post. She's struggling with MS.

Mark takes on labors of love, such as this poster, and is now working on something for me. To earn some money, he started doing chores for older people and ended up arranging and highlighting their keepsakes, in what he calls redneck feng shui.

Maude Maggart (posted by res ipsa)

Lesbian Air Force (by Suzie)

This is a serious story about police outing an Air Force sergeant and getting her discharged. But the headline, "Lesbian Air Force sergeant discharged after police tell military," has me contemplating a new branch of the armed forces.

True Virtuosity: Three Etudes, op 18, By Bela Bartok

The recordings of Bela Bartok playing the piano reveal that he was an unusually fine pianist*. His incredible delicacy of touch in quiet passages, his ability to move energize a bass line without overpowering the piece, his ability to enlighten a dense harmonic texture by precise balance are the essence of real virtuosity. His recordings, especially the well known Library of Congress recital with Joseph Szigeti show his interpretation of Beethoven and Debussy were more than of just of his time. His recordings of his own compositions are, if the word means anything, definitive.

You can hear in his Three Etudes, op 18, how his compositional genius and his pianist technique combine and become a single entity. While there have been some very fine pianist-composers, Prokofiev, Ravel, Bolcom, I don’t know of any who achieved Bartok’s level in the past century.

These etudes are amazingly difficult, I’ve studied the second one but never performed it. I’ve never heard a live performance of all three and am not certain how often they are performed together, hearing Zoltan Kocsis on this YouTube and being able to follow the score on screen is a humbling experience. Knowing I’m unlikely to ever come close to that level of virtuosity in this life is one of the few things that might make me wish for another incarnation.

posted by Anthony McCarthy

* Here is Bartok playing his Suite, a piece I’m currently studying.

You Will Buy The Lie And The Lie Will Entertain You by Anthony McCarthy

That's how I imagine the forthcomming conservative translation of the Bible will put that famous line from John.

The other day, it happened again. You might have had the experience yourself, if your mother is anything like mine, hearing her say “I don’t understand.....” can make your blood run cold. While my mother is, in fact, a saint, and has been a constant news junkie all her adult life and continues to be very well read and generally sharp as anyone, she has a bad habit of intentionally thinking well of people who have demonstrated that they don’t deserve it. The other day it was an issue of insurance companies and their larcenous ways.

After discussing it with her for about twenty seconds her problem was obvious, she didn’t take into account one of the facts vital to comprehending the modern insurance industry in the United States, they’re, generally, a bunch of crooks who are in the business of taking your money and finding every way to not give it back, including just wearing you down with run arounds.

But it’s not just her, we all do it, to some extent. There is an example up at Buzzflash.com right now where the question is posed, Is Glenn Beck Ignorant or Shameless. Betting on either ignorance or shamelessness would be a sure thing with Beck, who always seems like the bottle blond, bastard child of one of the sleazier characters in a Monty Python skit. The structure of the question leaves out an undeniable and important truth about him and conservatism today.

Today, in 2010, American conservatives they don’t care if what they are saying or hearing are lies. Little lies of convenience, big profitable lies, lies that hurt people, lies that get people killed, lies that will end up in the extinction of the human species. A lie that gets them what they want, money, power, audience share,.... is fine with them. American conservatives have no connection with the truth whatsoever, thirty years in to the Reagan era. For them, a lie isn’t just as good as the truth if it gets them what they want, it is superior, the truth being unprofitable for them. For the propaganda machine that has replaced any semblance of news, it is superior because it’s cheaper to produce while it attracts the right-wing hate talk audience that isn’t stuck in drive-hour traffic.

If you haven’t already over indulged your daily allowance of irony, you might want to read what Howell Raines, fromerly of the New York Times, has to say about FOX in the Washington Post. When you read it, ask yourself why the NYT and WaPo don’t practice what they’re advocating for the gutter media. That Raines is telling a few obvious truths on a rival doesn’t make up for past and continuing journalistic sins in those two corporations.


I’m not going to turn on NPR this morning and risk the chance that Scott Simon giving one of his sermons riffing on what he read in the paper right before deadline. Too much irony makes your blood pressure spike.

Question for the weekend (by Suzie)

Do you ever edit Wikipedia? It could use more feminist editors.

For example: Sam Tanenhaus' article, dissected in my post earlier today, mentions Aileen Wuornos. It still rankles me that so little is said about Richard Mallory, the first man she killed, who had been incarcerated as a sex offender. I just added an extra sentence to Wikipedia about his "strong sociopathic trends."

When his past came to light, I read details from the earlier case, if I remember correctly. It looks like he was tried in 1957 in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Perhaps someone who's better at research can find the records so that we can make this more widely available to the public.

If Wuornos was telling the truth, she would be the only serial killer with whom I'm familiar, who first killed in self-defense, whose first "victim" had brutalized her. I know a jury didn't believe her, but they didn't get to hear evidence of Mallory's past.

I know, too, that this is old history, but women's history matters.

Once again, the NYT finds feminism out of fashion (by Suzie)

I planned to write about the New York Times’ take on the 75th biennial exhibit of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Then I realized two of those stories were in the same Sunday edition as its crappy story on Amy Bishop. I read it in the bathroom, but I’m sure that was mere coincidence.

First, let me note that this isn’t the weekly Wyoming Sheep Horn. This is the NYFT, which has international influence.

Echidne tore up the Bishop story, which appeared in the Feb. 28 print edition sold in my area. I can’t resist highlighting a few more statements by Sam Tanenhaus, the author. He recalls movies that depict abused women turning on men.

A decade or two ago this all made sense. The underworld of domestic abuse and sexual violence was coming freshly to light. … Much has changed since then, but the topic of women and violence — especially as represented by women — remains more or less in a time warp, bound by the themes of sexual and domestic trauma …

Later, he discusses two performance artists whose work comments on violence against women.

All this is stimulating in its way, but it feels curiously outmoded. … They persist in registering the dimmed signals of a bygone time.

There are a lot of guys who haven’t gotten the message that violence against women is outmoded. The violence continues, and men are still way more likely to commit violence than women are. What’s out of date, for Tanenhaus, is saying that male violence against women remains a serious problem. It’s yet another NYT piece that suggests feminism is passé. (It's still OK to talk about violence against women in poorer countries. cf. Nicholas Kristof.)

The trivialization continued that Sunday in T, The New York Times Style Magazine. “Women’s Work” was the headline of a story by Linda Yablonsky, followed by: “How many angry feminist artists does it take to make it into the Whitney Biennial? None.” That subhead – usually written by an editor – appeared in the print edition I got, but not in the online version. I hope someone recognized it was inaccurate.

Yablonsky has written about feminist activism in the art world. Surely she doesn't think it has zero effect on the inclusion of women now.

This is the first Whitney biennial – titled “2010” – in which more than half of the artists are women, and some people are calling it “the women’s biennial,” she notes. When women's representation mirrors our numbers in the population, some men wail that women are taking over. Yablonsky continues:

“2010" suggests that the art of the moment has achieved gender equality, even if the market for it has not.

What does this mean? That women now produce as much art as men? That we now produce art as good as men? That the representation at this biennial indicates what's going on elsewhere? That gender no longer matters?

In the same edition, in an article on the opening party, Guy Trebay quotes a curator saying that “they had gone looking ‘for work with active political and social content’ to shake up the museum.”

According to Yablonsky, however, “This biennial generally puts the personal before the political.” Does she understand the phrase: “The personal is political”? Her next sentence is: “Sharon Hayes, 39, is mainly concerned with speech and who gets to voice or hear it.” How is this not political? “Indeed, Hayes says everyone in her video occupies 'a queer position.' Or as she puts it, “There’s a fine line between a butch lesbian and a trans man.” Oh, no, that’s not political.

“Photographs by women in this biennial suggest anything but a weaker sex,” Yablonsky writes. Is this supposed to bolster her argument that the artists are less feminist than ones in the past? In a photo essay, Stephanie Sinclair depicts Afghan women who set themselves on fire. Yablonsky comments: “Sinclair’s photos may be gruesome, but they’re filled with more compassion than sisterhood.” Wait, compassion isn’t part of sisterhood?

Most of the female artists in the biennial, she says, “seem blasé about their place in the social order … In fact, many women selected for '2010' are simply making art and don’t believe their status as women has anything to do with how far they get with it — or not.”

She doesn’t quote any of the artists saying that, but she does note that those photographed for her article talked as easily about lipstick as about work in the studio. News flash: Women can have concerns about the role that gender plays in the art world while still caring about how they will look in a NYT photo shoot.

Because of her depictions of men and penises, the Daily Beast says, Aurel Schmidt got tagged as a man-hater. “I was coming across a little feminist-y.” To Yablonsky, Schmidt says, “I don’t want anyone to accuse me of being a man hater, which I’m not.” Schmidt must believe that her gender affects her success. After all, a man who made the same art wouldn't be perceived as a feminist man-hater.

Some biennial artists have produced important feminist work, including Babette Mangolte and Lorraine O’Grady. Although 75, O’Grady is in the NYT photo titled “Girl power.” For this post, I've reproduced Mangolte's composite for "How to Look ..."

Four days before Yablonsky's article ran was a NYT review by Holland Cotter. From him, we learn that this biennial has been greatly scaled down and underplayed, compared with the last two. He doesn't discuss gender -- that was relegated to the NYT style magazine, which has the traditional subjects of the women’s pages: fashion, food, design, travel and culture.

Nicole Smith says women’s pages can “be traced at least as far back as the 1890s.”

In women’s pages, the “four Fs” were core content: “family, food, fashion, and furnishings” (Armstrong, 2006, p. 449). Special sections of the newspaper were developed for women, including society pages, which covered engagements and weddings; food sections, which included recipes and tips on being a good homemaker; and beauty sections, recently refashioned as women’s health, in which women received advice—some clinical and most not—about how to look beautiful, if not stay healthy (Armstrong, 2006). Even when women were reporting the stories in the women’s pages, the assumption of editors was that these types of stories were particularly appropriate for women—as opposed to “hard” news—because “women were assumed to have special abilities at the emotive storytelling, character sketches, and telling anecdotes that human interest stories demanded” (Fahs, 2005 , p. 306). While many women journalists pushed their editors to assign them stories that were relevant to a general audience and which represented real news as opposed to filler, the majority of women were relegated to these special pages ...

Although renamed, the special pages continue. That's why major newspapers such as the NYT and the Washington Post still relegate some stories on women to their style pages.

Something to Do with Citrus (by res ipsa loquitur)

1. Peel two or three pink grapefruit. Take off the pith, too. Slice the grapefruit crosswise and then separate the sections. Put them in a bowl and sprinkle with salt and pepper.
2. Clean a bunch of arugula.
3. (Very) Thinly slice a small red onion.
4. Get a handful of pitted, oil-cured black olives.
5. Toss all of the above together with extra-virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

Don't like grapefruit? Substitute oranges or blood oranges. That's what the traditional recipe calls for. My grandfather used to make it with lemons! I like it with pink grapefruit.

Friday critter blogging (by Suzie)

The sun would feel good. I scheduled this to run earlier; it's been raining steadily for two days.

This is a tiger at Busch Gardens in Tampa, photographed this winter.

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

ETA: the change in weather.

Thursday Fluff Post

I'm tired.

Is there any way of fixing doors where the plywood panels have cracked from old age? My books tell me that there isn't, but I'm hoping to hear otherwise because new doors are not in my budget. I was thinking of gluing 1/4 inch thick panels over the cracked ones and then painting the doors (they are currently stained).

Probably not worth doing?

Also, has anyone rehung doors which don't stay shut or open because of subsidence? My closet doors do that. The problem is that the bias is not just in one direction (those I can fix with padding of the hinge holes etc.) but in at least two. I'm getting sooo tired of being slammed on the butt by a door when I rummage around for clothes.

Alternatively, send me a lovely modern house with a large tai chi studio and a boxing corner and an inner courtyard with fountains and hedgehogs.

I Wonder If It Rains Frogs

In Paul Ryan's world. Whatever the case might be, Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) is offering us a plan for balancing the federal government budget. It consists of taking government expenditure to the level it last was in 1951 and of providing lots of lovely, happy tax cuts.

For some, that is. According to two different (though not right-wing) think tanks, the Ryan plan would give those luscious tax cuts to the top ten percent of income-earners but raise taxes on everybody else. Here is one of the relevant tax tables. Click on it to make it larger:



The regressive impact appears to come mostly from the Value Added Tax he proposes. One can certainly understand George Bush's joke about his base being the haves rather than the have-nots.

What I don't get is why anyone else would vote for Republicans. They wish to privatize Social Security (in this climate where we all can see the downside of risk), kill Medicare, get rid of publicly funded education and in general turn this country into a Banana Republic where the rich live in guarded enclaves while everyone else struggles to survive.

In Nigeria

Women are demonstrating to demand better government protection against the recent religious/ethnic violence between Christians and Muslims:

Hundreds of women have taken to the streets of Nigeria's capital, Abuja, and the central city of Jos in rallies against Sunday's massacre near Jos.

The women, mostly dressed in black, demanded that the government protects women and children better.

At least 109 people were killed in the ethnic clashes near Jos. Many were said to be women and children.

Survivors have told the BBC how they saw relatives and friends hacked down with machetes and their bodies burnt.

Witnesses and officials say the perpetrators came from the mainly Muslim Fulani group. Most of the victims were Christians from the Berom group.

The attacks appear to be retaliation for violence in the villages around Jos in January, when most of the victims were said to be Muslim.

It is not just the government which should listen to them but the perpetrators of this violence. I'm almost thinking that the ones who want all this violence could go ahead and attack each other in some set-aside areas. There's nothing brave about killing small children and other innocent bystanders.

Yes, I know that is naive.

More Barbara Lynn

Remembering the WASPs

They were Women Airforce Service Pilots who flew planes during WWII to release men for the war effort. From the AP article:

They flew planes during World War II but weren't considered "real" military pilots. No flags were draped over their coffins when they died on duty. And when their service ended, they had to pay their own bus fare home.

These aviators — all women — got long-overdue recognition on Wednesday. They received the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honor given by Congress, in a ceremony on Capitol Hill.

The Congressional Gold Medal was earlier given to the Tuskegee Airmen and the Navajo Code Talkers. Because of the racial segregation in the military during WWII I suspect that none of the WASPs were women of color. I may be wrong about that, of course.

Still,* the stories of the WASPs are worth remembering. From Women Aloft (p. 153):

Women pilots compiled an enviable record. The WASPs delivered 12,650 planes of 77 different types. Fully 50 per cent of the ferrying of high-speed pursuit planes in the United States was done by WASPs. On these and other assignments, they flew a total of 60 million miles. Of the 1,830 women admitted to the WASP program, 1,074 graduated and 38 lost their lives. None was mourned more than Evelyn Sharp, one of the most experienced ferry pilots, who died when she was thrown through the canopy of her P-38 as she crash-landed near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Since she was a civilian and did not qualify for death benefits, her fellow pilots took up a collection to help pay for her funeral. Although they were not officially entitled to do so, the townspeople of her hometown of Ord, Nebraska, draped her coffin with an American flag.

----
*Fixed this because it was a bad transition and didn't say what I intended.