Husbands who work long hours can hurt women's careers (by Suzie)

Cornell University sent out this news release:

Decades of progress may have earned women their place at the office, but it hasn’t won them an equal partnership in the home – and that puts hard-working women at a distinct disadvantage to their male peers.

Youngjoo Cha, Cornell doctoral candidate in sociology, finds that having a husband who works 50 hours or more per week can hurt women’s careers. Women have less time available to do paid work because they still are expected to do more housework and perform most of the caregiving responsibilities, as reported in “Reinforcing Separate Spheres: The Effect of Spousal Overwork on Men’s and Women’s Employment in Dual-Earner Households” in the April 2010 edition of American Sociological Review, a peer-reviewed journal, published by the American Sociological Association.

Cha’s work looked at 8,484 professional workers and 17,648 nonprofessional workers from dual-earner families, using data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau. Her analysis shows that overall, having a husband who works 60 hours or more per week increases a woman’s odds of quitting by 42 percent. However, for husbands, having a wife who works 60 hours or more per week does not significantly affect a man’s odds of quitting. The odds of quitting increase by 51 percent for professional women whose husbands work 60 hours or more per week, and for professional mothers the odds they will quit their jobs jumps 112 percent. By contrast, for professional men, both parents and non-parents, the effects a wife working long hours are negligible. Cha says:

“As long work-hours introduce conflict between work and family into many dual-earner families, couples often resolve conflict in ways that prioritize husbands’ careers. Having a husband who works long hours significantly increases a woman’s likelihood of quitting, while having a wife who works long hours does not affect a man’s likelihood of quitting.

“This effect is magnified among workers in professional and managerial occupations, where the norm of overwork and the culture of intensive parenting tend to be strongest. The findings suggest that the prevalence of overwork may lead many dual-earner couples to return to a separate spheres arrangement -- breadwinning men and homemaking women.”

I don't have access to the full study, and so, I don't know the results for nonprofessional workers. LiveScience has some more details.

I wonder what the researcher thought of the first sentence, which, I assume, was written by a PR person. It uses "hard work" as a synonym for "overwork." We need to stop the myth of hard-worker = time spent in the office. The first sentence also seems to suggest that women are equal at work, but not at home. I must have missed that news.

What happens at home needs to change, but change also is needed at work. This has been said for years, but workers need more flexible hours, and employers need to let employees work from home. Workers need to be allowed to reduce hours without losing benefits or being stigmatized.

Our current system is institutionalized sexism. Bosses may not discriminate on purpose, but they should know that the expectation of long hours, not all of them compensated, will take a greater toll on women.

Friday critter blogging (by Suzie)

Although this was shot elsewhere, my apartment complex gets flocks of white ibis.

Single Dads?

Those would be cassowaries, large flightless birds found in New Guinea and northeastern Australia:

The breeding season starts in May or June. Females lay three to eight large, dark bright green or pale green-blue eggs in each clutch into a prepared heap of leaf litter.[8] These eggs measure about 9 by 14 centimetres (3.5 by 5.5 in) — only Ostrich and Emu eggs are larger. The female does not care for the eggs or the chicks but moves on to lay eggs in the nests of several other males. The male incubates the eggs for 50–52 days, removing or adding litter to regulate the temperature, then protects the brown-striped chicks who stay in the nest for about nine months, defending them fiercely against all potential predators, including humans.

Here's a picture of a dad and his chicks:





I realized that I find it hard not to view the male bird as the mother! Either I'm applying traditional human gender roles to these birds or defining the more hands-on (claws-on?) type of parenting as "mothering" rather than "fathering."

An example of the sneaky effects of our cultural indoctrination.

It can also be interesting to speculate about why the cassowaries' sexual division of labor is advantageous for them.

We All Do It!

That seems to be the message on violent threats and politics:

Well, given that Thomas Jefferson was called the Antichrist by members of the Federalist Party, the pitched emotions at a major political crossroads perhaps aren't so surprising – nor are threats against lawmakers.

Instead, this moment is a part of what the American political process is, say some political analysts: Every major shift in policy or political direction is a revolution in miniature, with both sides retreating toward the radical to rhetorically demonize the other.

The Republicans ratchet up the anger over the country's changing direction. The Democrats play to fears by painting large swaths of Americans as radicals, racists, and rabble-rousers.

False equivalence. It ignores the fact that the Republicans also paint large swaths of Americans as radicals, communists and rabble-rousers and THEN threaten violence.

Remember this?






The article I quote is sloppy research at best and at worst an attempt to make the threats of violence and actual acts of violence look like "politics as usual." I suspect the latter because of this bit:

The incidents – and the accusations and counter-accusations that followed – are parts of a recurring cycle, says Mr. Geer.

Move on! Nothing to see here.

The Answer to Yesterday's Quiz!

Not really a quiz but a p.s. question in my post about the stereotype threat. I asked if anyone found something a bit off in the Wikipedia discussion of the issue.

This is what I had in mind: The piece begins

One published meta-analysis conducted by Walton & Spencer (2009) found significant evidence that stereotype threat impairs the standardized test performances of African Americans and women on the SAT.[2] However, an unpublished meta-analysis of 55 published and unpublished studies shows mixed evidence of this effect.[3]

We have one published study pointing one way and one unpublished study pointing the other way and these are given equal weight. What's wrong with that?

This:

A recent metaanalysis by Wicherts et al.[3] states that the literature on stereotype threat is an extreme example of publication bias, or the file drawer effect. Many researchers have attempted to replicate the effect, but those studies that find positive results are more likely to be published. For every published study that finds an effect, there is another study that finds no evidence of stereotype threat, or even a negative effect (black performance higher under stereotype threat). Moreover, the few null effect studies that have been published, such as the large-scale studies by Educational Testing Service,[12] have the most statistical power and more closely resemble real testing situations. This meta-analysis, however, was rejected for publication because of numerous flaws...

My bolds.

The Wikipedia anticipates a finding which has not yet been observed! And this anticipation is given the same weight as already published work. This smells off.

It would have been perfectly fine to refer to an unpublished study, assuming a manuscript is available for those who want to read it. But to give it so much weight in the discussion, especially given that it was rejected for publication suggests to me that the writer of this article has a prior bias.'

Happy April Fools' Day!

My Feminism Series

Because of stupid Blogger (sticks out tongue, screws eyes), my old permalinks are wrong. Here are the new links to the feminism series (or at least the first seven posts in it):

1. The Right To Go Out
2. The Planet of the Guys.
3. Our Father Who Art in Heaven
4. The Invisible Women
5. The Female Body As Property
6. The Longest Revolution
7. Penis Envy

Note that there's overlap in some of the posts because I wrote them from a different stance than the one I usually employ.

The Stereotype Threat

GH sent me a link to a study which attempts to measure the impact of sexual objectification on the cognitive performance of women subjected to it. The topic is fascinating and so are the ways the study tries to mimic the sexual gaze. But a total sample size of just twenty-five women makes me reluctant to draw any firm conclusions from it.

The question posed in that study reminded me of the stereotype threat, though having your brain freeze because of wolf whistles might or might not fall under that rubric. A stereotype threat is*

a disruptive concern, when facing a negative stereotype, that one will be evaluated based on this stereotype

It was first observed operating in various testing situations. African-Americans, Latinos and women in general tend to test lower when the test is preceded by something which elicits negative stereotypes about the group the test-taker belongs to.

Why does this happen? Evidence suggests that priming the negative stereotype inside the test-taker's mind reduces working memory capacity or increases her or his mental load.

It sounds a bit like the hoped-for effect of the insults sports fans toss at the opposing team when they want their own team to win, except that the stereotype threat is internalized and triggering it doesn't require actual slurs or insults. A study on women's performance in chess demonstrates this pretty clearly.
----
*Do you see anything odd about the way this Wikipedia article goes?

Beauty Hong Kong Style: Hundred Pounds Or Less

This article talks about eating disorders among women in Hong Kong, though it frames it as dieting/slimming:

Agatha Yau, a marketing executive, is one of these women. She has done many things over the years to stay trim: taken diet pills, eaten meals of boiled vegetables and practiced delaying gratification.

"Sometimes, I'll look at the food and just smell it," Yau, 22, says one morning as she has her breakfast — a skim caramel macchiato from Starbucks. "I think to myself that once I get married and have kids, I'll be able to eat it" because there'll be less pressure to diet.

"Guys here are so small and skinny," she adds. "They need to feel masculine, and they don't if you're bigger than them."

In most developed parts of the world, women feel pressure to be thin. But such pressure is especially intense in Asia— in places like Hong Kong, Seoul and Tokyo— where scores of skinny women seem always to be looking for ways to get even skinnier. Experts say dieting in Asia tends to be more extreme than in the West because of cultural perceptions of beauty.

"The magic number is to be below 100 pounds, no matter your height or your weight," says Philippa Yu, a clinical psychologist at the Hong Kong Eating Disorders Association.

In Asia, women want to stay skinny without exercising because muscles aren't considered a feminine feature, says Sing Lee, director of the Hong Kong Eating Disorders Center at Chinese University.

I bolded the two opinions which point out the role of the culture as a cause of eating disorders. The social norms in the U.S. are somewhat different. You can have some muscles, as long as they are not large and as long as you are slim but with big breasts. That combination is about as common without serious interventions than the idea that all women in Hong Kong should weigh less than hundred pounds.

How very odd that I haven't really written about women and body image on this blog! Perhaps that is because I have so much to say on the topic? Too much to squeeze into posts which may drop into the ether as isolated bits not conveying all the complications in the issues?

Well, I'm certainly going to write more on it in the future. For the time being it might be enough to point out that eating disorders are dangerous.

Anorexia can kill in extreme forms and not eating properly when young has been shown to have a correlation with osteoporosis in later life. Vomiting, associated with some types of bulemia, can destroy one's teeth. Permanent dieting deprives the body of necessary nutrients and the energy that could be used for something else.
---
I chose the picture for this post both because distorted body image can be part of some eating disorders and because the mirror can be viewed as the distorting messages of the culture.

Read My Archives

If you have nothing better to do. This piece on Penis Envy is a pretty nice one even if I say so myself. It's part of that series of posts I wrote in defense of feminism.

Or you might like to read more about how I review studies and their popularizations.

Repentance During The Holy Week of Christianity

Both Maureen Dowd and Ross Douthat write about the child molestation scandal of the Catholic church, and both focus on repentance. That's where the similarities end. Dowd (whom I should praise for finally taking off the anti-feminist lenses):

If the church could throw open its stained glass windows and let in some air, invite women to be priests, nuns to be more emancipated and priests to marry, if it could banish criminal priests and end the sordid culture of men protecting men who attack children, it might survive. It could be an encouraging sign of humility and repentance, a surrender of arrogance, both moving and meaningful.

Douthat also advocates contrition:

For those of us who admire the pope, either possibility is distressing, but neither should come as a great surprise. The lesson of the American experience, now exhaustively documented, is that almost everyone was complicit in the scandal. From diocese to diocese, the same cover-ups and gross errors of judgment repeated themselves regardless of who found themselves in charge. Neither theology nor geography mattered: the worst offenders were Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston and Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles — a conservative and a liberal, on opposite ends of the country.

This hasn't prevented both sides in the Catholic culture war from claiming that the scandal vindicates their respective vision of the church. Liberal Catholics, echoed by the secular press, insist that the whole problem can be traced to clerical celibacy. Conservatives blame the moral relativism that swept the church in the upheavals of the 1970s, when the worst abuses and cover-ups took place.

In reality, the scandal implicates left and right alike. The permissive sexual culture that prevailed everywhere, seminaries included, during the silly season of the '70s deserves a share of the blame, as does that era's overemphasis on therapy. (Again and again, bishops relied on psychiatrists rather than common sense in deciding how to handle abusive clerics.) But it was the church's conservative instincts — the insistence on institutional loyalty, obedience and the absolute authority of clerics — that allowed the abuse to spread unpunished.

...

Popes do not resign. But a pope can clean house. And a pope can show contrition, on his own behalf and on behalf of an entire generation of bishops, for what was done and left undone in one of Catholicism's darkest eras.

This is Holy Week, when the first pope, Peter, broke faith with Christ and wept for shame. There is no better time for repentance.

Parsing the differences in the two opinion pieces can be enlightening.

What struck me the most was that bit about the 1970's culture in Douthat's piece. I have no idea if data on child molestation prior to the 1970's exists anywhere, but it would be interesting to see if all the molestation in fact started during that lewd decade. Especially given that the famous extreme Catholic, Bill Donohue, used an argument having to do with the zeitgeist of the 1970's, too.

Donohue also argues that the Catholic church is taken to task for something which "everybody did" and that this is unfair. Here's where I disagree, most strongly.

Religious organizations should be held to higher standards than the average person in the street or even the average person holding secular authority.

They tell us that they are speaking on behalf of a divine source, after all. They tell us how we should live our lives, what is wrong and what is right. For all this they get freedom from taxes, lots of kowtowing and respect. Something has to be given in return, and at a minimum that something should be higher ethical standards of personal behavior.

The Black Widows

The horrible bombings in Moscow have drawn attention to the gender of the suicide bombers there. The New York Times :

The women, who came to be called the Black Widows, were not the first women to die this way. That dubious honor goes to a 16 year old Palestinian girl, who drove a truck into an Israeli army convoy in 1985. The Indian prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, was killed in 1991 by a member of the Birds of Paradise, a female group associated with the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka.

Suicide bombing was a tactic that came late to Chechnya and was nearly unknown during the first war from 1994 to 1996. But once it arrived, in 2000, in an attack that killed 27 Russian special forces soldiers, it quickly became associated with women.

...

While there is no single reason women decide to give up their lives, experts say they have usually suffered a traumatic event that makes them burn with revenge or question whether they want to live. This can be the death of a child, husband or other family member at the hands of Russian forces or a rape. Russian authorities have said the women are sometimes drugged.

And why do men become suicide bombers or terrorists? What drives them to do that?

That question is not asked as often which is insulting to men. It's as if all men could just become suicide bombers and we don't really have to wonder about the reasons they have, however distorted they may be.

Stripped Bare

Sometimes cultures collide. I was reading about Iceland banning strip clubs and then about the Republican National Committee spending almost $2,000 on a strip club visit. In both cases the strippers are likely to be women, the customers men.

Iceland is not the United States. It is much, much smaller (with 320,000 people, and much more homogeneous):

Even more impressive: the Nordic state is the first country in the world to ban stripping and lapdancing for feminist, rather than religious, reasons. Kolbrún Halldórsdóttir, the politician who first proposed the ban, firmly told the national press on Wednesday: "It is not acceptable that women or people in general are a product to be sold." When I asked her if she thinks Iceland has become the greatest feminist country in the world, she replied: "It is certainly up there. Mainly as a result of the feminist groups putting pressure on parliamentarians. These women work 24 hours a day, seven days a week with their campaigns and it eventually filters down to all of society."

...

According to Icelandic police, 100 foreign women travel to the country annually to work in strip clubs. It is unclear whether the women are trafficked, but feminists say it is telling that as the stripping industry has grown, the number of Icelandic women wishing to work in it has not.

I don't think the U.S. could have passed such a ban, given the way the RNC visit is written up:

Records show the Republican National Committee dropped $1,946 at a West Hollywood, Calif. strip club last month, but a spokesperson insisted that RNC chairman Michael Steele was not among the ooglers.

...

In a review last October, the Los Angeles Times said the bar's "dark, leather-heavy interior is reminiscent of the masked orgy scene" in "Eyes Wide Shut," the 1999 Stanley Kubrick film starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.

The club features a heavy net suspended above the lounge area where topless performers - dressed in little more than masks and bikini-bottoms - writhe above the heads of clubgoers, the paper reported.

"Even more provocative scenes," the paper added, "are played out in an enclosed glass booth area adjacent to the club's dance floor area."

The kinky costs come at a time when Steele is already under fire from many within the GOP for his high-flying ways.

Astute readers may have noticed that the Iceland link is to the Guardian and the U.S. link to the New York Daily News, and that these are not comparable newspapers. But note that even in the Guardian this topic is filed under "Lifestyles."

That's where we stand: The Icelandic ban on strip clubs is under lifestyles/women and the U.S. coverage is a concern about spending tax money on the titillation of men who work for the Republican party.

Where the Boyz Are

Nicholas Kristoff's recent piece in the New York Times discusses the gender gap in education: boys and men doing worse than girls and women. I have written about this topic many, many times in the past, largely to point out several aspects of the problem which have been ignored in the U.S. discussion. These omissions reduce the clarity of the debate.

The first of these is that the gender gap is not something specifically American or even specifically Western. In Iran, for example, about 60% of university students are female.

What this means is that the lower reading scores of boys in the United States are not because of the Evil Feminists and how they have changed schools in the recent decades. That a country such as Iran, with explicit policies discriminating against girls and women, has a greater gender gap than the U.S. (where everybody knows feminazis rule) refutes the anti-feminist argument. Whatever causes boys to do worse in some areas of education is pretty universal and thus cannot be linked to feminism.

A second important point that is always ignored has to do with the most important reason why anybody goes to college. This is the ability of a college education to raise a person's future earnings, compared to what is available without it.

And it is in the average earnings of men and women with just a high school degree that we find a large difference: Even today, after years of outsourcing, many traditionally male occupations (electricians, police officers and plumbers, say) offer a pretty good salary, and one which can be obtained without spending an additional four years at school after high school graduation. Remember that going to college costs both money and time. If you can find an OK job without going, you are more likely to do just that.

The traditionally female occupations (retail and clerical jobs, say) based on only high school education pay nowhere near as much, on average. Indeed, a woman may have to get a college degree to reach comparable levels of earnings as the blue-collar occupations I mentioned.

In the U.S. the military offers another occupational avenue for men in the college-going age groups. Though women are of course entitled to enter those better-paying blue-collar occupations and the military, choosing a non-traditional path is not at all easy. Women may experience sexual harassment when entering traditionally male blue-collar industries or be ostracized or just find themselves in a small lonely minority.

Kristoff's article doesn't address these issues. (But then I haven't noticed anybody addressing them.) Instead, he refers to an education writer called Richard Whitmire, the author of a new book called Why Boys Fail:

Mr. Whitmire argues that the basic problem is an increased emphasis on verbal skills, often taught in sedate ways that bore boys. "The world has gotten more verbal," he writes. "Boys haven't."

Has the world gotten more verbal? What did people do in the olden times, then? "Og take rock. Og slam rock on head of enemy?" What about Shakespeare, Goethe, T.S. Eliot? And how did the world get more verbal if one gender did not?

Interesting questions, all, especially given the decline in reading in general. But note the reference to teaching in sedate ways that bore boys. That was enough to make me go and read Whitmire's blog on this topic. Whether it's my unerring instinct for this kind of crap or my humongous verbality, I immediately found an opinion piece he had written in 2006 on affirmative action in college admissions for men. Here's how he sells the idea to women:

The dilemma admissions directors face is also a problem for the nation generally. The number of boys who are either qualified for college or want to go to college is in an alarming decline, and if it has gone unnoticed by the general public, it hasn't on campus. Men make up only 43% of college populations. At many colleges, the percentage of men has dropped to less than 40%, the tipping point where social relations get strained.

Admission directors prefer to keep the gender balance at 55% female and 45% male. But that requires taking in boys who on paper look less qualified.

Not everyone does that. The admissions director at American University in Washington, D.C., takes the position that boys and girls should be assessed equally. The result: AU's student population is two-thirds female.

That might be fine for American, but more broadly, having too few college-educated men will hurt U.S. competitiveness. And if girls who lose out now feel cheated, they won't when they're seeking mates or when their own sons are bound for college.

Emphasis is mine. I love that sentence! I guess those "cheated" girls will not have any daughters which also might feel cheated? None of them are looking for female partners? None of them will remain childless?

But we can also do a gender reversal on that bolded sentence and argue that we shouldn't have affirmative action for men! Because those men who don't get into college will feel OK later on when their daughters get in!

I may have hit upon the only biased piece Whitmire has ever written there. It's quite possible. But the argument that women should sorta gracefully give way to men because ultimately that's better for themselves is very, very common whenever the gender gap in education is discussed. It is a condescending and stupid argument, and whenever it is used I smell a player of the zero-sum game. It would be much more honest to argue that a person is for gender quotas in higher education. It would even be possible to make a fairly good case for such quotas without insisting that they are for the good of women and girls.

Well Past The Limits of Tolerance by Anthony McCarthy

As a long time student of the absurd lengths to which people will go to defend an abstract principle in denial of pressing reality, the news item about the “suicide voyeur” William Melchert-Dinkel, a 47 year old man from St Paul Minnesota, is a compelling example of how bad an intellectual pose can get.

Pretending he was a women half his age,* Dinkel trolled suicide websites (NB) and encouraged people to kill themselves in front of web cams for his sexual gratification. He’s suspected in at least five suicides and was believed to have encouraged as many as a hundred around the world. While pursuing his “suicide fetish (sic)” he worked as a nurse in hospitals and nursing homes.

After years of doing this he was outed by Celia Blay, a 64-year-old woman with few technical skills, who tracked him down when police refused to become involved. The details of the case are pretty awful but even worse is the fact that the criminally degenerate Dinkel will likely get off without prosecution in the United States. As he has put it

"Nothing is going to come of it, ... I've moved on with my life, and that's it."

And, given the free speech fetish in our current legal culture, he’s probably right. As he moves on with his life, his victims will, of course, not. The law that St. Paul police used to finally stop him, for now, is likely to not be deemed to cover internet predators of his kind, encouraging people to kill themselves for his gratification on web-cams. If he never serves a sentence of a day, it wouldn’t be surprising. Here is how Jonathan Turley puts it:

Turley said that if prosecutors file charges against Melchert-Dinkel, convicting him would be difficult, especially if the defense claims freedom of speech.

The law professor said efforts to make it illegal to shout "Jump!" to someone on a bridge have not survived constitutional challenges. "What's the difference between calling for someone to jump off a bridge and e-mailing the same exhortation?" he said.

You have to wonder, if the law is unable to prosecute Dinkel for what he’s done so far, how is it supposed to stop him if while “moving on with his life”, he starts right up all over again? And you can be certain that if he’s done it, there are many others. If there aren’t, now that his example has been made public, there will be. The internet has made it possible for people like this to find an unlimited supply of vulnerable victims, destroying them from the relative safety of virtual anonymity. Just as an aside, you can be sure that there will be some people doing this with skills that would prevent future Celia Bleys from finding them.

If the over-hallowed documents that our fabled, 18th century founders imposed on 2010 are unable to prevent this kind of degenerate from preying on vulnerable people, cheating them of far more than just their “free speech” rights, then they are inadequate for our present environment.

The absolutist viewpoint, removing any legal restraints from depravity up to and including encouraging vulnerable people to kill themselves on camera, is the one that is currently in vogue everywhere from the left to the far right of the Supreme Court. As Turley put it, “ if the defense claims freedom of speech,” that is the magic formula that grants a carte blanche in just about every case, these days. From this case, we can see just how little regard for peoples’ lives some of those civil libertarians really have. We can see how much power they are prepared to allow someone with no morals and a sick fetish to have over the vulnerable. In a libertarian system, power always triumphs. Libertarians believe they are the champions of freedom, when they’re exactly the opposite of that. A tyranny outside of government, allowed by government, is worse than the possibility of a tyrannical government. The present situation is an instance of government shirking the first reason that it is instituted, defense against danger.

But this legal fashion has other dangers as well, which could lead to exactly the consequence it pretends to prevent.

Eventually this situation will pass the point where people will tolerate it and a reaction will come. The danger of that will be, of course, that the enemies of speech vitally important to freedom and self-government will gain the upper hand and destroy the real value of the First Amendment. For today’s self-professed free speech industry to turn a blind eye to this is grotesquely irresponsible. In this case they proudly put their conception of “free speech” over the lives of the victims of these sickest of predators. Ultimately they endanger important speech merely on the excuse that it’s dangerous for governments and courts to make distinctions among different kinds of speech.

But that is fundamentally dishonest. The very business of governments and courts is to make judgment calls. Every single law that is passed and every case that is decided in some way is a gamble on whether or not the human being making it will make the right decision. To pretend that it is impossible to distinguish between the right to advocate the civil rights of a minority or the need for economic justice and Dinkel’s pursuit of his death fetish is about as absurd as it gets. To pretend that government and the law are unable to make that distinction is to pretend that it isn’t what they do now.** It’s what judges and lawyers do every single day they go to work. And it is to call into question the very basis on which government acts to produce an effectively beneficial result.

When I first decided to write about this I was going to concentrate on the horrific crimes of Dinkel but after reading some of the stories, the fact that our legal system is set up to protect him instead of his victims, in the name of “free speech”, turned out to be the bigger story.

* Some of his known aliases are "Li Dao," "Cami" and "Falcon Girl." I’d guess it’s important that he was posing as a woman and pretending to be sympathetic to his victims, especially given his identification of this as a “fetish”. If you want to see how depraved this is:

"im just tryin to help you do what is best for you not me," one message said, posted using the alias "Cami." Kajouji's mother said she was given a transcript by Ottawa police.

In another exchange, "Cami" tried to persuade Kajouji to hang herself instead of jumping into a freezing river: "if you wanted to do hanging we could have done it together on line so it would not have been so scary for you"

** Oddly enough, many speech absolutists don't have any problem with restrictions on the basis of repeating commercial speech. Of course, that speech is usually the "property" of the wealthy and so powerful.

NB: Suicide websites, websites that encourage suicidal people to kill themselves, websites that encourage anorexia as a lifestyle choice and a myriad of others like them are freely available to their potential victims. The ability of anyone with self-doubts to be able to come across these basically changes the world, it isn’t something that can be addressed with the bromides and platitudes of the 1970s anymore than it can those of 1790. Some changes in the environment are so strong that they force changes in even our most sacred assumptions. I think they will force a heightened level of responsibility on the society, like it or not. Pretending that isn’t the case won’t do anything to produce good results or preserve freedom.

Also note, I am fully in favor of laws allowing suicide for people with terminal illnesses, that isn't what this is about.

‘Avatar’ (by Suzie)

After “Avatar” became the highest-grossing movie ever in the world, and its technology touted as the future of film, I figured I needed to see it, despite the criticisms.

Google “avatar” and “racist,” and you get a number of hits. Google “avatar” and “sexist,” and you get much less, and those links generally include racism, too.

This may be due to different interactions between races and between genders. There are few communities that are overwhelmingly female. Offhand, I can’t think of any drama that compares a group of women with a group of men. In “Avatar,” the comparison is between humans and a humanoid species that lives in balance with nature. But many people see a racial comparison because the hero and the main villain are white, as are many of the troops, and the Na’vi, the moon’s indigenous inhabitants, are blue.

David Brooks says “Avatar” is the White Messiah fable:

the oft-repeated story about a manly young adventurer who goes into the wilderness in search of thrills and profit. But, once there, he meets the native people and finds that they are noble and spiritual and pure. And so he emerges as their Messiah, leading them on a righteous crusade against his own rotten civilization.

Yeah, I’m sick of the “noble savage” stereotype, too. But this isn’t just a fantasy among white people. Many people want to find, or return to, an Eden; a golden age; a simpler, more spiritual life in harmony with nature. Or, go to the Renaissance Faire. In reaction to the negative portrayals by imperialists, many colonized people talk of a traditional time when life was better, without acknowledging that it may not have been better for some people at some times.

“Avatar,” “Dances with Wolves” and others of their ilk can be read as rebuking imperialist ideas that the dominant society either shouldn’t care about ignorant, heathen savages or else needs to save the savages from themselves.

On io9, Annalee Newitz refers to a variation on this theme. She calls “Avatar”

the white guilt fantasy, laid bare. It's not just a wish to be absolved of the crimes whites have committed against people of color; it's not just a wish to join the side of moral justice in battle. It's a wish to lead people of color from the inside rather than from the (oppressive, white) outside.

I have no doubt that “Avatar” creator James Cameron would like to right wrongs against people of color. But “the king of the world” wants to lead everyone, from any which way, and he uses his avatar, his hero, to do so. (Maybe the movie fulfills another fantasy for Cameron, who has married five times. The Na’vi mate for life, and they bond with animals for life.)

In addition to race, the formula of an outsider leading insiders has been applied to age, nationality, region of the country, city vs. rural, ability, etc., in movies.

“When will whites stop making these movies [like 'Avatar'] and start thinking about race in a new way?” Newitz asks. That’s the wrong question. Mine is: How can we diversify Hollywood, in which the producers, directors and writers are overwhelmingly white men? When asked about better roles for women, Zoe Saldana, who plays Neytiri, says: “If there were more filmmakers that were female, trust me, it would be all about women.”

Some people think “Avatar” redeems itself from accusations of racism because Jake, the hero, chooses to become Na’vi. But Newitz says Avatar is

a fantasy about ceasing to be white … but never losing white privilege. Jake never really knows what it's like to be a Na'vi because he always has the option to switch back into human mode.

I wonder if she would apply the same reasoning to men who transition to women. Would she say that transwomen retain male privilege or that they can never understand what it’s like to truly be female?

I assume Zoe Saldana doesn’t consider “Avatar” racist. Donna Britt, of Politics Daily, found the movie “an indictment of intolerance” despite having a white hero. (I'm linking to a Google search because the direct link isn’t working for me.) I saw the movie with a friend, who enjoyed it, as I did, although she called it a “typical American movie” for focusing on a white man.

In a similar way, some women have grown accustomed to seeing male heroes in action movies, with the men often saving at least one woman. The hero’s journey is inextricably linked to masculinity. Men are expected to have adventures, take risks, be brave, be leaders, get rewards.

I don’t agree with Joseph Campbell’s idea of a universal myth, a monomith. But long before the West invented racial categories, there were plenty of stories about heroes: Young men seeking, or thrown into, adventure; who brave travails; who get advice from a mentor; who face the supreme test and are transformed, perhaps even resurrected; who return to their people – or stay with the new people – to help them, often as a leader.

At least Cameron puts women in important roles. “Avatar” has a female scientist; a pilot who supports the renegade humans; the spiritual leader of the Na’vi; her daughter, Neytiri; even a Mother Goddess. All take important action to save one another and the Na’vi. Neytiri saves the hero, Jake, at least twice.

That’s why some women call Cameron feminist, even though he put breasts on the Na’vi women, who are not mammals.

Speaking of bodies, I know some people with disabilities are offended that Jake, a paraplegic, gets the use of his legs back as a Na’vi. They consider it offensive for Jake to be “saved” from his disability. In the movie, however, he comes, not to prove he’s capable, which he is, but because he can fill in for his dead twin brother on an important project. Only villains put him down for his disability. He sides with the Na’vi, but not because that allows him to walk again.

For “Avatar 2”: Jake and Neytiri honeymoon in New York, and everyone wants to be a tall, blue catperson for one season.

A Small Corrupt Clique of Men Shouldn’t Rule Anything by Anthony McCarthy

The wider influence of religion and other institutions should always be based solely on the demonstration of active justice and morality. Those acts should be continual and ongoing, they shouldn’t be allowed to rest on the acts of other people in the past. The granting of political and social influence by mere assumption and rote stipulation is one of the worst features of organized religion through history. Religious texts from most traditions give warnings about people who put on robes and assume titles and with those the influence and, worst of all, power unwisely given on the appearance of religious sincerity. The scriptures, no less, of Buddhism and Christianity are quite explicit about phonies in religious dress, as are popular songs. The tendency to corruption among the clergy of established religion apparently isn’t entirely abandoned in countries without established religions.

Today’s Catholic hierarchy has forfeited its claims to respect and should be stripped of its general political influence. Its lackies, such as Bill Donohue, shouldn’t automatically get their ranting voices in the media. It has absolutely no credibility in the area of sexual morality, none whatsoever, its heavy hand on legislation dealing with sexuality and reproduction should be cut off as the offending one.

To a lot of Catholics and ex-Catholics, one of the minor annoyances of the gradually building scandal of clergy sexual abuse and enablement by the hierarchy is the hypocrisy of the hierarchs. The small clique of unmarried men who rule the church could be counted on to explain their stamping out any small progressive deviation from their rigid preferences with the phrase “it give scandal”. And now they, themselves, have given the church the biggest scandal since the Vatican did in WWII.

While Cardinal Ratzinger and Karol Wojtyla were doing their best to put a stop to the mild reforms of progressives begun during the papacies of John XXIII and even Paul VI* they were also continuing what we’ve found out is a long tradition of treating priests and other church employees abuse of children as a minor personnel problem, their rape and abuse of children as something to be covered up not reported to law enforcement**. I don’t think the two things, centralizing power in the Vatican and the abuse scandal are separate, they are two aspects of the same corruption. And it’s a kind of corruption that isn’t limited to religious institutions but has also arisen in purely secular situations. What it can tell us about some avoidable dangers inherent to institutions is universally important.

Apparently it wasn’t the FACT that children were being abused that was seen as the more serious problem, it was to create the illusion of chastity being maintained by the church. To some extent that was due to the perennial shortage of priests, due to the exclusion of the majority of Catholics from that vocation. When you’ve got priests carrying two or more parishes now, getting rid of the bad ones would leave the ones left stretched past the breaking point. The idea that married men and women were eligible for the priesthood, that there were no scriptural bases for their exclusion was one of the ideas Wojtyla came down hard on as soon as he became pope. No doubt his #1 henchman, Ratzinger concurred in that***.

I think it’s fairly obvious that the clique of unmarried men who run the church has done this primarily in order to maintain their absolute control of the wealth and power of the Catholic Church. I do believe that no other part of the church has had a hand in retaining pedophile priests and enabling their further crimes has been the decision of only unmarried, ordained men. I haven’t been able to find any instance in which a priest was retained or dismissed on the say so of any woman or married man. But it isn’t true that no priests were fired during the period when Ratzinger and his lackies were not only retaining and shuffling around abusive priests and other church employees, there were firings and even defrockings. Consider the case of Sr. Jeannette Normandin and Fr. George Winchester who got thrown out of their jobs at the Paulist Center in Boston.

I’ll concentrate on the case of Sr Normandin because I know people who have told me about their experience with her. They inevitably call her a saint. Sr. Jeannette had founded Ruah House, to care for women with AIDS, she had worked in prisons and among poor people for decades. Her great crime was that she baptized children of gay men who were part of the Paulist Center community. She lost her job, her home and was excluded from her community after giving 53 years to her religious vocation. The Cardinals and Pope who had a say in her dismissal obviously were more bothered by her baptizing children than they were over the rape of children by the priests they retained and reestablished, now we know more than once, so they could continue to abuse children.

It’s especially interesting to contrast how the Cardinals, up to the Pope, who threw her and others, out on these minor points are the same ones who got Cardinal Law out of Boston before he could be indicted for his part in the crimes of the pedophile clergy he enabled and supported.

The biggest scandals in the Catholic Church haven’t been from the majority of its members, it has come from the crimes of its most powerful rulers. They’ve pretty much lost their moral authority, Ratzinger’s part in the cover up was known before the CARDINALS chose to make one of the more corrupt among them pope. The same thug who cracked down on progressives over minor deviations from his preferred neo-medieval revival is now known to have been an enabler of priestly child rapists. What else he might be is yet to come out but I wouldn’t be surprised if this scandal doesn’t get much worse.

I asked one of my observant cousins why she stayed in the church, she said that the church didn’t belong to the pope, “it’s my church”, she said. While that wasn’t the way I took, I respect her and the other Catholics like the late Sr. Normandin who do good work from within the church. There is a lot of good that is done by people in the Church, though I think they owe it to us to make it explicit that their work doesn’t cover up the sins of Popes, Cardinals, Bishops, Priests, some Nuns and Brothers. It doesn’t make up for the child abuse and cover up, the coercion to silence the victims of crimes.

The use of scripture to explain things is a sometimes thing and, at times, a two edged sword. The vast variety of texts by different authors writing in various conditions and of varying experience passed down to us in copies of varying textual quality and authenticity, lends itself to contradiction. But I don’t believe the text in which Jesus said that people who corrupted children would have been better of drowned with a millstone around their neck is really ambiguous. Pope Benedict has had a hand in corrupting children. Many Cardinals such as Bernard Law have permitted the abuse of children. As seen in the recent procurement scandal within the Vatican apparatus it is a place where corruption can go on for quite a while. But this pope, who has been among the greatest proponents of the revival of confession, is stonewalling on his own, disqualifying, sins. The hypocrisy of the conservatives in control of the hierarchy doesn't seem to have a bottom.

I stopped being an active Catholic many years ago, I stopped identifying myself as even a lapsed Catholic later. While I have respect for many Catholics, who are doing good things and who are sincerely trying to be better people, the institution is hopelessly corrupt. Short of opening up the priesthood and the power structure to women and men, regardless of their marital state, the corruption flowing from the all-unmarried-male power structure will never be ended. The extent to which the power held by the Pope is absolute and that by the Cardinals and Bishops as absolute as the Pope will allow, will be the extent to which corruption and crime are incubated.

The Catholic Church in its present form is a good illustration of why non-democratic government will always devolve into criminality and corruption. I think the sincere Catholics deserve a lot better than that, they should stop giving the criminals money, they should demand that power be devolved. They should demand that the windows John XXIII tried to open be opened for good and that the all male power structure give way to something else. The People of the church could hardly do worse.

* Hard to remember how conservative he seemed at the time, isn’t it?

** Part of the early negligence was due to an unsupported faith in the ability of psychology to correct the behavior of pedophiles. The attempt to use psychology to rehabilitate priestly abusers was found, even by some of its early advocates, to be disastrously ineffective.

*** Ratzinger and Wojtyla were especially keen on trying to pin the pedophile scandal on gay men. Gay men are, of course, not automatically pedophiles anymore than straight men are. I, as most gay men I know, hold pedophilia to be an immoral violation of the rights of children, but to be disgusting. The recently revealed procurement scandal within the Vatican Choir is a good indication that the public campaign to purge seminaries of gay men was a PR stunt as well as unjust hypocrisy.

Question for the weekend (by Suzie)

How will the new Affordable Health Care for America Act affect you personally?

I'll go first. Because I pay for Medicare Part D drug coverage, I'm happy that there will be rebates and discounts for those who fall into the doughnut hole, where we have to pay for everything ourselves. I usually fall into it in November or December. The hole will be closed in 10 years.

(Keep in mind that we aren't getting free drugs. I paid $2,000 last year in premiums and out-of-pocket expenses.)

Some of you may be surprised to hear that 16 percent of Medicare recipients are younger than 65, but qualify because of a disability. A lot of people discuss Medicare as if it only affected elders. (For the stats, go to CMS and click on "populations.")

As of 2014, insurance companies cannot discriminate against adults because of pre‐existing conditions and health status. I wonder how that will work in regard to Medigap. Those of us with regular Medicare have to pay a deductible and 20 percent of costs unless we have a private Medigap policy to pick up those expenses. When I got mine in 2004, only one company in my state would write a Medigap policy for someone under 65. No one asked me about my health status, but that wasn't necessary. They already knew that I had to have a serious diagnosis to qualify for Social Security Disability and thus, Medicare.

People under 65 with disabilities are treated differently than seniors. We have to wait two years from the date that we were entitled to Social Security before we get Medicare. For me, that meant two years in a very expensive state risk pool.

I've followed the discussion of health-care reform in regard to gender. But now, I'd like to hear how the whole enchilada will impact you.

Friday critter blogging (by Suzie)

Calling all lizard lovers: Is this a monitor? I swear I'm going to take notes when I take photos in the future. This one comes from Busch Gardens in Tampa.

ETA: Lars says they are Dracaena guianensis - Caiman lizards.

Botswana Music

This is Ronnie. Watch his fingers.

The F-Word

Such an interesting piece about the new direction of Venus which used to be a feminist zine covering "women in music, art, film, fashion, and DIY culture." It has now been sold to a new owner who wants to get rid of that feminism-tag which smells of bra-burning, Birkenstocks and 1970s hirsute women with schoolmarm personalities:

I asked Beardsley about Venus and its commitment to feminism. "That's such a word fraught with interpretation and meaning," she said. "We don't use that particular F word around here. It just doesn't seem relevant." She called feminism "an old-fashioned concept" and explained that "it doesn't enter into our discussions about what we're going to cover and what have you." She said, "We're much more into discovering trends, talent, whatever they are, and they can come in all shapes, sizes, genders, and forms."

And I bet my goddess helmet with the emerald-studded snake decorations that the "trends, talent, whatever they are" come in the exact percentages matching the population percentages of all those "shapes, sizes, genders and forms." We now live in post-patriarchy and therefore fifty-plus percentage of the reported talent will be attached to a female "shape, size, gender or form."

But in that case why have a zine aimed at women in the first place?

There was no winter 2010 issue of Venus, but the spring issue, Beardsley's first, was given away at South by Southwest and it'll be on the stands March 30. It carries a note from the new owner telling readers, "You prove that smart, creative women are a force to be reckoned with."

If feminism is no longer relevant, surely the general magazines of the field cover women quite adequately?

I find this fascinating, because a) it will allow me to get going with that cannibalism book supposed to be my big project in the F-word utopia, and because b) the general definition Beardsley gives us about her plans does sound a bit like some new definitions of feminism. And I no longer need to write this blog! (High-fives herself.)

A Nasty Post on Women And Religion

Jodi has written an excellent post on the reasons why nobody should listen to the U.S. Catholic bishops as the arbiter of morality. Read it and grit your teeth.

And what about the Pope himself?

Top Vatican officials — including the future Pope Benedict XVI — did not defrock a priest who molested as many as 200 deaf boys, even though several American bishops repeatedly warned them that failure to act on the matter could embarrass the church, according to church files newly unearthed as part of a lawsuit.

The internal correspondence from bishops in Wisconsin directly to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, shows that while church officials tussled over whether the priest should be dismissed, their highest priority was protecting the church from scandal.

The documents emerge as Pope Benedict is facing other accusations that he and direct subordinates often did not alert civilian authorities or discipline priests involved in sexual abuse when he served as an archbishop in Germany and as the Vatican’s chief doctrinal enforcer.

Perhaps Ratzinger was way too busy writing about how women can never be priests and how people should not use condoms as a protection against HIV in Africa?

An alien from outer space would not be able to get its head (if it has one) around the way we decide on whose values matter. Stupak listened to the Catholic bishops, a celibate group of men, on the question of women's sexuality. Millions of people listen to Pope Ratzo, another celibate man who put his church ahead of the abused children, on the question of women's roles in the society. It sounds like a surrealistic play.

Here comes the nasty part: The reason why the Catholic bishops and the Pope have so much power is that they run a gigantic religious organization with many believers who give them money. They have power. What they say affects the behavior of hundreds of millions of people on this planet, and anyone who wants the votes, say, of some of those people must at least pretend to listen to the bishops and the Pope.

And many, many of those believers are women. Indeed, the majority of church goers in the Catholic church are women, and this is true for other forms of Christianity, too. It may be true for all the Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Islam and Christianity. It may be true for all religions.

Most women on this planet stay faithful to religious organizations which will not want to share power with them, which have holy texts full of misogyny and which in their extreme forms support societal structures completely unfair to women.

Yes, I understand the reasons for women's religious fidelity. Spirituality is channeled into the avenues that exist where you are born. Community is built around religion. Religion succors those who have less power.

I even understand how hard (and even dangerous) it is to tear oneself away from shared community values and approval, even when those values are bad and the approval based on a role which slowly suffocates you, and I certainly understand the fear of infinite hell if one believes in that. But it is still true that misogynistic religions would have less power if fewer women supported them, if more women spoke openly against the misogyny and refused to participate in it.

The consequences of such rebellious acts are not the same for all women, and I'm not advocating suicidal acts here. But most women will not be stoned to death for asking questions about their religion or for demanding more access to its corridors of power.

And no, I'm not arguing that religions must by default be misogynistic or that atheism is the only feminist answer. But it's necessary to note that silence can be interpreted as acquiescence.

Meanwhile, in Ukraine

The new all-male cabinet of Ukraine is not an accident, as told by the new prime minister, Mykola Azarov:

Women's groups in Ukraine have angrily reported Azarov – who presides over an all-male cabinet – to the country's ombudsman following his remarks last week. They accuse him of gender discrimination and holding Neanderthal views.

Speaking on Friday, Azarov said Ukraine's economic problems were too difficult for any woman to handle.

"Some say our government is too large; others that there are no women," he said. "There's no one to look at during cabinet sessions: they're all boring faces. With all respect to women, conducting reforms is not women's business."

There ya go. Women should stay in the kitchen.

But isn't it interesting how only feminists are supposed to be angered by this? I guess everyone else thinks the comment was perfectly appropriate.

My impression is that most of the countries which used to belong to either the Soviet Union or the old Soviet bloc have lots of open sexism of this pre-feminism type.

The World Of the Wealthy

Is a planet which revolves around a sun made out of real gold and diamonds:

Six of eight managers who had their 2009 awards set by Feinberg, the Obama administration's special master on executive pay, had their overall packages increased this year, according to a Treasury Department report released today. Chief Executive Officer Robert Benmosche has said that AIG must offer competitive pay to keep employees needed to repay its rescue.

Feinberg, who controls pay for AIG's 25 highest-paid employees, last year slashed overall compensation for that group by about 58 percent and instituted a $500,000 base salary cap for most workers. The majority of the employees who were among the top 25 when the insurer was bailed out in 2008 have left the company, and those new to the group had their 2010 awards lowered, on average.

It's that word "competitive" that deserves further attention, because I don't think the markets for top executives in this field are at all competitive. Neither do I quite understand why the skills of destroying a financial market are so rare that one needs to pay huge amounts for people who were doing that.

I understand that AIG is not necessarily rewarding the people who broke the market as the current crop of executives appears to have been hired recently. But that's the argument I read whenever someone defends the very high compensation packages of financial market executives: The skills and talent required are so rare that all the firms are fighting for a small handful of supermen (and an even smaller number of superwomen).

Of course such a market wouldn't be "competitive" in the first place but a monopolistic one. But if those people are truly so scarce, why not hire me? I'm pretty sure I can destroy a market. Can't be harder than goddessing.
---
Hat tip to moonbootica.

Signing The Executive Order

In silence. (Read the whole post. Do NOT read the comments if you feel serene and happy right now.)

Still, this is an improvement on the Stupak amendment because it doesn't (necessarily) expand the Hyde amendment to the private expenses of individuals. That's not much of a consolation, I know, to those of us who don't like the Hyde amendment.

I don't have the right to refuse the use of my taxes on illegal wars and the killing of innocents abroad, but those who are against abortion do have the right to refuse the use of their taxes for medically necessary abortions, as long as the woman will not die right there and then.

Perhaps we should start campaigning for a Dr. Jekyll amendment so that everyone gets to determine the specifics of how their taxes are used?

Just kidding there, and not too successfully.

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