Sex Segregation -- The Return

Ruth Rosen has written an excellent article on the new sex segregation in media:

Forty years ago, feminists demanded that special "women's pages," which featured fashion, society and cooking, be banished from newspapers. Instead, they insisted, newspapers should mainstream serious stories about the lives of women throughout their regular news.

Forty years later, the new media have re-segregated women's sections. The good news is that they are no longer about society, cooking and fashion. Most are tough, smart, incisive, analytic,and focus on events, trends or stories that the mainstream online news still ignores. The bad news is that they are not on the "front page" where men might learn about women's lives.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

I have noticed this trend when writing about serious matters concerning women. After finishing the post I make sure that the links work properly and that's when I tend to realize that I'm linking to "Fashion" or "Lifestyles!" It's so bad that I recently wondered if the obituaries of famous women will from now on be found on the Fashion pages in the NYT?

The Guardian in the U.K. does the same thing. Maybe I should rename this blog something like Lifestyles of the Poor And Not-Yet-Famous? Or What Goddesses Wear This Season? (the answer: scales)

More seriously, a good case can be made for separate women's pages. They allow a focus on news about women, they allow those news a serious reception (because the readers are not there after some accidental surfing) and they also keep many journalists fed and with a roof over their heads.

But it's depressing that matters having to do with women are still put into that subcategory that so beautifully fits into my series on why feminism is still needed.

A long time ago I wrote an article just for myself (I have books and books full of those) about sex segregation. It is doubtful that REAL sex segregation has ever existed. What goes on in Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan is not real sex segregation, because the only people who can travel in all the zones are men, as long as they are men related by blood or marriage to the women they are guarding, and because the women's world consists of itsy-bitsy rooms scattered here and there inside the vast men's world, and naturally because it is the men who rule over the world of women.

A real sex segregation would mean two equal and parallel but separate worlds, one run by men and consisting of men, and another run by women and consisting of women. They would probably trade with each other (sperm being sent in one direction and boy babies in the other), but the rulers of the men would not rule over women and vice versa. We don't have that and probably have never had that unless the Amazons were real.

Doesn't my version sound like science fiction? That the other one (the much more horrible one) doesn't sound like science fiction should make your ears stand up and the rest of you take notice.

Still Not Writing on The Oil Disaster

What could I say that makes any difference?

I have already written about the lessons we should learn here: That the corporations should not be allowed to own oceans or land masses or seeds that have been around for centuries or clean drinking water, that the governments should stop kissing their asses at every possible turn, that ordinary people (aka little people) should wake up and start bearing some responsibility here, because the earth is not some free lunch plate of tasty shrimp and salmon (oh please do not show me those pictures of the animals) and so on.

In any case, anyone reading me is already well-informed, smart and doing all the right things (such as reading me). But we should all keep the pressure on the powers-that-be. As my first proposal, I recommend community service as the proper punishment for the BP executives. Among the little people of Louisiana. And cleaning birds. And watching over the dying animals. That's a good start.

The rest of us can get serious about conservation and alternative energies, and I mean serious.

And let's start discussing the optimal population size again. I know it is completely out of the fashion, what with those scary uppity women refusing to breed enough to keep the white race triumphant, and I also know that it is out of fashion even among feminists. But I do not believe that human beings will ever accept the idea of permanent poverty as a lifestyle, and if we are all to have the Good Life while leaving space for animals and plants, too, we need to seriously talk about birth control. Either that or get ready for the energy wars of the future.

Back Home

I've been on the road since Monday morning. I stopped at Ikea on the way back. It's like the poor woman's trip to Scandinavia, because the cafeteria offerings and even the cafeteria furniture are identical to what you'd get there. So I had my Scandinavian dinner and refills of Scandinavian coffee, walked out, and suddenly I was back in Murka! What a wonderful world we live in.

Though I'd prefer instant transfer by thought. Traveling wears me out and gives me dark and gloomy thoughts and brain shivers. And a comparison basis for the Snakepit Inc. which sorely needs a new roof and repainting and something that eats ivy.

And no, I have no Ikea furniture. Not a single piece.

It's Called Love

So many studies simply beg to be looked at in greater detail and I don't have enough time. My beady eye spotted this one some days ago:

A rocky romantic relationship can cause significant stress, but contrary to conventional wisdom, its impact may be harder on young men than on young women, new research indicates.

Though previous research has long suggested that unmarried young women are more vulnerable than men to tough times in romantic relationships, the opposite seems to be true, according to research by sociologists at Wake Forest University and Florida State University.

As a complete aside, think of the difference between 'conventional wisdom' and 'old wives' tales.'

It's always tricky to do survey research, you know, especially on a topic where the answers themselves probably are at least partly affected by societal gender roles and what one thinks of as the proper answers. I'm not saying that this study wouldn't be a well done study or that the write-up would not be acceptable. I just find the summary a bit confusing.

But this is rather interesting if true:

* Problems in relationships seem to threaten young men's identity and feelings of self-worth, but this doesn't seem to be the case for young women.

It is 180 degrees from that 'conventional wisdom.' Women are supposed to be defined by their relationships, like totally, and men are supposed to be defined by their jobs.

I have now idea if that conclusion in the quotes is warranted or not. Just pointing out that we are not going to have the researchers of this study on every morning television program or daytime television show, telling the eager audience about how men and women really are.

It's going to go down the Memory Hole because it is not the received wisdom. But if true it's evidence against many of the current pseudo-trends.

For example, take the conservative argument that young women are destroying themselves and their chances of any happiness in life (through heterosexual marriage, natch) by refusing to be the gatekeepers for premarital sex, the kind of gatekeepers which keep the gate shut while young men are eagerly battering on it, trying to be admitted, as is their obvious role in life.

This view of men and women and romance assumes that men don't need any or want any and that the only reason why they'd ever date or get married is so that they can get through that gate. It's a commercial game, this conservative definition of love: I'll let you in if you buy me dinner for the next decades.

So I kinda like that finding because it points out that all human beings are affected by love. It's a real thing. The first symptom is usually sheep's eyes. Check for those.

At the same time, I'm not sure if we can conclude that men are more affected by relationships troubles in general:

Robin Simon, PhD, a professor at Wake Forest, and Anne Barrett, PhD, of FSU, studied the emotional reactions of 1,611 unmarried adults between the ages of 18 and 23.

They conclude that:

* The harmful stress of a roller-coaster relationship is more likely to affect the mental health of young men than young women.
* A recent breakup from a romantic relationship affects the mental health of young women more than young men.
* Young women are more emotionally affected than their romantic partners when it comes to being in a relationship or not. Young men, on the other hand, are more affected emotionally by the quality of their current relationships.

Simon tells WebMD that young men and women "are both affected by negative aspects, and by good ones, but when you look at both, men are more affected emotionally by both good and bad relationships."

Perhaps. I'd need to look at the study itself to assess that. But note that the border between a roller-coaster relationship and one that has ended is a rather vague and also note that the quality of a relationship also sorta fades into not having one at some point.

Note also that if the study had been written to just look at young people in general and their reactions to relationships and romance nobody would have bothered to even summarize the study. You gotta have a gender difference, gotta.

Al Franken The Feminist

He's a good guy. He recently gave an interview about his feminist beliefs which had this bit:

CA: Who is your favorite fictional heroine, and who are your heroines in real life?

AF: First, let me say I was shocked at how difficult it was to come up with a good fictional feminist. I'm a reader, I didn't think this would be tricky. I asked my wife and my daughter, male and female members of my staff (which includes a couple literature majors), I asked friends of all ages. And it was hard! Do you pick Anna Karenina or does the ending ruin her feminist credentials? What about Simone de Beauvoir's fictional alter ego - is that really fiction? Do you want to count Hester Prynne? Is Xena really the best we can do? Eventually I decided to go with Jo March from Little Women. Or Ripley from Aliens. The point is this genre is sadly lacking. The feminist heroines who inspire us tend to be real-life women, which is wonderful. But shouldn't some writers out there seek to fill this void? Let's see what a feminist heroine can do when they're not confined to non-fiction format. I'd read it.

A fun question that. Who IS your favorite fictional feminist? Though the interviewer didn't ask him quite that question, it's a good one.

Fantasy teems with fictional feminists, though most of them live in a world where they don't meet much resistance. Not sure if they count for that reason. Then there's Buffy. Sure, these are super-heroes but so are the men in the corresponding genres.

I would be satisfied with a female heroine who is a full human being. No need for her to have superhuman powers (though they can be OK, too). But she should be three-dimensional.

On Jo Marsh: She begins as a feminist. What she ends up as is harder to determine, because she becomes a background figure in the later books. I think Alcott tried to make her into a compromise between the Angel In The House of the Victorian era and the Modern Woman of those days. She is a bit of each.

I like her but I'd have to say that she did not achieve what she was capable of.

There are strong female characters in many of the classics but I'm not sure if that's enough to qualify as a feminist character. For more ideas, check here.

Where The Wimminz Are

Politico has a not-bad post on the scarcity of women in Sunday morning political shows. It covers many of the issues fairly well:

How can we have more women on those shows when women are 17% in the Congress (congrats, U.S. for doing so very poorly in the international comparisons of female representation in politics)? How can we make the same small number of women work more shows just so that more women can be on television, especially when women are expected to be at home on Sundays with their famblies? Shouldn't the shows reflect reality rather than some desired world of equal representation (odd how quickly we fall back from that other world I recently wrote about, the one in which feminazis rule over everything)?

But then if we don't see any women in public roles, women will have greater difficulty running for office and people never get jostled out of their comfort with a mostly male public sector. And the rules and norms still are different for women, beginning with focus on hair (and armpit hair, too).

The reason I call it a not-bad post rather than a good post is that the focus is solely on elected women in politics. What those Sunday shows do more generally is have more men in all roles, even in roles where the percentage of women should be much greater than 17%, and the piece doesn't address that. And several of the women who do get invited regularly to some of the shows are misogynists from the conservative gals' organizations. Indeed, the representation of feminists on all those shows is pretty much at zero (despite the fact that we rule the world).

Likewise, women I've talked to have a slightly different idea of how the gate-keeping works.

Out of Sync

Something odd I noticed the other day is that while the contents of much of feminism have changed in the last twenty years or so, the contents of misogyny have not changed nearly as much. It's as if the two are out of sync with each other.

Misogyny is still about the rotting flesh of all womankind, of all races, all religions, all ethnic groups and all classes. It certainly takes different forms depending on intersections between gender, class, race, ethnicity and religion, but it applies to women just because they are women. It doesn't matter if the woman is good or bad as a person, if the woman is old or young, if she is pretty or not, if she is good at math or not, if she stays at home with small children or is out working with small children or without them. Misogynists hate her or at least deeply despise her for her gender.

Movement feminists don't have a good response to that, because they are splintered into groups working on issues such as reproductive choice, women in the labor force, domestic violence, women in racial or ethnic minorities, immigrant women, women in the military etcetera. They don't have an Anti-Misogyny Squad.

Should there be one? I'm not sure. Can one discuss something with a misogynist? My experiences suggest that this is no more possible than teaching a stone to tango. Perhaps ignoring misogyny is the way to go? Ignorance is mentally healthier and less damaging to the young women, in particular. And not paying attention to woman haters is safer. We all like to feel safe.

But then a generalized contempt toward women is what ultimately underlies everything feminists battle. Everything.

What are your thoughts?

Who Are You?

This video is the conservative talking point right now:





Fox News writes about it:

A North Carolina congressman is under fire after a video surfaced Monday showing him in a physical confrontation with a young man on a street in Washington.

Rep. Bob Etheridge, a Democrat, is seen in the amateur video grabbing the wrist and neck of the unidentified man after he approached him and asked if he supported the "Obama agenda."

It is difficult to know what might have been edited out of the video, of course, but it's never acceptable to grab someone like that. Etheridge lost it.

And now we are to draw conclusions about the Democrats based on what he did. I understand the political game. The intended conclusion is that the Democrats are horrible to poor conservative students. Well, that is the intended conclusion for Republicans.

But think of how something like this would have been used if the politician in that video was a woman. Think. It's worth it, because it tells you that I am missing one hell of a chance here to point out that the representative indeed is a man, and that perhaps we shouldn't have men anywhere in the public sector, what with their inability to restrain their innate biological tendency toward violent behavior.

Note that I don't write posts like that, based on some single anecdote! But the anti-feminists do exactly the comparable thing, all the time. Hillary Clinton is a monster because she is female. Her tears are a sign that women should not be in politics. She should remind you of your wife nagging you to take out the trash.

It is never-ending and we don't notice how one-sided it is because us feminists don't do the same thing.

And the reason we don't do the same thing is that we are not sexists. But damn if it doesn't handicap us.

The Mean, Lean World Of Blogs

Last Saturday Atrios linked to this post:

In February, a NYT blogger, Zachery Kouwe, was fired for plagiarism. The proximate cause of the firing was a complaint from the WSJ, but he'd had run-ins with other publications in the past, including nicking a memo from Dealbreaker without attribution. That didn't stop Dealbreaker hiring Kouwe in April. Which seemed a bit odd at the time, and which in hindsight was certainly a mistake, since now they've gone and fired him. But it wasn't for plagiarism, this time.

I spoke to Matt Creamer, the executive editor of Breaking Media, Dealbreaker's parent. He sent me this statement:

Zachery Kouwe was a freelance contributor on Dealbreaker for just over two months. We ended the relationship on Thursday after it came to our attention that he wrote emails to Dealbreaker commenters referencing their workplaces. Our readers and commenters trust us with personal information and we take that responsibility very seriously. Anyone who registers on our sites should feel confident their information is secure.

Atrios then pointed out that:

One of those things you learn very quickly when you start blogging and get a commenting audience is that if you can't take a steady stream of not necessarily friendly criticism then blogging really isn't for you.

What Zachery Kouwe is alleged to have done is wrong, of course, and blogs indeed do get a fair amount of critical comments and a blogger must be able to take that.

But. I bet you knew that was coming, that but. But the situation is not the same for all bloggers. Some of us get lots more critical comments than others (though I'm not necessarily speaking of my divine self here). Women do seem to attract more than a per blogger share of nastiness. All women are subject to this, not only those who blog but also those who comment, based on a study that was done some time ago. Women who write on feminist topics are, however, especially attack-worthy.

It's easy to see why that would be the case. A feminist blogger is going to get the usual valid debates, the usual silly criticisms and so on. On top of that she is going to get the misogynists. They are drawn to feminist blogs like wasps to picnic lunches in parks. Hence the registration requirement on most large feminist blogs now.

Rather than writing about why that is the case (you know, in any case) I want to write about its impact. This might be chilling, because women considering a (so-well-paying) career as feminist bloggers must be able to take not only the usual level of criticism that all bloggers face but much more.

It's like an extra entrance fee to the field, one which you may or may not be willing and able to pay. It also wears you down over time, though of course it also reminds you of the reasons why you write in this field in the first place. It might also radicalize you further. Come to think of it, that is a pretty likely danger caused by those trolls and exactly the thing they don't want to happen.

Take me, for example. In my meatspace life I avoid woman-haters quite successfully. Most people I meet are OK. To have the woman-haters write me letters and such reminds me of their existence and of the strength of their hatred. After a while I had to start doing reality-checks to make sure that I don't become a reverse sexist on this blog or in my concrete life. I hope I have avoided that. But those constant reminders do serve as -- reminders of the fact that, yes, indeed, misogynists are out there and in some force. And they hates us, my precious, they do.
----
For an earlier post on this topic go here.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan

Women are not going to rule the roost any time soon:

Dr. Massouda Jalal once embodied all the possibility that was promised by the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Now, the former cabinet minister and presidential candidate, says she is in danger of being silenced once again, as are all the country's women.

The human rights campaigner and one-time Minister of Women's Affairs under President Hamid Karzai was in Ottawa Tuesday to warn Canadians that after 30 years of war and uncertain leadership, her country is taking a troubling turn for the worse.

The most recent efforts to end the conflict between the western-backed Karzai government and the outlaw Taliban are compromising the hard-fought fundamental values that have only started to take root in Afghanistan.

...

"In the beginning a lot of hope was created… We thought that a government made of civilians will be made a civil government," she said, noting that laws have been passed prohibiting violence against women or affirming women's rights.

But there have been more, and more prominent, steps backward in the last few years. More schools being burned, more female students being threatened and attacked, more instances of local laws barring women from travelling outside the house unaccompanied.

It's truly disorienting to move between the two posts below this and this one....

I'm pretty sure that the peace deal being brokered will mean more silenced women living in narrower and narrower circles. But that's nowhere as scary or interesting as the fantasy of the end of men in the U.S..

And Even More On The End of Men

I forgot my major criticism of Hanna Rosin's weird article in the Atlantic Monthly which has to do with the arguments WHY we are suddenly supposed to be so close to a matriarchy in this country (while elsewhere the Taliban and so on are busy). I quote from her:

The postindustrial economy is indifferent to men's size and strength. The attributes that are most valuable today—social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus—are, at a minimum, not predominantly male. In fact, the opposite may be true.

Ya think? That really is so stupid. So there were never any great male authors? No male journalists at the Atlantic Monthly? No male psychologists specializing on the differences between girl and boy brains and other similar crap? No male host on political television shows?

Men cannot sit still and focus? Computer geeks run around and don't focus on anything at all? How does one become a researcher without those skills? Do professors skip and jump around all day long?

And didn't I read in some other anti-woman version that men are all focused on narrow topics and that's why they end up reaping all the laurels for scientific work and so on, whereas women are busily multi-tasking everything in a scatterbrained manner?

This is such utter crap. I can call it crap, because it was intended as compost, to grow the horrible harvest in those comments. The magazine supported those comments, watered them and allowed them to flourish without any moderation. The magazine wants those kinds of readers, readers who at least despise women very very openly.

They wanted this. Now they own it.

The End Of Men

That is the title of an Atlantic Monthly article by Hanna Rosin which I just finished reading. It's not about all men being killed, though it does sound like it and is meant to sound like it so that you are prepared with your panic juices flowing. It's about a world in which women rule and men are nothing, hear me, nothing!

And this is the world we are going to live in the future.

I wasn't surprised seeing that article because a) Atlantic Monthly is now famous for handing all matters feminine to the capable hands of one misogynistic Caitlin Flanagan and also famous for general bashing of women and such, and b) you can always trust that people will read a story like this one. Nothing is better for clicks and circulation than something that engages our reptile brains and awakens the MRA guys from their testosterone perfumed caves.


The Comments


The best way to read it is probably to wade through the comments first. They are fun if you have a masochistic bend. Probably about 70% are from MRA guys based on the same talking points they get given, a handful of feminist commentary and the rest people seriously fearing a world in which men are NOTHING! and women rule everything. In the whole world!

Lots of comments about how men create everything of any value: houses, inventions, physical protection, arts and sciences, and how women create nothing. Lots of comments about testosterone and the inevitability of male power, lots of comments about how there is no wage gap whatsoever not caused by women's own behavior, how men are the ones who always had the hard time and how the society will now implode, completely. Because women have taken over all the power.


But the most upsetting bit was the subtext in several comments: We have a choice between patriarchy and matriarchy, nothing else, and we should choose patriarchy, because in a matriarchy we get violent young men in the streets and in a patriarchy we don't. That, my friends, sounds like a threat.

Not sure why I keep reading comments like that, unless it is for understanding. If so, I'm struck by the hostility of the comments, the extremely militaristic division of people into "us" and "them" (most of those, for obvious reasons, classifying men as "us"). I'm a feminazi of the highest caliber and I don't do that! But people who hate people like me do exactly that. It's one of the wonders of the world.

The comments are not logical when read all together. For example, women do so well in academia, I read, because of affirmative action that chivalrous men decided to offer to women, and they can always take it away. Women do poorly as CEOs and in sciences because women are inherently not good in those fields, but men do poorly in college because they are discriminated against by this society in which feminists are in power.

Feminists demand more affirmative action only in fields that pay well! Why don't feminists demand more men in low-paying fields such as social work? Which, in any case, would pay nothing at all if men had not been so chivalrous and allowed women to have more money than the marketplace would award them. No, don't mention to me that men don't want to enter those low-paying fields.

And so on and so on.


The Beginning of the Article


Then to the article itself. I should notice that perception is a funny thing. I read it as an anti-feminist piece, for reasons that I shall come to shortly. Several comments stated that it was a feminist victory song: We had finally gotten the world where men are NOTHING!


Rosin begins her article with sex selection. She argues that Americans now prefer girls to boys. The evidence? This kind of stuff:

Even more unsettling for Ericsson, it has become clear that in choosing the sex of the next generation, he is no longer the boss. "It's the women who are driving all the decisions," he says—a change the MicroSort spokespeople I met with also mentioned. At first, Ericsson says, women who called his clinics would apologize and shyly explain that they already had two boys. "Now they just call and [say] outright, 'I want a girl.' These mothers look at their lives and think their daughters will have a bright future their mother and grandmother didn't have, brighter than their sons, even, so why wouldn't you choose a girl?"

We are talking about fertility clinics, and we are asking individuals there what the general trend in the United States might be.

I happened to research that topic once when writing on gender selection in India, and I found that the trend in the U.S. is toward greater parity of boys and girls as the desired sex for the next child in the family. But there is a slight preference for boys, shown in surveys from mid-2000s and from 2007.

That bit about "These mothers look at their lives" is totally anecdotal. In fact, it could have been pulled out of one's ass. But note that this is what sets the stage for the piece: It's women who want to have girls because their own lives are so wonderful, and that information is provided by a not-quite-neutral Mr. Ericsson.

I am spending so much time with these beginning paragraphs because they point out one of the main tactics of the article when it comes to evidence:

It is to a large extent anecdotal, a case being built by interviewing individuals who agree with the thesis of the author or even by pulling movies as evidence for what is actually happening or by quickly listing arguments by linking them to their creators*, without giving any information about the credibility of the arguments or the evidence they are based on.

We spend some more time with Mr. Ericsson's family and are to draw conclusions from that. Next we move to patriarchy and its eternal aspect. Wonderful stuff it was, but now it's changing and changing so quickly! Perhaps too quickly. And back to the idea that girls are now preferred by parents in the U.S.:

American parents are beginning to choose to have girls over boys. As they imagine the pride of watching a child grow and develop and succeed as an adult, it is more often a girl that they see in their mind's eye.

How does she know this? Was there a study which demonstrated such a trend? If so, I missed it and would love the link.


Its Major Thesis


Next comes the major thesis which is written so that even the simplest misogynist can get its relevance;

What if the modern, postindustrial economy is simply more congenial to women than to men? For a long time, evolutionary psychologists have claimed that we are all imprinted with adaptive imperatives from a distant past: men are faster and stronger and hardwired to fight for scarce resources, and that shows up now as a drive to win on Wall Street; women are programmed to find good providers and to care for their offspring, and that is manifested in more- nurturing and more-flexible behavior, ordaining them to domesticity. This kind of thinking frames our sense of the natural order. But what if men and women were fulfilling not biological imperatives but social roles, based on what was more efficient throughout a long era of human history? What if that era has now come to an end? More to the point, what if the economics of the new era are better suited to women?

I hate this shit. I hate it, and having to go bang my head against the garage door. Women in the past could not specialize in flexibility and nurturing behavior. They were first fucking gatherers/hunters and then fucking farmers who worked from dawn to dusk and past it. They were not prehistoric Victorian housewives and men were not prehistoric Rambos or whatever the newest killer hero is called: They, too, worked their asses off all day long, most of the history. I hate intellectual laziness and nastiness.

Pardon me for that outbreak of my nurturing flexibility. Let's look at that paragraph just a little more: If this new era is better suited to women, were all those prior eras better suited for men? And exactly why and how? Is the only thing that has changed technology? No legal changes, say?

And why can't she ask if the new era is equally suited for both men and women? My guess is that she wants to sow gender war seeds, to get clicks.

So there you have it. We are at the dawn of a matriarchy where women rule:

Once you open your eyes to this possibility, the evidence is all around you. It can be found, most immediately, in the wreckage of the Great Recession, in which three-quarters of the 8 million jobs lost were lost by men. The worst-hit industries were overwhelmingly male and deeply identified with macho: construction, manufacturing, high finance. Some of these jobs will come back, but the overall pattern of dislocation is neither temporary nor random. The recession merely revealed—and accelerated—a profound economic shift that has been going on for at least 30 years, and in some respects even longer.

What is this "profound economic shift" she talks about? She doesn't quite define it so we are left with guesses. Mine would be that she talks about women's increasing entry into the labor force in the 1970s and into higher education during the same time period. That women were in the labor force in larger numbers before 1950s goes unnoticed. That women actually entered higher education in large numbers in the 1920s and got pushed back in the next decade gets unreported. History is simplified, made simple, made to support the idea of the dawn of matriarchy.

Even the seasonal canary aspect of construction and so on are here treated as permanent changes. It's also construction industry where jobs come back first when recession turns into the beginning of the boom. The financial industry and its problems are more specific to this time and place, but I very much doubt that all those laid off stockbrokers will now remain unemployed forevermore.

It's Chicken Little stuff, intended to make men fear that the end is night, the way the title frames it. Men are becoming useless because their role as --- what? --- is ending. The author doesn't really state what that role is but clearly it is based on the idea of women at home and men out there working:

Earlier this year, for the first time in American history, the balance of the workforce tipped toward women, who now hold a majority of the nation's jobs. The working class, which has long defined our notions of masculinity, is slowly turning into a matriarchy, with men increasingly absent from the home and women making all the decisions. Women dominate today's colleges and professional schools—for every two men who will receive a B.A. this year, three women will do the same. Of the 15 job categories projected to grow the most in the next decade in the U.S., all but two are occupied primarily by women. Indeed, the U.S. economy is in some ways becoming a kind of traveling sisterhood: upper-class women leave home and enter the workforce, creating domestic jobs for other women to fill.

That paragraph has three different things linked together (by being in the same paragraph). Thus we are told that women are now the majority of the labor force (of course women are also the majority of Americans), that working class families are matriarchies and that universities are full of women. Putting all this together implies that the issues are linked by some dawn of matriarchy.

But what is the actual evidence for them being linked that way?

The percentage of women out of all people in the civilian labor force fluctuates around fifty percent now, and so does the percentage of women in the population. Why is that a sign of some impending doom? Haven't most women always worked, in any case, even if only for their bed and board on the farms and inside families?

What is happening in working class families (IF it is happening) has much more to do with outsourcing and globalization than anything some matriarchal schemers are planning to do. Though it probably also has to do with the idea that the role of men is to be the heads of the households and that requires that they make the money.

"Women dominate today's colleges and professional schools—for every two men who will receive a B.A. this year, three women will do the same." This, too, is linked to outsourcing and globalization, at least partly, because the traditionally well-paying male blue-collar jobs have been outsourced and their place has been taken by McDonald-type jobs for all. As the author points out later in the piece:

It makes some economic sense that women attend community colleges—and in fact, all colleges—in greater numbers than men. Women ages 25 to 34 with only a high-school diploma currently have a median income of $25,474, while men in the same position earn $32,469. But it makes sense only up to a point. The well-paid lifetime union job has been disappearing for at least 30 years. Kansas City, for example, has shifted from steel manufacturing to pharmaceuticals and information technologies. "The economy isn't as friendly to men as it once was," says Jacqueline King, of the American Council on Education. "You would think men and women would go to these colleges at the same rate." But they don't.

Look at those income numbers. Then look at them again. Then remember that college is a financial investment. You need to pay at least some of those costs and there's one pretty concrete reason why women would be more willing to pay for college than men.

But she is also right that more boys should go to college. The solution, however, is not a system which pushes girls down while pulling boys up. The solution is equal opportunity. Funny how that way of thinking is totally alien to the article I'm criticizing here. It's either the frightening rule of the petticoats or Biblical/Koranic patriarchy for all.


And that last bit about "the traveling sisterhood" is just plain mean. All it points out is that women are still responsible for child-rearing and that to be released from that role you have to hire another woman in your place. Then it's your fault that she can't be with her own children.


Masculinity Equals Being A Patriarch


Come to think of it, the whole article mixes the idea of what men are with the idea of what the patriarchal roles for men are, and argues that the change or demise of the latter means the end of the former. Here's the obvious example of that, a story about a support group for divorced men who are not paying their child maintenance:

Like them, he explains, he grew up watching Bill Cosby living behind his metaphorical "white picket fence"—one man, one woman, and a bunch of happy kids. "Well, that check bounced a long time ago," he says. "Let's see," he continues, reading from a worksheet. What are the four kinds of paternal authority? Moral, emotional, social, and physical. "But you ain't none of those in that house. All you are is a paycheck, and now you ain't even that. And if you try to exercise your authority, she'll call 911. How does that make you feel? You're supposed to be the authority, and she says, 'Get out of the house, bitch.' She's calling you 'bitch'!"

The men are black and white, their ages ranging from about 20 to 40. A couple look like they might have spent a night or two on the streets, but the rest look like they work, or used to. Now they have put down their sodas, and El-Scari has their attention, so he gets a little more philosophical. "Who's doing what?" he asks them. "What is our role? Everyone's telling us we're supposed to be the head of a nuclear family, so you feel like you got robbed. It's toxic, and poisonous, and it's setting us up for failure." He writes on the board: $85,000. "This is her salary." Then: $12,000. "This is your salary. Who's the damn man? Who's the man now?" A murmur rises. "That's right. She's the man."

"You are supposed to be the authority." There you have it, and indeed, there you have the thesis of the article. It's not about the end of men. It's not even about the demise of male power in general. It's about the demise of the system of patriarchal domination where masculinity means being in control of the women and children and being able to dictate the rules within families and in the society in general.

If you don't have it, men are NOTHING! And the only alternative is to bring back the good-ole-boy patriarchy in a much stronger form, honestly. That women are NOTHING in it is unimportant, probably because women who are nothing sit at home and are not out in the streets killing people or some such thing. (They certainly aren't allowed to go and study mathematics which makes it easier to point out that women are better suited to staying at home and so on.)


My Opinion Summary


The theory Rosin presents is a form of tipping. She argues that we are going to go from eternal patriarchy, quite suddenly, to a matriarchy (now that would be news to the Talibans of this world and indeed to most continents in general), and she also argues that men can't survive that in some oddly defined sense of survival where survival seems to be associated with being the male head of the household and the breadwinner. That equal opportunity for women means no more heads of households and equal access to jobs and careers and, yes, child-rearing is completely ignored in the article.

It's unclear why men couldn't survive a matriarchy, given that women have survived a patriarchy. It's unclear what should be done about men's inability to survive in a world which actually is still pretty male-dominated and where just writing this kind of a fairy-tale article makes people seriously discuss a world in which women rule and how on earth men could survive it except that, of course, men are the genetically superior sex in the first place.

But then the women in Rosin's world have zero problems! They are the matriarchs in the working class family, muttering "my way or highway", they are the Cougars picking from young men for some careless sex, they are the women carting away all the degrees and all the good jobs, they don't have one single problem in the whole world! They rule.

Yes, I know. You can do a reversal on that paragraph and find out what patriarchy has consisted of centuries. What it still consists of, in many places on this planet. But instead of discussing that we are speculating on a reversal of the reversal: The monstrous regiment of the petticoats.

And all women are set on one side of the chess board, all men are set on the other side and the game begins! You might find this a very odd criticism from a feminazi like me, but ultimately my feminism is informed by the desire to be included in the group, to be seen as an individual, not to be judged on the basis of my gender allthefuckingtime.

Articles like this make achieving those goals (impossible in any case, I know) more and more difficult because the unquestioningly accept masculinity as subtractive: Whatever women are men don't want to be and whatever men are women cannot be, must not be allowed to be. They set up a seesaw where any gains women make are seen as losses to the men: IF being a man requires that one is the head of the household and the breadwinner, THEN that also requires that women cannot be breadwinners and that they must subject themselves to male authority. You cannot talk about the former without mentioning the latter.

Articles like this set up the world as consisting of two enemy armies, fighting an eternal war where the only reason for not utterly annihilating the other side is that pesky fertility thing. They stereotype and simplify in doing that in too many ways for me to count, but the obvious one is that the metaphor should not apply. Men and women are of the same species, belong to the same families and are largely pretty similar to each other. They even often love each other!

Now imagine a feminazi writing that. I must get treatment.


----
For a better take (one I read after writing this), check out Ann
* Throughout the '90s, various authors and researchers agonized over why boys seemed to be failing at every level of education, from elementary school on up, and identified various culprits: a misguided feminism that treated normal boys as incipient harassers (Christina Hoff Sommers); different brain chemistry (Michael Gurian); a demanding, verbally focused curriculum that ignored boys' interests (Richard Whitmire).

American pop culture keeps producing endless variations on the omega male, who ranks even below the beta in the wolf pack. This often-unemployed, romantically challenged loser can show up as a perpetual adolescent (in Judd Apatow's Knocked Up or The 40-Year-Old Virgin), or a charmless misanthrope (in Noah Baumbach's Greenberg), or a happy couch potato (in a Bud Light commercial). He can be sweet, bitter, nostalgic, or cynical, but he cannot figure out how to be a man. "We call each other 'man,'" says Ben Stiller's character in Greenberg, "but it's a joke. It's like imitating other people." The American male novelist, meanwhile, has lost his mojo and entirely given up on sex as a way for his characters to assert macho dominance, Katie Roiphe explains in her essay "The Naked and the Conflicted." Instead, she writes, "the current sexual style is more childlike; innocence is more fashionable than virility, the cuddle preferable to sex."

Pauline Oliveros
Deep Listening

Heart of Tones

The Kolumba Choir

Beyond what you might think of as minimalism or meditation music, Pauline Oliveros has been composing some of the more extraordinary music on the frontiers of what music can be. I'll be going into her work more for about the next month.

Listening to her music opens your ears to the possibilities of what sound is and what it can be.

Can You Imagine Eliot Spitzer Invited To Speak At A Highschool Graduation? [Anthony McCarthy]

I wasn't at my great nephew's graduation from Portsmouth High and it's just as well considering they had a surprise speaker, Rudolph Giuliani.

You wonder if they'd have considered having Eliot Spitzer address them. If Giuliani of the "notorious adultery" which had him publicly leave Gracie Mansion for a love nest, while he was in office was AOk, why not. Indeed the full epic of the mayor's infidelities, which went on semi-publicly for years, would have been enough to end the careers of a dozen Democrats.

We are talking about a High School graduation. I wonder if they'll have Mark Sanford sometime.

Why The Blogs of the Left Seem To Be So Depressed [Anthony McCarthy]

Because we are.

This commentary by Stephen Crockett at Buzz Flash says it better than I can, even if you don’t read the rest of this, do yourself the favor of reading it.

Barack Obama’s administration is failing because he turns out to be a received elite consensus zombie. He has shown no unconventional courage in any of the major issues that face his administration, the two wars, the horrible economy, health care, the environment, energy, ... you name it, he’s either caved or betrayed the position of his base supporters. He’s screwed his base so often you have to conclude he enjoys doing it. If he had more to show for it than he’s gotten, it might be forgivable that he has betrayed us on occasion, but what he’s gotten is awful*.

The health care bill that he signed is such pathetically weak and delayed relief to the uninsured and the victims of outright theft by the insurance industry that it will not be popular. If, as I’m increasingly worried, the Republicans take the government again, they will destroy even that and suffer very little for it. Those same Republicans who Barack Obama wooed and flattered and courted when he could have enforced party discipline and produced a real bill. The sell outs in the Democratic caucus in the Senate saw Obama’s weakness with the Republicans and they played it on behalf of their backers in the insurance and health care industry. And the results were not only an emboldened Republican machine but a wounded and dispirited Democratic base. The strategy that led to Baucus gutting health care in the Senate was devised by the Obama administration, when it became apparent that Kennedy wasn’t going to be there, they were incredibly stupid to not change it. That is if the predictable result wasn’t the one they wanted.

I’ve given my theory that Obama’s transformation from a community organizer to an organization man happened at Harvard Law. I’m sure that once he became a star there he didn’t want to risk that status by violating the core principles of the elite that raised him up. That’s how they do it, with a sandbag made of velvet. I think it’s that elite that he sees as his real audience, the paying customers who he needs to please. I’m now almost certain that he sees the rest of us as having no choice.

Well, we don’t have a choice for the next two years as far as he goes. We have fixed terms and he has two more years. I’m afraid that this year the Democrats in the House and Senate will suffer, some who deserve to be dumped due to their duplicity, many who don’t nearly as much. And that will do nothing to strengthen Obama. With his record, it will provide him with an excuse for further sell outs. That’s the way he played the veto proof majority in the Senate.

Do we have a choice in 2012? The Republicans will certainly put up someone worse and the choice will be between Obama and whoever that is. Obama and his inner circle are counting on the Democratic base and progressive independents having no choice but to vote for him again. They are depending on the marginally better being the more rational choice. They shouldn’t count on it. They should remember what happened to Jimmy Carter in 1980, if they haven’t already. He didn’t sell out the base of his support nearly as cynically and completely as Barack Obama, he hadn’t shown himself to be as weak a president and the base failed to return him to office in the face of Ronald Reagan winning the election.

A Democratic president doesn’t only serve as the Executive of the government, he is also the head of the Democratic Party. Barack Obama led the Democrats into the greatest majority that any party has held in a long time and he has botched and squandered it into the ground. Largely with no excuse. I do blame his Chief of Staff for a lot of that, Rahm Emanuel has been the lead sell out of this administration and nothing will improve as long as he’s a part of the administration. He has seldom passed up an opportunity to gratuitously flip the bird at the progressives in the Democratic Party. But Obama shows no signs of facing up to that. The rest of his staff seem to be pretty near useless for governing or for politics. That is one thing you couldn’t say about the Bush II thugs, they were good at politics.

But that conventional analysis is, of course wrong. The Voters are the ultimate authority in any legitimate government. It didn’t start with Obama. It was was the horror of the Democratic base and many independents at the Bush II regime, at the prospect of eight more years of a McCain-Palin horror, at the determination to get a better government in, that led to Obama winning. It was us, not him. We are the ones who put him over the line. He didn’t pull us over it. He is the one who owes us and that account isn’t settled up. He owes us.

In 2008 I put all of my credibility into Barack Obama’s victory in the general election, into the victory of the Democrats in the House and Senate. A lot of us did, a lot of us worked as hard on that election as we have on any. The House under Nancy Pelosi has kept faith the best. I can hardly imagine how dispirited and angry she must feel with all of those bills she got passed in the house awaiting action in the Senate, without much visible effort to push them through by Barack Obama. My own representative, Chellie Pingree, has also kept faith as well as a freshman representative could. I will support her with everything I’ve got.

He’s got less than a year to do something I could support him with and I’m not seeing any signs of that happening. Even if I vote for him in 2012, I’m not going to humiliate myself for someone who seems to enjoy shafting us.

* I won’t even begin on the BP oil gusher and the incredibly impotent response by the macho Obama Administration to BP. That would take thousands of words.

Friday critter blogging (by Suzie)

This is Pudge, balls to the couch. I asked his mistress, Mary, why she hadn't gotten him fixed. She replied: Because I would have had to take his master's before I could take Pudge's.

I know other men who won't de-ball their dogs, but I've yet to encounter a woman who feels that spaying a female would diminish the dog or reflect on her own femininity.

(I'm not counting people who don't fix their dogs because of health concerns or because they plan to breed them.)

Want, want, want (by Suzie)

The car belongs to a friend of a friend. My only hesitation would be the harassment. I don't always want to advertise my political beliefs. Do you put your beliefs on your back end?

Copulatory Vocalizations

I never thought I'd write those two little words. But a new study (yeah) has looked at heterosexual women's copulatory vocalizations and concluded that they are sham. Yes, sham! Hetero women scream and egg men on to get it all over and done with. It's manipulative, my sweeties:

More detailed examination of responses during intercourse revealed that, while female orgasms were most commonly experienced during foreplay, copulatory vocalizations were reported to be made most often before and simultaneously with male ejaculation. These data together clearly demonstrate a dissociation of the timing of women experiencing orgasm and making copulatory vocalizations and indicate that there is at least an element of these responses that are under conscious control, providing women with an opportunity to manipulate male behavior to their advantage.

It could be that "manipulate" is a scientific term here, something that even male subjects might stoop to. But then perhaps not, because of that "to their advantage" tail to the sentence. It's impossible for the researchers to imagine that some women might vocalize for reasons of love or for reasons of increasing the pleasure of their male partners. Just to offer other explanations than manipulation. (Or if they suddenly remembered that they left the soup boiling on the stove.)

I think that these results are based on questionnaires that women were asked to fill in later, not during the sex. If there are copulatory vocalizations which are involuntary consequences of the female orgasms or their approach, those vocalizations might not be remembered by the woman at all, what with her having fainted from pure bliss, say.

Weird Humored

Did you know that they actually sell electric nose-hair clippers? Can you get them monogrammed? For Father's Day, I mean.

The picture I stuck here is awe-inspiring. Imagine having to eat your soup through a straw. And what happens when it's windy? Will you get self-inflicted wounds in your face?

I like it. Bravery is always charming

Bad Humored

Is what I am, these days. Too much crap like this happening in the world:

The 130-page Amnesty report, As if Hell Fell on Me, was based on nearly 300 interviews with residents of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) and the surrounding areas.

"Nearly four million people are effectively living under the Taliban in north-west Pakistan without rule of law and effectively abandoned by the Pakistani government," said Claudio Cordone, Amnesty's interim secretary-general.
Map

A teacher quoted in the report, who fled the Swat valley with his family in March 2009, described how the Taliban operated.

"[The Taliban] took over my school and started to teach children about how to fight in Afghanistan. They kicked out the girls from school, told the men to grow their beards, threatened anybody they didn't like."

The teacher said the government failed to protect them.

"What's the point of having this huge army if it can't even protect us against a group of brutal fanatics?"

Indeed. And why can't we get rid of the rotting system the Taliban wishes to impose on its innocent victims? South Africa finally got rid of Apartheid. What's the difference?

I feel for all the Pakistanis who suffer under the Taliban and for the poor who suffer even without the Taliban. But what they do to the girls and boys is almost irreversible. It destroys lives. It warps them, in the case of the boys and it stunts them, in the case of the girls.

If there is a god she won't like that. Not at all.

Demoralized

Liberals and progressives are pretty demoralized, based on my informal and sloppy research. It's like an infected boil and needs to be lanced. But I'm not sure how to achieve that.

In fact, we have material for a horror movie: We had an election which took an astonishing feat of getting so many new people to the polls, enormous grass-root work, enormous expenditure of money by those who don't have that much of it, because the alternative was so frightening. We were tied to the seats of a bus driven by a brainless cowboy straight into the Grand Canyon, and we had to find the brake pedal, had to!

Then the high point of the story: Election victory! Or at least a disaster averted! Time to rest, to relax, to do laundry, right? Except that the movie didn't end. The music turned slower, more French and suddenly you weren't quite certain what was being said. Who was the audience now? Why didn't you count as the audience?

And the plot was changed mid-movie. Suddenly the election was a victory for semi-wingnuttery! It was the semi-wingnuts who pounded the pavement and knocked on the doors and spent money on the Democrats' election campaigns.

And we were told to hold hands across the political aisle, while those on the other side keep smashing our outstretched fingers with their made-in-Murka (not) baseball bats, cheerfully continuing Liberal bashing on every television channel. I'm not sure about this administration but that kind of hand-holding used to be called violence or at least dysfunctional behavior.

Then the oil pipe burst and will not stop spewing oil and we are all helpless, waiting to find out what British Petroleum will do to save the world it apparently owns. It sounds almost a metaphor for that demoralized feeling, causing instant mental paralysis and a desire to live under the bed. And even when we are angry we are paralyzed, at most managing a few petty spats with others who agree with us.

The movie I'm sketching out is still less frightening than the alternative (about a wingnut administration). But getting the movie changed cost us a tremendous amount. Yet we appear not to count among the desired market segments for this movie. So we feel blue and paralyzed.

The Florida Shootings

Trigger Warning.

A man in Florida went on a killing spree, targeting only women:

A gunman shot and killed his wife outside a South Florida restaurant where she worked, then targeted women inside and killed three others before committing suicide, police said yesterday.

Three women were hospitalized in critical condition, Hialeah police Detective Eddie Rodriguez said. "He went straight for the women,'' Rodriguez said.

And:

Regalado seemed to have targeted his victims. All were women. Only one was not an employee of the popular restaurant, 495 E. 49th St., on one of the busiest corners in Hialeah.

He deliberately walked in the kitchen, started shooting quickly, at close range, police said.

``He looked at me, went right by me but didn't shoot me,'' an unidentified male employee said.

The murdered women were Liazan Molina, 24, the estranged wife of the killer, Maysel Figueroa, 32, Lavina M. Fonseca, 47 and Zaida Castillo, 56. Those in critical condition are Yasmin Dominguez, 38, Ivet Coronado Fernandez and Mayra de la Caridad Lopez, 55.

It is to the credit of these news sources that they point out the gender-specific victim selection. But none of them moves to the obvious next point: Why did this murderer choose to kill women? What is the motive behind that?

When it comes to his possible motives, we get this:

Regalado, whose estranged wife, Liazan Molina, worked at the restaurant, had apparently been trying to reconcile the relationship in the days leading up to the Sunday massacre.

Molina, 24, had moved out of the couple's home. Police said when Regalado's attempts to get her back failed, he lost it.

And this:

The couple's relationship began in Havana when she was 18 and he was in his early 30s. Regalado told neighbors he had paid to bring Molina to America. Records show she received a Social Security card in 2007, the same year they married.

They had lived together for about four months in a small home in the 100 block of Northwest 48th Court off Flagler Street, neighbors said.

Regalado, who had been unemployed for several months, raised pigeons. The couple had two dogs.

But something happened to sever their relation. Facebook postings offer the best clue.

Regalado made numerous postings in an apparent attempt to win her back. She never responded.

Several weeks ago, she moved in with Dominguez, her cousin, neighbors said.

Neighbors said they had witnessed Regalado's deterioration since Molina moved out. He stopped eating, going from 240 pounds to 205.

``He told me he was going to move out of the apartment, that he was very sad,'' said neighbor Damaris Santana.

``He said he couldn't stand to be in the house alone.''

But Regalado would not reveal to his neighbors why the couple broke up.

``He told us it was over typical marital problems,'' Santana said.

So he just lost it? Could happen to anyone, I guess, when a relationship goes sour, especially as he had tried to get her back and had lost weight and felt sad and everything, right?

But he didn't just kill his estranged wife. He killed women as a category. Surely there's more to be said about that? What made him decide to act as a public executioner of women?

I don't know. Perhaps I'm being unfair to the media here, but it seems really obvious that one doesn't just go "poor guy, he lost weight and just lost it so obviously he went out and killed four women, that's what one does when a relationship goes sour." Even if you admit that he went nuts why didn't he go nuts in a gender-neutral fashion?

Sounds like he was a misogynist.

Today's Practice Post

1. Vampires suck. And no, I didn't invent that. I'd invent something better than that. Vampires swallow, too, and that will be the connection in your head from now to eternity.

2. I'm ready to hand this world over to the cockroaches. But they don't have arms. In either senses of the term.

3. Important question of the day: Who needs nature? Compare Shanghai ten years ago (above) to Shanghai now (below). Then sniff at those capitalistic skies.

Apply A Medical Approach To That Gushing Wound of Oil

Probably not worth even pointing out. But if our seas were a patient lying there while rapidly bleeding to death you would know the steps to take. First, stop the bleeding. Second, stabilize the patient and take care of all the harm that has already been done. Third, the major job of a very slow recovery.

Fourth, and that's the important bit, find out what caused the problem and make sure it will not happen again. That means looking into the power structures, the regulations, the incentive structures and so on. It also means reminding the corporations that they don't own this earth just because they think so. It means that people must wake up to their responsibilities as citizens.

Because the seas are not quite like a human patient bleeding to death and because we are not the physicians we should start on all those numbered steps at the same time. We should also ask whether BP has the best surgeons for this particular case and we should also ask, in a loud voice, why a corporation appears to be treated as if it is the most powerful entity in the area, and if it indeed is that, how did we let it happen.

Economics! Makes You Go Nuts!

When Atrios linked to this piece about studying economics making people more Republican I had to run out and find an old and very bad poem of mine. To see its relevance, here's a snippet from James Kwak:

Patrick McGeehan at the New York Times recently wrote about a New York Fed study finding that studying economics makes you a Republican. The headline conclusion is that the more economics classes you take, the more likely you are to be a Republican. Majoring in economics or business is also more likely to make you a Republican. (See Table 2 in the original paper.) The study is based on thousands of observations of undergraduates at four large universities over three decades, so it is focused on undergraduate-level economics.

My own impression is slightly different: People already tending toward Republicanism take more economics courses, because they hope to hear what they hope to hear.

But I'm sure both explanations can work at the same time. The reason why undergraduate economics might cause Republicanism is that the study starts with those simple models where the markets work beautifully. It's only later that you learn why reality isn't like that. Another reason might be more Republican professors in economics than in many other fields, though that's pure guessing from my part.

And here's the pome I wrote on Economics 101. It is deliciously bad:

Economics is a poisoned arrow
that stands out from my shoulders,
lodged there since the Introduction To.

It slowly leaks its palest poison
into my brain
until I grow selfish, sure and sane
until my life is rational and narrow
until my poetry no longer smolders
until I forget I once knew who
first replaced my rites with reason.

I took the simplest graphs sketched
on the board for the living flesh
and saw it wretched.

But this, of course, was the price fetched
by those who would see young minds stretched.


It has a point, of course! The arrow's point.

The most economics I ever knew was after the first semester. I remember going home for Christmas and lecturing everyone on every single economic matter, both micro and macro, until my sister yelled at me to shut up.

In hindsight it was probably a bit like what evo psychos feel. Here's this incredibly simple no-work-needed understanding of everything!

The rest of all those years of study was to make me normal again and to make everything about economics much, much more complicated. Because the world indeed IS complicated.

But the introductory courses really should try to vaccinate students against that poisoning.

Sex And The City 2

I haven't seen it. Confession time: I have never seen a single episode of the series or the previous movie, either.

But this review made me want to see it:

What have you heard about Sex and the City 2? That it's bad? Let me tell you: this may be the most radical, challenging film ever made.

It is also deeply conservative. That combination has the capacity to blow minds. People will stagger out of cinemas in Tennessee and Arkansas, bug-eyed and dribbling. This could also happen in places where they weren't bug-eyed and dribbling on the way in.

The first oddness of the film comes from the fact that the creators of the TV series were evidently kidnapped, bound and hidden in a cupboard while the entire project was taken over by the hardline, religious right.

Do you agree? And what skilled and mean writing! Somehow I don't think you'd get away with that in the American press.

A Good Idea

That would be contraception as a basic health benefit in the new system:

Federal officials drafting guidelines to implement health care reform should include contraception among the basic set of preventive services for women that private insurance plans must cover without cost sharing, concludes a new Guttmacher Institute analysis.

The so-called Mikulski amendment in the health care reform law enacted in March stipulates that preventive care and screenings for women are to be covered free of any cost sharing. However, while lawmakers who sponsored the amendment made clear their intent that contraceptive services be covered, the legislation leaves it up to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) to develop new evidence-based guidelines that would define which services to include. It is not yet clear whether DHHS will draft the guidelines internally or commission an outside panel to do so.

Despite it being a good idea, for reasons which have to do with the costs and problems avoided if contraception indeed were a basic benefit, we are not going to get it. That's my prediction, and the reasons are twofold:

First, it would be an expensive program in terms of the immediate spending. That's what is visible to people, not the later consequences of unwanted pregnancies and so on.

Second, the proposal feeds straight into the Womb Wars: Who owns them and what they are for.

Genealogy and Female Ancestors

Digging up your family roots. Trying to find the baron which old family stories tell about. That kind of stuff.

I've been doing some looking up for a friend, and what strikes me most about the whole adventure is how it truly is HIS story. Women disappear into the mists of time.

The obvious reason for that is the shifting last name, the disappearing last name, the pointlessness of giving the last name of a woman who no longer has it, being now married. The baptismal records state the birth of Maria Elizabetha, parents Johan Wilbert Cachelhooper and wife. If you are really lucky, they state the birth of Maria Elizabetha, parents Johan Wilbert Cachelhooper, and wife Anna Elizabetha!

Now, keeping your last name in marriage may not be justified so that future genealogists wouldn't have such a hard time, especially if you realize that finding the maiden name of Anna Elizabetha just tells you what her dad was called. But that disappearing last name is not a mere fluke. It's a sign of the way people viewed family as the family of men. That's why the women had to lose their last name and that's why all those genealogy sites give us family trees which start from Johan Wilbert Cachelhooper.

The descendants of Johan Wilbert Cachelhooper! Do you descend from him?

That Johan Wilbert Cachelhooper didn't make children all on his own gets forgotten. In fact, we could as well call the whole thing the family tree of Anna Elizabetha. Do you descend from her?

But we don't call it that, even if Anna Elizabetha's maiden name happens to be known.

All this is not just because of women taking their husbands' names. There is a real feeling on those genealogy sites that everyone is looking for their eight times removed grandfathers! It doesn't occur to anyone that if his wife cuckolded him he may not be your 8Xgrandfather, after all.

Then I got to the really fun stuff: Pioneers! Finding the arrival times in America of various European-born ancestors. Oddly enough, those pioneers were all men, and no, they mostly did not marry Indian women! Only men arrived on ship Darling Nancy in 1736! Only men entered the untouched wilderness (except for the Indians) to start farming and building houses!

Even here I found a sort-of reason: Most ship lists only recorded men over sixteen years of age. But how odd that the invisible women stay invisible, even today! Because they really were pioneers, too, and arrived on those same ships. They are even ancestors who could have their own family trees.

The reason I'm writing about this is not because of a particular story of particular immigrants to America (all invented here, by the way), but because it is such an excellent metaphor for what happens to women in history even more generally. Women disappear. It's both because at some point those who write down history decide on rules which make women less visible and also because women did not act in ways which history would notice. Having fifteen children without medical attention and running a farm without any labor-saving conveniences in the backwoods (with bears and wolves at the door) of the eighteenth century America did not give you a mention in history books. It still will not give you a mention anywhere.

But if you lead those women into those backwoods you get to be famous! You also get to decide on rules which mean that women will remain invisible. And most of that goes under our radar. I see some of it happening even today.

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This post ties in with the old question I remember reading in a feminist novel:

How many generations back can you go in your female line of ancestries? Most people can't make it past three generations at most, even if they can do better than that in the male line.

The Neo-Hooverism

It's not about all of us starting to vacuum again like mad (that joke may be lost on American readers). It's about the idea that this is the time to tighten up the belts a notch or two, to cut back government spending on the developmentally handicapped or on the elderly or the poor. To cut the fat off the government body, so that we only get the skeleton left over.

Digby wrote about that over the weekend, and about the way this is the time for Disaster Capitalism to strike. Even though the problems we have are caused by a just slightly milder version of the same Disaster Capitalism: that of allowing the boyz-n-galz to play ball in unregulated markets all over the world. For some people the obvious answer is more of the same!

Or what took place in Chile when the Shock Doctrine was first used. You should read Naomi Klein's books if you have not read it yet. She may exaggerate but the events she described did take place, most recently in New Orleans where the hurricane Katrina was used to a) get rid of most of the poor people and b) turn the school system into a right-wingish dream.

I'm not a fan of needless suffering. One needs to be that to support the silly ideas so many economists have these days.

But neither am I a fan of some sort of manna-from-heaven world. Everything has its price and people do need to work for their living. Systems which don't work well must be fixed, regulation must work properly and bad incentives must be weeded out.

I don't see that happening. Even in the U.S. our ability to get proper regulation of the financial markets seems limited, and the reason is that those who were in power are still in power, pretty much. The same is true in Europe, I suspect.

That means the cost will be taken out of the hides of those who never were in power in the first place. So sad. And they still won't hire me to fix it all.

Carla Bley

Can't Get My Motor To Start

The You Tube says this is a Nick Mason song but Carla Bley wrote the song, obviously did large parts of the arrangement, her big band of the time had most of the musicians in it and she co-produced the album.

I heard a live performance in Boston at a Jazz Festival during the same period and this recording can only give hint at the wonderful anarchy of that event. [Anthony McCarthy]

Heartbreakingly Beautiful

Carla Bley

Utviklingssang

Carla Bley piano
Steve Swallow bass

We're having storms here and my power keeps going off. [Anthony McCarthy]

The Irrationalities and Contradictions of the Mythic Construct, Individualism [Anthony McCarthy]

Claude Fischer, in today’s paper, does a little looking around that very odd self-attribution common in American life, rugged individualism. It’s long been my experience that the strongest and most aggressive claimants to individualism, are, inevitably, the most conformist of all. In the past, here, we’ve listed jocks, bikers, cowboys, .... macho guys in general, as about the most violently conforming identifiable personas there are. Yet all of these are commonly identified as being “rugged individualists”. Which says more about the phoniness of identities than it does about any people adopting those set models. In his article Fisher says:

American individualism is far more complex than our national myths, or the soap-box rhetoric of right and left, would have it. It is not individualism in the libertarian sense, the idea that the individual comes before any group and that personal freedom comes before any allegiance to authority. Research suggests that Americans do adhere to a particular strain of liberty - one that emerged in the New World - in which freedom to choose your allegiance is tempered by the expectation that you won't stray from the values of the group you choose. In a political climate where "liberty" is frequently wielded as a rhetorical weapon but rarely discussed in a more serious way, grasping the limits of our notion of liberty might guide us to building America's future on a different philosophical foundation.

Which is about the first time I’ve ever seen any kind of official explanation of that obvious phenomenon. You’re allegedly free to choose what rigid role model you adopt but once inside of that role, you’re expected to meet expectations. Though I doubt anyone chooses to be a biker or Rexall ranger without living up to other peoples coercive expectations.

As a New Englander, hearing people from conservative states and areas identifying themselves as rugged individualists has always seemed absurd, but no more absurd than my own state and region also saying the same thing people here. I don’t think that people in Maine are notably less conformist than those in Kentucky, the last state I remember being identified with “rugged individualism” on the radio. I'm certain New Hampshire isn't. There isn’t a state or region that doesn’t claim itself to be the home of “rugged individualism”. It’s an idea that people seem to like to please themselves with. Never mentioned is that the idea of collective individualism, as seen above, being a non sequitur if ever there was one. That the “individuals” so mentioned all seem to conform to a type doesn’t register either.

I don’t think that Americans really tend to think for themselves and act out of principle divorced from social expectation much more than most other people do. The pose of doing so, I think, masks a deeper conformity. For what it’s worth:

But in modern America, when you look at real issues where individual rights conflict with group interests, Americans don't appear to see things this way at all. Over the last few decades, scholars around the world have collaborated to mount surveys of representative samples of people from different countries. The International Social Survey Programme, or ISSP, and the World Value Surveys, or WVS, are probably the longest-running, most reliable such projects. Starting with just a handful of countries, both now pose the same questions to respondents from dozens of nations.

Their findings suggest that in several major areas, Americans are clearly less individualistic than western Europeans. One topic pits individual conscience against the demands of the state. In 2006, the ISSP asked the question "In general, would you say that people should obey the law without exception, or are there exceptional occasions on which people should follow their consciences even if it means breaking the law?" At 45 percent, Americans were the least likely out of nine nationalities to say that people should at least on occasion follow their consciences - far fewer than, for example, the Swedes (70 percent) and the French (78 percent). Similarly, in 2003, Americans turned out to be the most likely to embrace the statement "People should support their country even if the country is in the wrong."

I’ll leave aside any skepticism I’ve got about the whole idea of measuring something like that to go on.

Fisher also points out:

This quality in the American character struck observers from overseas, including Alexis de Tocqueville, who in his 1830s book, "Democracy in America," famously tied the relatively new word "individualism" to what seemed so refreshingly new about the Americans. Popular culture today reinforces this image by making heroes of men (it's almost always men) who put principle above everything else, even if - perhaps especially if - that makes them loners.

He began by mentioning Clint Eastwood, or rather, the various roles Eastwood has played. He’s the rugged individual following only the imperatives of his will, living his life for his own reasons and to his own ends. Then he mentions the public persona of Frank Sinatra But those roles as individualism is a bunch of hooey, it’s all about the set expectations of machismo in the end.

While, sometimes, Eastwood’s characters have a touch of self-sacrifice to them, the good of other people was seldom presented in a way that would escape cynical self-interest. The code that he was presented as following was hardly one of daily self sacrifice for people unconnected with him. Which wouldn’t have made a tidy commercial movie. There was generally, something grudging about any effort made on behalf of other people. And it then had to be de-sissified by a component of violence. Frank Sinatra’s known association with organized crime, not known as a bunch of free spirits, would make him an even odder role model of “rugged individualism”. You go individualist on those guys in an important way, you were likely to find it not too healthy for you.

I’ve run into the imperative to conform to expectations a lot, writing for this blog and commenting at other blogs. People are always complaining that you hold ideas that you shouldn’t based on your identity or, often, the pigeon hole they’ve put you in. Liberals aren’t supposed to vary from the dogma of free speech absolutism, leftists aren’t supposed to believe in the supernatural, neither are those who accept science, etc. etc. etc.

I hope I’ve never adopted an idea or a behavior on any other basis than that it makes sense, that the evidence available and reason leads in that direction. I hope I haven’t. That other people might have the same idea, even people I disagree with about other things, really can’t overrule evidence and reason. Individuals exist in the universe, they don’t escape its requirements and the limits imposed by it.

The important consideration in adopting an idea or a course of action isn’t if it is conformist or not, it’s why you’re doing it and to what end. Our lives are generally dictated by necessities, not elective choices. It isn’t conformist to eat an adequate diet to maintain life. Eating an eccentric diet that causes malnutrition isn’t rugged individualism, it’s irrational. Dressing in ways that will expose you to the cold and wet could kill you even faster – as any worried relative to fashion conforming teenagers will know.

An even more exigent restriction on individual will than that is the demand of morality that my rights don’t override the rights of other people and living beings to their lives and their rights. Rights and the people who hold them aren’t single entities, they exist in tension with others. Ignoring that doesn’t make you more individual, it makes you more of a selfish jerk.

The necessities of living in a society forces a level of conformity. Dirty Harry was a rogue cop, one who managed to keep his job through a couple of sequels, as I recall. He was in the business of enforcing conformity to the law, while breaking it as he saw fit. In at least one of his other movies he enforced frontier law even as he saw it was unjust. Though if I try to parse out all of the conflicting possible analyses of his movies, more so than the writers and directors seemed to, it would take books, not a blog post.

Igor Stravinsky once said that the more restrictive he made the parameters from which he chose to make a composition the freer he was to write the piece. Arnold Schoenberg famously came up with his method which seemed terribly restrictive to many. That both of them wrote some of the most extraordinary music produced since Beethoven while their detractors didn’t, would seem to indicate that they might have been on to something.

The obsession with individualism is understandable, given the consequences of nervous conformity and the irrational and often immoral strictures placed on us by society and government. But, as becomes clear when you think about it, what we call individualism is sometimes an even worse form of conformity. Maybe the entire concept is flawed and we should develop new ways to think about these issues. One that doesn’t present a false dichotomy of the kind that philosophy and formal study create for their convenience which only becomes increasingly removed from reality as they pursue it. If you’ve got to set up a bifurcated system of looking at it, generosity verses selfishness or irrationality verses rationality would be far more useful than individualist verses conformist. Which means little to nothing, when you look at it closely.

I Recommend Suzie's Friday Posts [Anthony McCarthy]

I'll post something later today. Until then, Suzie's posts on Friday are terrific.