Odd British School Uniforms

According to the U.K. Telegraph (sorta right-wing) three private Muslim girls' schools in Britain require that the students wear a face-covering veil on their way to and back from school:

Islamic schools have introduced uniform policies which force girls to wear the burka or a full headscarf and veil known as the niqab.

...

Madani, which has 260 pupils, charges fees of £1,900 a year. Its website states: "All payments should be made in cash. We do not accept cheques."

School uniform rules listed on the website have been deleted but an earlier version, seen by this newspaper, stated: "The present uniform conforms to the Islamic Code of dressing. Outside the school, this comprises of the black Burka and Niqab."

The admission application form warns girls will be "appropriately punished" for failing to wear the correct uniform, and its website adds: "If parents are approached by the Education Department regarding their child's education, they should not disclose any information without discussing it with the committee."

Madani Girls' School, which is a listed as a private limited company and was removed from the Charity Commission's records at the end of last year, was visited by Ofsted in 2008 but the inspectorate's report makes no mention of the strict uniform code.

It rated the school's overall performance as "satisfactory" but noted that "the history curriculum is limited to Islamic history in Key Stage 3". A number of aspects of school life were praised, including pupil behaviour.

Explaining the school's ethos, Madani's website says: "If we oppose the lifestyle of the west then it does not seem sensible that the teachers and the system, which represents that lifestyle, should educate our children."

Jamea Al Kauthar is a £2,500-a-year girls' boarding school, which accommodates 400 pupils in the grounds of Lancaster's former Royal Albert Hospital.

It states on its website: "Black Jubbah [smock-like outer garment] and dopatta [shawl] is compulsory as well as purdah (veil) when leaving and returning to Jamea. Scarves are strictly not permitted."

The website also lists a wide range of banned items, including family photographs, and warns: "Students must not cut their hair, nor remove hair from between their eyebrows. Doing so will lead to suspention (sic)."

Jamea Al Kauthar was rated "outstanding" by Ofsted earlier this year.

In Leicester, Jameah Girls Academy, which charges £1,750 a year for primary-age pupils and £1,850 for secondary, states in its rules: "Uniform, as set out in the pupil/parent handbook, which comprises of headscarf and habaya for all pupils, and niqab for girls attending the secondary years, to be worn during journeys to and from The Academy."

Ofsted stands for the Office for Standards in Education which inspects schools in Britain.

If these rules indeed are correct, they mean that the students have no choice about covering their faces. Just like with school uniforms in general. Even if students in theory had the choice of choosing a different type of school in practice it is their parents who make that choice.

Another website discusses the wider ramifications of this story:

Imposing the burka is as dangerous as banning it. As Dr Taj Hargey, chairman of the Muslim Educational Trust of Oxford, said, it creates a "dangerous precedent." The imposition of the burka is also a discriminatory measure because it allows only the students who comply with the school's dress code to become students on the grounds that the system educates pupils for an Islamic life. However, most moderate Muslim communities have condemned such policies, arguing they would serve only to isolate children from the rest of society.

Wearing the burka should be a personal choice, not an external imposition. For the same reason, Muslim women in France should be allowed to wear the burka in public institutions should they wish to. Banning the burka, or making it compulsory are both dangerous and extreme measures because they deny women the right to choose how they want to express their faith.

This links directly to feminist discussions about the burqa. The topic casts a lot of light on how the definition of feminism pushes a particular conclusion. Most of the feminists who focus on the outcomes for individual women (the product, if you wish, of a particular societal system of laws, rules and norms) conclude that Muslim women in non-Muslim countries should be allowed to wear the burqa if they so choose to do.

This is because of both the right to religious freedom (if it applies to a particular country in terms of its laws) and because of the fear that women who are not choosing to cover their faces but forced to do so by their families would have even less freedom if burqas and niqabs were banned, because then their families might not let them go out at all.

Still, I have heard several feminists state that they are not themselves comfortable with this conclusion. Perhaps that is because it also implies the right to be subjected to all the rest of the unfairness one's religion imposes on those of the female sex? Including, in some cases, total subjugation of women to men and so on. Thus, in extreme cases this particular lens of feminism leads to the preposterous conclusion that feminists should openly support the right of women to be oppressed. If that is the women's choice, of course!

I have written about this dilemma before. It's not much of a dilemma if one uses the old definition of feminism, having to do with equal rights for all independently of one's assigned gender and equal valuation of traditional male and female spheres of activity. Using this definition often offers the solution to me, and it does in this case, too.

I'm not going to address this directly to the question whether men are allowed to wear burqas and niqabs, too. In some sense they obviously are if women are, but the real question consists of going one step deeper and of asking why religions make different rules for the male and female followers. This is the case in most of the big religions and it certainly is the case in Islam. The Shariah law, for example, is explicitly unequal in many of its decisions. For example, daughters inherit only one half of what sons do, child custody is assumed to go to the father as the default option (i.e., whenever feasible) and so on.

Likewise, men are not expected to cover their hair or almost all of their body in Islam. The rules are different, to begin with, and this means that the appeals to religious freedom immediately and unavoidably set men and women into positions of inequality. This creates the paradox that fighting for the religious freedom of a woman often means fighting for her right to choose subjugation and a more limited life. That is where the reason of that uncomfortable feeling comes from when feminists defend women's right to wear the burqa in Europe or the women's right to choose a polygamous male-dominated religious marriage in the US. Its ultimate source is in the gender inequality that is an inherent part of many religions.

My Week In Review: How To Be A Feminist Activist From Mount Olympus

1.  Thought you might like to know that I sent learned letters of complaints to most of the UK and US websites which so lazily used the Netmums study without having a look at it. That's ten letters. I received three automated answers, the type which is sent to all weird people who send complaints in, the type which says how the recipient drowns in these letters so don't accept an answer.

Which I don't expect, naturally. I know my place. But the BBC in fact did react to my letter and made one small adjustment in their report on the non-scientific Netmums survey. Can you spot the adjustment? It's still wrong, of course, for reasons I discuss in the first post about the survey. But at least it's a small step in the right direction.

I take my helmet off for BBC. They tried and now I will try to link to them more often than any other British sources. That's how it goes.

2.  As I mentioned before,  I also wrote to the authors of the study directly, because I naively thought that they would wish to correct the flawed summary of the study.  Instead, they removed the detailed study results from the Internet and then told me that the results I had used were not the most recent ones.  When I asked for the link to the most recent ones I was told that they were not written up yet.  But somehow, despite the results not being written up yet, the summary has been around for over a week.

3.  All this (from the first post to sending the letters) took me at least twenty hours of work (and I'm very fast, divinely fast).  The impact of all that work is minimal.  It certainly does not change the images readers got from all those biased summaries splashed everywhere, and it is those images which now enter the societal subconsciousness when it comes to mothers and so on.

Most people would argue that my work was pretty much wasted.  But note that this is exactly how false information, drop by drop, turns into a large ocean of sexist thought and then sexist action.  The system is geared toward continuing that process and consumers of it all are far too convinced that All Is Well on the other side of this media circus.  

On the whole, though, I'm pleased.  My own conscience is clean now and the data is out there should anyone else care.  But you can see how impossible it is for a part-time goddess to do something like this all on her own.

The End of Private Health Insurance?

Tom Coburn thinks so and it gives him nightmares:

Sen. Tom Coburn intensified his attack on federal health-care reform Tuesday, telling a local Republican group that the measure signed into law earlier this year will soon force private health insurance companies out of business


"There will be no private health insurance in three or four years," Coburn told the Republican Women's Club of Tulsa County. "And that's by design. You're going to make insurance unaffordable for everyone - which is what they want. Because if there's no private insurance left, what's left? Government-centered, government-run, single-payer health care."

The 2,000-page bill's stated purpose is to cover most Americans without health insurance through a combination of expanded Medicare and government-subsidized private insurance, similar to what the state of Oklahoma does now on a limited basis.

Insurers, however, have blamed recent premium increases on new requirements that they cover pre-existing conditions and the children of policyholders up to age 26.

Interesting.

First, health care premia have been increasing steadily for decades, without any help from a frightening plot of government takeover. Indeed, it is partly those continuous increases which gave rise to attempts to reform the system. Because so many people couldn't afford to buy any health insurance whatsoever.

Second, a private health insurance market which cannot cope with people who have pre-existing conditions isn't of much use, especially when a pre-existing condition can be defined as almost anything. If the market is so weak and fragile that it cannot cover anyone but perfectly healthy people, well, then it has bigger problems than some looming government takeover.
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Via Wonk Room.

Meanwhile, in Congo. May Trigger.

Margot Wallstrom, the UN secretary general's special representative on sexual crime in conflict, has been to the village of Kampala where mass rapes took place recently as a war tactic:

Shedla Abedi's age was no protection when the rapists came to her village.

"Imagine – a young boy of 20, and me aged 62, old enough to be his grandmother," she said. She pointed to a frail, older woman walking with a stick. "Her too," she said, "And she's over 80."

...

Rape is a way of humiliating and cowing local populations who may be used as slave labour, but the scale of the August incident shocked even local doctors who have seen many horrors. "It's the first time I have seen something like this," said Dr Cris Baguma of the International Medical Corps, one of the first organisations to help the women. "I can't understand it, because they didn't kill people, it was only for rape."

We must not forget these women, and we must finally stop thinking that the victim of rape is somehow humiliated by that grotesque crime by grotesque perpetrators.

The Chilean Miner Rescue

I have watched the first five miners being rescued and the story is heart-warming and wonderful and, of course, great PR for the president of Chile as well as the mining minister of Chile. The rescue has been extremely professional and an example the U.S. should learn from (coughneworleanscough).

At the same time, if the original disaster had altogether been prevented, would these politicians now have such high approval ratings? It's more likely that they would get no extra kudos from that prevention because nobody would know it happened.

That is a real problem with the way human minds work. One is a greater hero for fixing a problem one perhaps could have prevented than for preventing it in the first place.

Not Everyone's Cup Of Tea

Those tea-party candidates. They are pretty extreme on women's reproductive rights, as in that there should be none.

Digby wrote about the misogyny of the tea-party yesterday, with special attention on Ken Buck of Colorado. I decided to check on his position on abortion, and Ken is indeed a guy who wants women to give birth to the child of a rapist:

As a father of two, Ken believes in the value of life and is opposed to abortion except to protect the life of the mother. As U.S. Senator, Ken will oppose federal funding of abortion and will fight to protect the life of the unborn.

Ken believes life begins at conception, and does not favor doing away with common forms of birth control, like the pill.

To insist that women give birth after rape does, of course, mean that no woman theoretically has the right to her own body. Rape, after all, is not something she has chosen.

The same is true of Sharron Angle, another tea-partier:

Angle: I'm pro responsible choice. There is choice to abstain choice to do contraception. There are all kind of good choices.

Manders: Is there any reason at all for an abortion?

Angle: Not in my book.

Manders: So, in other words, rape and incest would not be something?

Angle: You know, I'm a Christian and I believe that God has a plan and a purpose for each one of our lives and that he can intercede in all kinds of situations and we need to have a little faith in many things.

And the same is also true with Rand Paul who seems to find abortion murder even if continuing the pregnancy will kill both the woman and the fetus:

I am 100% pro life. I believe abortion is taking the life of an innocent human being.
I believe life begins at conception and it is the duty of our government to protect this life.
I will always vote for any and all legislation that would end abortion or lead us in the direction of ending abortion.
I believe in a Human Life Amendment and a Life at Conception Act as federal solutions to the abortion issue. I also believe that while we are working toward this goal, there are many other things we can accomplish in the near term.

What's most fascinating about these teabaggers is their great insistence on less government regulation, except when it comes to women. Women should have more government regulation. Weird.

Netmums' Answer and the Question of Resonsibility

No, I'm not obsessed about this survey and its popularity all across the established media in the U.K. and even over here, not at all! I could stop any time I want.

I received an answer from Netmums to my question about how to get hold of the newer detailed survey data now that they erased the data that used to be available, the data I used in my posts about the survey. I was told that the new results have not yet been written up. But how then can there be a summary of them?

Then to the question of responsibility. Until the detailed data vanished from the net I would have put all the responsibility on the newspapers and established websites which simply ran with this fantastic opportunity to bash mothers without any proper checkups.

Why them? Because we all know that thousands of websites do reader surveys all the time, surveys which are not scientific, surveys which are not carried out by statisticians, surveys which essentially mean nothing at all. But those surveys don't get covered by the BBC Education section. They are not taken seriously, because they are not intended to be taken seriously.

Everyone knows that those kinds of surveys are not statistically generalizable and that they are not peer-reviewed. But what that means is that nobody knows if they are any good at all. To take a summary of a survey like that and then to splash it all over a newspaper page, with appropriately shocking pictures, is simply irresponsible journalism. It is bad, lazy and misleading journalism. And at least ten sites did exactly that.

Why? Is everything in those newspapers potentially just pure crap? Maybe. But I think the reason for this particular choice had to do with the exciting material on how bad mothers are. That's what makes a journalist's heart beat faster because that is material which sells. It sells both to all those people who love watching mothers get their comeuppance, it sells to anti-feminists who can point out that it's women themselves who cause their own suffering and it sells to the attacked mothers who then go to the comments threads and explain why it's really daughters who are too hard to cope with. Everybody has fun!

What is really sad about all this is that if you study the detailed results carefully, for both mothers and fathers, the one thing you find there is a slight tendency to regard daughters in a more negative light than sons. That is the one result that would have been worth discussing because both parents did it in the survey, though partly due to poor framing of the questions. But that result disappears in the popularizations and the original summary. It is replaced by an insistent focus on the mothers.

And A Post-Post-Script: The Netmums' Survey on Dads

For the sake of completeness I better put this one up, too. I used these data in this post and in this one, but the data no longer exist on the net, alas:

Here are the full results of the Dads' survey.

1. How many children do you have?

* One child - 30.2%
* Two children - 45.7%
* Three children - 17.1%
* Four children - 4.1%
* More than five children - 2.9%



2. What gender are your children?

1. All girls - 22.6%
2. All boys - 18.4%
3. Both girls and boys - 65.7%



3. If you are planning on having more children, would you like:

* A girl - 16%
* A boy - 18.4%
* Don't mind - 65.7%



4. Before you had children, did you want:

* All girls - 3.6%
* All boys - 5.6%
* Both girls and boys - 33.7%
* I didn't mind - 57.1%



5. Thinking of your son's future, please rank the following in order of how important you consider them to be: (1 is most important and 6 is least important)

1. That they are happy - 91.9 % ranked this as most important

followed by, in order of importance

* 2 - That they have lots of friends
* 3 - That they have a successful career
* 4 - That they are considered attractive
* 5 - That they go to university
* 6 - That they are good at sport



6. Thinking of your daughter's future, please rank the following in order of how important you consider them to be: (1 is most important and 6 is least important)

1 - That they are happy - 95.2% ranked this as most important

followed by, in order of importance

1. 2 - That they have lots of friends
2. 3 - That they have a successful career
3. 4 - That they are considered attractive
4. 5 - That they go to university
5. 6 - That they are good at sport



7. Do you think parents tend to treat girls and boys differently?

* Yes - 86.3%
* No - 13.7%



8. Do you think it is right to treat girls and boys differently?

* Yes - 53.8%
* No - 13.7%



9. If you have children of both genders, did you find it easier to bond with one of your children than the other(s)?

* Yes - 33.3%
* No - 66.7%



10. If yes, please specify whether you found it easiest to bond with your:

* Son - 49%
* Daughter - 51%


11. If you have children of both genders, which of the following statements to do you agree with?

* I am more critical of my son - 28.5% agree
* I am more critical of my daughter - 13.2% agree
* I let my son get away with more - 15.3% agree
* I let my daughter get away with more - 36.8% agree
* I love my son in a different way to my daughter - 23.6% agree
* I argue with my partner about the way we parent each of our children - 32.2% agree
* Boys tend to be naughtier than girls - 33.9% agree
* Girls are more sensible than boys - 33.9% agree
* My son is a mummy's boy - 38.4% agree
* My daughter is a daddy's girl - 46.7% agree
* My daughter gets more treats than my son - 9.9% agree
* My son gets more treats then my daughter - 5.4% agree



12. Of the following adjectives, which do you think best describes girls or boys?

Adjective	Boys	Girls
Funny	78.3%	21.7%
Cute	18.5%	81.5%
Cheeky	77.2%	22.8%
Caring	20.9%	79.1%
Naughty	78.3%	21.7%
Industrious	63.7%	36.3%
Playful	72%	28%
Thoughtful	26.4%	73.6%
Stroppy	21.3%	78.7%
Loving	36.8%	63.2%
Argumentative	36.9%	63.1%
Eager to please	45%	55%
Serious	41.6%	58.4%

I have no idea what the number of fathers might be who answered this survey because that number was not given.

Today's Very Deep Thought

If I created a sham press release about a study which purports to show that 90% of mothers are planning to stuff their daughters with garlic and then roast them for Sunday dinner, most all major media outlets would accept my study just because of my say-so and would eagerly publish it.

A Post-Script To The Three Following Posts: The Netmums' Survey of Mums

I informed Netmums about the problems with their summary of the study I discuss in the following three posts. I also informed the BBC and Fox And Friends. There were many, many more sites that I should have informed.

I received a response from Netmums which states that the detailed results I was using in my posts below were not the most recent results (though it's hard to see how there could be more recent results, given that these are from September). They have removed all the detailed results from the net.

This means that only the summary (which I argue is full of errors) is now available for those who wish to study the questions. I have asked for links to those most recent results and will share them with you should I get them. I will also naturally provide corrections to all the posts below if they appear necessary.

Here is my copy of the full results of the Mums' survey, the one which appears not to be the most recent set of results:

In September over 2,500 of you completed our survey to help us find out whether or not we treat our sons and daughters the same or if we expect different things from boys and girls.

Here are the full results of the Mums' survey.

1. How many children do you have?

* One child - 31%
* Two children - 48.6%
* Three children - 14.6%
* Four children - 4.6%
* More than five children - 1.2%



2. What gender are your children?

* All girls - 23.2%
* All boys - 30.8%
* Both girls and boys - 46%



3. If you are planning on having more children, would you like:

* A girl - 21.4%
* A boy - 14.0%
* Don't mind - 64.6%



4. Before you had children, did you want:

* All girls - 8.2%
* All boys - 5.5%
* Both girls and boys - 41.7%
* I didn't mind - 44.6%



5. Thinking of your son's future, please rank the following in order of how important you consider them to be: (1 is most important and 6 is least important)

* 1 - That they are happy - 98% ranked this as most important

followed by, in order of importance

* 2 - That they have lots of friends
* 3 - That they have a successful career
* 4 - That they go to university
* 5 - That they are considered attractive
* 6 - That they are good at sport



6. Thinking of your daughter's future, please rank the following in order of how important you consider them to be: (1 is most important and 6 is least important)

* 1 - That they are happy - 97.9% considered this the most important.

followed by, in order of importance

* 2 - That they have lots of friends
* 3 - That they have a successful career
* 4 - That they are considered attractive
* 5 - That they go to university
* 6 - That they are good at sport



7. Do you think parents tend to treat girls and boys differently?

* Yes - 89.2%
* No - 10.8%



8. Do you think it is right to treat girls and boys differently?

* Yes - 49.4%
* No - 50.6%



9. If you have children of both genders, did you find it easier to bond with one of your children than the other(s)?

* Yes - 27.8%
* No - 72.2%



10. If yes, please specify whether you found it easiest to bond with your:

* Son - 54.9%
* Daughter - 45.1%


11. If you have children of both genders, which of the following statements to do you agree with?

* I am more critical of my son - 11.5% agreed
* I am more critical of my daughter - 21% agreed
* I let my son get away with more - 21.5% agreed
* I let my daughter get away with more - 17.8% agreed
* I love my son in a different way to my daughter - 25.9% agreed
* I argue with my partner about the way we parent each of our children - 32% agreed
* Boys tend to be naughtier than girls - 25.9% agreed
* Girls are more sensible than boys - 29.3% agreed
* My son is a mummy's boy - 47.2% agreed
* My daughter is a daddy's girl - 35.2% agreed
* My daughter gets more treats than my son - 8.4% agreed
* My son gets more treats then my daughter - 5.6% agreed



12. Of the following adjectives, which do you think best describes girls or boys?

Adjective	Boys	Girls
Funny	76.4%	23.6%
Cute	31.3%	68.7%
Cheeky	79.7%	20.3%
Caring	30%	70%
Naughty	72.2%	27.8%
Industrious	59%	41%
Playful	74.6%	25.4%
Thoughtful	29%	71%
Stroppy	16.1%	83.9%
Loving	58.1%	41.9%
Argumentative	28.4%	71.6%
Eager to please	46.1%	59.9%
Serious	50.5%	59.5%

I also saved the results for the dads' survey which also appear not to be the most recent results and thus have been removed from the net.
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ETA:  Check out this popularization.  The numbers in it suggest that the data set I have given above IS the one the survey used.

Two Final Points About Bad Research On Bad Mothers

I sometimes despair of my ability to explain what is wrong with some crappy piece of research in general or with an Internet survey which you can take or not, as you please, in particular. But maybe the latter becomes clearer if we did a survey among just the readers of this blog on some topic about gender. It's pretty obvious that the results from that one would not reflect the general views of people out there (mostly because you are smarter, heh).

The same problem exists with all those Internet surveys. People who are willing to answer them may differ in some ways from people who are not interested in answering them. For instance, they may care more about the questions in that survey than the general population the survey tries to reach.

All this is preparation to ask you if the two posts below are of any use or not and if they are clear to you. That's the first point.

The second point has to do with that outrageous argument in both the BBC article and in the Fox And Friends discussion that 55% of mothers find it easier to bond with their sons.

That made me incredibly angry because the survey, flawed as it is, tells us nothing of the sort. What it tells us is that 15.26% of mothers with both sons and daughters in the survey bonded best with a child who is a son. The other children are not necessarily all daughters, by the way.

But if we wanted to give some sort of a total number, along the lines followed by both the BBC article and the Fox And Friends discussion, then that number would be around 7%, as only 46% of the mothers in the study had both sons and daughters. That number is naturally nonsensical, because parents without both sons and daughters cannot answer a question like that in any meaningful way. Still, we are given something more nonsensical by the BBC: False data applied to an inappropriate sample.
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ETA: I found out that the sources of the errors are in the Netmums' own summary of the study. Examples:

A new survey by Netmums revealed that mums are much more critical of their daughters than their sons. Over 2500 mums took the survey and a staggering 88% admitted that they treated their sons and daughters differently despite thinking that this was 'wrong'.

The results showed that mums are twice as likely to criticise daughters. One in five admitted to letting their sons get away with more and more than half of all respondents (55%) even went as far as admitting they have stronger bonds with their sons.

Now, the net is full of bad surveys. But why some of them are picked for popularization without any scrutiny, well, that's worth thinking about.

Bad Research on Bad Mothers: Part II: The BBC Education News

This post is a continuation of the one below and needs the information given in that one. I'm going to continue peeling away the biases which contribute to popularizations of bad studies and incorrect data when they somehow allow the blaming of women in general and mothers in particular.

As a summary of the previous post, I showed that a non-scientific survey of child-rearing and gender opinions has been misinterpreted, misunderstood and given the kind of regard only true scientific studies should have. In this post I want to look at the assignment of certain characteristics to female parents when the characteristics should be applied to both female and male parents. I will also continue to point out misuses of the original Internet survey.

The BBC provides the following summary about the survey:

Mothers are more critical of their daughters than their sons and let boys get away with more, a poll suggests.

The survey by the website Netmums found mothers were twice as likely to be critical of their daughters than their sons (21% compared to 11.5%).

Remember that fathers are more critical of their sons (28.5%) than their daughters (13.2%)? That's twice as critical of their sons than their daughters! What a coincidence. They also let their daughters get away with more:

11. If you have children of both genders, which of the following statements do you agree with?

Fathers:

* I let my son get away with more - 15.3% agree
* I let my daughter get away with more - 36.8% agree

Mothers:

* I let my son get away with more - 21.5 agree
* I let my daughter get away with more - 17.8% agree

So why don't we have the BBC report on fathers being more critical of their sons and letting their daughters get away with more?
Now, it's always possible that the dad survey was so small nobody cared about the findings. But given that both surveys are based on a non-random sampling scheme, nobody should care about any of the findings.

Next part of the BBC summary:

More than half of the 2,672 mothers questioned (55%) said they had formed a stronger bond with their boys.

Um. Read the first post on this to see how blatantly and horribly wrong that assertion is. The correct percentage 15.3% of mothers who had children of both sexes, and the corresponding percentage for fathers is 16.17%

Back to the BBC summary:

The findings also suggest 51% thought it was wrong to treat boys and girls differently

The survey results tell us that 49.4% of mothers thought it was right to treat daughters and sons differently and 50.6% thought it was wrong. These numbers add up to 100%.

It also tells us that 53.8% of fathers thought treating sons and daughters differently was right, too. What the percentage of fathers might be who disagree is unclear because the survey results have the percentage of 14.7% for that answer. Which doesn't make sense and happens also to be the percentage answer to another question right above this question. It looks like 46% of fathers think treating boys and girls differently is wrong. That's a smaller percentage than the one for the mothers.

What that means, within the survey, is that the fathers were more comfortable with treating their sons and daughters differently than the mothers.

More from that summary:

Almost half of mothers questioned (48%) said their sons were mummy's boys

The percentage should be 47.2%. And almost half of fathers questioned (46.7%) said their daughters were daddy's girls! The survey didn't offer questions about sons being daddy's boys or daughters being mommy's girls! Sorta biased, don't you think? Even without that total focus on mothers' answers?

Finally:

The poll found mothers were more likely to attribute positive personality traits to their sons than their daughters.

Boys were more likely to be described as funny, cheeky, playful and loving, while girls were more likely to be described as stroppy, eager to please, serious and argumentative.

Actually (I'm getting tired of saying that), the poll asked the respondents to answer the following question:

12. Of the following adjectives, which do you think best describes girls or boys?

Note that this is NOT the same as asking it about the respondents' daughters or sons, and this question appears to be open for all parents, whether they in fact have children of both sexes or not. Note, also, that respondents could not pick the alternative "both" which means, for example, that you could NOT state that both girls and boys are industrious or loving. You had to choose one gender. I discuss the consequences of that in the first post.

But let's see how fathers and mothers agree and differ in the way they assign adjectives to boys and girls in that biased question.

First, they mostly don't differ. The percentage of both mothers and fathers who assign "funny", "cheeky", "naughty" and "playful" to boys is in the range 70-80%, as is the percentage of both mothers and fathers who assign "caring" to girls. The majority of both mothers and fathers also agree that the adjectives "cute", "serious", "thoughtful", "argumentative" and "eager to please" belong to girls, while the adjective "industrious" belongs to boys, though some of these percentage differences come closer to the fifty-fifty point.

The negative adjective "stroppy" (which really appears to duplicate "naughty" and "argumentative" and perhaps even "cheeky" if one flavors similar behavior differently by gender) is assigned to girls by 83.9% of the mothers in the survey and by 78.7% of the fathers.

All this tells us that if the mothers assign boys positive characteristics so do the fathers. But then that's what the British culture does, overall.

The only large difference between mothers and fathers in the survey had to do with the assignment of the adjective "loving": 63.2% of fathers assigned it to girls, whereas 58.1% of mothers assigned it to boys.

This concludes my writing on a survey which really didn't deserve any writing but required it after it became viral in that usual look-at-how-awful-mothers-are way.
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Thanks for DR for the link to the BBC EDUCATION! article.

Bad Research On Bad Mothers. Part I: Fox Popularizes It

DR sent me a link to Fox and friends discussion of a British study about how mothers treat their sons and daughters. Here is the relevant part of the show's rush (?) transcript:

02:05:27 >> Alisyn: An illustration of is british survey asked 2,000 women about their opinions towards their sons and their daughters and this is, by the way, via the internet and people could be more honest than they can be face-to-face and they found and I must say, this does ring true in my house and never noticed it until the study came out, 88% of mothers admit they are more critical of their daughters.
02:05:54 Than of their sons and use different adjectives, to describe them, the boys they think are funny, playful, .. their daughters, how do they describe them.
02:06:04 >> Clayton: Look, they describe their daughters as stroppy, british, argumentative and serious.
02:06:12 And they get into fights with them all the time and 55% of moms said they found it easier to bond with their sons.
02:06:19 >> Dave: I find that, it really comes down to who's oldest and who's youngest.
02:06:23 The examples I have seen the parents are tougher on the burst foreign child.
02:06:26 I mean, that is -- >> Clayton: That was my experience.
02:06:29 >> Dave: And mine, much easier on me, yeah.
02:06:31 I have seen -- >> Alisyn: That makes fee feel better, my first born are twin girls and our little boy, i would describe him as funnier, more playful and more loving and cuter and I thought it was girls are harder than boys.
02:06:47 >> Clayton: They are.
02:06:47 >> Alisyn: There you have it.
02:06:49 >> Clayton: Let me ask you -- >> Alisyn: We're blaming the kids, note parents.
02:06:52 >> Clayton: Let me ask you, hopefully your kids are not watching, which kids do you love more?
02:06:58 Go ahead, answer.
02:06:59 >> Alisyn: Look, all I'm saying is little boys are easier.
02:07:02 I think.
02:07:03 And that is why I'm possibly nicer to my little sons.
02:07:07 >> Clayton: My sisters got away with murder.
02:07:09 High sister what's the second born and my mom -- there was a lot of fire between them growing up, arguing back and forth.
02:07:14 But, you know, I had the earlier curfew, I'm sure, like you, FIRST BORNs AND SHE WAS OUT LIKE An hour-and-a-half later and i was like, wait.
02:07:21 >> Dave: I was the youngest.
02:07:23 >> Clayton: You were the youngest.
02:07:24 >> Dave: I stayed out all night!
02:07:27 >> Dave: We need another study for dave.
02:07:29 >> Dave: E-mail us, com, girls are more complicated.
02:07:37 >> Alisyn: I think so, too.

Now pay attention, my sweet readers:

Here we have a British study about mothers being harsher on their daughters! And the conclusion of the Fox And Friends discussion is?

Boys are easier!

What a relief for all mothers! Because it's OK to be harsher on your daughters than sons as it's the fault of the daughters. They are so hard to bring up.

That's what the popularizing media is telling us.

Now get your shovels out because we are going to start digging for this study.

Studying The "Study"


The first problem: It turns out that it's not a proper academic study at all! It's a survey carried out by a British website called Netmums, and, as far as I can see, participation in it is voluntary.

The second problem: If the people participating in that "study" are not a random sample of British mothers but a self-selection from the members/readers of that particular website, Netmums, none of the results can be statistically generalized to the overall population of British mothers, and they certainly cannot be generalized to American mothers. Except that Fox And Friends does exactly that.


Let's have a look at the survey questions themselves. That reveals the third problem: The survey is poorly designed and leads the recipient to certain answers, in particular in this question:

Of the following adjectives, which do you think best describes girls or boys? Funny, cute, cheeky, caring, naughty, industrious, playful, thoughtful, stroppy, loving, argumentative, eager to please, serious.

What is very bad about this question is that the answer cannot be applied to BOTH boys and girls. The respondents are FORCED to pick either boys or girls. Thus, if you think both your sons and daughters are funny/naughty/whatever, you must still pick either daughters or sons in the answer. Why is this a problem? Suppose that you think boys and girls are almost equally likely to be, say, naughty. This survey forces you to pick one or the other, and when the results are summarized you suddenly develop this tremendous difference by gender which may not be there in the first place. Also, forcing an either/or type of answer will certainly be affected by the societal gender norms. If you really think that boys and girls are equally stroppy but you must pick one, you are going to use that societal knowledge in your answer.

Finally, here's the fourth problem having to do with the popularization of this survey rather than the survey itself: Netmums also surveyed fathers! But the results about fathers appear uninteresting to Fox and Friends. Though I should add that the actual numbers of mothers and fathers responding to the survey are given in none of the places I searched (that would be the fifth problem), so I have no idea how many dads participated and how many mums participated. If the number of dads was, say, ten, then not discussing those results might make some sense, though only if the samples were random to begin with.

Are you having fun yet? I next printed out the survey results for mothers and fathers and collated them. Some of the figures, by the way, make no sense as added up they exceed 100% when the question doesn't allow that, and in other cases the figures may be typing errors.

What that little exercise showed me is that the mums and dads in this survey are not statistically similar groups as comes to their family composition. This is evident in the first two questions which ask how many children and of what sexes the respondent has. Among the fathers 18.4% had only sons but among the mothers 30.8% had only sons. Such a difference is large enough to make me believe that there is bias in the way people entered this study, and that bias is most likely coming from the fact that you could choose to participate. Note that the percentages of parents who had only daughters were fairly similar (22.6% of fathers and 23.2% of mothers) among the respondents.

Back To Fox And Friends' Take on the "Study"

Let's have a look at some of those assertions Fox And Friends made about the survey:

I must say, this does ring true in my house and never noticed it until the study came out, 88% of mothers admit they are more critical of their daughters.

Where did that come from? Let me check my papers*. Here it is:

For mothers:

11. If you have children of both genders, which of the following statements do you agree with?
* I am more critical of my son - 11.5% agree
* I am more critical of my daughter - 21% agree

For fathers:

11. If you have children of both genders, which of the following statements do you agree with?
* I am more critical of my son - 28.5% agree
* I am more critical of my daughter - 13.2% agree

Astonishing! Mindboggling! Where the f**k did Fox and News get that 88% figure for the mothers????

And note that the percentages for fathers and mothers seem to be mirror images, pretty much. Logic suggests that we should have had something about 88% of fathers being harsher with their sons on that show. Of course it would have been equally preposterously wrong but at least it would have been logical.

This is fun. Next comment from the Fox and Friends program:

And they get into fights with them all the time and 55% of moms said they found it easier to bond with their sons.

Get into fights with them all the time? However hard I comb the study I don't find that pearl of information anywhere. There is no question about fighting in that survey. The closest match I can find is in that biased question where you have to attach an adjective to either girls or boys but not both, and both mothers and fathers attach the adjective "argumentative" much more often to girls than boys. But that doesn't mean "getting into fights with them all the time", and if it does mean that then both fathers and mothers get into those.

What about that bonding bit? A disgusting misinterpretation of the data which goes like this:

Only for mothers who have both sons and daughters:
9. If you have children of both genders, did you find it easier to bond with one of your children than the other(s)?

* Yes - 27.8%
* No - 72.2%

10. If yes, please specify whether you found it easiest to bond with your:

* Son - 54.9%
* Daughter - 45.1%

And only for fathers who have both sons and daughters:
9. If you have children of both genders, did you find it easier to bond with one of your children than the other(s)?

* Yes - 33.3%
* No - 66.7%

10. If yes, please specify whether you found it easiest to bond with your:

* Son - 49%
* Daughter - 51%

So let's see how many lies Fox And Friends managed to get into that one: They stated that 55% of mothers found it easier to bond with sons. First, the question was only asked of parents who had both sons and daughters, though that's not a big problem, but it does change the overall percentages (note that they talk about all mothers). Second, out of the mothers who had both sons and daughters 72.2% did not find bonding any different by the gender of the child. Only 27.8% did, and out of those 54.9% found that the child they had the strongest bond with was a son.

Note also the data for fathers.

So what's the actual percentage of mothers in that survey who found it easier to bond with a son than a daughter? And what's the actual percentage of fathers who found it easier to bond with a son than a daughter?

The total answer doesn't make sense because roughly 30% of both mothers and fathers only had one child, and only 46% of the mothers (though 65.7% of the fathers) had children of both sexes. But it's possible to figure out the percentage of mothers and fathers within the group of parents which had both sons and daughters who found it easiest to bond with a child of the male sex. These percentages are 16.17% (49% of 33.3%) for fathers and 15.26% (54.9% of 27.8%) for mothers.

Now compare that to the 55% figure in Fox And Friends!

Last but not least: Boys are easier! Where did that conclusion come from? The survey asks nothing about the ease with which one can bring up a son or a daughter, nothing.

Perhaps this is all some sort of code for the survey results that both mothers (83.9%) and fathers (78.7%) find girls stroppier than boys in that question where they were forced to pick either boys or girls for each adjective. "Stroppy" is British slang for obstreperous, belligerent, easily insulted.

In the next part of this post I'm going to have a look at another popularization of this study. A calmer and gentler one than the Fox And Friends chatter.
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These results can be found in the results for moms and the results for dads. I printed them out and looked at them side-by-side.

Added later: Netmums removed the detailed results from the net the day after I sent them my questions about their interpretation.

Sunday Echidne Post

Sometimes I think I'm like that Crazy Feminist Aunt In The Attic in my blogging. Yellin' and screamin' and coming to family parties with a dead chicken pinned to my hat and slurping the coffee off the saucer and saying outrageous things innocently aloud and so everyone pretends not to notice. Battering at the floor. Yes, those spooky sounds you hear are me.

On the other hand, attics are lovely places, airy or crammed with goodies to examine, with space (at the top of the stairs) for dancing the jitterbug and with time-space for silence filled with sounds.

In other news, I can still make a great omelet, thanks for all the advice you gave me here some time ago. But now I want a house at a lakeside. Something like this one:

It's too small, though. But I love the tower. Perhaps two of these, put together so that there's a tower at each end?

What's your dream house?

Paul Dukas

La Plainte, au loin, d'un faune

Jean Hubeau

I was looking for another piece for the season and came across this piece Dukas wrote as his contribution to the memorial pieces many composers wrote after Debussy died. It's not exactly an autumn piece but it's pretty autumnal. Jean Hubeau studied piano with Lazare Levy and compostion with Dukas, himself.

And the same piece played by

Yvonne Lefebure

"Nazi Re-enactment" [Anthony McCarthy]

And They're Running for Congress.

This news is really disturbing.

Rich Iott, the Republican nominee for Congress from Ohio's 9th District, and a Tea Party favorite, who for years donned a German Waffen SS uniform and participated in Nazi re-enactments.

Iott, whose district lies in Northwest Ohio, was involved with a group that calls itself "Wiking", whose members are devoted to re-enacting the exploits of an actual Nazi division, the 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking", which fought mainly on the Eastern Front during World War II. Iott's participation in the Wiking group is not mentioned on his campaign's website, and his name and photographs were removed from the Wiking website.

I'd not realized that there were "Nazi re-enacters" . But it's something that shouldn't be a surprise. Confederate "re-enactment" is disturbingly common. And like that Civil War dress up and play hobby, the Nazi side of WWII "historical re-enactment" is really a falsification and distortion of what happened. These guys are a lot bigger on getting the details of their costumes right than they are with telling the truth about the historical record. It's bad enough to conveniently overlook that the Confederate side of the Civil War was fighting to maintain slavery and white supremacy a century and a half ago. To sanitize an SS unit of the Nazi army whose crimes are within living memory, in Ohio, is shocking.

The Republican Party has a disturbing and largely suppressed history of involvement with Nazis and former Nazis and the allies of Nazis. It's clear from this incident that involvement didn't die with the cold war and that the continued suppression of history is not a harmless matter of politeness to some of our more powerful people and families. After the crimes of the Nazis were committed and revealed, what might have been merely naive in the 1930s, becomes morally abhorrent.

People who falsify history almost always have a malignant agenda and that agenda almost always favors some form of inequality based on identity. The denial of the history of slavery in New England was essential for the assertion of the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon protestant elite of the 19th and early 20th century. The even more absurd denial of the place of retaining slavery in the Confederate rebellion played an important part in the retention of Jim Crow, semi-slavery well into this century. The lies about the real history of women under patriarchy is about the biggest lie in history.

These lies are perpetuated in novels and theatrical fiction, which are the primary substitute for historical information in the United States. With TV those the presentation of false history as mass entertainment has turned it into powerful propaganda. And those falsifications have a social and political effect. Denying that effect is also a lie, one of the favorite lies of the educated elite today. But causes have effects and so do intentions that can be put into effect. Falsifying the intentions of those who acted in history is essential to denying the effects of their actions. And that falsification can have the same results independent of the intentions of those telling the lies. Falsely romantic tales of the South told by hack writers for Hollywood with no more intent than to get paid have probably done more to perpetuate racism than all of the unreadable academic falsification effort put together. This stuff isn't harmless.

If Iott isn't forced to withdraw on the basis of his involvement with glorification and falsification of the Nazi SS, for God's sake, then we are in real danger from this. Having someone who is engaged in the falsification of the history of the SS in congress is not tolerable.

Cynical Nihilism Defines Corporate Culture And The Media That Serves It [Anthony McCarthy]

That Lou Dobbs would become a news item this week wasn't something I knew last week when comparing his role in the anti-Latino erruption that has fouled politics and society to the incident of anti-Semitic speech by Rick Sanchez. Now we know that while he was railing against illegal immigration and those who employed illegal immigrants, especially those from Latin America, those very people were tending his landscaping and taking care of the prize-winning horses his family owns.

If I had the time and skills I'd do an analysis of the two stories in the media, but it's my impression that the coverage of the hypocrisy of the voice and face of the anti-Latino backlash has been vastly more sympathetic than that of Sanchez. Consider the role in public life of the two men and the incidents that have embarrassed them. Sanchez's one-time descent into anti-Semitism on a talk radio show most of us have never heard of before, hasn't fueled laws like the one in Arizona that requires police to racially profile Latinos and others. It won't become a wide-spread and ugly campaign of the kind that was fueled by the years and years of Lou Dobb's CNN powered campaign. I haven't heard of Rick Sanchez being asked to address any mass meeting on the basis of his diatribe, though Lou Dobbs was scheduled to address a Republican-teabagger election season event today. Anyone who thinks that it wasn't his part in Latino bashing that got Dobbs the invite is lying.

These incidents open up so many of the serious and dangerous issues facing the ongoing fight for justice that it could generate a large number of posts. I'll go into one, very briefly. I watched Lawrence O'Donnell's show in which he had on Dobbs and Isabel Macdonald, the reporter who broke the story in The Nation. It became clear that Macdonald is quite good in print but she's not a performer in the way that Dobbs is. That is almost certainly why Dobbs would only talk to her on air, where he can use his skills to fudge and obfuscate instead of address fact. That is one of the biggest problems with broadcast and cable, which are more about performance than facts. Macdonald isn't a polished, experienced, performer which will be exploited in the cover up job. I guess that her gender will figure in that attempt as well.

In looking at what's being said about this, the constantly repeated lines are that Dobbs doesn't seem to have broken the law, himself, that he didn't directly hire the people who, we are apparently supposed to believe, he didn't notice were doing menial chores at his estates and with his prize horses. But the charge wasn't that Dobbs broke the law and that assertion has become part of the smoke screen. Isabel Macdonald's article shows that there was a serious case of Dobbs having low paid, illegal workers doing his grounds keeping and taking care of the show horses his family owns during years in which he was whipping up a national frenzy against illegal immigrants and the people who employ them. I haven't heard him deny that was the case, as he kept pointing out that he'd obtained their services from contractors. It's clear in the article that Dobbs and his adult daughter could hardly have not noticed that the people doing their work were Latinos and working in industries which employ large numbers of illegal immigrants, requiring them to work horribly long hours at very low wages and without much in the way of protection or benefits. Dobbs, working as a journalist covering exactly those issues for years and years, can't claim to be ignorant of these issues. His ADULT* daughter certainly doesn't get to claim she was unaware of her father's show.

But, as this develops, the Republican-teabaggers will overlook Dobb's hypocrisy and the fact that many of the same politicians and media figures who use hatred of Latinos employ low-paid Latinos, many of whom are almost certainly not here under exactly legal conditions. The news media will also bend over backwards to cut Dobbs slack, notably supporting him in exactly the way it didn't support Sanchez or other low-level, especially, minority people working in journalism. Dobbs made millions of dollars a year from his promotion of bigotry and there is nothing that wins the media over more than someone who has millions of dollars. And the media aren't bothered one bit by how they did it.

One of the most important things I've learned by watching the teabaggers is that it isn't that they're ignorant, it isn't that they believe the lies they're sold, it's that they don't care if what they hear and what they spout are lies, they don't care about the truth, they don't care about morality. The teabaggers are a completely nihilistic phenomenon fueled by a cynically nihilistic media and the corporate interests that harnesses them. They have no moral core, they value nothing except wealth and the power that is useful to getting more of it. That is the real movement that Lou Dobbs is a poster boy for, but he's just one of many who could serve that purpose.

The small, mostly poorly paid effort to report fact is really not the same thing as the corporate media. The people who do that should be aware of the fact that they not only have little in common with the corporate-electronic media, but that their work will be attacked by that same media. The more factual it is, the less convenient it is for their owners and masters. Real reporters need to realize that to protect themselves and the integrity of their work. They should develop the performance skills necessary to do that as well.

Note: The Tea Party has been carefully cultivated by the media, all you have to do is compare how every small PR event the teabaggers mount is covered by the media as compared to huge rallies of progressives such as the one in DC last week.

* Before I read the story the impression I got from the media was that she was a teenager. I would like to also compare the media treatment of rich adults in their 20s with poor kids in their teens and younger when they get into trouble.

Do Daughters Stink?

JP sent me a link to an article about the question why couples seem more likely to get married and stay married if they have sons rather than daughters:

Not only did researchers find that couples with sons are more likely to stick together, unmarried pregnant couples were more likely to have shotgun weddings if the baby was going to be a boy and divorced mothers of boys are more likely to remarry and stay remarried.

Does this mean that daughters are matrimonially risky and sons are marriage saviors? Not so fast, psychologists say.

The article is pretty good, actually, and well worth reading because it gives a much more considered view of the evidence.

But note the odd focus in the above quote: It must be something that daughters do or don't do that causes divorces! That NEVER occurred to me when I first read about the research. My thoughts were about whether men value sons more than daughters and whether both men and women think that divorce is worse for sons than daughters. It's not to my credit that I never thought of the possibility the above article later mentions: That daughters might provide more support to a divorced mother than sons and thus might make divorce easier for her.

But check out the comments to this article. Several of them interpret the article as meaning that daughters in fact cause divorces, by their behavior, by being pampered little princesses and so on. Some others argue that you can never have several women in one household because women can't get along. This despite the fact that the divorce does NOT reduce the number of women in the household because in the vast majority of cases it is the mother who gets physical custody.

So it sounds like the sameoldsameold misogyny again. In the comments, I mean. The article itself is not bad.

You're A Whore

How did you feel about that title? Did it make you angry at me? Did it seem nonsensical? Did you think it was funny? Were you like "whatevah"?

I'm asking those questions because of the recent news that someone in Jerry Brown's campaign in California called his opponent in the governor's race, Meg Whitman, a whore:

The comment came after Brown called the Los Angeles Police Protective League in early September to ask for its endorsement. He left a voicemail message for Scott Rate, a union official. Brown apparently believed he had hung up the phone, but the connection remained intact and the voice mail machine captured an ensuing conversation between Brown and his aides.

With evident frustration, Brown discussed the pressure he was under to refuse to reduce public safety pensions or lose law enforcement endorsements to Whitman. Months earlier, Whitman had agreed to exempt public safety officials from key parts of her pension reform plan.

"Do we want to put an ad out? … That I have been warned if I crack down on pensions, I will be – that they'll go to Whitman, and that's where they'll go because they know Whitman will give 'em, will cut them a deal, but I won't," Brown said.

At that point, what appears to be a second voice interjects: "What about saying she's a whore?"

"Well, I'm going to use that," Brown responds. "It proves you've cut a secret deal to protect the pensions."

I'm also asking about all this because several liberal/progressive men didn't see where the problem is. After all, Meg Whitman sells away her principles so she is a whore.

Now distance yourself from this particular example and note that I'm not advocating that anyone would vote for Meg Whitman in these elections. What I want to discuss is the use of insults such as calling a woman who is not a sex worker a whore. Or even calling a woman who IS a sex worker a whore. The two terms are not identical. The former term is neutral and descriptive whereas the latter is filled with contempt and loathing and moral judgments.

Why is this particular term picked among the many possible insults? What is it about the idea of a woman selling sex that is so horrible*? Consider that the vast, vast majority of female sex workers sell sex to male customers. Every single one of those men is exchanging money for sex. Yet we don't even have a good insult for them in English (Finnish has the term "whore-buck", buck as in male goat).

Then consider that it appears to be mostly men who use the insult "whore." Is it the idea of having to buy sex that they are really angry about? I don't think so, because another common insult is the term "slut" and a slut isn't taking money for sex. She's just having lots of it (though probably not with the person calling her a slut).

My tentative conclusion is that these insults are based on the old idea that good women don't have much sex and certainly not sex with many men. Any woman who violates that rule deserves our loathing and our contempt. Of course any man who violates that rule is a stud and deserves our congratulations.

It's the old double standard peeking through layers and layers of other stuff.

But that's not really what makes calling Meg Whitman a whore so dangerous in political terms. It's the fact that any woman can be called a whore or a slut or a bitch when she deviates (or is suspected of deviating) from established gender norms, and women know this.

It is this knowledge deep inside women that those liberal guys I mentioned earlier don't get. That's the reason why calling Meg Whitman a whore will backfire. Women know that there, but for the grace of goddess, go I.
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*This post is not addressing any of the problems of prostitution from a feminist point of view or sex trafficking or sexual slavery. There's clearly much that fills us with horror in those topics, but what I want to do with this post is ask the questions in isolation of the actual sex markets and how they work, to get at something different.

How not to comfort people (by Suzie)

In “Grilled Cheesus,” this week’s episode of “Glee,” the father of a high-school glee club member goes into a coma after a heart attack. The son feels anger, guilt, grief. His friends hope to comfort him by changing his worldview to theirs.

"Although Kurt has announced he’s an atheist, three friends sing him a spiritual song. Three sing and pray at his father’s bedside until he kicks them out. TVGuide:

Later that day, [best friend] Mercedes approaches Kurt, saying that she doesn't know how to be around him during this time because of his inability to connect to the spiritual world. He apologizes for pushing his friends away. She hopes that he'll come with her to church, where they will be dedicating their worship to Burt.

Sue, the glee club’s nemesis, wants to stop all the singing about God. But guidance counselor Emma says:

What is wrong with you? … There is a boy in that glee club that might lose his father. How could you get in the way when the only thing anybody is trying to do is give that poor child just a little bit of comfort?

Co-creator Ryan Murphy says: "Sue's an atheist, but I love that she doesn't want to be. She and [Kurt] are both saying to the world, 'Prove us wrong: If God is kindness and love, make me believe in God.' "

Please do not try this in the real world. If you believe in God, don't assume your atheist friends are secretly longing to be converted.

Kurt ends up understanding that his friends mean well and sings “[What if God Was] One of Us” with them. (In an earlier solo, he sang the "Across the Universe" version of "I Want to Hold Your Hand." I’ve embedded a film clip of T.V. Carpio singing it to another cheerleader.) Thus, the person who needs comfort must reassure others. The person who is in the minority among his friends and in the larger society, must learn to respect and tolerate their views, even though they make little attempt to understand his.

Many critics have praised the show as being well-balanced in its depiction of religion. Some atheists were pleased to be mentioned at all. Others were outraged, as I was. My outrage stems, in part, from my experiences as a cancer patient, when some Christians are convinced that they will console me through conversion.

Sunday and yesterday, I went into the small, sort-of ER at the cancer center. The Sunday RN did his job and nothing else. I was the only patient in the place. I was vomiting and crying in pain in my cubicle while he regaled the staff with humorous stories. Yesterday's RN treated me like a person, not just an inconvenience, joking with me, while she headed off the pain and nausea. This reminded me that caring can be shown in many small ways -- it doesn't require a full gospel choir.

Friday critter blogging (by Suzie)

Here is Sebastian the Chihuahua at attention.

Just Shout Louder

This Rachel Maddow interview with a Republican called Art Robinson (running against Peter DeFazio in Oregon) is an example of that tactic in debates. Robinson keeps shouting louder and louder. Then he spices that up with condescension.

Would he have done the same with a male interviewer?

Today's Giggle Time: The Hundred Most Powerful Women

Forbes has given us a list of the hundred most powerful women in the world. That the list makes any feminist go and bang her or his head against the garage door is just an extra benefit of the new way of defining power Forbes now uses:

The new system mixed an earnings component with a "buzz factor," as opposed to past lists focused more on wealth and executive position.

Great! I look forward to the list of the hundred most powerful men in the world on the basis of "buzz factor"! Except that we will not get that, because power is a serious matter when discussed in men. When it comes to women power can be most anything you wish it to be. Or so it looks.

So what does this wonderful new way of defining power accomplish, other than making the whole concept a little bit laughable?

Well, it ranks seven female presidents of this globe below the first 61 women in the rankings and no female presidents above that number. It puts a First Lady (Michelle Obama) in the top position and the First Lady of an American state (Maria Shriver, California) above all female presidents and the Prime Minister of Australia (Julia Gillard)!

The lesson is that women gain much, much more power by associating with powerful men than by trying to get power themselves! Such a good lesson to teach our daughters.

And if you do want to go for that brass ring of power all on your own, why bother about politics? You can just develop a lot of buzz factor! I can't help feeling that the changes were made so that the list would include more of exactly that: outrageous performers, beautiful bodies and so on. Never mind if the women listed actually have power. It's much more fun this way. And much less feministy which is a very nice side-effect.

Power is difficult to define, I know. But this list corrupts even the faintest attempts to do just that and essentially makes a joke of the whole idea that women could wield real power.

The list is really about fame and celebrity status. The people who created it and then decided to call what it measures "power" should be ashamed. So I think.

Today's Action Alert

Concerns the New York state case where a juvenile counselor (who appears to have worked for the judicial system) confessed to raping one juvenile and sexually harassing two others:

Simmons continued to prey on teenagers in his custody until 2008, when a 15-year-old girl came forward to say he had sodomized her behind a locker in the girls holding area, which he stocked with condoms and cookies. Investigators believe the assaults go back a decade to the rape of a 13-year-old in the holding area.

"Just the tip of the iceberg," Assistant District Attorney Amir Vonsover said in 2008, when Simmons was indicted for three sex assaults.

On Sept. 27, Simmons appeared in court and pleaded guilty to raping Ashley and sexually assaulting two other teens.

He received probation.

Getting just probation seems to be based on plea bargaining. You can protest here (I haven't checked if you have to live in New York state to do so).

That 2000 Dollar Deductible...

Rand Paul has proposed a 2000 dollar deductible for Medicare recipients.





The interesting bit in that video:

"I'm not talking about changing the deductible for anyone who gets Medicare currently," Paul told Cavuto. "But I am saying younger people -- probably 55 and under."

"We need people who will stand up like adults, admit to the problems, and try to fix these problems," Paul added. "Not on the backs of current senior citizens, but on the next generation that comes forward."

Paul later stated that he doesn't support higher deductibles for Medicare. Perhaps not even on the frail backs of future senior citizens?

Deductibles are a popular conservative nostrum for anything that ails health care in general. They make the price of medical care unsubsidized until the subscriber has spent the size of the deductible. What this means in the present case is that seniors on Medicare would have to spend 2000 dollars out-of-pocket before Medicare would step in at all. For those seniors whose sole income comes from Social Security (and many women are in that group, due to traditional gender roles) spending 2000 bucks on medical care each year is a lot of money. Might mean not eating or not heating.

Still, perhaps the deductibles could be adjusted by the Medicare recipient's income level? But even in that case they would be unlikely to drastically reduce Medicare total spending, simply because most of that is linked to hospitalization. By the time a person is ill enough to be admitted to a hospital that 2000 deductible has become irrelevant.

Scandinavian Music Group: Vieläkö soitan banjoa?

A nice song. Do I still play the banjo?

Exhibitionism

After coming across this article while searching for something else I suddenly remembered all my encounters with flashers or exhibitionists. Most of them took place in the large park I crossed at night on my way home from the university (yes, I was really stupid to walk that way on my own). Suddenly a guy would stand up from the bushes wagging his penis at me. This happened many, many times.

But the case I remember the best was having lunch at a cafe and looking up only to see a man ejaculating while staring at me eating. He was standing in an enclosed doorway which had a glass wall to the cafe. One of my rare moments of pure red rage took over, and I ran out and then chased him down the street. So.

The reason for my rage was of course the fact that he was using me as his masturbation aid.

Let's see what Wikipedia says about exhibitionism:

Exhibitionism, colloquially referred to flashing, is behavior by a person that involves the exposure of private parts of their body to another person in a situation when they would not normally be exposed, with a tendency toward an extravagant. The act may be at least partially sexual or intended to attract the attention of another or others, or to shock. Some people have a psychological compulsion to sexually expose themselves. The condition is sometimes called apodysophilia[1] or Lady Godiva syndrome. In some situations exposing in public is a crime of indecent exposure or public nuisance. Though the offence is not often prosecuted, it is taken especially seriously when the exposure (flashing) is to children and women.

Public exhibitionism by women has been recorded since classical times, often in the context of the women's shaming groups of men into committing, or inciting them to commit, some public action.[2]

Wow. Just wow, even with the warning that the factual contents of the post are disputed. If you read the whole thing you get the idea that flashing is mostly what women do.

I looked up the debate on the article and found most comments even more staggeringly weird, except for this one:

The definition is wrong, as are the illustrations. As clear from any dictionary (Merriam-Webster, OED, American Heritage), exhibitionism only refers to the sexual practice of displaying one's private parts for the purpose of self-arousal of the individual performing it, in front of involuntary observers. Not to public nudity in general. Use of the word for other types of situations is metaphorical and derogative. It's absurd to regard every woman in history that reportedly appeared nude publicly for one purpose or another as an exhibitionist. The images are also irrelevant, because they clearly show erotic "flashing" by professional models in porn context, intended not to stimulate the flasher but the public. A man with a long coat in the woods would be a more appropriate illustration.

I could be wrong, of course, but I doubt that the parks are full of female exhibitionists or that women bare their genitals to unwilling observers in order to masturbate. Perhaps the phenomenon I'm thinking about is something quite different than exhibitionism?

More News On The Gender Wage Gap

I found this yesterday:

--A new fact sheet released today by the Institute for Women's Policy Research, based on data from the US Bureau of the Census, shows that in 2009 median annual earnings for employed women were $36,278, compared with $47,127 for men, a female- to- male-earnings ratio of 77.0 percent (making for a gender wage gap of 23 percent). This gender wage gap deteriorated slightly in 2009, from a level of 77.1 percent in 2008, after peaking at 77.8 percent in 2007. For Americans employed full-time year-round, there is no evidence that men are doing worse in the recession than women earnings-wise.

"More effort to stimulate the economy and create jobs that pay decent wages regardless of gender or race is desperately needed. Women, especially those who support families on their own, would benefit from equal access to good jobs and equal pay"

The gender wage gap is stark for women of color. For full-time year-round employees, white women earned only 75 cents for each dollar earned by white men, but African American women only made 62 cents for every dollar earned by a white man, and Hispanic/ Latina women earned only 53 cents.

You can see the actual statistics in Table 1. of this publication (pdf) (left-click to enlarge the table):

A few things should be kept in mind when looking at that data:

First, these are gross figures. They do not tell us what causes these gender and race/ethnicity differences in earnings. The figures have not been standardized for actual working hours (such as overtime), occupation, industry or the worker's education or experience levels.

Second, part-time workers are excluded altogether. Women are much more likely to work part-time than men and part-time workers have lower hourly wages than full-time workers.

Table 1 above chooses to relate women's earnings to the earnings of white non-Hispanic men in the rightmost column. Those comparisons tell us that Asian-American women do best in that comparison and Hispanic women/Latinas worst.

I decided to play with the numbers in that table a little more. For example, we can look at the gross (unstandardized) race/ethnicity gap for each sex. If we use the white non-Hispanic men's earnings as the denominator and treat those earnings as if they equal one dollar, then African-American men make 73 cents, Asian-American men one dollar and Hispanic men/Latinos 61 cents.

Likewise, if we set white non-Hispanic women's earnings as equal to one dollar, then African-American women make 83 cents, Asian-American women 1 dollar and 10 cents and Hispanic women/Latinas 70 cents.

Once again, remember that the above figures (which are obviously really percentages) are not standardized for education etc. and therefore are not direct measures of race discrimination. Still, those numbers are interesting, especially when we compare the effects of race/ethnicity between men and women.

What about the gender gap in wages by race/ethnicity? If we set the men's earnings in a particular race/ethnicity group as one dollar, then women in that same group earn 75 cents if the group is white (not Hispanic), 85 cents if the group is African-American, 82 cents if the group is Asian-American and 87 cents if the group is Hispanic/Latino. Note that the gender gap is the largest among non-Hispanic whites.

Finally, we can simply rank the dollar figures in that table. Asian-American men have the highest average earnings, white non-Hispanic men the second highest, Asian-American women the third highest and so on. An instructive exercise.

Hollaback Has A New Address

Hollaback is the website which lets women react to street harassment. Check it out.

I was surfing the net the other night and came across all sorts of really woman-hating comments in the threads at places which aren't supposed to be woman-hating (those sites exist, too, and if you are interested check out what YesMeansYes found), and it occurred to me that having a site like Hollaback, but just for those types of comments would be fantastic. People could report the comments and the name of the site which allowed them to fester in their bottom for weeks, months or forever. Over time the site would grow and grow and grow and perhaps then someone would take my concerns over this cyber-misogynism more seriously.

What do you think of that brilliant idea?
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After thinking about it, I decided not to publish a sample of the comments I collected because they are awful and will make everybody who reads this feel dirty. But I will do so in the comments if my dear readers wish it.

Today's Ur-Stupid Statement

Not written today but a few days ago in an article about how the number of women in the Congress is likely to drop this year, for the first time in three decades.

This is the stupid statement:

Women's gains in Congress have been slow since
Jeanette Rankin of Montana became the first woman
in the House in 1917, three years before women
won the right to vote. Even now, just 17% of
Congress is female.

Beyond bragging rights, does having women in Congress make a difference?

Bolds are mine. The article then goes on to argue that it does because women bring up different issues.

Let's change that last sentence in the quote a little. It may clarify my anger:

Beyond bragging rights, does having Latinos in Congress make a difference?

When did democracy stop meaning anything? When is aiming at a Congress reflective of the actual composition of the country something to do with bragging rights? And where are the bragging rights in any case when so many otherwise comparable (and even not-comparable) countries have a greater representation of women than the United States?

The Opt-Out Government

This case from Tennessee tells us how a libertarian system works:

Imagine your home catches fire but the local fire department won't respond, then watches it burn. That's exactly what happened to a local family tonight.

A local neighborhood is furious after firefighters watched as an Obion County, Tennessee, home burned to the ground.

The homeowner, Gene Cranick, said he offered to pay whatever it would take for firefighters to put out the flames, but was told it was too late. They wouldn't do anything to stop his house from burning.

Each year, Obion County residents must pay $75 if they want fire protection from the city of South Fulton. But the Cranicks did not pay.

The mayor said if homeowners don't pay, they're out of luck.

...

This fire went on for hours because garden hoses just wouldn't put it out. It wasn't until that fire spread to a neighbor's property, that anyone would respond.

Turns out, the neighbor had paid the fee.

"I thought they'd come out and put it out, even if you hadn't paid your $75, but I was wrong," said Gene Cranick.

In terms of economic jargon, Gene Cranick tried to be a free rider, to get the benefits of the system without paying for them. That can work with some public goods (such as the services of a lighthouse) but firefighting services are not a pure public good. Though they have some of its characteristics, you certainly can be excluded from getting the service as Mr. Cranick found out.

At the same time, imagine what would happen with a purely private firefighting service. Each home owner would have to figure out how many others on that street have paid for the service. If none have, for example, then your house is in much greater danger of burning down (even if you pay for the service), simply because if other houses in the neighborhood start burning nobody will interfere. So the firefighters would wait until your house is surrounded by an inferno of flames before intervening.

Fun and games.
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Added: This is unrelated, except for the firefighting bit but a fun example of the incentives and their effect:

I was reading a history book which recounted the story of a group of villages in the 18th century getting together and starting a firefighting service. The men working in it were doing it only part-time but they had to be paid. So the villages decided to pay them per fire put out. You can imagine what happened next.