Life In the Neolithic Ages. A Feminazi Rant.

That's the current era in terms of gender equality (Ogg has rock. Ogg bang head of Oggette! bangbangbang! Oggette stupid. Ogg smart, look at Ogg bang!).

We don't live in a feminist era, whatever the nuttiest types of Men's Rights Activists say, and we don't live in a post-feminist era, unless by "post-feminism" we mean that feminism came and went, like a dirty ring around the collar. All gone now! Besides, it was all about man-hating, unshaved armpits and ugly women not being able to get laid.

Women don't want equality, Counterpunch, an extreme left-wing site, tells us, borrowing heavily from non-existing research from a British wingnut. Women can't drive and shouldn't wear the pants, right-wingers tell us when it looks like female advisers persuaded the president to make a certain decision. And the president is now effete, weak and contemptible, because women should not have power.

Elsewhere, the American invasion troops in Afghanistan have decided to back-pedal on the topic of women's rights. Trying to change the oppression of women there is like rolling that stone up the hill, only having it roll back down again. (Poor Sisyphus. I know how he felt.) But we must all be pragmatic! What can be achieved in Afghanistan is something safer for the west and something better for the Afghan men and that must serve us.

In Egypt, the transitional government has no women and the Muslim Brotherhood (not sisterhood) is likely to win many seats in the next parliament. Tunisia's revolution has a similar male flavor and so it goes.

And in the ivory towers, new theories are created every day in those weird type of evolutionary psychology workshops about the innermost nature of women as coy, not very smart, keen on trading sex for money and best judged by how close to a human-sized Barbie doll* she might look, preferably with blond hair and blue eyes.

Most people are comfortably numb with this state of affairs. Even many feminists have switched their focus from women to oppressions of every kind.

But of course things have much improved in this country and in many other countries when it comes to the acceptable roles of women. Even international progress is visible if you squint hard enough.

The reason for my rant is not that. It's the obliviousness with which writers carefully pen the term "post-feminist," the pretend-seriousness with which they discuss the imaginary coming era of men's oppression by women, all combined with jokes about women as bad drivers or worries about whether women should be in power. It's the opining on feminist topics by many who appear to have done their research by having a ten-minute thought one night over a beer or two, and it's our willingness to take such thoughts every bit as seriously (if not more so) than the writings of people who actually have done the necessary research.

Take, for instance, the often expressed view that we now live in a post-feminist world? When honor killings exist? When the United States has never had a female president? When the Erick Ericksons of this world can proudly compare the US Secretary of State to bad women drivers? When work-life balance is just yet another women's issue? When I can watch a week of Japanese television about the earthquake-tsunami-nuclear-disaster combination and not see one female expert or politician interviewed, when all those rooms of power are full of only men? When the US Republican Party has declared an all-out war on women, and few notice this? Post-feminist, indeed, but only in the sense of feminism being irrelevant.

What about the ominous rise of the new matriarchy, some of you might ask**. Aren't women now dominant among university students? Isn't the world soon going to be run by those bad female drivers? Perhaps it is time for a counter-revolution! Perhaps we have gone too far in the direction of favoring women. And look what that got us? As commentators from both the left and the right told us, weren't women supposed to be the peaceful sex, the sex that will stop the wars? But look what three women did in the case of president Obama's Libya decision! They were the heedless warmongers. Which means...what?

Iran fixed the too-many-women problem in its universities by putting up quotas against female students in "manly" disciplines, such as engineering. The US tries to fix it by telling us stories about how bad it is ultimately for women (not for men, mind you, or for all of us) if they are the majority of college graduates:

They have nobody higher up or equal to marry! That something which we would applaud in a randomly picked student (hard work and drive) is so often presented as a problem: too-many-women, should make you think. It's a sign of the neolithic age of gender relationships: Zero-sum thinking, gender myths based on man-the-provider-and-leader and woman-the-subservient-housewife and generalized diffuse sexism which always leads us to the conclusion that women should do with something slightly less than full equality.

As I mention in the title of this post, this is a rant. But if it still comes across as too earnest and serious, think about why that might be the case.

Gender equality is not something that is taken seriously, in general. That's why Erickson can present his contempt of women as a joke and that's why we don't all riot when we are told that women should cut back on higher education so as to leave more space for men which they then could marry. We are uncomfortable with taking the topic seriously because we are still living the neolithic era of gender relationships. And that is what makes us uncomfortable with feminazi rants.
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*These link to the first posts of two series, not to the specific posts in which those arguments are presented. You can find loads more in my archives if you are bent that way.
**Just an aside: Note how outdated some of the arguments made about the "end of men" are less than one year later. The mancession, for instance, is rapidly disappearing and there are some signs that a womancession might come next.

CNN and the Inner Sexist, Erick Erickson

One year ago CNN hired Erick Erickson, a wingnut, and described him like this:

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

CNN loves sexists. Erick Erickson has his very own radio show, and this is what he said about Obama's Libya decision:

Here's another Erickson theory about Libya, also from the his March 21 radio show:
ERICKSON: By the way, it's the women's fault. … It's, apparently, the women in the Obama administration who have decided we needed to go to war in Libya. … This is typical. This is so typ-- i'm mean, I'm going to bring my inner sexist out I'm afraid tonight, some of you are going to be very upset with me. But this is like women drivers. We're going to war in Libya, we have no plan, we have no map, even if we have a map of war, um, it wasn't going to get read, they were going to pull over and ask the French apparently for help, or at least make the guy pull over and ask the French for help. This is crazy.
And more:
ERICKSON: This is just silly. I mean, back-seat driving by the women, and they're gonna get Barack Obama lost. What is it with Barack Obama caving to the women? I mean, now we know who rules his personal life. I guess Michelle is firmly in charge as well, if Barack Obama is going to cave that easy to three women in his administration over what to do with Libya.
And even more:
ERICKSON: It took the women to get him involved, and the women apparently went in without a clear plan. No shopping list.

Bolds are mine. You can listen to Erickson if you wish. He then continues, in a nasal voice, by not being able to remember numbers and by not being able to pronounce Russian names. Note that I make no conclusions about men's ability to remember numbers or to learn foreign languages from that.

Neither do I point out that George Bush went to Iraq with no exit plan or with no obvious planning at all, and I make no conclusions about other men on that basis. That's because I'm not a sexist.

But Erickson is a proud sexist. And "an important voice", according to CNN.

Pause here for a moment and ask yourself what would happen to a conservative commentator who let his or her "inner racist" go wild in a radio show. That person wouldn't have a commenting job to return to, at least for a few months. But an inner sexist? Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. We all know how women are. But those Ay-rabs, they sure oppress their little brainless women, don't they?

That's the conservative non-religious take on women. The religious take is worse. In either case, I don't understand women who vote Republican, especially without complaining loudly and long about total miscarried zygotes such as Erickson.

Not that it's necessary loads better elsewhere on the political spectrum, except for the blatant blurting out of the nastiest statements about one half of all humanity: That, my friends, the conservatives excel in. And they think it is funny and fair.

In any case, now we know what CNN thinks of women, too.

Elizabeth Taylor, RIP

She has died of congestive heart failure at the age of 79.

To me her most interesting performance was in the "National Velvet", which made this description of her role in it sound pretty weird:

Her teenage performance in 1944's "National Velvet" created a template for the obligatory infatuation with the majesty of horses by young girls that has been mined for comedic gold by everything from the spoof movie "Hot Shots!" to the "Carol Burnett Show" and dozens of online memes.

I would have thought that the themes of "National Velvet" were much more complicated than mere girls' infatuation with the majesty of horses! One of those themes had to do with what was allowed for women and girls in 1944 and to what extent they were allowed to excel in their lives.

This short plot summary omits a few of the twists in that sub-theme:

National Velvet is the story of a twelve-year girl, Velvet Brown, living in Sewels, in Sussex, England, who saves a horse from the knacker's yard and trains it for the Grand National steeplechase, aided by her father's hired hand, a young drifter, Mi Taylor. The fictional horse which Velvet Brown trained and rode in the National is called "Pie." When she discovers that the Latvian jockey hired to ride Pie doesn't believe he can win, she disguises herself as a male jockey and rides the horse to victory.

Velvet collapses after her victory, is examined by a doctor, and her achievement is disqualified because of her sex. Note how all this, both positive and negative, is about the limits of gender?

Earlier in the movie Mrs. Brown, Velvet's mother, talks with Velvet about her own background. She swam the English Channel as a young woman, but tells Velvet that such feats as hers, or the one Velvet contemplates, can be attempted only once in a lifetime. Thus, the overall message of the movie is an ambiguous one when it comes to female achievement. Velvet is determined in the face of opposition and she succeeds. But ultimately her victory is nullified and she is shown as not really minding. Or perhaps she sees her victory in a different light.

Why Unions Matter in the US. A Short Lecture.

(Let's see how this works with a snot-filled head. Yes, I'm still sick which should be impossible for us divines)

Unions increase the negotiating power of workers. This is important when the other side in the negotiations consists of humongous firms, such as is the case with oligopolies or monopolies or with state governments. It makes no sense to pretend that someone interviewing for a janitor's job at a large firm has the same negotiating power as the firm. Indeed, the very term "negotiation" makes no sense in that context. As Galbraith has argued, unions provide the necessary countervailing power for large employers. Even with all their imperfections, unions can guarantee that the janitor in my example has rest breaks and some protection against hazardous chemicals, say.

Those who wish to kill unions because of their market power should also wish to kill firms with market power. All the negative arguments (and more) about unions apply, in mirror image, to the large employers. They have the ability to depress earnings of those they hire and the ability to make the working conditions dangerous. That the enemies of the unions tend to be the friends of monopolized industries shows that the concern about market power doesn't extend everywhere.

Unions also matter in the political market place. Out of the ten largest donors to political parties, three are unions, and those are the only three which do not donate only to Republicans. If unions can be de-fanged altogether (and we are almost there), one of the few wider channels of donations to the Democratic Party will also die. That the Democrats in the Congress don't appear overly worried about this makes me wonder what color the sky might be in their world.

(Why are longer words and cumbersome sentences easier to make when one is not feeling well?)

The Department of Not-Labor in Maine

Now this is just hilarious (via):

Maine Gov. Paul LePage has ordered the removal of a 36-foot mural depicting the state's labor history from the lobby of the Department of Labor headquarters building in Augusta.
In addition, the LePage administration is renaming several department conference rooms that carry the names of pro-labor icons such as Cesar Chavez.
LePage spokesman Dan Demeritt says the mural and the conference room names are not in keeping with the department's pro-business goals and some business owners complained.

Orwellian! LePage is one the Republican Nazgûls who have ridden their ghost horses into the governorships of several US states.

But why not rename the Department of Labor something more attractive for business? The Department of Easily-Scrapped-Non-Durable-Inputs? Such inputs can't have unions, clearly.

Here are three panels from the mural. The rightmost one depicts textile workers of the past:

I can see how some of those panels might make a business person uncomfortable. But isn't that a good thing? Don't we want a world where work is safe and provides a sufficient living?

Who am I kidding there?

Hilda Solis has finally come out in support of unionization rights. Too little too late?

Ask the Nazgûls:

Sexism to the Right of Me, Sexism to the Left of Me.

It's not only the wingnuts who have trouble with female politicians. Here's the progressive Robert Dreyfuss in the Nation:

Obama's Women Advisers Pushed War Against Libya

So three or four of Obama’s advisers, all women, wanted war against Libya.
 
We’d like to think that women in power would somehow be less pro-war, but in the Obama administration at least it appears that the bellicosity is worst among Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and Samantha Power. All three are liberal interventionists, and all three seem to believe that when the United States exercises military force it has some profound, moral, life-saving character to it. Far from it. Unless President Obama’s better instincts manage to reign in his warrior women—and happily, there’s a chance of that—the United States could find itself engaged in open war in Libya, and soon.

Compare that to the National Review's Mark Krikorian, an arch-conservative:

They Know Who Wears the Pants in This Country

Look, I’m a sensitive New Age guy — I cook, I do laundry, I choke up at movies (well, Gladiator, anyway). But does anyone think our enemies abroad are as enlightened as we are about feminism? Steyn is right that the specific lesson they’re learning is that nukes are the best insurance against invasion — but a broader one is that our commander-in-chief is an effete vacillator who is pushed around by his female subordinates. Prof. Althouse notes, “A feminist milestone: Our male President has been pulled into war by 3 women,” and Senator Graham scored points with “I Thank God for Strong Women in the Obama Administration,” but we’re going to pay for this.

Oh my. Two men from the opposite extremes of the American political discourse, and both of them are really bothered by the gender of these advisors! Dreyfuss wants all women to be non-bellicose or if that's not possible then at least he wants Obama to "reign" those bellicose broads in.

Krikorian is much ruder in his sexism. He hints that no proper Islamofascist would ever respect a president who listens to women, that men must be the bosses. But both these gentlemen address the gender of Clinton, Rice and Power. Indeed, both of them focus more on the general class of "women" than on the particular individuals. It's sexism when women are stripped of their individuality in this manner, when they are turned into mere samples of some larger mass of womanhood.

Some days I despair, I do. I don't expect anything better from the Krikorians of this world. But Dreyfuss disappointed me. Or as Katha Pollitt puts it in her response to Dreyfuss:

In any case, the fact that three women argued for it skillfully and won their point is not very interesting. So why stress it, except that it mobilizes a raft of misogynist tropes about castrating females, the dangers of petticoat government and the folly of expecting anything good to come out of gender equality? After all, can you imagine a piece in The Nation titled “Black President Opts for Bombs” or “Qaddafi, a Man, Threatens to Massacre Rebels, Most of Whom Are Also Men”?

Misogyny—it’s the last acceptable prejudice of the left.

Powerful Women: They Make A President Look Weak

So the Republicans tell us. And no, sexism is not only lingering (as the quote below suggests). It is thriving:

"When we have [French] President [Nicolas] Sarkozy dictating the pace and terms and conditions for security initiatives in the world, we know that we've entered a new era in terms of America's place and leadership and vision for security around the world, and that concerns me greatly," former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, who just announced a presidential exploratory committee, said Monday.

Speaking from Chile Monday afternoon, Mr. Obama again stressed that America is working "with our international partners" on the offensive against Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, stating the action has been solely "in support of an international mandate from the Security Council." Longtime Republican strategist Ed Rollins says that sort of rhetoric presents an opportunity to critics like Pawlenty, who can point to it as evidence that Mr. Obama doesn't see America as the preeminent nation in the world.

"To a Republican audience, it's what they want to believe," said Rollins. "They want to believe the president is weak and hasn't been decisive."

That perception may have been reinforced over the weekend with a spate of stories like this one in the New York Times, which suggested that a trio of women - Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Senior National Security Council aide Samantha Power and ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice - pushed Mr. Obama to take a harder line with Libya.

The White House tried Monday to rebut that narrative, with a senior administration official maintaining that Mr. Obama has led the debate and telling Politico that Clinton and Power weren't present in the meeting where he made his decision. It has good reason to push back: No president wants to be seen, particularly in an era of lingering sexism and anti-French sentiment, as being told what to do by a coalition of women and a country populated by what some conservative commentators are prone to call "cheese eating surrender monkeys."

So. Girls still have cooties and the best way to ridicule a man is to suggest that he listens to women (or the French). He will then deny ever having listened to women in the first place!

I can't but admire the light touch in this piece. Lingering sexism! Like the smell of last night's garlic dish! Nothing active about that odor, nothing purposeful in the Republican campaign. It is, after all, based on the very idea that no man would ever take advice from wimmin. And the author of this article isn't exactly disagreeing.
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I forgot to add a genuine wingnut voice to this choir:

Before you send me any burning bras, the problem is not with women leaders — the enemies of the Virgin Queen and the Iron Lady can attest to that. The problem is not even with the president having strong female subordinates. Rather, Obama's pusillanimity has been hugely magnified by the contrast with the women directing his foreign policy and the fact that they nagged him to attack Libya until he gave in. Maybe it's unfair and there shouldn't be any difference from having a male secretary of state do the same thing, but there is.

Girls have cooties.

The Only Kind of Labor the Republicans Care About

The Guttmacher Institute has calculated the impact of H.R.1 on U.S. international family planning and reproductive health assistance. The H.R.1 is the Republican-controlled House of Representative bill to fund the government to the end of the fiscal year 2011.

It's a good thing that the Senate is not yet under Republican control, because the bill proposes to cut 200 million dollars from international family planning. That is about one third of the total currently allocated.

The Guttmacher numbers suggest that if the Republicans in the House had their way about 10,000 more women would die while giving birth and about 1,600,000 additional abortions would be performed, 1,200,000 of them unsafe.

The specific estimates can probably be debated. But what cannot be debated is the fact that the Republican focus on banning abortions always translates into more suffering for the women, and especially for those women who cannot vote in the United States. Even the women in the United States should not have access to reproductive medical care if that might mean access to abortions. We have learned that from the Planned Parenthood debacle.

What's so weird about all this is that the Republicans didn't run on forced birth arguments in the last elections. Those are what we are getting, however, on all levels of government. The Republicans don't seem at all concerned about jobs, and the only kind of labor that concerns them is the kind associated with giving birth.

And yes, this post relates to my previous one.
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Added later: Read Shakespeare's Sister on more domestic examples.

Abortion And Equal Rights

Rheality Check asks president Obama to pay more attention to women's reproductive rights when he visits Brazil, Chile and El Salvador. To be quite honest with you, I don't think the president has much of a personal opinion on reproductive rights. They are certainly one of the items in his to-be-compromised-over toolkit.

That aside, I was shocked to read that abortion is illegal in both Chile and El Salvador under all conditions:

Abortion is illegal under any circumstance in Chile, even in cases of rape or when a pregnant woman’s life is in danger. And for the past decade, U.N. human rights committees have recommended that Chile loosen its abortion ban in order to comply with its human rights obligations, but the government has refused.

Similarly, since 1998 El Salvador, the last stop on President Obama’s trip, has criminalized abortion on all grounds. El Salvador’s restrictive abortion law contributes to its high maternal mortality ratio, more than twice the average in Latin America. The government vigilantly enforces the ban, prosecuting women who have had abortions as murderers.

Of course the illegality of abortion does not mean that abortion wouldn't exist in those countries.

But take a step back and consider the kind of world which the US radical religious right would desire: There would be no legal abortion and the contraceptive pill would be banned as an abortifacient. A woman going out of her own home in such a world could, in theory, be made pregnant by a stranger against her own will and that would be it. She would have to give birth. Likewise, her husband could most likely make sure that she becomes pregnant whenever he wishes it to happen, whatever her desires.

That is an extreme scenario, sure. But it shows how essential reproductive control is for women's equal rights in general. And it also shows why the battle over abortion is also a battle over who gets to control fertility. If it is not the women themselves they will, logically, have fewer rights and less freedom than men, especially given who is expected to take care of children and given the radical right's emphasis on mothers staying at home.

It is a pity that the US abortion rights are based on the concept of privacy rather than the concept of equal rights. The latter make a much stronger case for reproductive rights.

Helping women in Japan (by Suzie)

When the earthquake and tsunami first struck, I wrote about how women may have different needs in disasters. Because I didn't know where to donate, I asked Madre, a nonprofit I trust. Media coordinator Stephanie Küng recommended Circle of Health International, which is helping the Japanese Organization for International Cooperation in Family Planning. COHI says:

JOICFP is working with the Japanese Midwives Association to provide direct care for Maternal and Infant care. They are on the ground, know the situation, have experience in crisis settings, and will focus on making sure women and their families have access to maternal and newborn care and that issues around gender-based violence, something that often sky-rockets in times of crisis, remain an important component of relief efforts. COHI and its volunteers will be called upon by these organizations, as they deem needed. For now, the best way we can help is by providing these organizations with the funds needed to work within Japan.

You can donate through COHI or the International Planned Parenthood Federation. JOICFP gives more specifics:

We plan to distribute relief supplies, such as diapers, sanitary napkins, and relief clothing for women and newborns to meet their daily needs. We will also support healthcare activities, such as providing healthcare services for mothers and newborns, and psychological care for women who are suffering from severe stress after this disaster.

If you know of any other nonprofits helping women specifically, please leave the information in the comments.

Women may decide who becomes Tampa's next mayor (by Suzie)

Tampa made national news when a mailer suggested an unmarried woman should not become mayor because she lacked family values.

Evidence of who created the mailer is inconclusive. Nor is there proof the mailer was ever mailed; it has an invalid permit. Both candidates -- Republican Rose Ferlita, the target of the mailer, and her opponent, Bob Buckhorn, have denied involvement. Both candidates have courted women voters, who may play a key role in the March 22 mayoral runoff, as they have elsewhere.

Did a Buckhorn supporter come up with the mailer in hopes of cornering the market on sexist homophobes? If so, may that person never work in a Democratic campaign again. Or, did a Ferlita supporter create and leak it to the media, hoping it would rally women? If so, that plan worked well.

Outrage spread across Twitter and the blogosphere, including ThinkProgress, Politico, Sociological Images, Bust, the Frisky, Village Voice, Bilerico, Pam's House Blend, Feministing, and then I stopped counting. Page Gardner, founder of Women's Voices. Women Vote, wrote in the Huffington Post about discrimination against single women, especially if they have children. (Ferlita doesn't.)

Echidne wrote about it, as would I, if I didn't live in Tampa and know some of its politics. Peter Schorsch said the mailer was uploaded anonymously to his SaintPetersblog. But some question his credibility; a circuit court judge once said that "he has a history of dishonesty." Schorsch sent the document to Ferlita campaign consultant Anthony Pedicini, who sent it to the St. Petersburg Times, the Times says.

It became news the same day that popular Mayor Pam Iorio endorsed Buckhorn. She said she had not planned to endorse a candidate, but went ahead because of negative and untrue statements made by Ferlita, most notably that Buckhorn had supported a policy requiring police to lock their guns in the trunk of their patrol cars.

Buckhorn replied with an ad calling Ferlita's campaign sleazy. Ferlita responded with a news release, saying:

The ultimate disrespect he has shown me, as a woman, is by calling me "sleazy." With his checkered history with women and women’s issues, and his elitist attitude, I’m not surprised. ... Mr. Buckhorn stop your attacks on women!

The news release also quoted Mary Alvarez, who served on the Tampa City Council with both Ferlita and Buckhorn:

Bob’s attempt to diminish the status of women in politics and the progress that’s been made over the last 100 years is unacceptable.

What?! I've never heard of Buckhorn having a problem with women or with women's issues. I've known him for two decades, since he worked for Tampa's first female mayor, Sandy Freedman, who has endorsed him. Her endorsement is enough for me.

Other prominent Democratic women have endorsed him: Alex Sink, who came close to becoming the first female governor of Florida last year; Linda Saul-Sena, who served on the City Council; state Rep. Betty Reed; and Doris Weatherford, who has published on women's history for more than two decades. The Tampa Tribune, the St. Petersburg Times and Creative Loafing have endorsed him.

Both he and Ferlita are fiscal conservatives who are liberal on some social matters. For example, both supported issues listed on an Equality Florida questionnaire, with three exceptions. They supported the recognition of domestic partnerships for public employees, but Buckhorn gave no response on the creation of a domestic partnership registry for others. He said he was pro-choice and supported the right of gay people to adopt children. Ferlita gave no response on those two issues.

I want more women to run and win elected office. But I don't want them to gain votes through misinformation.

Betty Carter

Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most

Remember This When The Networks Start Talking "Donor Fatigue" [Anthony McCarthy]

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The woman in the paisley tube dress saw her house crumple when the land convulsed that dreadful day in January 2010. Home today, as it has been for 14 months, is a dank, dirt-floor shack barely wide enough for a small bed.

But Amazante Valesco, as relentlessly buoyant as she is deeply poor, hears the news from Japan of the earth trembling and monster waves cascading and thinks, “What happened to them is worse.’’

Before Haiti’s earthquake, the 56-year-old mother of five lived in a neighborhood of this capital city known among the locals as Tokyo, although Valesco isn’t sure why. “When the tsunami hit, I saw that even a train full of people got washed away,’’ she said. “That makes me very, very sad.’’

This is what I was talking about last week when I said the better part of human nature combined with our ability to reason was our best hope for survival and a decent life. It isn't going to be found in the absurdity of trying to redefine "altruism" to fit it into an academic model of natural selection, which denies the reality of unselfishness by redefining it as selfishness. The reality isn't found in papers in behavior or cog-sci journals. Apparently, it's more likely to be found in people who live in squalid deprivation but who have not allowed that to destroy their humanity. They haven't been talked out of that and into, would be, science based indifference, Though there really isn't much in the way of science to support it. Apparently, the burden of affluence and contemporary understandings of ourselves convince us that we are fatigued by news of distant suffering, ignoring the example of people whose souls aren't so deadened.

I am working on a long piece about Marilynne Robinson's Absence of Mind, the book form of her Terry Lectures from 2009. I would recommend reading them but you can hear her delivery of them here. The central essay, The Strange History of Altruism, is a revelation.

Why Do We Let Them Do That? On the Way Girls Dress And Other Thoughts

The Wall Street Journal has an opinion piece
on the way young girls dress:

In the pale-turquoise ladies' room, they congregate in front of the mirror, re-applying mascara and lip gloss, brushing their hair, straightening panty hose and gossiping: This one is "skanky," that one is "really cute," and so forth. Dressed in minidresses, perilously high heels, and glittery, dangling earrings, their eyes heavily shadowed in black-pearl and jade, they look like a flock of tropical birds. A few minutes later, they return to the dance floor, where they shake everything they've got under the party lights.
But for the most part, there isn't all that much to shake. This particular group of party-goers consists of 12- and 13-year-old girls. Along with their male counterparts, they are celebrating the bat mitzvah of a classmate in a cushy East Coast suburb.

...


All of which brings me to a question: Why do so many of us not only permit our teenage daughters to dress like this—like prostitutes, if we're being honest with ourselves—but pay for them to do it with our AmEx cards?

Why do we let them do that, the author asks. She is not asking why some parents let their sons get laid, by the way. She is focusing on trying to understand "Why Girls Dress Like Sluts" but refuses to look for it in the right places.

Thus, she ends up writing about feminism and post-feminism and the contraceptive pill, as if the current fashions in young girls' clothes were somehow a consequence of the contraceptive pill or of feminism! We are all so confused! None of us knows the answers! But perhaps we all regret having had premarital sex ourselves. The mothers, she means. She hasn't asked the fathers what they think of their own past sexual experimentation.

No wonder that the conclusion is confusion if one refuses to search for the real reasons. Let's help her a little there:

The first thing to notice is that young teenage girls dress for their peer groups. It is the values of those peers which matter, and the root of those values lies in popular culture and the way it portrays young women.

The second thing to notice, as the author does admit, is that the young girls don't dress a certain way because they want to, say, get laid. They dress that way because it makes them popular. Most of them have only a limited idea how that way of dressing might look to someone of their parents' generation or perhaps even more generally.

Then the third and most important thing: The images of young women in popular culture have changed in the last few decades. This began with the early music videos and was much intensified by the widespread consumption of Internet pron and its impact on the competition for clickable images by non-pron producers. In short, for a woman to be viewed as worthy of attention she must be much more sexually explicit in her demeanor and dress than was the case before*. Just think of the Fox News female news readers.

I'm not arguing that some wholesale change has taken place. But change there has been, and none of it is directly related to feminism or the contraceptive pill.

A better candidate for the best explanation is the pornification of the culture. Ignoring that candidate (and the whole question of what parents let their sons do) means that this opinion piece ends up blaming the mothers for the way their daughters dress. The mothers can then blame their daughters for disobeying any attempts to make them dress differently. This creates a beautiful circle of blaming and confusion which takes us absolutely nowhere.
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*Here is a picture of Lady Gaga, as an example:

Saturday Night Music

Merrily Singeing As The World Burns [Anthony McCarthy]

I haven't been paying attention to the sons and daughters of Narcissus, the DC press corps, much this week, being distracted by events in Japan, Libya and the ravaged working classes in the United States, so I'm not certain how much coverage the annual Gridiron Club dinner has gotten. But you don't really have to know much about what went on to know what the real news it generates, because that news has been the same every single time it's been given.

At the dinner the gaudy glitter, such as the Washington press corps, is dragged out to sparkle in the lights of some DC ballroom or other, it doesn't much matter which one. The entertainment is provided by the wits of the press, making mild fun of themselves, the government officials they're supposed to cover and events related to their alleged profession. While an outsider who is aware of the reality of what they're joking about, the humor is anything but funny, As mentioned here recently, when politicians make decisions, people really do die, sometimes many of them. But war, cuts in assistance, incompetent - or more often - indifferent address of safety issues and emergency response, ... it's all fuel for the fire of the DC media, who, while the less that filthy rich America burns, hold fast to that commandment of the Gridiron Club "Singe but do not burn".

Here's how Susan Page put it in her speech of the night:

The Gridiron’s third and final rule: The Gridiron may singe, but it never burns. This is a rule that does still apply. We don’t mind making our dinner guests squirm in their seats during our performance on stage. But we don’t want to make you so mad that you stand up and walk out.

Heaven forbid anyone might take any of it seriously enough to go look for the vomitoria.

I haven't dealt with the rather putrid appearance of the servants of The People at the Gridiron, though it's been expected that politicians and cabinet members will not only attend but speak, joking among themselves and the assembled members of the fourth estate. Those appearances are frequently in terrible taste, they are sometimes pathetically unaware that those acts of government they're talking about devastate and end lives on a wholesale basis. While a long post could be written about that aspect of this display of decaying imperial capitol life, it should be remembered that it's not the politicians who institute it. If a president didn't show up or if one of the two parties decided to not participate, that absence would be punished by the very media that commands their presence. And it's not a politicians job to keep journalism honest.

The DC press corps is corrupt by choice, they are well paid enough so that many of those you could name are in the tax bracket which befitted from Barack Obama's* tax deal in the lame duck session last year. They break the most obvious requirements for doing their jobs, not reporting on people they socialize with, being above the appearance of suspicion. The second rule of the Gridiron, according to Susan Page, is that reporters are never present, which is probably good since by participating in the Gridiron event, an alleged journalist has given up any right to being expected to be trustworthy when they report on their guests. The media, like every other profession, is not competent to police itself. The American media, the freest it's ever been, has devolved into a corporate servicing sewer, in no place is it worse than in Washington, due to a mixture of servicing the establishment and the deadly seriousness of what that establishment does here and around the world.

So, as we were horrified at the news of the world this week, that news was the subject of light and cynical entertainment for a gathering that would have taken the late, great Jack Levine to depict. He could have drawn a series of sketches, such as those they used to have back when cameras were banned from courtrooms. The accounts of the festivities remind me of Levine's great "Welcome Home", painted just after World War Two ended and the soldiers came home. I can't say more than he did.

* About Barack Obama's political skills, this sums it up rather neatly.

Nerd Friday: David Brooks And No-Sex-On-First-Date Research

Today Brooks tells us on his blog that delaying sex makes relationships stronger:

Today we rise up in defense of traditional values. For example, is it a good idea to have sex with somebody on the first date? Probably not. In the Journal of Family Psychology, Dean Busby, Jason Carroll and Brian Willoughby studied the effect of sexual timing on later marriage relationships. They found that couples who waited before engaging in sex for the first time went on to have higher relationship satisfaction, even after controlling for education, the number of sexual partners, religiosity and relationship length.

From that Brooks goes on to muse about whether the cause for this finding is in "impulsivity" or mores. Now it could be that the Busby, Carroll and Willoughby study has some neat way of defining impulsiveness. Or it could be that Brooks pulled that one out if his...hat. Likewise for sexual mores, I suspect.

I actually have nothing against the idea of no sex on the first date, but I'm pretty unconvinced that having sex on the first date is what makes relationships turn bad.

Neither does Brooks think so. He seems to believe that perhaps people who are impulsive cannot control themselves on the first date or even later on, and that relationships with impulsive people are less satisfactory for everyone, including the impulsives themselves.

His alternative theory is that people with more rigid sexual mores end up with happier relationships overall. His conclusion combines the two theories:

On the other hand, if you took impulsive people and surrounded them in a culture that strongly discouraged bedding down on the first date, would this by itself improve relationship quality?
My guess is it would, at least a little,

A hilarious conclusion! If it is impulsiveness that causes relationships to go sour, the social mores haven't done anything to stop that after the no-sex-on-first-date. If it's sexual mores themselves, those who don't agree with them won't be affected. And note how he back-pedaled from his original thoughts about impulsiveness and sexual mores? Now it is indeed that first bedding which causes the later problems, and if only we could stop it, well, all relationships would be like chocolate ice-cream! Meaning excellent.

Mmm. Let's have a closer look at the study Brooks uses here. From Science Daily:

The study involves 2,035 married individuals who participated in a popular online marital assessment called "RELATE." From the assessment's database, researchers selected a sample designed to match the demographics of the married American population. The extensive questionnaire includes the question "When did you become sexual in this relationship?"
A statistical analysis showed the following benefits enjoyed by couples who waited until marriage compared to those who started having sex in the early part of their relationship:
Relationship stability was rated 22 percent higher
Relationship satisfaction was rated 20 percent higher
Sexual quality of the relationship was rated 15 percent better
Communication was rated 12 percent better
For couples in between -- those that became sexually involved later in the relationship but prior to marriage -- the benefits were about half as strong.

Nothing about "impulsivity" there Not even sexual mores are mentioned! And the research does seem to recommend abstinence-until-marriage which Brooks decided not to touch.

The three authors of the study are all professors at the Brigham Young University. If I have the correct RELATE reference, their sampling frame, the place which they used to find their sample of 2035 married individuals, is this:

RELATE was developed by the Marriage Study Consortium at Brigham Young University. Founded in 1979, the Marriage Study Consortium is a non-profit organization with the specific tasks of developing research and outreach tools that can be used directly with the public and that can be used to gather information about relationships. The consortium consists of a group of scholars, researchers, family life educators, and counselors from varied religious and educational backgrounds who are dedicated to strengthening and understanding premarital and marital relationships.

Brigham Young again. That's not necessarily a problem (though the original Brigham Young certainly had a different idea of marriage) though one might want to be careful when all evidence and all research comes from the same place.

But what certainly IS a problem is the use of the RELATE site as the sampling frame, and trying to pick a sample from that site "designed to match the demographics of the married American population" doesn't fix it. Here's why:

People who filled in the questionnaires at the RELATE site did so by their own choice, not because they were randomly assigned to do so.

Statisticians have a name for this problem: self-selection bias, and it cannot be corrected by picking a sample which otherwise matches the demographics of married Americans. Such a sample has not corrected for the fact that the individuals in the final sample ONLY consist of the ones who filled in the questionnaire in the first place.

If those who did not fill such a questionnaire are different in their marital satisfaction ratings, the study doesn't tell us anything that can be generalized to them. And the odds are that those who answered the questionnaire are different from those who never did. For instance, the former may be more dissatisfied with their marriages or less wary about the Brigham Young University and so on.

I'm not sure if writing about Brooks' theories about the universe, everything and what is wrong with the young (women, mostly) is worth my time. But I don't think research should be used as a propaganda tool and it angers me when that happens.

Nerd Friday: On Individual Health Insurance

Individual health insurance markets are the ones where you can buy an individual policy just for you or for your family. Most health insurance in the US is provided through employers as group policies. Individual policies tend to be more expensive than group policies, because the costs of writing one (extra health check-ups, investigations etc) are higher than the costs of a group policy (which can be written just once for a large group of people) and because customers in the individual market include more people with higher health risks. For instance, one reason why someone might not be working is ill health, and unless that person belongs to one of the socially subsidized groups (the elderly, or limited groups among the poor) the only place for him or her to get insurance is the individual health insurance market.

But research also suggests that insurers can play more games in that market, perhaps because they have more market power on state level. Thus, some health insurers charge higher premia for coverage when the applicant is a woman in a fertile age group or create the policies in such a way that anything related to pregnancy is not covered or covered insufficiently. And we have all heard about the denial of coverage and the later searches to find a reason for stopping coverage for those who suddenly consume a lot of resources.

A new survey by the Commonwealth Fund suggests that those markets function very poorly indeed (though I should warn you that I have not read the actual survey to judge its conclusions):

Nearly three quarters of those seeking health insurance in the U.S. individual market in recent years faced roadblocks or were turned down due to prior medical conditions, a report released on Wednesday said.
The report by the Commonwealth Fund, a healthcare advocacy group, said 71 percent of an estimated 26 million people who tried to buy insurance on the individual market in the previous three years had problems purchasing affordable insurance.
About 35 percent said they were turned down or charged higher prices because of their medical history.

It's hard to know what the survey means by "affordable" insurance, however. But the 35 percent figure about denials of coverage or higher prices is worrying.

Those who wish to cancel Obama's health care reform policies should note that the above is what we get in their absence. Of course the basic reason for all these problems is, as I have written before, the fact that insurance is a terrible model for the way to cover health care costs.

Gaming While Female

The first rule, according to this interesting article (thanks, JP), is to avoid pronouns! That way the other gamers don't realize you are a gurrl and you get less harassment. This is true for even those of us who only "write while female:"

"The first rule is: try to avoid pronouns." A tall order, especially when it comes to the basic act of writing. And taller still given that Brittany (whose full name and publication she wishes to remain anonymous) has worked in editorial media for several years. "I mean, of course you end up using them. But if it's on Reddit or The Guardian online-anything with comments or feedback-it's the same: you're going to get shit if readers figure out you're female."
Since the internet's explosion into the mainstream, the idea of harassment has been thrown into the same semantic cyber-danger pot as "chatroom predators," "identity theft," and "Craigslist personals". But as online experiences which have long been solitary become increasingly community-based, receiving abuse via interactive technology has become, it would seem, a given-and widely-absorbed into women's online routines.

I can attest to that "writing while female" thingy. It gives you your daily iron rations and strengthens your muscles, it does.

But most of the article concerns gaming and the negative attention female gamers get:

One Reddit user contributed: "I never realized how bad it was until my girlfriend got into gaming. She started with L4D [Valve's Left 4 Dead] on the 360. She would constantly get bombarded with disgusting voice messages and lewd comments. I've been playing online games for a long time and never experienced anything close to what she has to deal with. I'm not even talking about comments like ‘lol a gurl, get back in the kitchen', I'm talking about extremely vile things. Like the little kid who voice messaged her that he was going to chop her up into little pieces and have sex with all the pieces. I mean, seriously?"
Like all areas of waking life, women in online media are caught somewhere between indignation and the frustration at having to be indignant: the distress of being targeted, and the backlash at discussing factors which still allow women to be targeted – particularly in ways which many view as vestigial of a time long past.
"I know, rationally, that random insults are exactly that," says Grace. "But I still find it hard to brush off. Maybe I'll grow that thick skin, but I don't feel that the onus should be on me to do so."

I was surprised to read that gaming is quite popular among women. If the article has its facts correct, in 2009 women over 25 were the largest US constituency among gamers. Even if this isn't correct, women clearly do play games.

And get a lot of flack for it:

One "whisper" reads: "wow retard r u on ur rag or somethin." In a Call of Duty chat-log: "you fat fuckin tomboy go kill yourself."

Here's the most fascinating part of the article: the first response to it (thanks, JP, for pointing it out):

Men will start respecting women once they stop accepting special treatment

.
Now what might he mean? Does he mean that female gamers demand "special treatment", that everyone gets harassed equally? Or is he talking about some wider societal implicit contract he thinks is broken? Such as "we open doors for you and don't beat you up as long as you stay away from our games and our jobs?"

Another comment in the thread suggests the former:

Not that I totally agree with drhojo, but the opposite of his assertion (which I assume you believe in) is that women get special treatment online. Not that women aren't disadvantaged in many respects, but they shouldn't get special treatment in games.

In the article, one woman states "Maybe I'll grow that thick skin, but I don't feel that the onus should be on me to do so." Well, the onus should be on her. Gaming is a male-dominated activity, and trash talk and insults are kind of an integral part of it, stemming from male competition and posturing, which is kind of a big thing in males. Women just need to brush off the insults and remember that they are just as she says: random insults, where she hasn't been singled out to be harassed. If she was male, the insult would be about tiny reproductive organs and some such other things.

Here's the thing: Men and women online are not harassed equally. Women are harassed more than men and often in nastier ways. I know that this is not something that a man might notice, unless he pretends to be a female himself. But it's true.

An alternative interpretation of that first comment is that it refers to wimminz not staying in their proper places in general. Kitchens and such. It's supported by this comment:

Well, Ladies, that "free drinks at the bar" racket we had going sure was a fun ride, but yeah, it's time we stopped holding back the sexes.

So you want to be equal, Ladies? Watch this punch. Something like that? The idea that the price of protection is subjugation and segregation of the sexes? Like in Afghanistan?

I'm probably dealing too harshly with few impromptu comments, and most responses in that thread are not of those types but rather the reverse. Still, the ominous hints about what will happen if gender-equality is enforced have cropped up in several places recently. Women will no longer be declared out of bounds as prey, the assumed protective male blanket will be tugged away, and doors will be slammed in your face. Not even a free drink available anywhere!

Race & the gang rape in Texas (by Suzie)

How could the reporter and editors responsible for the first NYT story on the gang rape in Cleveland, Texas, be so sexist? Because they were trying to avoid appearing racist -- at least, that's my best guess.

When the story broke, I added some comments on race. Since no one responded, readers are now stuck with a whole post on the subject.

Mainstream reporters are not supposed to mention race unless it's essential to a story. The NYT story didn't mention it. The reporter must have realized that race has influenced the perceptions of this case by some (if not many) townspeople. On one side, he had authorities, mostly white, accusing black males of rape, evoking the history of lynching. Perhaps he thought he would report the "other side" by parachuting into the Quarters, the predominantly black neighborhood where the rapes occurred, and interviewing black residents who blamed the young victim.

At least online, the NYT ran only two photos, both of the abandoned trailer where the girl was raped. It chose not to show mug shots of the suspects. After other media published mug shots, the ethnicity of the victim still wasn't disclosed right away. (She's Hispanic and was 11 in the fall, when the rapes occurred. Authorities now say she was raped in September and October before the November gang rape.)

More confusion followed when Quanell X, leader of the New Black Panther Party in Houston, held a town forum in which he and the audience -- composed mostly of African-Americans, judging from videos -- heaped more criticism on the girl and her parents. Initial stories did not mention the race of the audience, nor did they print inflammatory statements from Quanell X such as: "It looks like the Ku Klu Klan is leading the investigation."

Some people assumed that the audience was representative of the town. Jason Linkins in the Huffington Post suggested virtually all of the town's residents were monsters. Dan Amira in New York Magazine said: "If Cleveland, Texas, is suddenly consumed by fire and brimstone, you'll know why." A woman who posted on a Facebook page for the town addressed the residents interviewed by the national media: "Thank you for giving them another reason to look at Texans as a bunch of redneck, trailer park trash."

Lots of people look down on poor, rural whites in the South. I know. I was one, and we lived in a trailer for two years. I have relatives who live in a trailer in rural Texas. Even among liberals/leftists who are supposed to care about class, people shake their heads over ignorant rednecks. But referring to African-Americans as monsters who deserve to die? That's generally the territory of white supremacists, whose websites are on this case like white on rice.

The town has almost 8,000 residents, with 45.7 percent white, 23.7 percent African-American, and 27.7 percent Hispanic. ABC News quoted Brenda Myers, who runs a youth center there:

It's becoming a black and white issue because it happened over in the quarters. It's segregating our community again.

Racial tensions between blacks and whites rose last year after a former white mayor pushed to recall three City Council members, all black, over accusations of financial mismanagement. It's not surprising that African-Americans might feel grief and anger over 18 black males arrested, especially the teens who had otherwise shown promise.

The response might have been different if the victim had been an African-American who lived in the same neighborhood as the boys, a girl who had grown up with them, a girl whose parents knew their parents. It might have been different, but who knows, considering how many rape victims from all walks of life get criticized, and how few acquaintance rapes get reported. On one web site, a photo of the victim was published with the word "snitch."

Black residents could still have raised questions of racism, asking, for example, why more white guys aren't prosecuted for gang rapes, or whether white authorities were mistreating black suspects. Racist whites would still have depicted African-Americans as animals.

Last week, Susan at HayLadies wrote that people would not have blamed the victim if she were white. That thinking disappears class. Lots of whites look down on lower-class whites, and many whites and blacks look down on white women who hang out with black men. At least two of the suspects were stars on a winning basketball team, and no one should underestimate the ability of sports fans to excuse rape by athletes.

Why would anyone expect black residents to blame a Hispanic girl and not a white one? After all, anti-lynching campaigns were based, in part, on the idea that white women falsely accused black men of rape. In "A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America," Darlene Clark Hine and Kathleen Thompson quote Hazel Carby:

Rape has always involved patriarchal notions of women being, at best, not entirely unwilling accomplices, if not outwardly inviting sexual attack.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett capitalized on this thinking when "she declared that no one really believed black men were raping white women," Hine and Thompson wrote. Instead, she suggested, accusations cast aspersions on the morality of the white women.

In the Texas case, if the girl were black, and the suspects were non-Hispanic whites, I guarantee the NYT would have mentioned race, and some whites would be making racist comments while other whites decried racism. African-Americans would support the girl. If the suspects were Latinos, some people would try to make it an immigration issue. (By the way, the media has noted that the girl was born in Cleveland. For the sake of the family, I hope they are citizens, too.)

Quanell X referenced tensions between blacks and Hispanics, but I haven't seen any other reporting on that topic, other than a small rally in Houston by Mujeres Unidas.

Whatever the mix of ethnicities, I'm pretty sure this story would have gone national, not just because the gang rape of an 11-year-old by this many boys and men is sufficiently heinous, but also because cell phone photos and video were passed around her middle school. Expect a trend story in the NYT's Style section.

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Some odds & ends: I don't have to say "alleged" in regard to the rapes because some suspects admit that they had sex with the girl. Even if she consented, Texas law would still consider it forcible rape, unless a boy was older by only three years or less. One of the suspects is 14. They also can be charged with other offenses, such as kidnapping and making and distributing child pornography.

I can refer to rapists, but not when I'm talking about specific suspects, since they haven't been convicted.

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A couple of weeks ago, I was at a party full of educated leftists. A professor argued against laws that established an age of consent, saying the judicial system should determine if a child was mature enough to consent. Imagine how much worse the victim-blaming would be.

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Please read Akiba Solomon's take on this case at ColorLines. The writing is tremendous.

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Update: The Houston Chronicle has court documents describing four young men as the ringleaders. Multiple men and boys raped the girl on at least four different days from September to December. A child advocate described how adults can groom a child, winning her trust, before asking more and more of her.

Head Cold Thoughts

I have a head cold. Which is not worth reporting as it's not especially unpleasant, except for the feeling that I need auxiliary structures to prop my humongous head up. But it affects my writing and research ability.

This is my defense for anything you don't approve of on this here blog during the last few days and also in the future.

The Conservative Vendetta Against the NPR

From Raw Story:

The House Rules Committee will hold an emergency meeting Wednesday to consider legislation to permanently prohibit federal funding of National Public Radio (NPR) after conservative activist James O'Keefe released a video smearing the news organization.
The bill, H.R. 1076, was introduced by Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO), who is leading the effort in the House to eliminate all federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the parent organization of NPR and the Public Broadcasting Service.
Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s (R-VA) office told Politico that he will bring the bill to the House floor on Thursday.
A video created by O'Keefe's "Project Veritas," showed activists Shaughn Adeleye and Simon Templar posing as members of the fictional Muslim Education Action Center (MEAC) and meeting with NPR Foundation President Ron Schiller and NPR Senior Director of Institutional Giving Betsey Liley.
The heavily edited video seemed to indicate that Schiller laughed when he was told that the fake Muslim group advocated for sharia law. He also allegedly said the tea party was filled with racists, and that NPR would be better off without federal funding.
The NPR Board of Directors accepted CEO Vivian Schiller's resignation the next morning.
"I am amazed at the condescension and arrogance that we saw in the vide," Rep. Lamborn said in a statement after the video had been released. "They are obviously out of touch with ordinary Americans."

This vendetta has been going on for years. So long, in fact, that I'm bored with it. As a consequence of this vendetta, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been leaning towards the right-wing for some time, long enough for the NPR to be reinterpreted as Nice, Polite Republicans.

But all this leaning has been to no avail. The wingnuts want to kill the NPR. They hate Sesame Street and Mr. Roger's Neighborhood and other children's programs which don't try to sell children toys. They hate the idea that one might learn something by watching television. And they utterly hate the idea that there is a non-corporate (well, barely) alternative to all that corporate information Americans consume every single day.

And then there are the Fox News, explicitly sending out the Republican take on every single news item. But because Fox News is owned by private capitalists it is safe. If only we could find some private capitalists to fund the NPR in a way which wouldn't make it kneel in front of the same right-wing think tanks which already rule at Fox!

I'm not terribly keen on the current quasi-Republican NPR myself because I can access foreign news sources on the net. But it has had an important role to play in those children's programs. To watch wingnuts wanting to kill it is sad, and it reminds us that they do not believe in cooperation or compromises.

Slightly off the topic, NPR is one of the only places on American television where we can see women who look like real women do. The men on television don't differ vastly from men in the real world, but the women on, say, Fox News do! They are made up to look like dolls.

The other night I was watching a Fox News clip which showed three faces of side by side, one man in the middle of two women. The man had your average sort of middle-aged male face. Nothing to write home about. The two women, on the other hand, may have been human-sized Barbie dolls. At least NPR never committed that particular sin.

Meanwhile, in Tampa Florida, Single is a Terrible Thing for Female Politicians to Be

This mailer went out in Tampa Florida, concerning a mayoral candidate Rose Ferlita. Note the triple whammy in just that first paragraph: Ferlita is bad because she is single (could she be-- gasp! -- lesbian?), Ferlita is bad because she has political ambitions (which her opponent obviously doesn't have, what with not running) and Ferlita is bad because she doesn't have children (which her opponent has, probably being taken care of by someone else than him).

The odd thing about all this, according to Bust, is that Ferlita is the conservative candidate in the race:

Making the story even more bizarre is that these mailers weren't made by a right-wing extremist group. Rose Ferlita is the conservative candidate in the race and the fliers were sent out by “Less Government Now;” a 527 political action group (meaning they can accept an unlimited amount of donations as long as they don’t advocate for any specific candidate) that’s connected to Scott Maddox, a democrat candidate who last year convinced a friend to enter the running as a fake tea party candidate in order to split the Republican vote.

In any case, note the Catch-22 conservative values place on women: You cannot run if you don't have children because that means your family values stink. But you cannot run if you have children because that means your family values stink. You should be at home with the children.

Pakistan's First Female Taxi Driver

So Zahida Kazmi has been hailed. She has been driving a cab since 1992 when she was widowed at the age of 33 with six children to feed:

She took advantage of a government scheme in which anybody could buy a brand new taxi in affordable instalments. She bought herself a yellow cab and drove to Islamabad airport every morning to pick up passengers.

In a perilous and unpredictable world, Zahida at first kept a gun in the car for her own protection and she even started off by driving her passengers around wearing a burqa, a garment that covers the entire body.
Her initial fears soon dissipated.
"I realised that I would scare passengers away," she said. "So then I only wore a hijab [head covering]. Eventually I stopped covering my head because I got older and was well-established by then."

Her story is fascinating. But it is unlikely that something of this sort could happen today:

But had Zahida been starting out now, things would be quite different as she would be entering the workforce in a country torn between the forces of liberalism and Islamic radicalism.
Pakistan in 1992 was a more moderate place: it was opening up to the world; the dish antenna had been introduced; Pakistan had won the cricket world cup. Zahida says society felt fairly open to her.
But the Taliban presence in many parts of Pakistan has intensified over the years.

Zahida tells that young women don't want to follow in her footsteps, her own daughters included, and who would blame them? The consequences for them might be very different in a radicalized society than in the more open society of the early 1990s.

The article is of interest because it points out how few jobs Pakistan has for women without college education. Most women work for the family in some role or another and usually don't get paid for that work officially. This, of course, makes them more dependent on the family network for their well-being which, in turn, supports the patriarchal arrangements.

C Word [Anthony McCarthy]

I'll bet you haven't heard it yet. I'll bet you've either not seen it or have seen that other “C” word a lot more in the past several days. And by now you know I don't mean “the C word” when I say “C Word” because “the “C” word” is ubiquitous in comparison.

As during the Gulf oil gusher last spring and summer, CONSERVATION is the real “C word” that is so obscene that few dare speak it. It is a dirty word, a forbidden word, in even the lefty blogosphere which prides itself on its freedom to say the most obscene things allowed. I tired it just to check if what's happening in Japan, which, it increasingly seems, is going to turn out to be the single most catastrophic thing which industrial science has brought to life, would make it sayable. Just as during the Gulf oil gusher, when I tried to bring it up, talking about conservation got reactions of stunned silence, angry accusations of sanctimoniousness, derisive dismissal and certain assertions that it couldn't possibly happen.

The analysis of the United States as a country that is religion ridden is way overblown. Not because atheism is far more common than is believed but because what the quite secular worship of Mammon is the real state religion. That's understandable, given our modern culture. It's a thoroughly modern religion quite compatible with modern science and the culture of modernism, post-modernism (whatever that is), and just about every other kind of -ism imaginable, except that minor religion, environmentalism. It is very compatible with pseudo-christianity, the obnoxiously ubiquitious religion that floods the airwaves, inspires right-wing politics, and whose obscenenly compensated clergy is a scandal of consumption too much for even many an ardent Mammonist to stomach.

One of the most telling reactions a mention of conservation got on the blogs this weekend was a dismissive snark asking how many people were going to volunteer to set their thermostats at 59 degrees F. Something that hadn't been mentioned since I didn't bring up specifics in the preliminary attempt to initiate discussion. The idea that it's outrageous to present the idea that instead of destroying the environment and our species with it might be worth going to the effort of conserving energy is one of the most absurd faith holdings of secular America, I assume it is considered outlandish in other places but I know it is here. The proposition holds that our extinction isn't enough to make people put on a sweater inside.

The idea that it is impossible to get people to change their behavior through the application of reason is something I've brought up here before. It's widely believed today thanks to the faith holdings of determinists of biology and the social sciences. We are taught from an early age that we are automatons controlled by atavistic forces, our unthinking, unreasoning genes, which are engaged in a relentless and unstoppable persuit of the dreariest and most unpleasant and persistent inventions of psychological mythology “the pleasure principle”, somehow to ensure their persistence in the bodies of their hosts, us. It is an idea which has no actual evidentiary basis in anything like real science but in explanatory myths.

Democracy is the belief that The People, acting as a body, can make informed decisions, the outcomes of which will change the world for the better. Or that, at the very least that those decisions CAN be, more often than not, better than any other alternative. That is the very idea which is damaged by two things, the first is this academic faith that people can't change what it asserts is their nature, a nature defined as being far more depraved and predetermined than that proposed by John Calvin.

The other thing it can't survive are lies told through the mass media and the lies encouraging consumption to increase the profits of the corporate elite have made the concept of unprofitable conservation the most unmentionable, if not obscene concepts of this new century.

Of course, it's all a lie, history shows that it is a lie, people CAN be convinced to do what they don't want to because the consequences of not doing it are worse than doing it, they can even be convinced to sacrifice their pleasure to aid people they don't know and will never see. They can be convinced to do it in favor of animals they won't see. That used to be quite common back before the advertising industry, the actual most successful application of psychology, relentlessly pounded it into the minds of Americans, hour after hour, that they were to consume, consume, consume. And that isn't evidence of the correctness of the many contradicting psychological theories of the consultants bought by the advertising agencies to give them more effective ways to corrupt The People, it's nothing more complex than the fact that it's far easier to get people to act selfishly than for the common, or even their own good. Doing the right thing is harder than doing what's wrong, but it's not impossible. No more impossible than getting an 8-year-old to do their math homework.

If this doesn't stop, we or our hoped for children and grandchildren are all going to die. I'd rather take a chance that the biological determinists are wrong and die in the attempt to save life on this planet than to just give up. That's not something which the depraved corporate media thinks is worth saying. You might have noticed that the media has been full of the hired liars of the nuclear industry, just as it was those of the petroleum industry this week, even as we see a nation and the major biological environment on our planet facing an unprecedented, conceivably fatal threat. I think it's worth the effort, I have just enough faith in human nature to think that it's worth trying. I have even more faith that the better nature of human beings matched with our ability to reason can save us from unreasoning greed.

"A Humorous Anecdote to Connect with the Audience" Some Serious Feminist Analysis.

It was a humorous anecdote to connect with the audience! That is how Bernardo Hees, the Burger King boss, apologized for this:

Bernardo Hees, 40, told a group of students in Chicago that “here the food is good and you are known for your good-looking women”.
Comparing the city to his student days at the University of Warwick, where he studied for an MBA, he recalled of his time in England: “The food is terrible and the women are not very attractive."
His gaffe came only six months after taking the helm at the chain, which has 11,500 outlets worldwide, and unsurprisingly were not welcomed in Coventry, where Warwick University is based.

I love to write on these issues, just love it, and not for the reason that I'm a prig of a feminazi with no sense of humor (though that is true, too) or that I would really fear Hees would now go all out to discriminate against female Burger King workers.

No, the reason why these are such fun to write about is that they prove my thesis about The Planet of the Guys. One connects with the audience by making a joke about "your women and food!"

This is deep and subtle, my smart readers, deep and subtle. It's about WHOM one sees as a member of the audience and WHOM one does not. Like the professor I once had who gave an example based on the idea of a cheating girlfriend. What with being a heterosexual goddess-type, I got tremendously confused for a few minutes trying to relate the topic of the lecture to how my girlfriends might cheat me. Until I realized that he was lecturing to the heterosexual men in the room only.

His internal audience was different from the actual audience in the room, and so was the internal audience of Mr. Hees. This is so common that most of the time we don't even bother pointing it out, we feminists. It's such a trivial matter that lots of people walk around with a view of the world which consists of guyz. But it matters greatly. To see just how much it matters, reverse these examples I gave you and have a woman comment on good-looking men and cheating boyfriends.

The answer is not for Mr. Hees to go all "politically correct" (as the wingnuts still like to call anything demanding fair treatment of the previously oppressed groups). The answer is for him to start seeing the world as it is, which is roughly fifty percent female.

And while these examples may still be trivial ones, what is happening in Egypt, say, is not. Once we don't see women as human beings unless someone tugs at our sleeves and demands it, women as a class are going to be in some trouble.

Only Half The Revolution in Egypt

Nadya Khalife writes about the transitional government in Egypt. Women have been left out of it:

The images of Egyptian men and women standing side-by-side in Cairo's Tahrir Square inspired and captured the attention of the world and shattered stereotypes about the restriction of women from political life.
But the exclusion of women from the political transition process questions that optimism.
No women are on the constitutional drafting committee and none of the newly appointed cabinet ministers is female.
The announcement during the protests of a civil society initiative to form a Committee of Wise Men confirmed the likelihood that women could be pushed to the sidelines again. A committee whose very name excludes women should have no place in this process. Some women's groups are calling on the military council to help establish a special committee to facilitate the full and meaningful participation of women.

This is of course traditional. Some say that revolutions eat their sons but the daughters are always the first course in that celebration dinner. Khalife urges for women not to be left on the wayside in this new future of Egypt. I worry more that the new road might be paved with women if a strong stance is not taken.

This is because of the religious faction in Egypt and its power. The current Sharia-based laws aren't exactly gender-neutral, either:

In addition to ensuring women's participation, there will need to be a strong commitment during the transition period to protecting and promoting women's human rights by abolishing discriminatory laws and practices.
That means repealing family law provisions that discriminate against women and instead giving them equal rights in marriage, divorce, guardianship, custody and inheritance. New laws to make domestic violence and sexual harassment crimes should be adopted and enforced as well.
More also needs to be done to eradicate traditional practices that harm women's and girls' health, such as the country's high rates of female genital mutilation, which impacts between 80 and 90 percent of women. Past efforts by the Egyptian government to curb this practice have not been sufficient.

The 24/7 News Cycle in Disasters

I have come to the conclusion that it is no more useful than the old system. We don't have a public service source with one set of properly verified news and information, a place we could all turn to to find the latest information and advice.

Instead, we have hundreds, thousands of different news-makers, all scraping the same minimal information for insights and text. As I followed the news on Japan over the weekend, it was incredibly hard not to get confused over how many reactor buildings had exploded, how many were at risk of partial core meltdown, and what all this might mean.

Part of the problem in this case is the naming of the reactors. Explosions at reactor Number 3 get confused with "the third reactor exploding." But mostly this is caused by the need to put something out there all the time, even though no new evidence has appeared. Thus, for a period of about eight hours, I read that yet another reactor building had exploded when it was still really the same second building.

This wouldn't perhaps be as confusing if I stuck to only one source of news. But I kept surfing while trying to find something more reliable on the various types of meltdowns and their probabilities and consequences, until I realized that nobody knows what will happen, given the rare quality of these events. All the assertions the experts make are subjective probabilities, not objective probabilities, because we don't have the latter. This is untested ground. The Three Mile Island and Chernobyl catastrophies were not the same as this one and the information they can offer to us is only partial.

A much less worrisome but still annoying aspect of the 24/7 news cycle is the need to juxtapose human interest stories with horrible numbers about the dead. To have empathy is important, and human interest stories trigger it more easily. But when news keep coming every few minutes, the human interest stories about how the furniture moved or someone got stranded on a train simply don't fit together with the next information of a thousand bodies found on a beach. The former trivializes the latter.

I'm not blaming those who put together the live blogs or write the articles. But if we want 24/7 coverage of catastrophies, we are going to get raw coverage, clips put together with minimal explanations.

My thoughts are with the people of Japan.

Adele