Didja Hear the One About the Old Lady Who Spilled Coffee On Herself and Became a Multimillionaire? (by res ipsa)

Of course you did. And because you are forward-thinking, fabulous, feminists you knew -- or at least suspected -- that there might be a bit more to the story than that.

I once wrote a paper about the gulf between public perception and reality of tort suits: about the the number of suits filed versus the number that came to trial versus the number in which a verdict was reached; about the distance between initial jury awards and final judgments; about the truly egregious behavior that prompted some of the enormous verdicts that are legend. I wasn't surprised that people who ran around flapping their gums about "frivolous lawsuits," "runaway verdicts", and "greedy lawyers" knew nearly nothing about the mechanics of lawsuits, had only a single-sentence grasp of the facts in any particular case, and had not thought through the implications of what "tort reform" -- as advocated by its most shrill and well-funded proponents -- would mean to them. None of that mattered. What did matter was their rage -- a nasty, uniquely American obsession -- that somewhere someone with whom they had no connection might be getting something they did not deserve. I hope they're never forced to bring a tort suit, because if they do, they're in for a rude awakening.

If you have HBO, I urge you to check out Hot Coffee. When I wrote my paper, I filled in the gap between my own perception and the realities of "The McDonald's Coffee Case", and to do this day, I don't think justice was served.

Economic News About Wealth

The Pew Research Center has published the results from a new study which looks at the impact of the current recession on the wealth levels of majority and minority households:

The recession, which included a collapse in home values and high unemployment, took the greatest toll on minority wealth. From 2005 to 2009, median wealth fell by 66 percent among Hispanic households and 53 percent among blacks, compared with 16 percent among whites. The losses left Hispanic and black wealth at their lowest levels in at least 25 years.
“It’s not so much that the wealthy were busy getting richer – it’s that they slipped back less than those at the other end of the ladder,” says Rakesh Kochhar, a demographer and co-author of the analysis released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center.

In 2009, the median net worth of white households was $113,149, compared with $6,325 for Hispanics and $5,677 for blacks. That gap is about twice as large as the 1 to 10 white-to-minority wealth ratio that prevailed during the two decades before the recession.

The reason? It is probably partly due to the greater incidence of unemployment in the minority populations but mostly due to this:

The housing crash that began in 2006 reduced home values for most American homeowners, but it hit minority families particularly hard because more of their wealth is tied to their homes.

If the value of your house drops by 40%, and all your wealth is tied up in its equity, what happens to your wealth?

This graph shows the impact of the recession on the net wealth levels of different ethnic or racial groups:

The New York Times article suggests that the Latinos suffered the largest drop in net wealth levels because they are concentrated in areas of the country where the housing market collapse was the hardest.

This may also explain the large drop in the Asian households' net wealth, given that this is a group which has not suffered from equally high unemployment rates or low average incomes as the African-American or Latino populations. Another reason for the larger effect on Latinos and Asians might come from more recent immigration status. Immigrants mostly enter without much personal wealth, and to gather it takes time.

But neither of these arguments explains why the median wealth levels of whites are twenty times those of African-Americans. We should be very concerned about these differences. Likewise, the housing markets should get more presidential attention than the deficits.

Meanwhile, in Texas, A Fire Bomb Attack At A Clinic Which Does Not Perform Abortions

Luckily, it seems that nobody was hurt in this act of domestic terrorism. But this story is still worrisome:

Planned Parenthood of North Texas said someone threw an ignited container of diesel fuel that smashed the outer glass of the front door and started a small fire around the door and on the sidewalk. The container was not thrown inside the clinic which is located in a small strip mall shopping center.
Planned Parenthood said this is the first time one of its 21 health centers in North Texas has been attacked with some kind of incendiary device and called it "alarming."
The McKinney clinic provides women's health and reproductive services, but does not perform abortions, according to Planned Parenthood.
The clinic opened in June 2008 and frequently draws anti-abortion protesters who have demonstrated without incident.

This is a clinic which does not provide abortions but services such as checkups, cancer screenings and so on. Yet it was attacked with an incendiary device.

Cannibals Vs. Their Dinners

Imagine a political debate between the heads of the Cannibal Party and the party representing their dinner. The way American media would cover that debate is by stating that each side is fractious and combative and that a compromise and maturity is strongly needed.

Paul Krugman writes about a gentler and kinder version of this in American current politics:

Think about what’s happening right now. We have a crisis in which the right is making insane demands, while the president and Democrats in Congress are bending over backward to be accommodating — offering plans that are all spending cuts and no taxes, plans that are far to the right of public opinion.
So what do most news reports say? They portray it as a situation in which both sides are equally partisan, equally intransigent — because news reports always do that. And we have influential pundits calling out for a new centrist party, a new centrist president, to get us away from the evils of partisanship.
The reality, of course, is that we already have a centrist president — actually a moderate conservative president. Once again, health reform — his only major change to government — was modeled on Republican plans, indeed plans coming from the Heritage Foundation. And everything else — including the wrongheaded emphasis on austerity in the face of high unemployment — is according to the conservative playbook.
What all this means is that there is no penalty for extremism; no way for most voters, who get their information on the fly rather than doing careful study of the issues, to understand what’s really going on.

This is a feature, not a bug, of a system where the journalists are given absolution of the need to actually study a topic or to learn the relevant facts about the policies. Many of them do know the topics, but they are not required to educate us about them. That would be biased!

I Read The Comments, Sowwy

We should start a support group! Something which would force me NOT to read woman-hating comments on the net. This time it was in a Finnish afternoon rag, called Iltalehti, and the story began with a letter to the editor (by a Master of Economics, of all things!) which stated that there should be NO quotas for women on the highest levels of firms (something apparently under debate in Finland*) because men are more intelligent than women.

The numbers given in the letter begin with the assertion that an IQ of 105 or more is required for a person to successfully complete a four-year university degree, and that slightly more than 30% of men in Finland qualify, whereas only slightly more than 20% of women qualify. I have no idea where those numbers came from and they sound unlikely to me. They certainly seem not to be supported by the actual gender ratios among Finnish university students.

But never mind! It was the comments about this letter to the editor that I then read. They are absolutely and totally horrible (with a few exceptions). The majority agree that women are stupid, only good for routine work under supervision, better still, they should stay at home which they really want to do in the first place (despite Finland not having much of a history or tradition of housewives).

Women are illogical (despite the fact that logic tests do not show sex differences), emotional and should acknowledge their own intellectual inferiority. Nobody wants a female boss and women cannot really become men, however hard they try. By "men" the comments really mean a human being, but that role is reserved for male people in their opinion.

Even evolution was all about man-the-hunter, this time on the tundra, not in Africa, while the prehistoric Finnish woman sat in the cave (very few of those in Finland, by the way) suckling her babies. So she never evolved, and to this day remains stupid, weak, emotional, illogical and good-for-nothing. Indeed, she only exists because the prehistoric man protected her! (Which is really funny, given that even misogynists need women to give birth to sons, so had the prehistoric women died out, so would the prehistoric men.)

Foreign women are better than Finnish women, but the worst of all are something called "femakot" which is a wordplay with the plural of a "sow" (like in female pig) and feminism.

So. The comments allow anonymity and don't seem to be moderated. And of course a story (well, it's not really a story as we are given no links to the supposed data or anything else to judge it) about the stupidity of women WILL draw a certain kind of man. A self-selected sample, for sure, and I cannot use this experience to draw conclusions about the average level of misogyny in Finland. And who knows, perhaps all those nasty comments were written by one man.

But a Finnish strand of misogyny exists, and is of the same totalizing type as the misogyny over here (and quite comparable to what is written on the really bad sites on the net):

Women are always bad! It doesn't matter if a woman works or stays at home. If she works she is pretending to be a man or taking a job from a man or acting too uppity or backstabbing other women or having illogical quarrels with them. If she stays at home she is lazy, watches television all day long and uses the man as a wallet. If she works hard physical jobs with poor pay only, she is regarded as being in her proper place but gets no respect, because she is well suited for jobs which require low intelligence and good subservience skills.

If she is not well educated, it is because she is too stupid. If she is well-educated, what she studies is fluff and rubbish and does not contribute to anything in the society. Psychology is often mentioned in that context.

Everything about women is always wrong, with the possible exception of total self-sacrifice, silence and ever-present offerings of sex. It's not so much a doormat that these men want but a mummy/inflatable doll/servant.

Or perhaps a plate of ginger cookies? One comment stated that a plate of ginger cookies needs no intelligence; all it needs is not to start drooping.

The way sexism works in these stories is that all women are represented by one imaginary woman, created by picking all the worst stereotypically female characteristics the misogynist can think of. This creation is then offered up as "all women."

Men, on the other hand, are either portrayed by someone like Einstein or another famous man, not a man with the worst stereotypically male characteristics. It is a neat trick.

I am upset, and that's why I wrote this post. I always find it hard to accept totalizing hatred, especially when it is sold as a fun debate in the so-called "war between the sexes." Because there is no escape from being the object of that hatred, nothing that one might do not to be hated.

Whom can I call next time I feel the draw of a horrible comments section?
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*One commenter reacted to this by stating that if women were as intelligent as men and as good leaders, no quotas would be needed.

A Blast From The Past

While looking for something else, I happened to come across this 2006 popularization of Louann Brizendine's book, The Female Mind:

It is something one half of the population has long suspected - and the other half always vocally denied. Women really do talk more than men.
In fact, women talk almost three times as much as men, with the average woman chalking up 20,000 words in a day - 13,000 more than the average man.

Women also speak more quickly, devote more brainpower to chit-chat - and actually get a buzz out of hearing their own voices, a new book suggests.
The book - written by a female psychiatrist - says that inherent differences between the male and female brain explain why women are naturally more talkative than men.
In The Female Mind, Dr Luan Brizendine says women devote more brain cells to talking than men.

There is no correction to that Daily Mail article, despite the fact that this appeared a day before the Daily Mail piece:

Mark Liberman, professor of phonetics at the University of Pennsylvania, has turned the demolition of the women-talk-threetimes-as-much-as-men fact into a personal crusade. The 20,000 v 7,000 numbers that appear on the book jacket, he says, "have been cited in reviews all over the world, from the New York Times to the Mumbai Mirror". They are rapidly hardening into fact, but where do they come from?

Brizendine's book runs to 280 pages, of which almost a third are notes. Liberman was sure he would find "a reliable source for this statistic" among this battery of supporting data. Instead, according to a piece he wrote in the Boston Globe, all he found was an apparent attribution to a self-help book - Talk Language: How to Use Conversation for Profit and Pleasure by Allan Pease and Alan Garner. He was not impressed.

In the end, he concluded that the figures were probably based on guesswork, likening the "fact" that women talk more than men to the often stated "fact" that the Inuit have 17 words for snow. Both, he said, were myths. The Inuit actually have only one word for snow; and research shows only minute differences between the amount that men and women talk. "Whatever the average female v male difference turns out to be," he concluded, "it will be small compared to the variation among women and among men; and there will also be big differences, for any given individual, from one social setting to another."

Mmm. In short, there is no such research.

But notice something funny? The false assertions still live out there, on the net! And the next bunch of false assertions will also live there.

Update (by res ipsa)

Quick but important update on the woman convicted of "homicide by vehicle" because her son died jaywalking: she will serve no jail time. Not only that, the judge at her sentencing offered her a new trial, which pretty much says that the prosecutor -- a cruel and stupid woman named Annamarie Baltz -- never should have brought the case in the first place. (And no, Baltz gets no props for asking for probation. I suspect that absent the giant shitstorm that occurred when news of the case made it beyond the borders of Marietta, Georgia, she would have asked for jail time and then some.)

I hope this poor woman (her name is Raquel Nelson) can find some peace now. Her son died. She has suffered enough.

h/t (once again) to watertiger

Today's Republican Cuts: Not Equal Sacrifices

National Women's Law Center asks you to contact your member of Congress about the Boehner budget proposal:

The $1.2 trillion dollars slashed over 10 years in Speaker Boehner’s proposal would devastate programs that we care about – programs like child care, Head Start, K-12 education, Pell grants, job training, family planning and other women’s health services, and services for the elderly.

But that’s just the beginning. Speaker Boehner’s plan also requires an additional $1.8 trillion worth of cuts by the end of the year, which forces Congress’ hand even further. Dismantling the Affordable Care Act, cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits for current retirees, slashing Medicaid, or unraveling other key pieces of the safety net for women and families would be all but guaranteed. All this, without promising a single penny raised through additional tax revenues from those with the greatest means to pay.

You must have heard by now that "everyone must sacrifice" in this sudden perceived need for austerity.

What you are not told is whether the sacrifices are ever going to be equal. Some sacrifice practically nothing, others sacrifice practically everything. Calling for sacrifices from "all" means nothing if those sacrifices are left unspecified and if nobody ever checks whether someone sacrificed or not. Besides, the term "equal" in this context should mean that the sacrifice hurts equally. In practical terms this means that the wealthy could afford bigger sacrifices, in absolute terms, because even larger sacrifices would not leave them destitute.
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P.S. And no, Boehner's proposal is unlikely to pass the Senate. But even as it stands, it moves the perceived "middle" to the right, especially given the opposition to it from the tea-partiers in his own party.

Elizabeth Parker's Confession

EB sent me a link to this interesting nineteenth century embroidery:

You can left-click on the picture to make the writing large enough to read. It's not cross-stitch, by the way. Looks like back-stitch to me. Whatever the stitch, Parker was an extremely skilled needlewoman.

Her work throws an interesting light on the person behind a piece of needlework. Most early samplers that I have seen quote Bible verses or pious wishes, and the texts may not have been chosen by the embroiderer herself. That's why the few pieces with different messages are so fascinating.

The initial function of the samplers (among those social classes who could afford them) was to teach young girls the skills they required, from darning, button-hole making and sewing a straight seam to elaborate embroidery techniques. The samplers were also used to teach girls basic numbers and the alphabet.

They were kept by many, both because they were reminders of how to perform the necessary tasks and because they could be framed to demonstrate the skills of the young needlewoman.

Today those early samplers are viewed as decorative. But their initial functions were different, and, as Elizabeth Parker's confession tells us, they could be used in ways having nothing to do with the job of a housewife.

Some of you may know that I'm interested in embroidery and related techniques, their social interpretation and the way arts and crafts are interpreted when they are done predominantly by women. The website link at the top of this blog shows you some of my (much clumsier) work.

Rick Warren on Taxes

Pastor Chris Warren sent a tweet about the horrors of taxes:

Yesterday famed "Christian" pastor Rick Warren, wealthy author and megachurch leader, tweeted the following:

HALF of America pays NO taxes. Zero. So they're happy for tax rates to be raised on the other half that DOES pay any taxes.
After a firestorm ignited decrying this egregious mix of selfishness and ignorance, Mr. Warren deleted his tweet. But the screenshot is preserved for Internet eternity.

Warren confuses federal income taxes with all taxes. People who earn too little to pay federal income taxes still pay many other types of taxes, including payroll taxes.

But Warren's statement is interesting, even with that mistake. Is Warren saying that a man of God can also be a man of mammon in this country, despite the tremendous difficulty of finding anything to support that attitude in the biblical writings about Jesus?

All this may be more complicated:

Warren holds conservative theological views[7] and holds traditional evangelical views on social issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage, and stem-cell research. Warren has called on churches worldwide to also focus their efforts on fighting poverty and disease, expanding educational opportunities for the marginalized, and caring for the environment. During the 2008 United States presidential election, Warren hosted the Civil Forum on The Presidency at his church with both presidential candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama. Obama later sparked controversy when he asked Warren to give the invocation at the presidential inauguration in January 2009.

Warren's invocation may have been the first of the many compromises we have watched since then.

I'm still confused about Warren's values, as demonstrated by his tax comment. Perhaps he was simply uninformed of the characteristics of those who don't pay federal income taxes? Perhaps he thought that the half of tax payers not paying any are drawn out of some kind of demonic lottery, with no thought to the incomes of those people?

Or perhaps what he and others like him are arguing is something different: That social transfer payments should be decided by private individuals and their religious codes, not by the governments? First make the poor pay more taxes, then donate money to those poor you deem deserving or to those causes that agree with your own values?

The Political Kabuki Theater on The Debt Ceiling

This is such fun! The Republicans want to raise the debt ceiling only until next March when we are all promised a new round of these theater performances where the Republicans growl and breathe fire and the Democrats wring their hands and talk about compromise.

The Democrats want the ceiling raised until after the 2012 elections, which the Republicans see as a dastardly plot about elections and electability. But then having this tiresome spectacle again in March would be all about helping the Republican presidential candidates' electability.

It would all be great fun to watch from another planet. I especially wish to point out this:

Both the Republican-controlled House and the Democratic-dominated Senate prepared to take up partisan plans to raise the debt limit and cut deficits. First votes are expected Wednesday.
The plans share a number of similarities - both would cut discretionary spending by $1.2 trillion and set up special committees to find more savings. And neither plan includes new revenues - a major concession by Democrats to the GOP's bottom line.

I wouldn't call that a major concession. A better term would be an almost-total-surrender. But even that does not suffice for the boyz on the right. And yes, it's hard to remember that the administration and the Senate are not run by Republicans right now. I guess that is where the hilarity lies for me.

Soon the real bosses may appear on the scene, given the rattling of the stock markets! Pass the popcorn for one more act of these plays.

Is It Because She's a Woman and/or Because She's Black? (by res ipsa)

I don't have time to analyze all of the issues at play in these two cases, but I wanted to put them on your radar. If there were Trigger Warnings for sexism, racism, and injustice, these cases would need them.

First: Mom Convicted in Son's Jaywalking Death . With regard to this one, I think the answer is "Both". Society is very hard on mothers, and especially on black mothers. Oh, and just as an aside, this is Newt Gingrich's former district.

Then: Black Student Can't Be Valedictorian (h/t watertiger) Take a look at the case docket; the judge assigned to the case sure has an interesting background.

What a lot of mean, pig-ignorant, punitive creeps walk among us.

Anders Behring Breivik: A Supporter of the Subjugation of Women?

Yes. In fact, almost all terrorists would fall under that category. Misogyny may not be the central focus of their anger but it is one thread in the net they have wrapped around themselves.

Michelle Goldberg has waded through Breivik's long manifesto, and points out his misogynistic thinking:

Breivik describes himself as a disaffected product of the Norwegian liberal political elite, furious at the way sexual instability has affected his own life. His father was a diplomat, stationed first in London and then in Paris. His parents divorced when he was a year old, after which his feminist mother married a Norwegian army captain, and his father wed a fellow diplomat who Breivik calls a “moderate cultural Marxist and feminist.” Though he describes his stepfather as somewhat conservative, he nevertheless complains of a “super-liberal, matriarchal upbringing,” which he says has “contributed to feminise me to a certain degree.”
A terror of feminization haunts his bizarre document. “The female manipulation of males has been institutionalised during the last decades and is a partial cause of the feminisation of men in Europe,” he writes.

...

Nevertheless, the right clings to the idea that feminism is destroying Western societies from the inside, creating space for Islamism to take cover. This politics of emasculation gave shape to Breivik’s rage. Thus, while he pretends to abhor Muslim subjugation of women, he writes that the “fate of European civilisation depends on European men steadfastly resisting Politically Correct feminism.” When cultural conservatives seize control of Europe, he promises, “we will re-establish the patriarchal structures.” Eventually, women “conditioned” to this new order “will know her place in society.”

I have written about the odd bargain the race-war conservatives offer women: You can submit to us or you can submit to the new Muslim overlords! In either case, your place in the society is to obey a man and to have many, many children if your lord and master so decrees.

Sunday Reading

Rebecca Traister wrote about the Slutwalks some days ago. Despite the less-than-felicitous summary in the linkage code, the article is nuanced and worth a read.

Another New York Times piece worth reading is today's article on male contraception. It raises all sorts of interesting questions, many (but not all) of which are addressed in the article.

Is The Norwegian Terrorist A Christian Fundamentalist?

The horrors that Anders Behring Breivik committed in Norway fall under the rubric of domestic terrorism, though currently both international and domestic terrorism tend to be about gods and how the society should be arranged.

After the initial assumption that the attack was by extreme Islamists (visible in many of the early write-ups), it turns out it was by an extreme anti-Islamist who regards most even mildly left-wing parties in Europe as Marxists.

But then political extremes are in some ways not that far removed from each other. The dimension on which to measure political opinions about methods form a circle, interrupted between the two extremes which lie close together, not a straight line where the extreme end-points would be far apart.

The actual platforms of right-wing and left-wing extremists are quite different, of course, and Breivik is of the former kind:

Authorities described Anders Behring Breivik, 32, as a gun-loving, highly religious Norwegian obsessed with what he saw as the threat of multiculturalism and Muslim immigration to the cultural and patriotic values of his country.
"We are not sure whether he was alone or had help," police official Roger Andresen said during a news conference. "What we know is that he is right-wing and a Christian fundamentalist."

Breivik's writings certainly support the idea that he is politically a social conservative of the anti-immigration type. But is he a Christian fundamentalist in the American sense of the term?

So far I have not read any writings by him which would discuss the creed of Christianity or its religious issues. No Bible quotes, no conclusions about what Jesus might want him to do, no great focus on the evils of same-sex marriage or abortion.

He shows some concern about the falling birth rates and the troubles of the nuclear family, and he disapproves of ordained ministers who wear jeans. But he is not the kind of fundamentalist Americans are used to.

What he seems to fear is the death of a Christian culture in Europe, and he sees this as happening through wide-spread immigration of Muslims which will turn the continent into a Saudi Eurabia governed by the sharia laws.

Yet he did not attack Muslim immigrants in Norway but those he perhaps sees as the future "door-openers" for future immigration: The youth of the Labor party (Arbeiderpartiet) which currently governs Norway as the senior partner in a coalition government. Though Breivik would call them Marxists. In that sense the label "right-winger" is more appropriate for him than the label "Christian fundamentalist."

A Guest Post by Anna: A Literary Canon of Women Writers, Part Eight: The Sixteenth Century

(Echidne's note: Earlier parts of this series can be found here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 ,part 5, part 6 and part 7.)


Marguerite de Navarre (French: Marguerite d'Angoulême, Marguerite
d'Alençon, or Marguerite de France) (11 April 1492 – 21 December 1549),
also known as Marguerite of Angoulême and Margaret of Navarre, was the
queen consort of King Henry II of Navarre. As an author and a patron
of humanists and reformers, she was an outstanding figure of the French
Renaissance. Samuel Putnam called her "The First Modern Woman".

Marguerite wrote many poems and plays. Her most notable works are a
classic collection of short stories, the Heptameron, and a remarkably
intense religious poem, Miroir de l'âme pécheresse (Mirror of the
Sinful Soul). This poem is a first-person, mystical narrative of the
soul as a yearning woman calling out to Christ as her
father-brother-lover.

Her work was passed to the royal court of England, suggesting that Marguerite had influence on the Protestant Reformation in England. The Heptameron is available in English as "The Heptameron: Margaret, Queen of Navarre ; Translated From the Old French Into English With Eight Original Etchings by Leopold Flameng (1881) by King of Navarre, Queen Marguerite consort of Henry II." The Mirror of the Simple Soul is available in English as "The Mirror of the Sinful Soul: A Prose Translation From the French of a Poem by Queen Margaret of Navarre (1897) by Queen, consort of Henry II, King of Navarre, Marguerite."

Marguerite Briet (c. 1510, Abbeville - after 1552), who wrote under the
pen name Hélisenne de Crenne, was a French novelist, epistolary writer
and translator during the Renaissance. Her three original works are:
Les Angoisses douloureuses qui procèdent d'amours ("The Torments of
Love") (1538), Les Epistres familières et invectives ("Personal and
Invective Letters") (1539), and Le Songe ("The Dream") (1540). She was
also responsible for the first (partial) French prose translation of
Virgil's Aeneid: Les Quatre premiers livres des Eneydes du treselegant
poete Virgile, traduictz de Latin en prose Françoyse (1542).

Hélisenne de Crenne's novel "The Torments of Love" is a unique blending of
sentimental and chivalric elements (at the end of the novel, Athena—who
sees the work in terms of battles and combats—and Venus—who sees the
work in terms of love—fight over the book), humanist scholarship,
orality and eloquence. The work is divided in three books and an
epilogue all told in the first person, and the first person narrations
and the justifications given for the existence of the book are unique
in French literature of the period. Furthermore, the three sections of
the novel are extremely different in tone and genre: the first book is
sentimental (and judgements made by the female narrator about her lover
Guenelic in the first book are modified by his actions in the second
part), the second chivalric; the final epilogue shows both the
influence of Hélisenne's translation of the Aeneid and her interest in
"dream" tales. It is available in English as "The Torments of Love",
from the University Of Minnesota Press.

Tullia d'Aragona (1510–56) was a famous courtesan, renowned more for
her intelligence than her beauty; in fact she was considered quite
plain, but won over many rich and famous men, and became financially
independent, a rare thing for a woman in her day.

Her book "Dialogue on the Infinity of Love", first published in 1547, casts a woman rather than a man as the main arguer on the ethics of love. She argues that sexual drives are fundamentally irrepressible and blameless, challenging the Platonic and religious orthodoxy of her time, which condemned all forms of sensual experience, denied the rationality of women, and relegated femininity to the realm of physicality and sin.

Human beings, she argues, consist of body and soul, sense and intellect, and honorable love must be based on this real nature. This book is available in English as "Dialogue on the Infinity of Love (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe)", translated by Rinaldina Russell and Bruce Merry.

Louise Labé, (c. 1520 or 1522, Lyon – April 25, 1566, Parcieux), also
identified as La Belle Cordière, (The Beautiful Ropemaker), was a female French poet of the Renaissance, born at Lyon, the daughter of a rich ropemaker, Pierre Charly, and his second wife, Etiennette Roybet.

Thanks to her acclaimed volume of poetry and prose published in France in 1555, Louise Labé remains one of the most important and influential women writers of the Continental Renaissance, best known for her exquisite collection of love sonnets.

Her works are available in English as "Complete Poetry and Prose: A Bilingual Edition (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe)", translated by Deborah Lesko Baker and Annie Finch. A recent book by a female scholar has argued that the poetry ascribed to her was a feminist creation of a number of French male poets of the Renaissance, but this is highly debated.

Gaspara Stampa (1523?-1554) is one of the finest female poets ever to
write in Italian. Although she was lauded for her singing during her
lifetime, her success and critical reputation as a poet emerged only
after her verse was republished in the early eighteenth century. She
was believed to have been involved in a love affair with Count
Collaltino di Collalto, and it was to him that she eventually dedicated
most of the 311 poems she is known to have written. The relationship
broke off in 1551, apparently resulting from a cooling of the count's
interest, and perhaps in part due to his many voyages out of Venice.
Stampa was devastated.

The first complete translation of Stampa into English, as well as the first modern critical edition of her poems, is available as "The Complete Poems: The 1554 Edition of the 'Rime,' a Bilingual Edition (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe)", translated by Troy Tower and Jane Tylus.

Modesta Pozzo (1555–92), who used the pen name Moderata Fonte, was a
Venetian woman who produced literature in genres that were commonly
considered "masculine"—the chivalric romance and the literary dialogue.

Her book "The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their
Nobility and Their Superiority to Men" is an imaginary conversation
among seven Venetian noblewomen. The dialogue explores nearly every
aspect of women's experience in both theoretical and practical terms.
These women, who differ in age and experience, take as their broad
theme men's curious hostility toward women and possible cures for it.
In this work, Fonte seeks to elevate women's status to that of men,
arguing that women have the same innate abilities as men and, when
similarly educated, prove their equals.

The book is available in English as "The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe)", translated by Virginia Cox.

Friday Cat Blogging

It is very hot and hard to think of a proper post. I'm going to have another cool shower and try later. In the meantime, enjoy partial cat blogging:

Friday critter blogging (by Suzie)

I found an old hassock for a friend who broke her ankle, but then I went into the hospital and couldn't take it to her. In the meantime, my Chihuahua, Ginger, has turned it into the equivalent of a bean-bag chair.

In other Chihuahua news, here's the popular video of Paco, who looks a lot like Ginger, going after robbers.

Want Some Fried Snake? I Think I'm Done

So could you weather goddesses and gods just stop already? Yes, you are awesome and awe-inspiring, and yes, we are stupid idiots not to do anything practical about climate change, and yes, Mother Nature bats last and she hits only home-runs, and yes, summers are hot and humid, like a poorly heated sauna, in any case.

But my brain feels like a battered fish when it comes out of the deep-fryer.

On the Gang Of Six Proposal To Reduce Deficit by Cutting Taxes

The Gang of Six is the name of a bipartisan group of six Senators who have written a recommendation aimed at cutting all the fat (and the liver and the kidney and the brains) out of the federal budget to trim the deficit! This is done by sending the granny home from the nursing home and by stripping her from some of her Social Security Income when she gets too old.

But it's also done by something that sounds like an attempt to lower taxes:

But that obscures the fact that the Gang of Six tax plan doesn’t really pencil out. They have promised:
• Lower marginal tax rates so that they fall in 3 brackets: one at 8-12%, one at 14-22%, and one at 23-29%;
• The elimination of the alternative minimum tax, which would cost $1.7 trillion;
• Reform but not elimination of the really big tax expenditures, like charitable deductions, the employer health care deduction and the mortgage interest deduction;
• Revenue-neutral corporate income tax reform;
• And yet a grand total of $1 trillion in net revenues, on top of the $800 billion built in from the assumption of the end of the high-end Bush tax cuts.
How in the would do you lower rates, cancel the AMT, get nothing from the corporate side, promise not to nix the biggest tax expenditures, and raise at least $3.5 trillion? That’s the cost of the AMT, $1.7 trillion, plus the revenue raising targets, $1.8 trillion. I’m NOT EVEN COUNTING the money you would have to make up for lowering the individual rates. You’d have to tax Wall Street trades or add a carbon tax to get to that number.

Maybe there is some way to make sense out of these numbers? But what is the sense in lowering tax rates and keeping corporate total taxes constant when the president tells us that all Americans Must Sacrifice? What are the corporations sacrificing? And what are the very wealthy sacrificing? Even with fewer allowed deductions, super-high income earners would probably take home more money than currently is the case.

On the other hand, less wealthy individuals are certainly asked to sacrifice! The cuts in Medicaid and Medicare the proposal includes could have severe consequences, often on the most vulnerable among us, and it is extremely hard to see how the tax part of the proposal would cut the deficit without the middle classes paying more than they do now.

Apropos of something slightly different, the top marginal tax rates used to be much, much higher all through the so-called golden years of America's economic domination. Yet now a 35% top rate is regarded as unacceptably high. Fascinating.

Meawhile, in Uttar Pradesh. May Trigger.

Violent rapes and murders have become a cause for concern:

A spate of exceptionally brutal rapes in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh has shocked India. Many of the victims were young girls.

...

"With the help of his friends, he dragged me to a secluded area and began to assault me with knives and axes. I was conscious for some time, but once they cut me on my head and neck, I fainted. When I became conscious, I was in hospital."
Sarika shows me her injuries - a fist-size wound on her scalp, her jaw which has been sewn together, her right hand which had to be re-attached, her right earlobe from where big chunks are missing, and long scars on her arms.
Shivam has been arrested, but the others are still free. One told the BBC he had been wrongly accused.
A terrified Sarika and her family have abandoned their home and land in Fatehpur district's Udrauli village to stay with relatives in another village nearly 45km (30 miles) away.

The article goes on to describe aspects of the crimes which help the perpetrators: Many people are poor and have to go out to the fields because they have no toilets at home, the attacked are usually low-caste Dalit women (the earlier "untouchables"), and the attackers are likely to be men of power and influence.

But all this must have been true in the past, too. So what has changed to make the recent spate of rapes, mutilations and killings even more vicious? Or is it that people are now paying more attention, that victims (or their relatives) now get a hearing?

Good News On Preventive Health Care Services for Women

The news are these:

Virtually all health insurance plans could soon be required to offer female patients free coverage of prescription birth control, breast-pump rentals, counseling for domestic violence, and annual wellness exams and HIV tests as a result of recommendations released Tuesday by an independent advisory panel of health experts.

...

Women’s health advocates pronounced themselves delighted that the Institute of Medicine committee had chosen to recommend not only the widest possible range of contraceptive services but also an expansive spectrum of other preventive services.
These include screening for gestational diabetes in pregnant women; more sophisticated testing for a virus, known as HPV, that is associated with cervical cancer; annual counseling for sexually active women on sexually transmitted infections; and multiple visits to obtain preventive services if they cannot be provided in one annual exam.

The recommendations may not be adopted, true. Still, the emphasis on preventive services and the coverage of contraceptives is to be applauded. I hope they are also covered for men, naturally, especially after the male pill becomes available.

As one expert in the linked article notes, unplanned pregnancies are a huge problem in this country. They are also the pregnancies most likely to result in abortions.

This makes the resistance of the socially conservative Family Council illogical:

Jeanne Monahan, director of the Center for Human Dignity at the socially conservative Family Research Council, said that many Americans may object to birth control on religious grounds. “They should not be forced to have to pay into insurance plans that violate their consciences. Their conscience rights should be protected,” she said.

Well, perhaps not illogical if their final goal is to make sure that women have no rights to prevent births: No contraception, no abortion!

Such interesting consciences some people have.

Disgustingly Messy Kitchens Are Now The New Trend! Or Sex Is Passé!

How do I know that about kitchens? I have one, and right now I am writing about it. Presto, a new trend!

Pseudo-trends happen all the time. They are fads of a kind, provoked by some sort of boredom, the desire to discuss topics on which we all have opinions and anything which kicks the hind-brain into action.

Pseudo-trends are fun to remember afterwards. Do you recall how everybody was nesting after the 911 atrocities and how there would be a gigantic baby boom as a consequence? It didn't happen.

But pseudo-trends are a drag to follow when they actually happen. Take this, from Erica Jong, the author of Fear of Flying:

People always ask me what happened to sex since “Fear of Flying.” While editing an anthology of women’s sexual writing called “Sugar in My Bowl” last year, I was fascinated to see, among younger women, a nostalgia for ’50s-era attitudes toward sexuality. The older writers in my anthology are raunchier than the younger writers. The younger writers are obsessed with motherhood and monogamy.

It makes sense. Daughters always want to be different from their mothers. If their mothers discovered free sex, then they want to rediscover monogamy. My daughter, Molly Jong-Fast, who is in her mid-30s, wrote an essay called “They Had Sex So I Didn’t Have To.” Her friend Julie Klam wrote “Let’s Not Talk About Sex.” The novelist Elisa Albert said: “Sex is overexposed. It needs to take a vacation, turn off its phone, get off the grid.” Meg Wolitzer, author of “The Uncoupling,” a fictional retelling of “Lysistrata,” described “a kind of background chatter about women losing interest in sex.” Min Jin Lee, a contributor to the anthology, suggested that “for cosmopolitan singles, sex with intimacy appears to be neither the norm nor the objective.”

And what women think about instead of dildoes and such are...dirty kitchens! Or so I conclude in this post.

Katha Pollitt answers the question in the title of the linked article: Is Sex Passé? properly and exhaustively. I simply wish to add that what we see here is the construction of a pseudo-trend about women, something the New York Times excels in.

To be very fair, I should point out that perhaps the trend turns out a real one, though I doubt that very much. But if it does, it has probably much more to do with the way sex is nowadays defined than anything having to do with mother-daughter relationships or with the libidos of women.

A Clarification To The Post Below

I was wearing my medieval velvet beret with the tassel on the side while writing it, surrounded by them academic robes. I was not wearing my fighting helmet and double swords and throw-knives. Sometimes the former is necessary, sometimes the latter. And sometimes posting cute kittens is necessary.

At the same time, I feel wrong about writing the former type of post rather than the latter type of post on the topic of the very one-sided markets for paid sex (where women are the workers, men the customers, on the whole), a market which has traditionally and routinely criminalized and punished the sellers of sex, not the buyers, a market in which those sellers are left without much legal protection if they do get violently attacked, a market which indeed uses sexual trafficking and slavery (at least in part) to get those sellers which were then in the past criminalized and punished.



And all this in a society where being called a whore is an insult, but being called a john is nothing at all. Yet the market itself could not exist without the johns, would not exist without them.

Men Who Buy Sex

Now this is a piece which should provoke some discussion here:

A clinical psychologist, Farley studies prostitution, trafficking, and sexual violence, but even she wasn’t sure how representative her results were. “The question has always remained: are all our findings true of just sex buyers, or are they true of men in general?” she says.
In a new study released exclusively to NEWSWEEK, “Comparing Sex Buyers With Men Who Don’t Buy Sex,” Farley provides some startling answers. Although the two groups share many attitudes about women and sex, they differ in significant ways illustrated by two quotes that serve as the report’s subtitle.
One man in the study explained why he likes to buy prostitutes: “You can have a good time with the servitude,” he said. A contrasting view was expressed by another man as the reason he doesn’t buy sex: “You’re supporting a system of degradation,” he said.
And yet buying sex is so pervasive that Farley’s team had a shockingly difficult time locating men who really don’t do it. The use of pornography, phone sex, lap dances, and other services has become so widespread that the researchers were forced to loosen their definition in order to assemble a 100-person control group.

...

Overall, the attitudes and habits of sex buyers reveal them as men who dehumanize and commodify women, view them with anger and contempt, lack empathy for their suffering, and relish their own ability to inflict pain and degradation.
Farley found that sex buyers were more likely to view sex as divorced from personal relationships than nonbuyers, and they enjoyed the absence of emotional involvement with prostitutes, whom they saw as commodities. “Prostitution treats women as objects and not ... humans,” said one john interviewed for the study.
In their interviews, the sex buyers often voiced aggression toward women, and were nearly eight times as likely as nonbuyers to say they would rape a woman if they could get away with it. Asked why he bought sex, one man said he liked “to beat women up.” Sex buyers in the study committed more crimes of every kind than nonbuyers, and all the crimes associated with violence against women were committed by the johns.
....

Prostitution has always been risky for women; the average age of death is 34, and the American Journal of Epidemiology reported that prostitutes suffer a “workplace homicide rate” 51 times higher than that of the next most dangerous occupation, working in a liquor store.

Read the whole article. Then read the comments! You shall be enlightened... The study and the article appears to be the fault of goddesses like me: feminists.

(As a complete aside, I often wonder if I fly around in my dreams, oppressing all men into not being able to have sex with the best looking woman in the whole world and making sure that their bitches of ex-wives exploit them and walk away with their hard-earned money, just to begin on the next victim. Because all that and more appears to be my doing. Or the doing of other feminists.)

I have been unable to get hold of the study itself, probably because it is "exclusively" for Newsweek. But some things smell off to me.

For instance, the average age of death being 34 seems simply impossible. To get that low an average for the length of life in some population usually requires a very high infant mortality rate. But that is not relevant when we are looking at an occupational group. That leaves very few alternative ways of getting such a short life figure, and most of those are unlikely. It is, however, true that prostitution is an occupation with a very high violent death crime rate.

At the same time, getting good data on paid sex work or its customers is very difficult, especially when prostitution itself is regarded as a crime. Because I have been unable to get hold of the original study, I don't know where the data come from and have no way of judging them. Neither do I know how the questions were answered in general.

I also wanted to get more percentages and more numbers in general. As an example, what percentage of the users of prostitutes' services declared themselves as misogynists? How were the questions here phrased?

And how were the original samples found? This is very, very important, because the way the samples were created affects the likelihood that they are representative of all men.

While searching for this study, I found very little on the consumers of paid sex. Even the estimates of what percentage of men frequent prostitutes varied from 18% to 80%! The latter figure seems impossible, because if that use has any frequency we should find a humongously large number of women and gay men to be sex workers, much larger than any existing studies suggest.

All this means only that I take studies in this area with lots of reservations. That is not the same thing as agreeing or disagreeing with any particular study; it just means that I don't think the data we have is sufficiently reliable to draw firm conclusions which would generalize to all men, all sex workers or all human beings.

It's worth stressing that these reservations do NOT mean that no study on the topic is any good, that difficulties with studies would mean that we shouldn't study the field at all or that somehow the status quo is justified by being skeptical about the methodology of a particular study.

If you read the comments to the linked article you will find much anecdotal evidence, based on individuals' own life experiences (or at least what they say those are). Anecdotal evidence of this kind tells us nothing of how many people have the same experiences or different ones, and it can never substitute for a study which does tell us those numbers. How common something is does matter, after all.

It's also good to remember that comment threads are not a random sample of opinions. People with strong feelings comment more often, so threads are likely to cover extremes better than the muddy middle, say.

Likewise, an article deploring the misogyny clearly present in at least some use of prostitutes' services will get more than a proportionate share of comments which argue back or attack that view, sometimes paradoxically revealing misogyny in the way they do it.

Gosh. Well, you know what I mean. I'm talking about one particular study, not the wide topic under the study. A more subjective opinion: If true, this really frightens me:

Farley’s findings suggest that the use of prostitution and pornography may cause men to become more aggressive. Sex buyers in the study used significantly more pornography than nonbuyers, and three quarters of them said they received their sex education from pornography, compared with slightly more than half of the nonbuyers. “Over time, as a result of their prostitution and pornography use, sex buyers reported that their sexual preferences changed and they sought more sadomasochistic and anal sex,” the study reported.

The majority of the study participants got their sex education from porn??!!! That would be extremely worrisome, because the majority of porn is made for male audiences, is based on what pleases the male customer and certainly is not objective and neutral sex education.

Just imagine: This is what your future girlfriend will love you to do to her!
-----
See also this post.

Summer's Adam

It does not exist, I'm sad to tell you. But Summer's Eve does exist. It is a special cleansing liquid for vaginas. So that they don't smell bad. I have not found a special cleansing liquid for penises so that they wouldn't smell bad, ever.

This Summer's Eve was shown as an ad with the new Harry Potter movie:





I guess it's funny. It also implies that vaginas are the secret power which makes the world go around, that women are fairly passive princesses and that men act, even die, for the desire to get access to pussy. And, naturally, that ordinary cleanliness is just not enough for something so desired and "powerful" as vaginas are.

On the other hand, what else could a company manufacturing a special cleansing liquid (which might not even be healthy to use) for the vaginas alone use in its ads? The need must be created for the product to be sold.

I'm eagerly awaiting the launching of Summer's Adam.

The Elizabeth Warren Case

So she did not get Obama's nomination to lead the agency she created, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, despite clearly wanting that nomination.

Try to twist your thinking brain around that! Someone is good enough to create the whole concept but not good enough to run the agency. What did she do wrong? Whom did she anger? Why did nobody have her back?

I want to stay on that emotional level at first, because what happened to Warren is humiliating and insulting. No other way to look at it. But what happened to her is also a good example of the way American politics now work:

Wall Street doesn't like her because she wants to defend the consumers against Wall Street. And the Republicans don't like her because she wants to defend the less wealthy against the wealthy. The president doesn't like her because she is the proverbial sacrifice on his altar of bipartisanship. (Women so very often have turned out to be that sacrifice, by the way, although I have no idea if Warren would have fared any better with the first name Ed.)

Now to the practical political analysis: Warren was not nominated because the Republicans (and other friends of banksters) wouldn't vote for her. Better to have a functioning agency than years of nomination fights, right? Except that Obama nominated someone with pretty much the same views, Richard Cordray, and if it is the views the Republicans don't like he won't have the votes, either. If, against this prediction, Cordray sails through the nomination process I would call Warren's treatment very clear sexism.

I'm not sure what to make of this pieces:

From the AFL-CIO to the Consumer Union, few liberal groups have expressed anything but the mildest of disappointment that their heroine did not get the job.
Warren herself, who very much wanted to head the agency she conceived and has been building, put out a statement on Sunday supporting Cordray. She followed it up on Monday with an article backing the decision on Huffington Post, a liberal outlet that had crusaded for her nomination.

...

“She is playing extremely well with others right now,” said one close observer of the process who declined to be identified by name because he continues to work with the administration and CFPB. The White House did not immediately response to a request for comment.
One school of thought holds that Warren’s warm support came in return for White House assurances of assistance in a possible campaign against Republican Scott Brown (R-Mass.) next year. Senior Democrats have indeed suggested that Warren could count on such support.
But it is not at all clear that such a campaign will ever materialize.
For one thing, it is not clear that Warren, now on leave from Harvard Law School to serve on the White House staff, is inclined to run. And while the financial industry is not happy with Brown for what they see as his failure to fight against new limits on debit card swipe fees, bankers would certainly prefer him to Warren, meaning he would raise massive amount of money off her candidacy.
“If [Warren] runs, Brown will be opening bank accounts in the Caymans to hold all the financial industry cash that will flow his way,” said one industry executive.
Said another: “Banks are furious at Brown over [debit card] interchange. But they would never support Warren.”

Well, I was just pretending not to know there. I did notice "the heroine" and the "now plays well with others" comments and put them in the box they belong to. I also noticed that Massachusetts elections are decided by what the banksters think and do. Indeed, elections under the current political financing system are often decided by what the people with money think and do. That's why it's not surprising that someone who created a consumer protection agency would not be allowed to run it, after all. The principle surely is to nominate the fox to guard the chicken coop, though that will take some time to arrange.

But it is still very insulting to Warren.

A rainbow of potions and pills (by Skylanda)

The New York Times this week reports on a phenomenon that you’ve likely experienced if you take more than a couple of prescription drugs, or especially if you care for an elderly parent who juggles a rainbow of blood pressure meds, statins, prostate shrinkers, memory enhancers, and other sundry pills and potions: all that confusion that happens when one generic pharmaceutical is substituted for another, and suddenly a little oval pink pill they’ve been taking for years is substituted with an oblong white pill and the patient no longer has any idea what they are taking for what purpose anymore.

The article suggests that the problem lies in the transition that occurs when expensive branded drugs go generic: you knew that your Viagra was a little blue diamond because Pfizer masterminded a decade-long PR program to ensure that you knew this. But when the little blue pill or the big purple pill turns into a bland little yellow thing, the patient loses the differentiation between those and the six other bland little tablets they are taking. Lipitor is next on the block to go generic this year – and about time: as one of the highest-potency anti-cholesterol drugs, a generic Lipitor could stop the hair-splitting between those who can take the old low-potency statins and those who need the expensive blockbuster cholesterol medications like Crestor and Lipitor. But still: those generics will be variable, produced by dozens of generics makers, likely in a rainbow of neutral colors - instead of the old oval white that Lipitor users have been taking since the drug came onto the market 14 years ago.

Marketing people argue that the look of a pill is part of a company’s right to set their product aside from all other products – including generic equivalents; generics should not carry the same look of branded Viagra or Prilosec (the famed first Purple Pill) because that was part of the propriety marketing of the patented drug. Proponents of drug safety argue the opposite: that changing the drug’s look when it goes off-patent to a variety of appearances that change every time a pharmacy stocks a different supplier contributes to confusion, non-compliance, and even harmful drug errors. (This would also save me at least half a dozen conversations a week in which a patient tries to explain which medication they are taking by saying, “You know, it’s a that little yellow one with the oval shape, you must know what it is…” I try to cut these conversations short as fast as possible: I do not know what pill that is, and there is no utility to my committing these thousands of variations to memory. I prescribe between 20-50 medications on a daily basis, and some hundreds more as a matter of course, most of which have dozens of generic variations. You want your doctor to spend their free brain space reading up on the latest data, engaging in lively discussions with colleagues about the evidence on controversial cases, maybe reviewing ways to make their office practice more efficient. You do not want them wasting space limited brain space brain memorizing the size and shape of infinite varieties of generic pills.)

To a certain extent, I agree with the latter: confusion would drop precipitously if one drug always came in the same form, no variation between size, shape, or color. But there is a fundamental flaw in that thinking, a deeper problem with pharmaceutical labeling, and a systematic fix parallel to the color and size issue that strikes deeper at the heart of medical error:

Currently, all medications on the market are required to carry a unique identifier code; to figure out what a drug is from the code on any pill, you essentially have to run it through a program that is designed to suss out this information. This code identifies the drug and maker, but often with letter and number combinations that have nothing to do with what is in the pill – they just have to use a unique code (AN 627, for example is – inexplicably – one formulation of tramadol). What would work better? Regulators could require that the unique identifier be almost microscopically small, but that every pill actually have the generic name and dose imprinted or inscribed on it. Like this.

This may not solve the issue of the elderly patient whose sight is beginning to fail but who is still juggling their own medications – certainly the big-pink-pill versus small-yellow-pill is going to be a lot easier to distinguish than the tiny writing it will take to fit words like “atorvastatin 20mg” on a standard Lipitor tablet. But it will help caretakers keep the jumble of meds apart – and it can help give hospital and care facility nurses a layer of final checks on medications that are completely lacking now: when you know you are supposed to be handing out the combination blood pressure drug Zestoretic but the only marker on the pill is an “A” on one side and a “26” on the other, you have no final verification that you chose the right medication from the supply, that the Pyxis machine spat out the right drug, that you did not mix up the drugs between the first patient’s room, the emergency call back to the desk, the stop by a third patient’s room who has been frantically delirious all night, and finally back to the room of the second patient who is receiving the medication: all part of the normal chaos that nurses cope with on a shift-wide basis.

Forcing the use of generic names from the day a drug is marketed would also encourage an early familiarity and reliance on generic names, which separates providers and patients from the attachment to well-branded and well-marketed drugs later on. In training I had faculty who refused to let trainees use brand names of drugs – even those which had no off-patent equivalent – because they were so passionate about the effect of branded drug pricing on health care costs; it was atorvastatin or no name at all.

In medicine – as in most disciplines – some errors are fundamentally due to individual incompetence and cannot be fixed by systemic solutions; these are few and far between. Most errors have systemic solutions that could drastically reduce harm, and this is a core example of them. Maintaining the same shape, size, and color to medications across the generics would be ideal, but labeling clear identifiers on pills at all is such a fundamentally much more important issue that has largely not even hit the radar: a issue of convenience, an issue of efficiency, and moreover, an issue of safety for you and your family as the patients who rely on these products to maintain their health.

Cross-posted from my recently relocated and re-launched blog at America, Love it or Heal It.

Back To The Fifties? Credit Cards And Stay-At-Home Parents

You probably did not pay much attention to the Credit Card Act of 2009. In any case, it was full of goodies for the consumers, including stricter regulations about when companies can market credit cards to people under 21 years of age. The basic requirement is that the applicant must be able to pay back the money owed or must have a cosigner capable of doing so.

But the Federal Reserve recently expanded this rule to people over 21 years of age. This is very bad news for stay-at-home parents, most of whom are women. From last March:

The U.S. Federal Reserve approved a rule that would require credit-card issuers to consider consumers’ individual incomes before extending credit.
Credit-card applications generally can’t request “household income” because that term is too vague for issuers to evaluate whether customers will be able to make the required payments on the accounts, according to a statement from the Fed today. The rule is needed to prevent making credit available to consumers who lack the ability to pay, the Fed said.
The change is supposed to limit issuers from giving cards to college students, yet some lawmakers have been concerned that stay-at-home spouses will suffer.
“The proposed regulations ignore their demonstrated credit-worthiness because of their lack of current market income,” Representative Carolyn Maloney, a New York Democrat who sponsored the credit-card bill and Representative Louise Slaughter, a New York Democrat, said in a letter to the Fed in January.
Card issuers can allow spouses to apply jointly for credit, the Fed said.

Or in simpler terms:

Earlier this year, the Fed ruled that credit card applications should ask about a consumer’s individual income or salary rather than his or her “household income.” This isn’t just for students under 21, but for everyone. That means that a stay-at-home parent is considered as unworthy of credit as an unemployed college kid–and seven out of eight stay-at-home parents are mothers. No one without a pay stub, no matter the value of her contribution to her household, can get a line of credit unless her spouse cosigns the account.
...
In response to criticism from women’s rights advocates who believe that access to credit is a key tenet of financial independence, the Federal Reserve noted that the individual-income provision may be “inconvenient or impractical,” but that such restrictions are necessary to prevent reckless lending and borrowing.

Or in even simpler terms: A stay-at-home spouse must ask the breadwinner spouse's permission to get a credit card, but that same breadwinner spouse does not need the stay-at-home spouse's permission! Financial inequality will be neatly built into these relationships. It really is back to the fifties, my sweet readers.

And what happens if the breadwinner spouse refuses?

The underlying thinking is obvious: The money the breadwinner earns is just his (or her) money, not the family's money! And the stay-at-home partner is worth nothing.

And this is just inconvenient or impractical?

I guess one might argue that every person should carefully consider this before becoming a stay-at-home parent.

Irreconcilable (by res ipsa)

I finally got Blue Valentine from Netflix (and by the way, I am sticking with the DVD plan; not enough selection for streaming only, but I digress...).

This is one of those "Portrait of A Relationship's Disintegration" movies. I thought the acting was excellent, but the movie was a bummer, which wasn't where I wanted to go on the particular day I watched it (which in turn begs the question of why I rented it in the first place, but again, I digress...).

In the movie, the lead character decides to terminate a pregnancy. She goes to a clinic and before the procedure, a nurse asks her the following questions:

"At what age did you first have sexual intercourse"?
"How many sexual partners have you had"?
"Does the father know about this pregnancy"?
"Is the father supportive"?
"Is this your first pregnancy"?

I am curious about two things. First, are these questions typically asked before an abortion? I asked one woman I know who had the procedure and she said she was not asked such questions, but as we know, one does not a data set make. It must vary from state to state; that portion of the movie was set in Pennsylvania. More importantly, how are the answers to the first four questions medically relevant? I can see how the question about number of prior pregnancies would be, but the first four seem designed to shame the patient. It would not surprise me to know that such shaming happens (and by the way, if it's legislatively mandated, that would be a First Amendment violation), but I do want to know if its typical in reality, or if the movie was trying to shame the character.