The Free Market God in Action in Health Care: A Lesson

I have worn out my fingers typing about the problems of markets in health care. There is a very long list of conditions which cause problems for markets as the way one distributes products and services, and the health care qualifies for every single one of those conditions! Some of those we could change, some of them we cannot change. The great uncertainty about future needs and the very asymmetric information are among the ones we cannot change. As an example of the latter, think how it would be if your trip to the bakery would start with the baker determining if you really need bread or not. Can you see the bad incentives there?

This post is not about that but about the market power in health care and about the case of desperately-needed-treatment-and-market-power:

Here's another jaw-dropping price on a new drug. The scorpion antivenom Anascorp, approved in August, is sold in Arizona these days for $12,000-plus per vial, meaning one course of treatment could run as much as $62,000. Across the border in Mexico, where Instituto Bioclon makes Anascorp, the drug has been marketed for years at about $100 per vial, the Arizona Republic reports.
What's more, Rare Disease Therapeutics won U.S. approval for Anascorp based on a tiny study--just 15 patients--led by the University of Arizona. The company didn't develop the drug and doesn't manufacture it, but rather just markets it under license from Instituto Bioclon.

Read the whole quoted article to see how the price keeps multiplying up the delivery chain so that the final price is 120 times the Mexican price.

How to explain something like this? I think the American suppliers would use the rare-diseases argument which goes something like this: To find a cure for a rare disease probably requires as much expenditure and work as the finding of a cure for a common disease. But the market for the former is so tiny* that the only way to recoup those development costs is by charging enormous amounts for the treatment. Or to have someone subsidize those costs in the first place.

But this case does not qualify, because it was the Mexican Instituto Bioclon who invested in the treatment and who should get those development costs recouped, not the American distributor.

A better explanation has to do with the price elasticity of demand for something like anti-venom for scorpion stings. Suppose you had been stung by a scorpion. How much would you be willing to pay for that anti-venom? Depending on the outcome without the anti-venom, the answer might well be all you own, all you could borrow or all you could steal.

Economists call such products price-inelastic, and markets usually price them very high if competition doesn't stop that. But competition in health care is unlikely to stop that because of that arrangement which stops hospitals from the US from simply buying the drug directly from Mexico or probably from any other intermediary but the one which has that price tag of $12,000 per vial.

So why not create the kind of competition that would bring the price down? Here's the real snag for the free-market idolators: They don't want governments to interfere. But the competition will not be of the right kind without government supervision and interference.

Consider the idea of just letting everyone buy the anti-venom directly from the cheapest possible global source. Wouldn't that take care of the high price?

It would. But it would also bring in bad quality venom, the need to inspect factories in foreign countries and other problems which the markets themselves CANNOT solve.
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* Markets may not be tiny in the sense of numbers of affected people. They may be tiny in the sense of people being able to pay. For instance, getting stung by scorpions is not a rare incident on a worldwide level. It's just an incident that is more likely to happen to those who don't have much money for health care or much access to it.

Link to the story via David Atkins at Digby.

Princess Nancy Pelosi

That's what Herman Cain called the House Democratic leader in the last-but-one Republican presidential debate. This and various other items made the Washington Post ask if Mr. Cain might have a "woman problem":

In a matter of a week, Herman Cain referred to the House Democratic leader as “Princess Nancy” Pelosi, said presidential rival Michele Bachmann would be “tutti-frutti” ice cream and shrugged off a joke about Anita Hill.
The Republican presidential candidate also has denied allegations that he sexually harassed several women and, through his lawyer, threatened to investigate anyone else who makes such a claim.

The "princess" reference was first discussed in the foreign press, by the way, what with all the other juicy stuff in that particular debate.

Now Gloria Cain, who is married to Herman, has come out to defend her husband:

“I know that’s not the person he is,” Gloria Cain said on Fox News Channel’s “On The Record.” ‘’He totally respects women.”

I guess I report, you decide. Mmm.

Meanwhile, in Iran

The mullahs are tightening the screws which keep women in the proper tiny boxes. As the Washington Post reported a few days ago:

The first snow of the season fell in Tehran this week, but female ski bums planning to carve fresh lines at one of the three resorts in the Alborz mountain range will be able to hit the slopes only if they are accompanied by a male guardian.


A police circular, reported Thursday on the pro-government Etedaal Web site, states that women and girls are no longer allowed to ski in the absence of a husband, father or brother.

The mandate of Iran’s morality police is currently being broadened by hard-liners attempting to roll back reforms enacted under former president Mohammad Khatami. The current government says the reforms led to a lack of observance of religious dress codes, among other things.

This is not a major thing in itself. But it struck me as metaphorically so apt: Women are not allowed to enjoy the sun, the silence and the speed of skiing and snow-boarding alone. They must be accompanied and guarded.

When I ski I have wings. I'm an eagle, flying alone in a white universe.

But the mullahs want women's wings cut.

Today's Echidne Thought: On What Made America Great

I got a book advertisement in my mailbag. It's about a right-wing book which tells us how it was the politically incorrect views of the Founding Fathers which made this country so great. I didn't ask for the book to be sent for review, which means that I cannot tell which politically incorrect ideas they like so much. It could be slavery or it could be women not having votes. But most likely it's Christianity as the real constitution of this country.

Anyway. This made me think about myth-making in general and how very blind we become when familiar myths are quickly shown on our interior computer screens. It's useful to stop when that happens and to ask what the facts might be.

And among those facts about what "made America great" are these: A giant landmass with many natural resources, great untouched farming land, natives who could be pushed aside, plentiful immigration of willing workers and the possibility of creating a gigantic market without national borders.

Political events mattered, too. But for some odd reason myths erase certain aspects of the past altogether, and even smart people may not notice that.

You can apply that pause-and-rewind-your-internal-video to other questions, too. Wars, for instance, and the very strong economic motives for most of them.

Looking For A Well-Paying Feminism-Related Job? Copy Katie Roiphe!

Does that sound like a joke to you, about getting well paid for something to do with feminism? Those jobs do exist though you have to be creative in finding them.

The thinking goes like this: If there is going to be a debate about whether women are full human beings or just handmaidens or Playmates, two sides are needed. But men might not be the best boxers on that Playmate side, because then they will come across as sexists. So that side needs women and they pay well. Or at least pay.

Hence the Caitlin Flanagans, Camilla Paglias and Charlotte Allens who get to write in all sorts of mainstream places about what is wrong with feminism and how the good old times were really very much better altogether. And women are rather silly creatures, are we not?

Katie Roiphe has the same shtick. You may not be familiar with her Seminal Work which was published a generation ago. Here is a summary from the review of the book by Katha Pollitt:

In "The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus" (Little, Brown; $19.95) Katie Roiphe, a twenty-five-year-old Harvard alumna and graduate student of English at Princeton, argues that women's sexual freedom is being curtailed by a new set of hand-wringing fuddy-duddies: feminists. Anti-rape activists, she contends, have manipulated statistics to frighten college women with a nonexistent "epidemic" of rape, date rape, and sexual harassment, and have encouraged them to view "everyday experience"- sexist jokes, professional leers, men's straying hands and other body parts- as intolerable insults and assaults. "Stranger rape" (the intruder with a knife) is rare; true date rape (the frat boy with a fist) is even rarer.
As Roiphe sees it, most students who say they have been date raped are reinterpreting in the cold grey light of dawn the "bad sex" they were too passive to refuse and too enamored of victimhood to acknowledge as their own responsibility.

Katie is still at it. Her newest opinion piece for the New York Times, "In Favor of Dirty Jokes and Risqué Remarks," hooked to the Herman Cain incidents, argues that workplace sexual harassment is mostly just innocent jokes, that women are strong enough to take them and that work would be a really boring place if nobody could ping your bra strap while you go to the water cooler. Or rather:

Is the anodyne drone typing away in her silent cubicle free from the risk of comment on her clothes, the terror of a joke, the unsettlement of an unwanted or even a wanted sexual advance, truly our ideal? Should we aspire to the drab, cautious, civilized, quiet, comfortable workplace all of this language presumes and theorizes? At this late date, perhaps we should be worrying about different forms of hostility in our workplace.

No, of course not! That anodyne female drone should be out there pinging jockstraps and making jokes about the probable size of various male colleagues' penises! To spread the joy and humanity to everyone working in that place. Duh. Everybody can see that.

Except perhaps for our Katie. The fun thing about the world she would like to have back is that it makes no demands of equal treatment of men and women, and that for an unusual reason:

Women are strong enough to take everything the world throws at them. Therefore, there is no need for concerns such as date rape or sexual harassment. But then if we accept her premise, men must be too weak to be able to endure any kind of restraints on their behavior. Or the poor must be strong enough to take poverty and so on. You can go on with those examples, I'm sure.

My apologies for writing about all that. The central point about making money from feminism is to oppose it, to portray it as a humongous evil claw squeezing the whole society while also being totally wrong and marginalized and unattractive and utterly illogical, like swimming against the waterfall of nature and tradition.

Cheaper generic medications: Not coming to a pharmacy near you (by Skylanda)

The New York Times reported Friday on a move by Pfizer – the makers of the blockbuster cholesterol drug Lipitor – to manipulate the market to limit generic supplies to a number a major drug management agencies after Lipitor goes generic in the coming months:

“Pfizer has agreed to large discounts for benefit managers that block the use of generic versions of Lipitor, according to a letter from Catalyst Rx, a benefit manager for 18 million people in the United States. The letters have not previously been made public. A pharmacy group and an independent expert say the tactic will benefit Pfizer and benefit managers at the expense of employers and taxpayers, who may end up paying more than they should for the drug.” [emphasis mine]

Lipitor is said to be one of the most profitable drugs ever produced, generating over $100 billion in sales and forming a mainstay of Pfizer’s drug portfolio. And this is not necessary bad; Lipitor saves lives. It plays a role in primary prevention of cardiovascular disease, it can be the difference between rehabilitation after a heart attack or stroke and rapid recurrence leading to greater debility or death. It is not without problems, but overall, it is an important drug in the modern arsenal against chronic disease.

But there are a couple complications to this picture.

One is that in the world of the statin drug class to which Lipitor belongs, not everyone with high cholesterol needs Lipitor – or, more importantly, a medication as expensive as Lipitor. There are half a dozen other drugs in the same class, several of which went generic so long ago that they appear on the Walmart list of $4-per-month medications. The older generic statins are notably weaker; this isn’t a secret. But for your average middle-aged person walking around with high cholesterol – those who eat a little too much butter, exercise a little too little, or just drew the genetic short straw on the lipid metabolism front – the cheap medications will effectively get the cholesterol numbers to where they need to be (so too often will diet, exercise, and some other non-medicinal approaches, but let’s set those aside for a moment for the sake of argument). The truly more potent (and notably more effective, and notably more expensive) statins – that is, Lipitor and Crestor – can generally be reserved for people with true disease in whom there has been a failure to get to goal cholesterol levels with weaker medications: people with prior heart attacks and strokes, people with familial cholesterol running sky-high numbers for no good reason, people who have undergone surgery to actually remove cholesterol plaques from their arteries.

But that’s actually kind of a small market compared to the millions and millions of essentially healthy 50ish folks who could head off problems in the future with a little help from a statin friend – ie, those who will probably do fine on a generic drug. So why is Lipitor such a blockbuster when the number of people who need it relatively small?

That, of course, comes down to marketing. Pfizer has long advertised the potency of Lipitor – and wouldn’t you want the best for your heart? – failing to note that cost-per-cost, the best just isn’t necessary for many people. Samples given through doctor’s offices (which are invariably branded drugs, never generics) instill brand loyalty from the side of both the doctor and patient. Moreover, pharmaceutical companies skew or hide the true cost of these upper-echelon drugs by marketing schemes like copayment vouchers that reduce the cost to the insured consumer for branded drugs from higher cost (where they should be) to zero – encouraging patients to request more expensive drugs than are necessary because the up-front cost to themselves is so low.

But true market manipulation on the scale described – that is, using the clout of a major manufacturer to block the early sales of generics – is a dangerous and costly precedent. This process is enabled by the streamlining of drugs through “pharmacy benefit managers” such as Medco, which you might have encountered as one of the “mail-in” pharmacies that more and more insurance carriers are requiring patients to utilize. However, the unspoken secret of these “mail-in” pharmacies is that many of the discount brick-and-mortar pharmacy chains carry generic medications at a fraction of the price of the mail-in servicers – sometimes at prices less than a standard generic copay for an insured patient. Insured patients are made to feel that they are compelled to use these monopolizing benefits managers, when in fact consumers are only required to do so if they want their insurance carriers to pay; if a brick-and-mortar pharmacy charges less than their standard copay for a generic drug, there is actually no reason to go through insurance at all, but rather just pay cash and bypass these middlemen altogether – something the insurers and “pharmacy benefit managers” would prefer that consumers not know about as they pay higher prices for the mail-in services.

The net effect of this is that nations like the United States that allow unfettered market manipulation pay – you guessed – more for health care while achieving less health than countries that frown on this kind of shady tactics, for example by setting formularies that account for cost-effectiveness and allowing for planned deviations when medical necessity demands.

Am I blaming Pfizer for the all the ills of the American health care system? No. But when one hand of the health care reform effort is struggling with the untamed beast of cost control – and the other hand is paying overkill prices for drugs that outstrip medical necessity – one has to wonder where the balance will be struck between innovation and affordability.

In any case, open generic competition for Lipitor will take over in the next year, ending any debate about paying full price. But the success in consumers’ and regulators’ ability to block this kind of behavior will set a long-reaching precedent in pharmaceutical patent-holders willingness to try these kind of rank shenanigans again, the next time a blockbuster drug goes off-patent. And that is something we all have a stake in.

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

One Additional Lesson From The PSU Child Abuse Case. May Trigger.

MAY TRIGGER


If you follow American news you will know about this case. It involves allegations of sexual abuse (including rape) of young boys by the once-heir-apparent of Joe Paterno, Jerry Sandusky.

Paterno is a myth in himself among those who follow college football; a man who is admired and respected for the way he has treated the players, a god-like figure whose importance and power at Pennsylvania State University is hard to overestimate. At the age of 84, he is simply called JoePa. He has won more football games than any other coach in history.

And he was fired, together with the university president, Graham Spanier, for the minimal action they took in a 2002 case:

An alleged incident in March 2002 is particularly shocking.

Despite his retirement, and despite the 1998 probe, Sandusky still had privileges on campus, including access to gyms and locker rooms.

Late in the evening of March 1, 2002, a Friday before the university's spring holiday, a graduate assistant on the football team entered the main football building's locker room to the unexpected sound of showers running, according to the grand jury report. It said he heard "rhythmic, slapping sounds" which he believed to be the sound of sexual activity.

The graduate assistant found Sandusky sodomizing a boy of about 10 years old, the grand jury report said. Rather than calling the authorities, though, he called his father.

The next morning, at his father's urging, he called Paterno and told him a version of what he had seen - exactly how much detail he gave is not clear from the grand jury report. Paterno - whose stature among sports fans is hard to overstate - did not call police either.

"HORSING AROUND"

The graduate assistant was later identified as Mike McQueary, a red-headed former Penn State quarterback who has since risen to the ranks of assistant coach.

McQueary, who was described in the grand jury report as a "credible" witness, has not commented since the charges were brought. Requests for comment via his father and brother were declined. On Friday, he was put on administrative leave by the university.

A full day after Paterno spoke to McQueary, the head coach told his boss, athletic director Tim Curley, that a graduate assistant had seen Jerry Sandusky "fondling or doing something of a sexual nature to a young boy" in the team showers, the grand jury report said.

Nearly 10 days later, McQueary met Curley and Gary Schultz, the Penn State vice president, and told them he had witnessed "what he believed to be Sandusky have anal sex with a boy" in the showers, the grand jury report said.

Curley denied to the grand jury that McQueary had reported anal sex and described the conduct as "horsing around."

The grand jury report said McQueary was never interviewed by police, even though he had reported what he saw to Schultz, who ran the campus police department. Schultz later told the grand jury he was surprised to learn there was a long report in the police files from the 1998 investigation.

The reporting of the 2002 incident went all the way to Graham Spanier, the university's president since 1995 and a sociologist and family therapist by training.

Spanier testified to the grand jury that he was told of an incident in 2002 - though he said the sexual aspects were not part of the report - and that he was also told there were no plans to inform law enforcement or child welfare officials.

The Sandusky Grand Jury Report is available on the net. It makes for gruesome reading.

Much has been written about all this, including about Sandusky's use of the Second Mile organization to groom vulnerable children, and my addition to it is not intended to be an important one. But it is something that hasn't been addressed enough.

Suppose that you walk into a locker-room and observe a child rape taking place. The rapist is someone powerful. Your life has just turned upside down. It demands that you take a stand, that you make an ethical choice, and it demands that while kicking down the pyramid of cards you have laboriously built as your career plans. It does not care about all those consequences. You must take a stand right there and then, and whatever you choose will make your life more difficult. That is how it is. The only choice you have is about what you are going to do. The event happened, you were picked as the witness, and it is not going to be pretty.

Or consider this fictitious example: You are in a car, driving to get to your own wedding, guests are waiting and you are late. And then you witness a bad accident, are, in fact the first one to arrive after it happened. Life has given you another horrible choice. Almost all of us would stop to help, almost all of us would find the wedding delayed, perhaps cancelled, our clothes ruined.

That is what all this means. When bad things happen, other things get pushed aside, ignored, even broken. And you still must make a choice.

All this links to the janitor who witnessed another incident and to his superior who chose not to report it, either, though the janitor was informed about how to make such a report. These workers knew that they might lose their jobs because they were relatively powerless, that nothing else might happen in any case.

For them the consequences of reporting were the probable losses of jobs. For the graduate assistant witnessing the locker-room incident the possible consequence might have been the loss of mentors, the loss of a promising career. Or perhaps sleepless nights. Or not.

And for the Penn State football fans? We have seen some of their reactions to the unavoidable consequences of the Sandusky case becoming public. Those reactions, too, are linked. The god HAS fallen off his pedestal, there ARE more important things than winning football games. Their lives are asking them to grow up and to accept this.

I come across as a moralizing goddess here, and that is not my point. The organization failed, the organization was too hierarchical, too painfully patriarchal. Like an ingrown toe-nail. The powerful get more protection than the powerless, and other powerless cannot change that very easily.

But there is still that choice, an unpleasant one. And it is nothing to do with being a hero or not.

Kim Richey (by Suzie)

I recently heard Kim Richey in concert. I cannot get enough of her voice.

Vote for women bloggers (by Suzie)

The Women's Media Center has nominated 27 women for its Social Media Award. Sadly, Echidne isn't nominated, but you may be interested in ones you haven't read before. The list is here. Vote here. I voted for Melissa Silverstein of Women & Hollywood. Who will you vote for?

Today's Whine

With some nice cheese:

I write too much. It is exhausting, and if I keep ladling stuff out without replenishing it I will end up writing posts like this one.

Facebook Jokes About Sluts. May Trigger.

You may have read about the Facebook rape page campaign. Its objective was to make Facebook walk its talk on hate speech and such. Here's the talk:

B. Prohibited Content - You agree that you will not promote, or provide content referencing, facilitating, containing or using, the following:

...

5. Content that is hateful, threatening, defamatory, or pornographic; incites violence; or contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence.

And here was the walk (a condensed list of examples), until quite recently:

@facebook “Riding your Girlfriend softly, Cause you dont want to wake her up” #notfunnyfacebook http://chn.ge/szNQw0
@facebook “Let’s have sex.. LOL jk i’m a rapist, were doing it wether you like or not” #notfunnyfacebook http://chn.ge/szNQw0
@facebook “Kicking sluts in the vagina because its funny watching your foot disappear” #notfunnyfacebook http://chn.ge/szNQw0
@facebook “1.5 Million ‘likes’ and I will rape my mom!” #notfunnyfacebook http://chn.ge/szNQw0
@facebook “It’s Not Rape If You Yell Surprise” #notfunnyfacebook http://chn.ge/szNQw0
@facebook “Whats 10 inches and gets girls to have sex with me? my knife” #notfunnyfacebook http://chn.ge/szNQw0

Facebook initially defended such pages as jokes, which are allowed, even if in bad taste. This naturally suggests that any kind of hateful or violent speech can be allowed as long as it's turned into something that might look as jokes.

In any case, Facebook agreed to remove the pro-rape joke pages.

I didn't write about the campaign when it was happening because I was still sick and thinking was like pouring out molasses from a narrow-necked bottle on a cold January morning. And this is a tricky topic in lots of ways.

That's the backstory as journalists like to say. What I really want to write about is the new incarnation of one of those old joke pages because of what it taught me.

The page is most likely the one about "kicking sluts in the vagina." I swear that yesterday it was still called Wiping-makeup-off-your-shoe-after-a-long-day-of-kicking-sluts-in-the-vagina. But today it is called Wiping-makeup-off-your-shoe-after-a-long-day-of-kicking-sluts-in-the-face.

The change at least clarifies what the joke is supposed to be: Sluts wear a lot of makeup so when you kick them in the face you gotta clean your shoes. I was desperately trying to figure out how the makeup got in the vagina in the older version of the "joke." Before the kicking, I mean.

But that's not the aspect of the page which taught me something. It's the comments, many of them by women, which find kicking sluts in the face (or the vagina) very funny.

So how do those commenting on the page define the term "sluts?" Clearly the women who like the joke don't think that they themselves belong to that despised group. "Sluts" is Other Women Of A Certain Type. But is that how the creator of the page means the term to be understood? Or is it synonymous for "women?" And how many of the commentators think it's the same as women in general and how many think it's those nasty women who are loose about their sexuality?

I can't tell the answer to that question. But what I have learned from that page is that the term "slut" has not been reclaimed in any meaningful way.

Hidden Politics Inside Number-Crunching

You wouldn't think that the way we measure inflation in various price indexes could be used to cut back on federal spending in a way which the politicians hope remains hidden:

Just as 55 million Social Security recipients are about to get their first benefit increase in three years, Congress is looking at reducing future raises by adopting a new measure of inflation that also would increase taxes for most families — the biggest impact falling on those with low incomes.
If adopted across the government, the inflation measure would have widespread ramifications. Future increases in veterans' benefits and pensions for federal workers and military personnel would be smaller. And over time, fewer people would qualify for Medicaid, Head Start, food stamps, school lunch programs and home heating assistance than under the current measure.
Taxes would go up by $60 billion over the next decade because annual adjustments to the tax brackets would be smaller, resulting in more people jumping into higher tax brackets because their wages rose faster than the new inflation measure. Annual increases in the standard deduction and personal exemptions would become smaller.

There are problems with almost any price index you care to construct, and the reasons for changing the current one are these:

The inflation measure under consideration is called the Chained Consumer Price Index, or chained CPI. On average, the measure shows a lower level of inflation than the more widely used CPI for All Urban Consumers.
Many economists argue that the chained CPI is more accurate because it assumes that as prices increase, consumers switch to lower cost alternatives, reducing the amount of inflation they experience.
For example, if the price of beef increases while the price of pork does not, people will buy more pork. Or, as opponents mockingly argue, if the price of home heating oil goes up, people will turn down their heat and wear more sweaters.
A report by the Moment of Truth Project, a group formed to promote the deficit reduction package produced by President Barack Obama's deficit commission late last year, supports a new inflation measure. "Rather than serving to raise taxes and cut benefits, switching to the chained CPI would simply be fulfilling the mission of properly adjusting for cost of living," it argues.

At the same time, the current CPI for All Urban Consumers is not a terribly good measure of the cost of living for older Americans. That is because the "standard shopping basket" (i.e., a representative consumer budget) the index uses is not that close to the standard "shopping basket" of the elderly.

As discussed in this government publication, the elderly buy more medical care and shelter than the standard basket contains. Because the prices of medical care and shelter have risen faster than the general price level, the cost-of-living increases for the elderly may not be adequately reflected in the current CPI for All Urban Consumers.

Is that boring enough for you? The point I'm trying to make is this: Sure, the current CPI may be overestimating price increases in general because people adjust what they consume based on the price changes, so the old standard shopping basket is no longer relevant.

But at the same time, the current CPI may underestimate the impact of price increases on older Americans. If we are going to fix the former problem and not the latter, lots of frail old people could suffer.

The Feminist Grievance Industry

This is really funny:





In that clip Mary Matalin, a Republican television face, argues that:

There Was A "Grievance Industry" Where Feminists Found "A Way To Be Offended"

I'm laughing so hard that my tummy hurts, for two reasons. One is a personal one, having to do with the enormous amounts of money that belonging to the "feminism industry" has brought me and my grievances!

The other reason is a much funnier one: Think about who it is who has really made money out of a "grievance industry". Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage! That's who.

Very Good News!

The Egg-Americans initiative in Mississippi was defeated. My sincere thanks to all who worked very hard to get just that done.

The fight was won but the war will go on, sadly. The war against women, that is. Similar initiatives are being planned in several states in 2012. But I'm heartened by the Mississippians not going the whole hog on the denial of women's personhood.

In other good news:

A year after Republicans swept legislatures across the country, voters in Ohio delivered their verdict on a centerpiece of the conservative legislative agenda, striking down a law that restricted public workers’ rights to bargain collectively.

This post is going to be on only good news. Not-so-good news will be covered later.

The Way To Respond To Sexual Harassment: P%$#OW!??

The Herman Cain sexual harassment accusations dig up all sorts of interesting stuff from the bottom mud of the oceans that R Us. For one example, see how Fox News people cover it. It's nowhere near as bad as it could be, given the bias Fox News has, but it is still very informative:





The interesting bit:

Discussing the story with Megyn Kelly, Powers discussed this clear hole in the story:
“Some people look at this and they say, y’know – I don’t know what you would do, Megyn, but, if I were in that situation, if someone put their hand up my skirt and pushed my head down, someone would be in the hospital and it wouldn’t be me. Also everyone would know about it.”

It feels wonderful to think like that, it does. Me the powerful female Ninja, he the Bad Guy who ends up in the hospital!

Then reality rears its ugly gray head and looks at you with its blurry eyes: Any woman who would carry out that daydream would NEVER get a single employment offer from that industry again, NEVER.

Because the guy in that daydream is powerful, and because nobody ever hires anyone who has made a fuss like that in the past.

It's just the way things are. Ask those who have gone public about the crimes of corporations they worked for, say. Your career is over and you better get enough from the courts or publicity to survive for several years.

I exaggerate a little there, mostly to make the point that There Are Consequences from going public with claims like this, just as sending a harasser to hospital with physical damage would also have consequences for the woman.

Some other bits in that video are also interesting, including the idea that avoiding being alone with married men will keep you safe from sexual harassment.

Too Little, Too Late And By A Guy Who Won't Be the Republican Presidential Candidate.

I managed to squash almost the whole post into the title! Soon I will be a twitter phenomenon.

To add to the title, Newt Gingrich now thinks that the fervent deregulation of the financial markets in the nineties may have been a mistake.

Today's Funnyfunny Joke

Via HJ, and found here:

My Deep Thought For The Day

Is this: If you look at the political happenings in the US, the fight could perhaps best be understood as a fight between people who want to have a civilization and those who don't want to have a civilization.

It's up to you which side represents which, but creating and maintaining civilizations costs money.

OK, it's not that deep a thought. Perhaps 2.5 inches at most.

From Wisconsin, With Hilarity

Remember that concealed-carry thing from the Nazgül state of Wisconsin? The idea was that people would be properly trained and vetted before getting the permit to carry a concealed gun. Well, there's more:

Those seeking permits to carry concealed weapons no longer need to show they had at least four hours of firearms training.
Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen wrote rules implementing the state’s new weapons law that set four hours as the minimum length of firearms training courses. But on Monday, his fellow Republicans on the Legislature’s Joint Committee for Review of Administrative Rules suspended the requirement for minimum hours.
The measure passed 6-2, with all Republicans for it and all Democrats against it.
The effect likely will be that the state Department of Justice will accept any training certification submitted with an application for a concealed weapons permit, Van Hollen told the committee just before it voted on the matter. Thus, some people could wind up getting permits after a bogus instructor passes out permits after teaching a course that lasts just a few minutes, Van Hollen said.

It's not truly hilarious, except for cynical goddesses. It's pretty frightening.

Is An Embryo A Person?

So asks the Christian Science Monitor when it writes about the Mississippi Egg-Americans Proposition, to be voted on tomorrow.

But of course the real question up for vote in Mississippi is about women's personhood. Anything that turns all potentially fertile women into potential aquaria and all pregnant women into aquaria-in-use WILL reduce the human rights of that container. There is no way around that.

One of Herman Cain's Accusers Speaks

From Talking Points Memo:





Reading the early comments attached to that YouTube is not exactly recommended but very instructive.

Herman Cain's campaign states that the accusations are completely false.

The Stop Internet Misogyny Week. May Trigger.

Several British women writers have decided to tackle the the topic of misogynistic attacks aimed at women who write on the Internet. Helen Lewis Hasteley in the New Statesman, Laurie Penny in the Independent and Vanessa Thorpe and Richard Rogers in the Guardian all write about women bloggers and journalists and the kinds of slurs we routinely receive.

On this side of the pond, Jill at Feministe lists some of the threats she has received and Digby discusses the differences in the treatment she gets now that readers know she is a woman, compared to the time when most readers assumed that she was a man.

It is important to be clear about a few things when discussing this topic. First, the level of malicious attacks women receive is probably higher than the level of malicious attacks men receive, in the sense that if two writers wrote exactly the same opinion pieces but one appeared as female and one appeared as male, the female-seeming writer would receive a more vitriolic treatment. This is only a hypothesis, but it has empirical support from a study: "Assessing the Attack Threat due to IRC Channels"* which assigned Internet bots male, female or neutral names and then observed the number of malicious messages these (silent) bots received:

The female bots received on average 100 malicious private messages a day, exceeding by far the totals of any of the other bots, with the other attack types being roughly equal. It is interesting to note that the bots with ambiguous names received significantly more malicious private messages (on average 25) than the male bots (on average 3.7), but less than the average between the male and female bots (which is around 52).

Because this study controlled for everything but the name of the bots, the large differences found must be due to the female, neutral and male names of the bots.

Second, the types of threats or attacks vary by the perceived gender of the writer or blogger. Digby writes:

When people thought I was a male, the insults had a very different tone. They were always on the intellectual/political playing field, tough and challenging but never personal.Now, when things heat up, crude and nasty misogyny appears, the most common being that I'm a bitter old spinster who needs to get laid --- which would come as something of a surprise to my husband. But in normal times I mostly have to put up with being condescendingly lectured about what a silly old bubblehead I am for ....fill in the blank. (My favorite all time comment has to be the fellow who complained, "You wrote a lot better before you came out as a woman.")

And Laurie Penny:

You come to expect it, as a woman writer, particularly if you're political. You come to expect the vitriol, the insults, the death threats. After a while, the emails and tweets and comments containing graphic fantasies of how and where and with what kitchen implements certain pseudonymous people would like to rape you cease to be shocking, and become merely a daily or weekly annoyance, something to phone your girlfriends about, seeking safety in hollow laughter.
An opinion, it seems, is the short skirt of the internet. Having one and flaunting it is somehow asking an amorphous mass of almost-entirely male keyboard-bashers to tell you how they'd like to rape, kill and urinate on you. This week, after a particularly ugly slew of threats, I decided to make just a few of those messages public on Twitter, and the response I received was overwhelming. Many could not believe the hate I received, and many more began to share their own stories of harassment, intimidation and abuse.

And Helen Lewis Hasteley:

The sheer volume of sexist abuse thrown at female bloggers is the internet's festering sore: if you talk to any woman who writes online, the chances are she will instantly be able to reel off a Greatest Hits of insults. But it's very rarely spoken about, for both sound and unsound reasons. No one likes to look like a whiner -- particularly a woman writing in male-dominated fields such as politics, economics or computer games. Others are reluctant to give trolls the "satisfaction" of knowing they're emotionally affected by the abuse, or are afraid of incurring more by speaking out.
Both are understandable reasons, but there's another, less convincing one: doesn't everyone get abuse on the internet? After all, the incivility of the medium has prompted a rash of op-eds and books about the degradation of discourse.
While I won't deny that almost all bloggers attract some extremely inflammatory comments -- and LGBT or non-white ones have their own special fan clubs too -- there is something distinct, identifiable and near-universal about the misogynist hate directed at women online. As New Statesman blogger David Allen Green told me: "In three years of blogging and tweeting about highly controversial political topics I have never once has any of the gender-based abuse that, say, Cath Elliott, Penny Red, or Ellie Gellard routinely receive."

In short, women are more likely to be attacked simply because of their gender than men are. Writing-as-a-woman is still a crime in the minds of some on the Internet.

Third, it is important to stress that Internet misogyny is a whole different beast from honest criticism or arguments as long as they are about the topic itself. The latter is to be expected and encouraged. The former has only one intention, and that is to silence women who write on the net. Indeed, to silence all women who would ever consider writing on the net.
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The linking to the article caused me trouble. You can access it through this old post.

More from Nakke, The Finnish-Speaking Parrot

Here he sits on his roost in the kitchen at night.





Rough translation:
He says "Give me a kiss" and makes smooch sounds. This is repeated several times in the video. He then says "who is it there", imitates coughing and laughter, calls the woman his beloved or love (though slightly wrong).

He then asks "who is it?" again, and starts saying "cuckoo". He laughs, and then appears to poop. After that he says "So." Then "papa will clean," to which the woman responds by saying "not now".

Nakke then says "what are you doing, UGH!" "UGH!" The next bit I can't quite get but he appears to say "who says poop?" "Why do you say it?"

The "cuckoo" game is repeated several times, he says "silly!" and then something I don't get.

At the end of the video he says "give me a kiss" again, then "give me your paw" He ends by saying "Oh dear" or "Oh bother" or "Damn" and flies away. (These choices are because none of them quite corresponds to "voi, voi sentaan.")

The Nazgûl Rule in Wisconsin

It's a most fascinating place, these days, full of what conservatives call social engineering when they are not doing it. But Wisconsin is run by wingnuts now, and it's instructive to learn what sorts of things they find Very Important to change.

There's the right to take a gun to the state Capitol, for instance, and the general right to carry concealed guns. How that will work out in road rage cases is something we will all learn about in the near future.

So having weapons available all over the place is crucial for the Nazgûls. What else?

Well, this:

Ever since Republicans captured the majority in a number of state legislatures last November, they have systematically attempted to make it more difficult to vote: by onerous voter ID requirements (in Wisconsin, Republicans have legislated photo IDs while simultaneously shutting Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) offices in Democratic constituencies while at the same time lengthening the hours of operation of DMV offices in GOP constituencies)

And then this:

Schools that teach sexual education would have to promote marriage and tell students abstinence is the only reliable way to prevent pregnancy, under a bill the Senate passed Wednesday.
The Republican-backed measure passed on a party-line 17-15 vote and now goes to the Republican-run Assembly. It would allow schools to teach abstinence-only courses, which has been banned in Wisconsin since last year under a law Democrats passed when they controlled state government.

...

The courses also would have to discuss parental responsibility and the socioeconomic benefits of marriage and explain pregnancy, prenatal development and childbirth.
Beyond that, Lazich's bill would recommend - but not mandate - other topics to be covered. Current law requires sex education courses to cover a range of subjects, such as anatomy, puberty, parenting, body image, the benefits of abstinence, marriage and family responsibility, the use of contraceptives and how drugs and alcohol affect decision-making.

And I'm not even going to write about what has been done to the unions and to the teachers there.

Sauron is smiling, you know.

Spare The Rod And Spoil The Child?

You probably have heard of the child discipline techniques of a Texas family court judge William Adams (who sits on child abuse cases), because his daughter put up a seven-year old video of both her parent beating her. Mostly her father, who is clearly out of control in the video:

"I really don't want to get into this right now because as you can see my life's been made very difficult over this child," Adams told the station.
When asked if he felt he was going to face any suspension or discipline from the state over the video, Adams responded, "In my mind I have not done anything wrong other than discipline my child when she was caught stealing. I did lose my temper, I've apologized."
Aransas County Sheriff Bill Mills said Wednesday that Adams has disconnected his phone because of threatening calls and faxes after the video went viral. Mills said Adams told him he did not plan to go to his office at the courthouse Wednesday.

The beating appears to take place in a bedroom and the man is apparently unaware that he's being filmed.

"Go get the belt. The big one. I'm going to spank her now," the man says in the clip's opening seconds.

A few minutes into the video, a woman appears and barks at the girl to "turn over like a 16-year-old and take it! Like a grown woman!" The ordeal then appears to be over for about a minute when both adults leave the room and shut the door, but then the man returns and the beating resumes.

Toward the end of the video, the man shouts that he plans to beat the girl "into submission." The girl does not appear to be seriously injured, and at the end of the video the adult woman tells her to leave the room and sleep on a sofa.

I'm not linking to the video directly. But I watched it and found it far more upsetting than the videos of police brutality in the Wall Street protests. That's because the teenage girl in the video had no way out, because she was alone and attacked by the two people who were supposed to be her guardians and because especially the father was clearly out of control, not carrying out some weird parental task but simply attacking his daughter. That she was not left in physical pain is immaterial.

Neither do I really care about what she had done. Not even the police would have punished her in that exact manner, replicating the experience of being attacked in the street or perhaps in a war zone.

This Ring A Bell?

I was reading something I saved earlier for possible blogging, about the scarcity of women at the top of corporate echelons, and came across this:

She describes a corporate environment that offers much more latitude to men and where the bar is much higher for women. In her view, men tend to be promoted based on their promise, whereas women need to prove themselves multiple times.

I doubt there's any research on this question, but what she describes there might fit some cases I know about. That would explain why promotions come more slowly to women than to men. The "promising young man" vs. "the woman who has earned her spurs."

As I mentioned, this is pure speculation on my part. What's interesting about the idea is that if it turns out to be true it probably wouldn't be based on overt discrimination or anything of the sort but on something more vague.

The Men Behind The War On Women

That is the provocative title of a Huffington Post piece on the great influence of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops when it comes to women's reproductive lives:

A group of men with no real background in law or medicine, but blessed with a strong personal interest in women’s bodies, have quietly influenced all of the major anti-abortion legislation over the past several years. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops may be one of the quietest, yet most powerful lobbies on Capitol Hill, with political allies that have enabled them to roll back decades of law and precedent.
Over the past two years the GOP-controlled House of Representatives has launched one of the most extreme assaults on women's choice the U.S. has seen in decades. Republicans voted twice to slash federal family planning funds for low-income women, moved to prevent women from using their own money to buy insurance plans that cover abortion, introduced legislation that would force women to have ultrasounds before receiving an abortion and, most recently, passed a bill that will allow hospitals to refuse to perform emergency abortions for women with life-threatening pregnancy complications.
But the erosion of women's rights didn't begin with the GOP takeover. President Barack Obama's health care reform law contained some of the most restrictive abortion language seen in decades.
Lift the curtain, and behind the assault was the conference of bishops.
"It is a very effective lobby, unfortunately, and now they have an ally in the Republican majority because both groups find this a means by which to fight women's health issues in general," said Rep. Lois Capps (D-Calif.), a member of the House Pro-Choice Caucus. "The bishops carry a lot of clout."
"We consider the two biggest opponents on the other side the Catholic bishops and National Right to Life," said Donna Crane, policy director of NARAL Pro-Choice America. "They are extremely heavy-handed on this issue."
While the bishops have always been vocal on the issue of choice, they have emerged since the 2009 health care reform debate as one of the most powerful anti-abortion advocates on Capitol Hill.
Now, they are stepping up their attack on women's choice with a new, high-intensity campaign aimed at the latest front in the national anti-abortion battle: birth control. And the opposition is worried that they might have just enough sway over lawmakers to succeed.

Let me see. Here's this big Guy Religion which does not allow women to become priests and has not allowed women to interpret the doctrine of the church. That doctrine is interpreted by celibate men who then use their interpretations to influence politics in countries world over. And the activity qualifies for a tax-exempt status:

The Conference of Catholic Bishops is not technically a lobbying organization -- churches are tax-exempt, and they don't have to disclose publicly how much money they put toward lobbying. According to the IRS, a 501(c)(3) organization like the Conference can speak out on moral issues as much as it wants, but "may not attempt to influence legislation as a substantial part of its activities."

The Catholic clergy's secret weapon is a man named Richard Doerflinger, who dropped out of a doctoral program in theology 31 years ago to work on abortion policy for the USCCB as Deputy Director of the Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities. As the point person on pro-life issues for the bishops, Doerflinger says he has been helping lawmakers write anti-abortion bills behind the scenes for decades, including the Stupak Amendment. In 2008 he was recognized by the Gerald Health Foundation as one of the "greatest heroes of the pro-life movement."

How It Is Done: Right-Wing Defences of Herman Cain

There's always a deep lesson in these kinds of news. This time it's the sexual harassment accusations against Herman Cain. Because of the lack of detailed information (so far), people commenting on the case can say whatever they wish.

And what the conservatives tend to say are things like this:

National Review: "Is There Anyone Who Thinks Sexual Harassment Is A Real Thing?" From a November 2 post by John Derbyshire on National Review Online:

Is there anyone who thinks sexual harassment is a real thing? Is there anyone who doesn't know it's all a lawyers' ramp, like "racial discrimination"? You pay a girl a compliment nowadays, she runs off and gets lawyered up. Is this any way to live? [National Review, 11/2/11] 

That's how it is done. Note how Derbyshire implies that sexual harassment is nothing but giving "a girl" a compliment!

Like "nice rack?" A used condom in her lunch sandwich?

Derbyshire also redefines sexual harassment suits as something which makes his life a pure hell. They are unnecessary, baseless and invented to stop him from living his life to the fullest.

It's an interesting interpretation of who the real victims are.

Class Warfare in Chicago

Interesting:

Someone at the Chicago Board of Trade issued another message to the Occupy Chicago protesters by blanketing them with these McDonald's job applications. The protesters are understandably offended by both the message and by the hundreds of pieces of new litter around them.

This is especially interesting given this piece of news from last April:

After sifting through about one million applications, McDonald’s hired more than 60,000 workers nationwide, and over 1,000 in Chicagoland, in conjunction with its National Hiring Day earlier this month.

Bolds are mine, asshattery by someone else.

Trust And The Financial Markets As Gambling Casinos

The role of trust in the success of financial markets has not been highlighted the way it should have been. One exception is an in interview of a former financial regulator, William Black.

Consumer trust is crucial in the day-to-day operations of any bank or investment firm. That's why banks used to have marble columns and rotundas; to show that the depositor's money would be safe.

Somehow we have forgotten almost all that. The debate now is about how uncertainty affects firms, and even there the uncertainty is defined to mean only what the governments might do. What we should talk about instead is the severe loss of trust and what can be done to bring trust back.

This links to my frequent reminders that we need proper regulations of the financial markets and proper incentives for those who gamble in them. If failing the consumers and others who rely on the markets gives you no other punishment but a golden umbrella when you leave, who cares about customer trust?

Still more on the Mississippi Single-Cell-Americans Initiative

The proponents of the Egg Americans (coming to a womb near you!) initiative in Mississippi are finally admitting that the fetal personhood amendment would have some serious consequences for the aquariums intended for the use of fetal persons:

From NPR’s Diane Rehm Show:
Hoye: Any birth control that ends the life of a human being will be impacted by this measure.
Rehm: So that would then include the IUD [intra-uterine device]. What about the birth control pill?
Hoye: If that falls into the same category, yes.
Rehm: So you’re saying that the birth control pill could be considered as taking the life of a human being?
Hoye: I’m saying that once the egg and the oocyte come together and you have that single-celled embryo, at that point you have human life, you’ve got a human being and we’re taking the life of a human being with some forms of birth control and if birth control falls into that category, yes I am.
Hoye, who is the president of the Issues4Life Foundation (a group that has erected anti-abortion billboards aimed specifically at African-Americans) also told Rehm that in vitro fertilization would not be affected by the passage of the bill, despite objections to the contrary.

Rubbish. In vitro fertilization would certainly be banned by the bill if the definition of a fertilized egg as a full human being is taken seriously. How to treat ectopic pregnancies would become a dilemma, too, and I still think it is not an accident that the fetal personhood initiatives always seem to ban the contraception methods that women can use in an invisible way.

On the other hand, the opinions in that quote made me think that perhaps a Single-Cell American is a better term for these new persons than Egg American.
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This post on one of the local proponents of the initiative is also pretty scary.

Today's Fun Survey: Women And Ambition At Work.

It's about how women no longer have the desire for those top jobs:

Tiffany Willis of Dallas has spent years climbing the corporate career ladder, working up to 70-hour weeks and pulling in about $60,000 as a middle manager.
She describes herself "as that mom sitting at the top of the bleachers at my kid's Saturday-morning football game on my cellphone for a conference call with my laptop."
But no more.
She walked away from the pressures, paycheck and prestige of jobs she called "meaningful and important" earlier this year and refuses to return, no matter how many offers come her way.
"I will never go back to the corporate world," she says. "I want to own my life."
A new nationwide survey shows that Willis, 44, may not be alone. A women and workplace survey from More magazine shows that 43% of the women surveyed say they are less ambitious now than they were a decade ago. And only a quarter of the 500 women ages 35 to 60 say they're working toward their next promotion.
And forget about the corner office: 3 out of 4 women in the survey — 73% — say they would not apply for their boss' job. Almost 2 of 5 — 38% — report they don't want to put up with the stress, office politics and responsibility that often go hand in hand with such positions.

And what are the conclusions we are to draw from all this? That women don't want that brass ring? That women with children should not work? That men earn more because 100% of men out there are working towards their next promotion?

Got you there, I hope. The survey does not ask men about anything. The lack of that comparison basis makes any interpretation of the evidence as something singular to women wrong. We simply don't know, assuming that these changes in ambition are real, whether they are only taking place among women or also taking place among men. Especially given the crummy economic situation and the way many firms try to get two people's job from one person on one paycheck.

But I was also rather struck with the assumption that $60,000 a year for a 70-hour workweek was somehow being up there in the stratosphere. It sounds pretty exploitative to me.

Then have a look at the way the results are reported. For instance, the quote above on wanting the boss's job states that "Almost 2 of 5 — 38% — report they don't want to put up with the stress, office politics and responsibility that often go hand in hand with such positions."

Does that means that more than three out of five ARE prepared to put up with those negative side-effects? I couldn't get hold of the study to check and it's always possible that some respondents said they don't know or didn't answer the question.

Now this would be a fun assignment. Pick the data above and write a post about how many women really are very ambitious at work! One in four of all women are hovering around, ready to grab the job of their bosses! One in four are avidly working towards their next promotion! And so on.

Most men are not working towards their next promotion. I'm willing to bet on that. But because we didn't study that at all, everything about the interpretations is pure speculation.

More on the Egg-Americans Initiative in Mississippi

From Feministing.

On Stoves/Cookers

Melissa's post made me so glad that my stove is a 1950s pink-and-chrome one. It came with the house, and no, you can't have it.

It looks a bit like this one except better:

When it needs repairs, I take out the pipe cleaners and scrub the pipes. That's it, pretty much. When the day of its demise arrives I will sell it for much money. That's the plan.

MF Global: Here We Go Again

MF Global, the eighth-largest US futures broker, has declared bankruptcy:

MF Global Holdings Ltd failed to protect customer accounts by keeping them separate from its own funds, said a top U.S. exchange regulator, another shock for commodity markets scrambling to contain fallout from the brokerage's bankruptcy.
The revelation on Tuesday by CME Group Inc, MF Global's immediate regulator, suggests MF Global violated a central tenet of futures brokerage. It could put client money at risk and erode confidence in a market that for decades has enjoyed a sterling reputation for safety.
The Associated Press, citing a U.S. official, reported that MF Global has admitted to using client money as its financial troubles mounted. A company executive made the admission to federal regulators in a phone call early Monday, the AP reported.
The fall of the brokerage led by ex-Goldman Sachs boss and former New Jersey governor Jon Corzine sent shockwaves through commodity markets as futures traders feared the damage could spread or that similar problems could hit other brokers.

And what are the possible consequences of all this? Not much, perhaps:

Government rules require securities firms to keep clients' money and company money in separate accounts. Violating them could result in civil penalties.

Government regulation of the financial markets has been a mangy toothless lion for a couple of decades now. Nothing the young lions of Wall Street would have to fear. And even though some dentures have been recently provided for the regulatory lion, they are kept in glasses of water on the bedside tables of the banksters who are still really in power. Regulation is only allowed if the industry agrees with it, and the industry is not at all interested.

Worth Reading Today

This article offers a lot of food for thought on how to create coalitions in political movements by examining the intersections between race, gender and class.

Chiseling Through The Writer's Block: On Mini-Skirts in Finland

Some time ago I read a Finnish web newspaper post on Slutwalks in Finland. The title of the piece was about a mini-skirt not meaning yes, and the piece itself was a good summary of the initial goals of the Slutwalk-movement.

I read through the comments because the site actually has moderated comments and I thought I might get away with not having to use steel wool and bleach in the shower afterwards. To scrub off all that misogyny.

And indeed, someone had most likely removed the references to female genital organs and the utter stupidity of women in general. The general conclusion of the overwhelmingly male commentariat was that of course nobody should be raped just because of wearing a mini-skirt, of course. But at the same time, women should understand that wearing a mini-skirt will raise the risk of being raped.

Here's where things got interesting, for me. Another opinion piece posted roughly at the same time in the same newspaper urged all Finnish women to look more feminine. The young man who wrote it argued that women should wear high-heeled shoes and mini-skirts, jewelry and make-up. Women should enjoy their femininity and refuse to become androgynous just because of feminist propaganda! Their sisters in St. Petersburgh and Vienna look so much more delectable!

Because of the timing of the two pieces, I expected the second one to have comments about the risks of walking around in a mini-skirt, given the Slutwalks piece. But astonishingly enough, only one female commenter made that reference.

Others argued that Finnish women are too fat to ever look good, that feminism had created ugly and fat women and so on. One man gave his long and considered opinion on how much better-looking and slimmer women are elsewhere. And so on.

Now, I understand that the two posts were not linked in any other sense except by timing. But they also shared something else, a certain kind of male gaze when it comes to women, and I found that fact fascinating.

To see what I mean, consider the Finnish fatty women argument of the second post. Very little work Googling told me that Finnish women have the fifth highest BMI of all European women. BUT Finnish men have the second highest BMI among European men. Only the Greek score higher.

Ignoring the greater fatness indicators of Finnish men while criticizing Finnish women would seem odd to my friendly alien from outer space, unless he/she/it/they realized that the men who made those comments feel entitled to criticizing the looks of women, whatever their own looks might be.

Going back from that piece to the Slutwalk piece made me see the women-are-fat argument linked to the mini-skirts-raise-your-risk argument. They both have the flavor of someone in the audience criticizing the play performed on some stage.
---------

I wasn't going to write about these random observations here, because the two posts are not by the same person or intended as a duet, and because I'm pretty sure that the post on how women should look sexier was not very widely read. But the web newspaper refuses to let me become a commenter there and this particular topic is in my brain pipes, clogging up everything.

Come for the Lady Gaga, Stay For Feminism

Finally, a piece about feminism in the mainstream media which is not about how much its corpse stinks. This one looks at the phenomenon of feminist blogs and the rise of Internet feminist discussions.

Misogyny For Halloween. Or Charlotte Allen's Trick Or Treat.

Charlotte Allen is the female woman-hater extraordinaire who a few years ago wrote a long rant about how dumb women are. All women. And Washington Post published it.

Her new misogynistic screed is published by the Los Angeles Times. It begins as it plans to go on:

A faux-ho dressed (or mostly undressed) for Halloween might want to be careful where she turns tricks or treats.

What do "SlutWalks," the anti-rape demonstrations that have been held in nearly every major city, and Halloween parties have in common? A lot. Both feature phalanxes of females flaunting scanty clothing that typically involves lingerie.

Mmm. Read the rest of the piece. Note the totalizing language. There is hardly a woman out there wearing something not faux-ho. Note, also, how Charlotte knows why women participate in Slutwalks: They want to flash tits and ass to admiring men:

As illustrated by Valenti's remark, the SlutWalk feminists are in denial of a reality that is perfectly obvious to both the women who favor "sexy" for Halloween parties and (although perhaps not consciously) the SlutWalkers themselves. The reality is that men's sexual responses are highly susceptible to visual stimuli, and women, who are also sexual beings, like to generate those stimuli by displaying as much of their attractive selves as social mores or their own personal moral codes permit. In Victorian times that meant flashing an ankle every now and then. Now, it means … whatever. It's no wonder that SlutWalks have quickly outstripped (as it were) Take Back the Night as anti-rape protest. Women get another chance besides Halloween to dress up like prostitutes!

Did I already mention the totalizing language? "Women" get another chance to dress up like prostitutes.

The rest of the piece is mostly word salad. First, we are told that men are highly susceptible to visual stimuli, that faux-hos should be careful where they turn their tricks and so on. But next we are told that of course men don't rape women just because the women show a lot of leg! Even though rape IS sex, whatever boring feminists argue, and men are highly susceptible to visual stimuli. But no, men don't rape women who go out in lingerie. Still, women better be careful about what they wear when they go out. So they don't get raped.

Of course Charlotte doesn't cite any studies on whether the way a woman is dressed exerts an independent effect on the probability that a man will rape her.

Despite the wealth of interesting bits and pieces in that word salad, I want to focus on her mini-rant about the link between rape and sexual desire:

The other reality that feminists tend to deny is that rape and sexual desire are linked. Rape, in that view, is a purely political act of male dominance. This ignores the fact that the vast majority of rape victims are under age 30 — that is, when women are at their peak of desirability.

That first sentence in the quote is so revealing of Charlotte's inner landscape (which ain't pretty). Read it again if you didn't notice anything odd about it.

The term "sexual desire" is not qualified. The way it reads, she might be talking about women's sexual desire! But what she really means is that rapists get a hard-on and decide to rape someone to get rid of that. Instead of masturbating, say.

Likewise, "women at their peak of desirability" leaves "desirability" oddly undefined. What she means is "women at their peak of desirability for men."

All that might sound like nit-picking but I don't think so. It tells us how Charlotte's mind works, which people count in her world and which people do not.

And what about the argument that rape is based on rapists' sexual desire because most rape victims are under thirty, the age group where women are "at their peak of desirability?" Who knows. But before we can study that we should also note younger women are more likely to go out at night, less likely to own a car or afford cabs and also more likely to date. All this puts them at a higher risk for rape. Or put another way, a rapist must go to much more trouble to rape an older woman, on average. Still, women (and men) of all ages, from childhood to old age, have been raped.

I don't know. Charlotte's way of talking about the relationship between sexual desire and rape makes me think of excusing cannibals by saying that they were hungry.