Autism. It's The Uppity Women's Fault.

This is one of the worst pieces of so-called science reporting I have come across for a very long time. Granted, it's in the Daily Male Mail which is all about trying to get women out of the labor force and back into the kitchens, barefoot and pregnant and preferably very, very stupid. But still.

The article is a steaming turd, perhaps fished from the toilet bowl of one Michael Baron-Cohen, well known for his open distaste for the distaff gender. Or perhaps some of it is from the brain of Michael Hanlon, the writer of the piece. It's hard to say.

Let's hold our noses and jump straight into the article:

For some years now Professor Simon Baron-Cohen (cousin of the comedian and actor Sacha), a psychologist at Cambridge University, has been developing his theory that something called ‘assortative mating’ may be at least partly to blame for the spectacular rise in autism diagnoses.

The theory states that when people with strongly ‘systemising’ personalities – the sort of people who become engineers, surgeons, computer experts and who shine in some aspects of business – marry each other and produce children, the effects of this kind of ‘male brain’ are genetically magnified, increasing the chances of producing an autistic child – a child with what Prof Baron-Cohen suspects is an ‘extreme male brain’.
 
Strong ‘systemisers’ are often slightly obsessive, perfectionist and make great scientists and are often extremely talented at music. But they sometimes have difficulties socially interacting with other people – a combination of traits that can blend into the milder end of the autism spectrum.
 
Cambridge University’s Autism Research Centre is now asking members of the public who are graduates and parents to take part in a survey which will investigate any links between educational achievement, what kind of job they have and how their children develop.

Specifically, the new study will attempt to find out whether two ‘strong systemisers’ do indeed have a higher chance of producing autistic children.

A few warnings are due at this point: First, the whole concept of "systematizing" is due to Baron-Cohen. He created this concept and he markets it. As I have written earlier, the questionnaire he used to define "systematizing" behavior is loaded with bad questions which, whether intended or not, will confuse gender roles with "systematizing" behavior. To understand what he really intends by the term, let's just say that he believes men are logical and women are emotional.*:

In his book "The Essential Difference," the Cambridge University neuroscientist [sic] Simon Baron-Cohen (cousin of Sacha of “Borat” fame) wrote: “The female brain is predominately hard-wired for empathy. The male brain is predominately hard-wired for understanding and building systems.”

Second, the concept of "an extreme male brain" as the autistic mind is also his. He assigns emotional brains to the female sex and logical brains to the male sex, never mind that even his biased test cannot get there and never mind that there is no reason why the two characteristics should not be both present at the same time, both high or both low and so on. His book on the gender of brains (The Essential Difference) makes for hilarious reading, by the way.

Third, the planned study appears an odd one. If strong "systematizing" behavior is defined somewhat similarly to mild autism, then it would not be unlikely, given the apparent genetic aspect of autism, that two parents with signs of mild autism would have at least as high a probability of having an autistic child as one parent with signs of mild autism and a higher probability than two parents with no signs of autism.

So what is Baron-Cohen going to actually measure in this study? Only occupations and educational achievement? Or something like my description here? And what is it we would learn from this all? I'm also confused about the reason to only include people who are graduates. Surely his famous systematizing tests could be done on any parents, whatever their education levels are. So why limit the study in this manner?

Note, finally, that the planned study is already endangered. He is asking people to self-select for the study, while openly informing the potential participants what it is that he hopes to find.

Assortative mating, by the way, refers to similar people marrying each other. What Baron-Cohen has in mind is the idea that the drastic increase in the number of diagnosed autism cases might somehow be linked to a drastic change in the proportion of people who marry similar people.

For this to make any sense at all, there must have been a humongous change in the likelihood of assortative mating in the fairly recent past. A humongous one. And I really mean a humongous one.

And this is where I cannot tell if the rest of Michael Hanlon's article is his own theory about what might have caused such a change or if it is still part of Baron-Cohen's theorizing. I wouldn't be surprised, either way, because I'm familiar with Baron-Cohen's misogyny. But in any case, one gentleman or another tells us that this drastic change is due to feminism! In the past clever women didn't get married at all or only late in life, so they didn't have time to give birth to lots of autistic children! And logical gentlemen preferred dumb blondes without an education!

An example:

Until relatively recently in our history, being exceptionally bright was not much use to you if you were female. In Victorian Britain, for example, the opportunities for a woman to earn her living through brainpower alone were extremely limited.
According to the 1901 Census, there were fewer than a hundred registered female doctors in the whole of the United Kingdom.
Going to university was difficult and expensive – most did not even allow girls to study. There were certainly few opportunities for careers in engineering or the sciences.
You could become a teacher or a governess, or maybe, of you were exceptionally talented, earn your living writing or in the arts. Most of the professions were closed, as was the world of business.
Brainy women were not even seen as particularly desirable partners. Clever or rich men chose brides on the grounds of looks, ‘breeding’ or both.
Having an IQ in the 140s probably counted against you if anything. The traditional image of a ‘dumb blonde’ hanging off the arm of the successful politician or businessman was a horrible cliché but it had an element of truth.
And in any case, very clever women would have often been mad to get married.

You feel dizzy? I did, after reading that a few times, because Hanlon confused education, an acquired characteristic, with "systematizing" which is supposed to be an innate characteristic, as if a Victorian young maiden couldn't have had a "systematizing" brain because she was not educated!

Hanlon also makes the case that women didn't really have many career opportunities at all which suggests that most of them got married as fast as they could, what with the need to eat and so on. But then he argues that bright women wouldn't have wanted to get married, because of losing those nonexistent and poorly paying career opportunities offered by governessing and such. This is a mess. And I haven't even pointed out that Hanlon's view of the Victorian era has no ordinary working-class women in it at all.

What we are to take home from that silliness is the idea that smart women in the past did not reproduce. Now they do! Possibly with smart men! Voila, an explanation for increased autism!

The big, big problem with this argument is that there is no way of testing it. We cannot go back to Victorian times, armed with the Baron-Cohen test ("Do you like to collect train timetables?"), to see if assortative mating was less common then than now, and we cannot learn what percentage of smart or stupid women reproduced then as opposed to now. So the whole approach appears doomed.

But of course that is not its point, not at all! This piece has to do with the Dangers Of Educated Women and the Dangers Of Working Women. If only women did not go to college! If only women stayed at home! That neither of these probably affects assortative mating is irrelevant. That neither of these would affect "systematizing" if it is an innate characteristic is irrelevant. The important message is out.

And the message is that it is the fault of mothers. Not the fault of fathers, even though it takes two to tango, assuming that this hare-brained theory is taken seriously, but the fault of mothers who should not have gone to college and who certainly should not be logical thinkers.

It takes a lot of work to get those sexist messages out. But then the history of autism research is a stained one. In the 1950s autism was thought to be caused by "refrigerator mothers":

In his 1943 paper that first identified autism, Leo Kanner called attention to what appeared to him as a lack of warmth among the fathers and mothers of autistic children.[3] In a 1949 paper, Kanner suggested autism may be related to a "genuine lack of maternal warmth", noted that fathers rarely stepped down to indulge in children's play, and observed that children were exposed from "the beginning to parental coldness, obsessiveness, and a mechanical type of attention to material needs only.... They were left neatly in refrigerators which did not defrost. Their withdrawal seems to be an act of turning away from such a situation to seek comfort in solitude."[4] In a 1960 interview, Kanner bluntly described parents of autistic children as "just happening to defrost enough to produce a child."[5]

These early researchers couldn't put the blame for autism on uppity career mothers, so they put it on "refrigerator mothers." Which just goes to show that it is always the women's fault.
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*It's important to point out that he asserts this but does not prove it in any way, given that a) his tests are biased (examples linked to male gender-roles are overwhelmingly used in the systematizing questions) b) even then any gender differences are slight and c) the division into "systemizers" and "empathizers" does not go by gender terribly well. Only 40% of the women who took the test actually fall into the group which would be characterized by what Baron-Cohen calls "a female brain."

Likewise, there is no currently existing evidence to suggest that women are "predominantly" "hardwired" for empathy. What does it even mean, that "predominantly"? Everyday life requires the ability to think logically, to understand fairly complex sequences (even following a recipe requires that, and you don't get much more gender-linked tasks), and to empathize about something may require systematizing, the ability to arrange complex information in a way which lets one understand what the situation is and why the person deserves empathy or not.

And the term "hardwired" is almost always used in the absence of any actual evidence of how that would be achieved.

The War on Christmas

We are losing, Atrios points out. Because Bill O'Reilly on Fox News stated that his side is winning the war on Christmas.

If you don't know what that war might be all about, you probably don't live in the Wingnut Land of American conservatives. To quote the quite conservative David Frum:

But the thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion. Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics. Outside this alternative reality, the United States is a country dominated by a strong Christian religiosity. Within it, Christians are a persecuted minority.

Bolds are mine.

The war on Christmas is hard to take seriously. It sounds like something from Terry Pratchett's Diskworld books. What we should take very seriously, however, is this new war on facts.

A Guest Post by Anna: A Literary Canon of Women Writers, Part Thirteen: Last of the Nineteenth 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, Part 7,Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11 and Part 12.

Christina Georgina Rossetti (5 December 1830 – 29 December 1894) was an English poet who wrote a variety of romantic, devotional, and children's poems. She is best known for her long poem "Goblin Market", her love poem "Remember", and for the words of the Christmas carol "In the Bleak Midwinter". Her poem "Love Came Down at Christmas" has also been widely used for a carol. She was deeply religious and often suffered from depression, as well as suffering from Graves Disease for the last decades of her life; she eventually died of breast cancer.

Her most famous collection, Goblin Market and Other Poems, appeared in 1862, when she was 31. It received widespread critical praise, establishing her as the main female poet of the time. Hopkins, Swinburne, and Tennyson praised her work, and with the death of poet Elizabeth Browning in 1861 Rossetti was considered her natural successor.

The title poem is one of Rossetti's best known works. Although it is literally about two sisters' misadventures with goblins, critics have interpreted the piece in a variety of ways: seeing it as an allegory about temptation and salvation; a commentary on Victorian gender roles and female agency; and a work about erotic desire and social redemption. Her works are widely available in English.

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) was an American poet whose work became widely known and critically acclaimed after her death. She spent most of her life as a recluse in her Amherst, Massachusetts home. After her death in 1886 her younger sister Lavinia discovered her poems, and in 1890 Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Louis Todd published a heavily edited collection of her poems. A complete edition was not published until 1955, and an edition arranged in the way she originally arranged her poems was not published until 1981.

There were initially unfavorable reviews and skepticism of her literary prowess during the late 19th and early 20th century, but now Dickinson is considered a major American poet. Dickinson's poems are unique for the era in which she wrote; they contain short lines, typically lack titles, and often use slant rhyme as well as unconventional capitalization and punctuation.

Some scholars have suggested that the numerous letters and poems that were dedicated to Susan Gilbert Dickinson indicate a lesbian romance, but this is difficult to verify as Lavinia and Susan burned some of Emily's letters, as Emily had asked them to. Emily Dickinson's complete poems are available in English in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson and Thomas H. Johnson.


Fatma Aliye Topuz (October 9, 1862 - July 13, 1936), aka simply Fatma Aliye or Fatma Aliye Hanım, was a Turkish novelist, writer, and women's rights activist. Although there is an earlier published novel by the Turkish female author Zafer Hanım in 1877, since that one remained her only novel, Fatma Aliye Hanım with her five novels is credited as the first female novelist in Turkish literature. Her husband was less clever than her and, during the first years of their marriage, did not allow her to read novels written in foreign languages.

Fatma Aliye published her first novel Muhazarat ("Useful Information") in 1892 under her real name, in which she tried to disprove the belief that a woman cannot forget her first love. It was the first novel in the entire Ottoman Empire written by a woman. The book was reprinted in 1908. Her novel Udi ("The Lute Player"), published in 1899, depicts a female oud player, whom Fatma Aliye met in Aleppo. Renowned novelist Resat Nuri Guntekin refers to Udi as one of the most important works, which attracted his interest in literature.

Her other novels are Raf'et (1898), Enin (1910) ("Groaning") and Levaih-i Hayat ("Scenes from Life"). She thematized in her works marriage, harmony between the spouses, love and affection, and the importance of courtship, contrary to arranged marriage.. Further, she created independent and self-reliant heroines, who work and earn own money without the need of a man.

In 1893, her prominence increased after the publication of Ahmet Mithat's book Bir Muharrire-i Osmaniye'nin Neşeti ("Birth of An Ottoman Female Writer") composed of Fatma Aliye's letters. In these letters, she expresses her never-ending enthusiasm to learn. Her essay "Nisvan-ı İslâm" was translated into French under the title "Les femmes muselmannes" and also into Arabic language, and her novel Udi into French. A criticism of her, published in a French newspaper, about a book titled Women of East and West by Frenchman Émile Julliard attracted much attention in Paris. Her work was also exhibited at the library of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, USA and was listed in the catalogue of the Women's Library at the fair.

Beside her literary works, she wrote for thirteen years between 1895 and 1908 columns in the magazine Hanımlara Mahsus Gazete ("Ladies' Own Gazette") about women's rights without giving up her conservative views. Her sister Emine Semiye (1864–1944), one of the first Turkish feminists, was also among the intellectual women as editorial staff of the twice a week issued magazine.

In her 1896 published book Nisvan-ı İslam ("Women of Islam"), Fatma Aliye explained the situation of Muslim women to the western world. As written in her magazine columns, she defended in this book the conservative traditions contrary to the modern characters she created in her novels. Her works are unfortunately not widely available in English.

Note: The entries for the authors included in the literary canon for all of the nineteenth century have been placed in chronological order by the authors' dates of birth here.

A Rant About Whoever Changes MY Computer Stuff

Has this ever happened to you? You start a browser you use all the time or Google a term just as you did yesterday or log into your e-mail and suddenly find yourself in a brand new space? Where everything is now NEW AND IMPROVED and where all the things you had handily at your fingertips and well memorized are now useless?

Twitter just did that. Though the changes are not large, they do manage to bury all the stuff I need. But in other cases I feel almost as if I had been robbed. There I stand, in some imaginary rain, and I haven't got an umbrella! All that learning: gone down the drain. And I'm supposed to be happy about the frequent changes.

I'm beginning to suspect that those who design changes do not take into account the learning curve. Or rather having to crawl up it once again. And again. And again. Learning takes time which is not then available for other things. It's a real cost, and an infuriating one if the changes are not useful to begin with.

Part of my anger comes from not having much choice about those changes. Sometimes the old system will be available for a month or two, but no longer than that. But part of it has to do with how all this clashes with the concept of ownership I have somewhere in my primitive brain.

If I have paid for it, it is mine, right? Imagine buying a couch, using it for a few months, and then waking up one morning to find that someone has changed it to a pair of armchairs while you were asleep. In some gaudy color with horrible tassels along the hems.

Those programs I think I own I really do not own, even when I didn't get them for nothing. All I own is the vague concept of "something to sit on" (to continue with the couch metaphor) and I have no control over its other details unless I discontinue the contract altogether. But all the contracts seem to be the same type, and all the designers seem to be about changing things.

Lest you think I'm a complete stick-in-the-mud, let me hurry to add that changes can be useful and over time they are needed. It's the frequency of the changes which I deplore and the feeling that I have about the costs of learning. I suspect they are completely ignored by whoever it is who keeps changing my computer stuff.

More on the Powerful Catholic Bishops and The War On Women

The Catholic Bishops. The guys who don't want women to have any control over their reproductive destinies. Those guys. Here's what is happening now:

In August, Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, announced new rules that included contraceptives for women in the package of preventive health care services that all insurers must cover without a deductible or co-payment beginning next year.
The policy follows the recommendation of the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine. It will help drive down the rates of unintended pregnancy and abortion by making birth control more accessible.
It was distressing but came as no surprise that the new rules prompted protests from Roman Catholic bishops and other church leaders. What is surprising, and even more distressing, is that the White House is considering caving to their call for an expansive exemption that would cover employees of hospitals, universities, charitable organizations and other entities that are associated with religious organizations but serve the general public and benefit from public money.

It's not the White House who is considering caving in. It's president Obama.

Let's go to that arid-but-firm Logic Land and consider all this there.

It makes no sense. Now, what would make logical sense is for the Bishops to demand that no woman who has put down her religion as Catholic should get free contraceptives, wherever she might happen to work. That would be logical. It might even wake up those women who don't make a fuss in their church about its misogynistic policies and politics.

But that is not what the Bishops demand. They demand that women who work for their organizations should not get free birth control, whatever their religion might say about that. And the reason is that these guys don't believe women should have the right to artificial contraception.

That oversteps their domain, however we might define it. Sure, tell your flocks that women's bodies belong to the church. Don't tell women not in your flocks that their bodies belong to your church.
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Read Frances Kissling on this topic in general.

The Fashion in Shrouds

Margery Allingham's The Fashion in Shrouds was first published in the UK in 1938. I bought it because I had never read it and because I like reading old detective novels as the equivalent of literary fast food. I'm familiar with other Allingham's books, and though she shares the usual class-snobbery of most of the British detective writers of that era I didn't recall her as especially racist or sexist.

This book is sexist, however. It is also racist and classist, but sexism takes by far the starring role here.

The book begins when Allingham's private detective, Albert Campion, visits his sister, Val, who is a famous women's fashion designer, at her place of work. During their initial conversation he states:

"If one resents one's sister or even loathes the sight of her," he remarked presently, "it's for familiar faults or virtues which one either has or hasn't got oneself and one likes the little beast for the same rather personal reasons. I think you're better than I am in one or two ways, but I'm always glad to note that you have sufficient feminine weaknesses to make you thoroughly inferior on the whole. This is a serious, valuable thought, by the way. See what I mean?"

"Yes," she said with an irritating lack of appreciation, "but I don't think it's very new. What feminine weaknesses have I got?"

He beamed at her. In spite of her astonishing success she could always be relied upon to make him feel comfortably superior.

That's the first hint that this book is what idiots call a discourse on gender roles. Remember that the man speaking above is the detective in the book, the one we are going to follow all through it. And, nope, he is not going to get his comeuppance later on.

Instead, it gets worse. Campion is much irritated by the sound of many women speaking simultaneously. A horrible noise. Later in the book he tells his sister:

"Oh." said Mr Campion furiously, "This is damned silly introspective rot. What you need, my girl, is a good cry or a nice rape -- either, I should think."

It could be that we are not supposed to agree with Mr Campion's opinions. But there's also all that stuff about the unfulfilled career women. It culminates with the marriage proposal Val receives from the man she loves, Alan Dell:

"It's not so easy," he said. "Wives are out of fashion. I love you, Val. Will you marry me and give up to me your independence, the enthusiasm which you give your career, your time and your thought? That's my proposition. It's not a very good one, is it?
...
However, that is the offer. In return--and you probably won't like this either--in return, mind you (I consider it an obligation), I should assume full responsibility for you. I would pay your bills to any amount which my income might afford. I would make all decisions which were not directly in your province, although on the other hand I would like to feel that I might discuss everything with you if I wanted to; but only because I wanted to, mind you; not as your right. And until I died you would be the only woman. You would be my care, my mate as in plumber, my possession if you like. If you wanted your own way in everything, you'd have to cheat it out of me, not demand it. Our immediate trouble is serious, but not so serious as this. It means the other half of my life to me, but the whole of yours to you. Will you do it?"

"Yes," said Val so quickly that she startled herself. The word sounded odd in her ears, it carried such ingenuous relief. Authority. The simple nature of her desire for him took her breath away with its very obviousness and in the back of her mind she caught a glimpse of its root. She was a clever woman who would not or could not relinquish her femininity, and femininity unpossessed is femininity unprotected from itself, a weakness and not a charm.

That's $14.75 I will never get back, and the only reason I read the whole book was that I could not believe in the absence of a comeuppance for Mr Campion.

Though I must admit that it's funny how similar this sounds to one of the trolls who sends me crap about how horrible American women are, not wanting to cook and clean for him 24/7 in exchange for a wedding ring.

I'm not going to do a literary analysis of a silly old book like this, though I think it's worth pointing out how very often sexist or misogynist rants are covered under the euphemism of "discussing gender" even when it's only women who are bashed as a class. Even today.

So why am I writing about this at all? Perhaps to point out that finding innocent amusement can be damn hard.

Happy Thanksgiving! (by Suzie)

This is an Hermes scarf depicting the flora and fauna of Texas. I wore it yesterday like a cape so that everyone could feast their eyes on the wild turkey in the middle.

For this post, I copied the image from a site that notes that Texas artist Kermit Oliver designed this 1986 scarf, the first time an American had designed for the high-fashion Paris company. (That's Paris, France, by the way, not Paris, Texas.) As a Texan, I fell in love with the design when I saw it last year. I hunted on eBay until I found one that was less expensive -- it has some marks on it.

Many women diagnosed with cancer get rid of stuff they no longer need. Others do the opposite, shopping as if there were no tomorrow. I've gone through both cycles and am on the downhill side of my thrift-store shopping spree.

I'd like to hear your thoughts on shopping, as the madness of the season begins.

A Good Piece On The 47%

It explains that Republican argument about all those people who are not paying federal income taxes (47% of all tax-payers) at all and how we should immediately make them pay lots and let the rich pay less. It hits all the main points, from noting that federal income taxes are just one of many types of taxes and that most tax-payers do pay taxes in general, then pointing out that it was the Republicans who made the changes which dropped many tax-payers to zero levels and finally making this very important point:

There is no question that the wealthy pay a higher overall tax rate than any other group. That is an American tradition. But there is also no question that their tax rates have fallen more than any other group’s over the last three decades. The only reason they are paying more taxes than in the past is that their pretax incomes have risen so rapidly — which hardly seems a great rationale for a further tax cut.

On Rape of Children and Gender. WILL TRIGGER.

Two recent articles discuss the Sandusky allegations from the point of view of the gender of a rape victim. Daniel Mendelsohn in the New York Times asks:

WHAT if it had been a 10-year-old girl in the Penn State locker room that Friday night in 2002?

The likely answer to that question reveals an ugly truth, one that goes stubbornly undiscussed. Whichever version of Mike McQueary’s story you choose to believe — his grand jury testimony, in which a “distraught” Mr. McQueary, then a graduate assistant to the football team, “left immediately” after witnessing the former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky sodomize a young boy, or the e-mail recently leaked to the press, in which he wrote, “I did stop it, not physically ... but made sure it was stopped when I left that locker room” — the mind recoils at the grotesque failure to intervene more forcefully. How could a grown man have left the scene without taking the child with him? Mr. McQueary wants us to imagine that his brain was racing during those “30 to 45 seconds,” that he “had to make tough impacting quick decisions.” But it seems clear he wasn’t thinking at all — and it’s hard not to wonder why.

I think it was the gender of the victim.

Don Lemon at CNN.com, in a brave and moving article about the sexual abuse he underwent as a child, makes a similar argument (though more focused on the legal definition of rape in Pennsylvania):

So, I imagine it’s difficult for people who haven’t dealt with abuse to confront it, face it, or, for that matter, know what to call it. But if the events at Penn State are to teach us anything, it should be that we can no longer turn away from something so ugly just because we struggle to define it or accept it exists.
So, let’s just call it for what it is: rape.
Rape is what former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky is accused of doing to at least one boy in a university shower. But because the victim is a boy, under Pennsylvania law, Sandusky is charged with deviant sexual behavior. If the victim had been a little girl, in fact, the law would call it rape.

...

But as painful as it is for us, as far removed as we are, no matter how much we may want to put it out of our minds, no matter how much we want to turn away, we cannot and should not. Our inability to view and talk about male and female rape in the same way might have permitted a man to continue his alleged depraved behavior for decades. Rape is rape no matter the gender of the perpetrator or the victim. Pedophilia is wrong no matter the gender of the perpetrator or the victim.

I agree that rape should be called rape, whether the victim is female or male. Indeed, feminists have worked hard to get the definition of forcible rape the FBI uses changed:

The FBI took a step away from the archaic way it defines rape on Tuesday, when an agency panel voted to update the federal definition for the first time since 1929.
Currently, the FBI defines rape as the "carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will."
This definition is narrower than the one used by many police departments around the country, and women's rights advocates say it leads to the under-counting of thousands of sexual assaults each year.
On Tuesday, an FBI panel composed of outside experts from criminal justice agencies and national security agencies voted to broaden the federal government's definition.
The new definition would take out the requirement that the sexual assault be "forcible," remove the restriction that the attack be toward a woman and include non-vaginal/penile rape and rape by a blood relative.
The panel's recommended definition reads: "Penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim."

Emphasis mine. Women's rights activists have been working to get the definition of rape changed so that the victim does not have to be female or the penetration vaginal and with a penis. I wish this work was better known, for obvious reasons.

What about Mendelsohn's question concerning the victim's gender and the answer to that question given in the article:

WHAT if it had been a 10-year-old girl in the Penn State locker room that Friday night in 2002?

...

Does anyone believe that if a burly graduate student had walked in on a 58-year-old man raping a naked little girl in the shower, he would have left without calling the police and without trying to rescue the girl? But the victim in this case was a boy, and so Mr. McQueary left and called his dad (who didn’t seem to think that it was a matter for the police either).

Perhaps Mendelsohn is right. Perhaps he is wrong. I really don't know*.

But the accused man, Jerry Sandusky, was very powerful. Would such power somehow not have had any effect if the alleged victim had been a ten-year-old girl? I doubt that.

I applaud these gentlemen for writing on the topic of rape. It is important to shed as much light on the evil consequences of rape and sexual abuse. If these articles help the survivors of sexual abuse to come forward and seek help when help is needed, they have paid for themselves.

At the same time, I hope that the work feminists have done in the area was better known, that we didn't always slide towards another round of Oppression Olympics and that future articles on the sexual abuse of boys didn't have to end with these sorts of statements:

But true masculinity, like true sportsmanship, contains other virtues, too: forthrightness, honesty, fair play, courage in difficult situations, readiness to acknowledge error, concern for the weak as well as admiration for the strong. In their handling of Mr. Sandusky, the leaders of Penn State’s legendary football program failed to display a single one of these qualities.

Emphasis mine.
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*Mostly because the answer depends on the way he posed the question. There's the problem of how sexual abusers of children choose the place for the abuse. By focusing on events that allegedly happened in men's locker-room, Mendelsohn adds something to the basic question he wants to ask about the treatment of girls and boys as victims of sexual abuse, and that is the presence of a girl in an all-male space.

But those who sexually abuse young girls will not do so in an all-male environment such as showers for men, because they are more likely to be caught. Both boys and girls are more likely to be abused in a setting where the abuse can be masked as something more innocent.

Ideally, Mendelsohn should have asked whether people are more likely to acknowledge the rape of a ten-year-old girl than a ten-year-old boy. The environment in which those are most likely to happen are not necessarily the same.

In some countries ten-year-old girls can be legally married off. This suggests that getting answers to such a question on worldwide level might be tricky.

Pertinent Comments About The Thanksgiving Meal

Thanksgiving is an American (and Canadian) holiday. The American version takes place this Thursday. Here's a funny cartoon (courtesy of noblejoanie) for those of you who celebrated this holiday as children.

Holidays are never the same if you did not celebrate them as children, because so much of the anticipation and the emotions of it all depend on those memories being re-awakened. This means that I always stand outside the Thanksgiving holiday, even when I participate in it.

But be not sad for me! This means that I don't have to eat pumpkin pie! I hate pumpkin pie. Pumpkin is a vegetable, like a turnip, and should not masquerade as a delectable dessert. That, my sweet and erudite friends, is cruelty! So is not letting me just eat the crust.

Now yell at me.

The Occupy Movement And Women

This is an interesting take on why there are more men than women in the various Occupy protests:

Women may be the 51%, but the Occupy camps and General Assemblies look as gender-imbalanced as Congress

...

Thus far I've visited eight Occupations in the U.S. and Canada, four on the West coast and four on the East: Toronto, New York City, Baltimore, DC, Los Angeles, San Francisco, the University of California at Berkeley and Oakland.
The only GA that had anywhere near gender parity was the largest one there's been yet -- the GA on the day of the general strike at U.C. Berkeley. The largest GAs will only turn out 500 people max; Zuccotti Park is a tiny granite slab in lower Manhattan and can't fit many more than that. But the Mario Savio Steps at Sproul Hall at Berkeley held more than 4,000 students and activists -- and half of them appeared to be female. (Go Bears!)

...

But when it comes to women, Occupy is really a microcosm of the greater culture at large. This should give comfort to those who find Occupy's dynamics puzzling -- and greatly embarrass those in the movement who see themselves as revolutionaries. America's gender conflict fault-lines are making a familiar reappearance inside Occupy, with results both predictable and novel.
I'm not the only one to notice the Occupy gender gap. This issue is talked about at GAs, I'm told, a lot. Nearly every night at Occupy LA, the question comes up: "What can we do to get more women out here?"

That initial comparison to the US Congress may be misleading in this particular case. The reasons why so few women end up in the Congress have much to do with American still-sexist beliefs about who should wield power and with the two-party-winner-takes-all system. But a female member of the House or the Senate does not face a greater risk of rape or sexual harassment by just being there. A female member of the Occupy movement very well may.

I think of it this way: Every person thinking about joining an Occupy-protest somewhere must weigh the pros and cons of that decision, and those cons are a longer list for a woman, especially if she is going alone.

This is because the protests are open, take place in public areas with large crowds milling about and the presence of the police is not necessarily a sign of greater security. Indeed the article I link to suggests (though does not prove) that women may have a higher probability of getting arrested than men. Even if that is not the case, women must think of not only the same risks men take but also the additional risks of sexual assault or sexual harassment.

Given all this, one would expect fewer women than men in those protests even if the same percentage of both genders supports the movement.
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Added later: It's hard to get exact numbers on the gender breakdown and it might be the case that the author of the linked piece got the numbers wrong. That initial reference to the US Congress would give us a much lower percentage of female participants in the protests than is the case. Whether the General Assemblies look like the US Congress I cannot say.

Today's Instructive Video

Michelle Bachmann filling the water glasses before the Republican presidential debate

Capital Gains Taxes: The Worst Thing In The World.

That's what we are often told. If only those poor capital gains were not taxed so harshly (!), all investors would let their money flock here! The "job-creators" (shorthand for very very rich people) suffer because of that fifteen percent tax on long-term capital gains! It's an economic imperative to stop taxing capital gains!

So say several Republican presidential candidates, including Herman Cain and Rick Perry:

Two Republican presidential candidates, Herman Cain and Rick Perry, have proposed tax reform proposals to stimulate the economy and spur job growth. Both proposals share many desirable attributes, such as simplifying the complex tax code, lowering the corporate tax rate to become globally competitive again, eliminating the death tax and capital gains tax to increase capital mobility, eliminating taxes on repatriated foreign earnings of U.S. multinational companies so they make investments at home, and maintaining revenue neutrality so the tax cuts will not add to the federal budget deficits.

Bolds are mine, the biased writing is by the link I quote.

Huntsman would also eliminate capital gains taxes for all, Romney only for middle class tax-payers. Obama would eliminate this tax for "small businesses."

Why am I writing about something so boring? Because of this:

The top 0.1%–  about 315,000 individuals out of 315 million–  are making about half of all capital gains on the sale of shares or property after 1 year; and these capital gains make up 60% of the income made by the Forbes 400.

Assuming these numbers are true, what would be the impact of zero capital gains taxes on economic inequality in the United States? The richest of the very rich would pay zero taxes on 60% of their income!

It's like looking at the hairy underbelly of the Republican ideology, it is. Those Republican presidential candidates are openly asking the extremely rich to be released from income taxes, and the Republican commentators think that is an excellent idea.

Woman the Shopper. Man the Scientist. A Funny Sci-Fi Story

You can read it in the Nature magazine. It is about two extremely intelligent science guys sent out to buy girls' knickers/panties by the wife of one of them, and how these extremely intelligent gentlemen could not find those knickers anywhere, even though their wives easily could. Which means that the knickers are brought in from a parallel universes only women can access. But at least men can do abstract science!

The flavor of the story:

At this point I must digress, and mention, for those who are not aware, the profound differences in strategy between Men Going Shopping and Women Going Shopping. In any general shopping situation, men hunt: that is, they go into a complex environment with a few clear objectives, achieve those, and leave. Women, on the other hand, gather: such that any mission to buy just bread and milk could turn into an extended foraging expedition that also snares a to-die-for pair of discounted shoes; a useful new mop; three sorts of new cook-in sauces; and possibly a selection of frozen fish.
And the interesting thing is — and this is what sparked the discovery — that any male would be very hard pressed to say where she got some of these things, even if he accompanied her.

Verrry good! I like those clear objectives Men The Hunters have, how they enter a complex environment, catch their animal and return home. Now contrast this to the next part of the story:

So there we were, looking for knickers, and a rather wary woman asked if she could help, given that we looked lost and hopeless. Russell explained to her exactly what we were looking for, and her wariness seemed to become mild alarm, until we hastened to reassure her that this was in fact a commission for the mother of said child. She then said, with what seemed to be great satisfaction, “Oh, no; you'll never find those in here — you'll have to go down to [some remote location],” which we had no chance of achieving before they closed, so the whole mission was now a failure.

Mmm. Yes, I know all this falls under the Humorous Stories About Blundering Men. But really, where were those clear objectives and simple strategies?

Others have written about the hidden message in this story to women who would be scientists, so it might be more useful if I wrote about the role practice has here.

Like in practicing by finding where certain items are sold. That practice usually comes from having to do that shopping, over and over and over again. After a while one miraculously learns (from a parallel universe, most likely) that girls' knickers are not available at the fish counter of the local supermarket! Or that the local pharmacy/chemist does not sell snow tires for your car.

And after you learn about those snow tires, you might, while waiting for your car to be shod with them, also pick up some new windshield/windscreen wipers and this neat little snow-scraping appliance which also defrosts the keyholes of the car and serves as an extra flashlight/torch! All that comes from a parallel universe which you can only access through repeated practice and by being on the lookout for certain products.

I astonish myself! I am ruining a perfectly good funny-sci-fi story by pointing out that it's not really that funny if you are not like that smart science guy whose practice in shopping for children's clothing consists of mostly making evo-psycho explanations for why women seem innately better at it.

But it's worth ruining because of the real parallel universe lurking behind this story. In that universe, men are such blundering fools when it comes to shopping or finding their socks that it is really very cute! Besides, no man need ever get any better at those skills because they are innate blunderings, though nicely balanced out by men's scientific superiority.

Katha Pollitt on The Sandusky Case

She writes:

And that brings us to the patriarchal aspect of the Penn State scandal. I know it’s predictable and boring, but come on, people! There really is a message here about masculine privilege: the deification of a powerful old man who can do no wrong, an all-male hierarchy protecting itself (hello, pedophile priests), a culture of entitlement and a truly astonishing lack of concern about sexual violence. This last is old news, unfortunately: sexual assaults by athletes are regularly covered up or lightly punished by administrations, even in high school, and society really doesn’t care all that much. A federal appeals court declared that a Texas cheerleader could be kicked off the squad (and made to contribute to the school’s legal costs) for refusing to cheer her rapist when he took the field—and he’d pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault too, so why was he even still playing? According to USA Today, an athlete accused of a sex crime has a very good chance of getting away with it. If Sandusky had abused little girls, let alone teenage or adult women, would he be in trouble today? Or would we say, like the neighbors of an 11-year-old gang-raped in Cleveland, Texas, that she was asking for it?

And she is quite right. The eleven-year-old in Cleveland, Texas, had her case initially written up in the New York Times as victim-blaming. She wore make-up, she dressed like an adult woman, she went out with the rapists. And where was her mother in all this? That the Times later wrote about the case from a different angle was because of all the criticism the initial write-up provoked.

Even more generally, victim-blaming has been almost totally absent in the Catholic Church cases. This is as it should be, of course. But the same should be applied to female children who have been raped or sexually abused and to their parents.

Today's Pepper-Spray Picture

The deed courtesy of the UC Davis campus police.

I haven't written much on the Occupy movement because others do it well and because I don't have anything to add to the general debate. Still, I see the movement as an attempt at democracy when democracy is no longer truly functioning in this country (or quite a few other countries).

Money and power have married each other, and the rest of us are offered only slates of candidates which money and power have pre-picked. Is it even possible to get elected to the US Congress if you don't belong to the very top of the one percent? And by the time you have fund-raised enough for your election campaign, whom do you owe your allegiance?

Blogging While Female

Sadie Doyle writes about Internet misogyny, a topic I also wrote about a while ago.

The topic Sadie covers is not for laughs but this is hilarious:

Last October, cartoonist Gabby Schulz published a comic about Internet sexism. Titled, in part, “How Every Single Discussion About Sexism And Woman-Type Stuff On The Internet Has Ever Happened,” it detailed a familiar cycle: Man says sexist thing, woman responds, men shout at woman, etc.
Within 24 hours, “men’s rights” blog The Spearhead fulfilled Schultz’s prophecy. Their post, titled “Feminist Cartoonist Bemoans Online Resistance, Claims She is Enslaved by Patriarchy When Men Disagree With Her,” sniffed that Schultz’s cartoon “supposedly depicts what happened when she called some guy sexist.” Predictably sexist comments followed: “I bet ole Gabby is soaking wet with all the attention shes getting tonight,” one Spearhead commenter opined. ”Shut the fuck up you stupid cunt,” wrote another. Yet another wrote, “I am not being sexist when I say I do think your point of view is lesbic: you seem to despise all men.” Schulz reports receiving death threats.
So far, so predictable. Except for one tiny detail: Gabby Schulz is a guy. His biography — easily accessible from the offending post — shows him with a full beard, and uses the pronoun “him.” The comic was based on a controversy surrounding cartoonist Kate Beaton. But many harassers had no inclination to fact-check: If someone named “Gabby” didn’t like sexism, that someone had to be a self-pitying girl.

Speaking of hilarious trolling, I get a big laugh from those trolls who tell me I obviously cannot think at all or who correct me in the field of my doctorate because they took an intro course once, and me being but a feeble-minded foaming c***t must be corrected. It really is funny.

Asshattery is not gender-linked, as such, but the patronizing and loud teachery tone without any actual listening is an odd perk we female bloggers get.

Here Under the Northern Star. A Musical Interlude.

This is a Finnish song which is supposed to be quite hard to sing. I think its sole aim in life is to present as many Finnish h-sounds as possible. But I have a soft spot for the sadness of it all.

A rough translation:

1.

Here under the Northern Star
on the highest of hills
I look far into distance
you return to my dreams.

Here under the Northern Star
the sky fills with purple
it makes me a blanket
to shelter me.

2.

And under the Northern Star
I come
I leave
and only in the sight of the Northern Star
I shed a tear for you.

3.

Here under the Northern Star
a singer is full of sorrows
here the moon gibbous
is also melancholic

Here under the Northern Star
frost slides into the soul
and by killing all feeling
it rips the heart apart.

Repeat of 2.
Repeat of 1.
Repeat of 2.
Repeat of 2.

Sniff.

Comfort the Afflicted And Afflict the Comfortable. The Media and the Sandusky Case.

The quote, attributed to Peter Dunne, is one way of defining the moral task of the press. That this task has been slowly drowning in the she-said-he-said-and-some-people-say ocean of pretend-neutrality has made me very sad and angry.

Hence my pleasure in finding that at least some in the press are doing their jobs on the Sandusky child abuse allegations. Otherwise I would not have learned of the conflict-of-interest problems of Leslie Dutchcot, the judge who granted Sandusky bail:

The judge who freed Jerry Sandusky on bail that was lower than prosecutors requested -- and said he didn't require an ankle monitor -- has not only volunteered for Sandusky's Second Mile charity but also reportedly benefited from a fundraiser organized by a Second Mile official.

Now she has been replaced as the judge in the Sandusky hearings by an out-of-county judge. The reason? This:

“Due to the unique circumstances surrounding this case, it was essential that every precaution be taken to ensure all legal proceedings occur without the appearance of bias on the part of the judicial system,” said Vereb.
“With this particular case, it would have been extremely difficult to find a judge without some connection to Penn State, The Second Mile or any alleged victims. Assigning the case to an out-of-county judge takes away any hint of bias or conflict of interest.”

Probably. But that quote reminds us that the comfortable lunch with the comfortable, fund-raise with the comfortable and in general move within a tight circle consisting of other quite-comfortable-thank-you folks. And this is the reason why the press cannot live inside that same circle.

The most recent installment of the Sandusky allegations has to do with the mysterious disappearing files at Second Mile, the charity which Sandusky appears to have used for grooming boys:

According to unnamed Times' sources, investigators served subpoenas on the Second Mile to learn the names of every child who dealt with the foundation. Members of the charity's board of directors learned recently that records from 2000 to 2003 were missing.
The charity has since located the records from one of those years, the newspaper reported, but the rest remain gone.
"It could be that they are just lost, but under the circumstances it is suspicious," a law enforcement official involved in the case told the Times.

I hope those files turn up. But whether they do or not, it is important to learn that they are currently missing.

It may be worth pointing out that the way I read "comfortable" and "afflicted" in that quotation is not necessarily based on material wealth but on societal power. Those who think that laws apply to only little people, those who buy their way out of problems which would send others to prison, those are the comfortable. If the press does not afflict them, who will?

Why Must We Do This? On How Male and Female Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse Might Differ. May Trigger.

An article discussing male survivors of childhood sexual abuse covers much useful material and many opinions. Its relevance is obvious in view of the Sandunsky case.

But read this section of the piece:

Different experience for boys 


Sexual abuse has a different impact on boys than on girls, and they deal with it differently because of socialization, experts say.
“Men aren’t supposed to be victims. Men are supposed to be strong,” said Jim Hopper, clinical instructor of psychology at Harvard Medical School. “A man says I’m not a real man, because I let someone do this to me. I should have been tougher. Even after years of therapy they say this.”
Girls who are abused by men are psychologically damaged, to be sure, experts say, but boys abused by men often come to question their sexual identity and orientation.
“If they were sexually abused by a man, there’s this whole stigma — does that mean I’m gay, or did he do it to me because I look gay?” says Hopper.
Another difference: Boys who are forced into sexual acts may have an erection — a physiological response which makes them all the more confused and ashamed of the encounter, Gartner says.

I am not an expert in this field, but is it not the case that female victims of rape or other sexual abuse can feel sexual arousal and even orgasm? I'm pretty sure that I have read about that and the way it can cause feelings of shame and confusion.

If that's the case, the last difference mentioned is not an actual difference.

What about the second-but-last difference? The article compares two different types of abuse. In one type, adult men abuse young girls. In the other type, adult men abuse young boys. That male victims of the latter type of abuse are more likely to question their sexual identity and orientation may not be because they are boys. It may be because their abuser was of the same sex.

To properly compare boys and girls here the abusers should all be of the same gender as the victims or all of a different gender than the victims.

Finally, the first difference mentioned in the article: How boys are not expected to be victims. When you turn that around you get to the conclusion that girls ARE expected to be victims. I understand what the expert means here and I agree that this is a problem in getting the survivors to come forward when they need help.

At the same time, that's the part where I asked myself why we must do this? Why can't all victims of sexual abuse be taken equally seriously? Why must an article tell us how it might be harder if you are not viewed as born weak and a potential victim anyway? There are better ways of framing the important information about the difficulties men may face when seeking help.

A Fascinating Interview

With the 84-year-old Seattle activist, Dorli Rainey, who got pepper-sprayed by the Seattle police. I like the idea of taking just one step out of one's comfort zone when it comes to activism.

What Is Pat Buchanan Good For?

Atrios gives him the World's Worst Person badge today, because of Pat's clever statements about the obvious link between same-sex marriage and the Sandunsky child abuse case.





I have written about Pat's views on us wimmin in the past. But Pat is an equal-opportunity-bigot, pretty much.

Hence the question in the title of this post. Why is a man like that always invited to political debates on television?

Here's my guess for the answer: The American mainstream media views acceptable political opinions along a half-line. It has an absolute starting point, the most extreme lefty opinions allowed on television, and those tend to be pretty milquetoast ones. No fire-breathing lefties on American television, never.

Indeed, this left end-point used to consist of what I call courteous conservatives. It has been pushed back a bit, but not by much.

The other end point, however, is always the most foaming-at-the-mouth wingnut bigot you can possibly unearth, always! That's why I call the system not a line but a half-line (probably not the real name for something like that), because the right end-point can be moved further and further out, so that it always allows for the extremest of the extremists!

I don't mind having Buchanan on television, not at all. What I DO mind is that we are not allowed to have his lefty equivalent on television.

This imbalance works out equally strongly when it comes to feminism, by the way. The anti-feminists always get invited to the shows, the so-called feminist side might consist of only the interviewing journalists who try to take a middle-of-the-road or he-says-she-says-but-some-people-believe stance.

All US mainstream debates are biased by the way the extreme opinions are picked, and the bias works in favor of the conservative and anti-feminist views.

Very Proud of Myself

I spent five hours yesterday driving in Boston. To explain why that makes me feel proud and a bigger-than-normal goddess may not be possible for those of you who have never driven in Boston. It is an experience.

I don't think there was a single casualty! No cars were harmed during the day! And I only collapsed after I got back to the Snakepit Inc.

P.S. I tried to find a video of Boston drivers but none on the YouTube can compete with reality.

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.