Honorary Sons. It Pays.

I was sent a link to this UK rant about women. It's by one of the women whom I call honorary sons in this post.

They annoy me, for obvious reasons. Well, if they are not obvious ones, the major reason is that a woman cannot condemn the whole of her own sex without condemning herself but somehow that doesn't seem to occur to the honorary sons.

The second one is that these women are doing what they do as substitute misogynists, for men who would get told off for hating on women. Women, however, can hate on women in public. This is because the common error in thinking that women can't be misogynists even if the society tells us that misogyny is quite all right, just a way to blow off steam and to crack jokes.

The third one has to do with the fact that the misogyny of women appears more fact-based than the misogyny of men. After all, they are women so they should know!

But by far the strongest reason why the honorary sons annoy me is that they have chosen the low-cost well-paying option in the war against women! They have almost nothing to lose and much to gain!

They get paid well for their nasty opinions on women, whereas feminists mostly do not. Women, on the whole (despite that audience reaction in the video) don't bombard the honorary sons with death threats for their perfidy, whereas feminists do get death threats and Internet harassment from misogynists of all stripes. It's safe to attack women!

And as I mentioned, the money looks good from this side of the aisle. Each and every topic about women gives one honorary son (at least) a job spouting out there. For some odd reason the almost-invisible feminists must be balanced by a large number of honorary sons in public debates. The debate on women's perfidy is of a completely different type from the debates we have on ethnicity or race, by the way.

Then there's the whole logical inconsistency in the sermons of the honorary sons: If women shouldn't be in the public sector at all, what are they doing there? Who gave them that special dispensation from their flawed genitals? Who raised them up there with the Real Sons? Why should we listen to them when women are not worth listening to?

Finally, they will get to share every benefit feminists have fought to get them, including the right to be on television foaming about the horrible ickiness of their own gender, while never ceasing to fight against those advances.

This is why their occupational choice is such a low-cost high-yield alternative. And so unethical, especially if the honorary son is not a real misogynist but just plays one on television. If she is a real misogynist then I pity her for what must be going on inside her brain.

But in either case, all the honorary sons should voluntarily relinquish everything that feminism has won for them. They should not vote, they should not have well-paid jobs and they should not speak in public. Then they would annoy me less.

Defiant Hair! On Michelle Duggar's Tips For All Subjugated Wives.

Did you know that women can have defiant hair* or obedient hair? Some types of hair just scream feminism and uprisings and rebellions against the godly husband's rule and must be avoided at all cost in Christian fundamentalist patriarchal marriages, such as the one the television stars Duggars have. They also have nineteen children and counting, as the program tells us.

Michelle Duggar has come out with a set of wifely tips for a happy marriage. They are wonderful and equally applicable to living (for a short time) with a hungry tiger or as an indentured servant to a real narcissistic knuckle-head. You can find the original handout at the bottom of this post.

The tips are what one might expect. A wife will destroy her husband's manliness by breathing too loudly because Christian fundamentalist manliness is more fragile than an eggshell.

Maintaining that egg requires that the wife not work outside the home, that she accepts his leadership in all things, that she never argues back, that she never refuses his physical advances and that she doesn't have defiant hair.

I can't get over that defiant hair. I bet I have terrorist hair.
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*Braids decorated with the husband's knuckle bones? Medea-like tentacles reaching out to his throat?

The Two Faces of Rick Santorum

Rick Santorum has the most open mind of the late twelfth century. He disapproves of education outside the home because wives are to do that. He disapproves of women working outside the home and he disapproves of contraception because it allows wives to work outside the home. He believes that global climate change is a hoax.

You have all learned that. But what you may not be equally aware of are Rick's Attila-the-Hun values when it comes to Real Politics, not just stomping on women. In that arena anything goes according to our Ricky! Want to exploit the poor? Go ahead! Want to hand over all power to multinational corporations? Great idea!

But want to regulate markets? NEVAH! Rich people should pay more taxes? OVAH Rick's dead corpse! And so on and so on.

Isn't that astonishing? The Bible is pretty explicit on the perfidy of those who would oppress others in the marketplace. But Rick reads his Bible most selectively. It's almost as if it was a book about the taming of the shrew.

Marriage in Trouble. Pay Attention To The Framing.

A few days ago the New York Times published an article on the demise of marriage. It was to be expected, given Charles Murray's recent book, never mind that Murray is the go-to-guy on the inherent stupidity of the minorities, women and now all poor people.

The NYT article uses Murray's framing albeit in a nicer dress and with a better makeup. This is how it begins:

It used to be called illegitimacy. Now it is the new normal. After steadily rising for five decades, the share of children born to unmarried women has crossed a threshold: more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage.
Once largely limited to poor women and minorities, motherhood without marriage has settled deeply into middle America. The fastest growth in the last two decades has occurred among white women in their 20s who have some college education but no four-year degree, according to Child Trends, a Washington research group that analyzed government data.
Among mothers of all ages, a majority — 59 percent in 2009 — are married when they have children. But the surge of births outside marriage among younger women — nearly two-thirds of children in the United States are born to mothers under 30 — is both a symbol of the transforming family and a hint of coming generational change.
One group still largely resists the trend: college graduates, who overwhelmingly marry before having children. That is turning family structure into a new class divide, with the economic and social rewards of marriage increasingly reserved for people with the most education.

Careful reading pays here. The title of the piece is "For Women Under 30, Most Births Occur Outside Marriage." What have we altogether eradicated?

Men and fatherhood. Poof! It's gone! And every person interviewed in the piece is a woman. To write about heterosexual marriage without interviewing one single man should come across as weird. That's leaving out half the people all this should concern.

Once men are left out this way we cannot ask what they think of the issue. They have been erased. They have no say in the question of marriage and their behavior has nothing to do with the rate at which people get married, stay married or have children outside marriage.

I understand that the piece is explicitly written about women. But one should not leap from women to marriage and that is what the piece does. It also implies that the reasons for the increase in births outside marriage are only women's reasons and that ultimately the "blame" for the apparent demise of marriage also belongs to women.

Writing about "marriage in trouble" is not something I can do in a short blog post. What do we mean by "marriage?" What are the expected roles of the partners? When someone writes about "marriage" does that person really mean a traditional patriarchal hierarchical marriage with a male breadwinner-boss and a female helpmeet at home? If "marriage" is the best environment for children to grow up in, what kind of "marriage?" An unhappy one? The traditional arrangement? An egalitarian marriage?

If the partners live together for decades and have children together without getting formally married, is this not marriage in the relevant sense? After all, the article states:

Almost all of the rise in nonmarital births has occurred among couples living together. While in some countries such relationships endure at rates that resemble marriages, in the United States they are more than twice as likely to dissolve than marriages. In a summary of research, Pamela Smock and Fiona Rose Greenland, both of the University of Michigan, reported that two-thirds of couples living together split up by the time their child turned 10.

Would formal marriage stop those couples from separating? In other words, in what direction does the causality run in the United States?

Such difficulties crop up when we try to analyze the reasons why the contractual arrangement "marriage" might be in trouble. What is it that makes it less common than in the past? The article hints at the idea that women in the past "had to" get married because of few alternatives to surviving without it. Is this what we should bring back? What is the role of men in "marriage?" Just a source of income? The manager of the whole enterprise? An active participant in child-rearing?

As I said, all this requires many more pages than a blog allows. But certain hints can be dug out from that NYT piece:

Among mothers of all ages, a majority — 59 percent in 2009 — are married when they have children. But the surge of births outside marriage among younger women — nearly two-thirds of children in the United States are born to mothers under 30 — is both a symbol of the transforming family and a hint of coming generational change.
One group still largely resists the trend: college graduates, who overwhelmingly marry before having children. That is turning family structure into a new class divide, with the economic and social rewards of marriage increasingly reserved for people with the most education.
“Marriage has become a luxury good,” said Frank Furstenberg, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania.

...

Money helps explain why well-educated Americans still marry at high rates: they can offer each other more financial support, and hire others to do chores that prompt conflict. But some researchers argue that educated men have also been quicker than their blue-collar peers to give women equal authority. “They are more willing to play the partner role,” said Sara McLanahan, a Princeton sociologist.

Yes, money does help. It protects people against external shocks and greases the wheels of life. I once read that the top two reasons given for divorce are arguments about money and arguments about the division of household chores, both of which make me think about the patriarchal marriage arrangement and so on.

But if money was the only difference between marriage rates and the prevalence of unhappy marriages across social classes, then wouldn't we expect to see single parenthood higher among the more educated people? This is the group which can more easily afford to have a child without a partner, the group which can afford to hire help if needed, the group which can afford high child maintenance payments.

Something else must be going on.

McLanahan's theory might be worth pursuing. My own guess is that it is the traditional patriarchal marriage which is in particular trouble when combined with reduced real incomes for men, after years of outsourcing of jobs and the increased income inequality in this country.

In my more optimistic moments I regard this era as the transition to a new more egalitarian marriage/cohabitation and the troubles we see as the pains of that transition, the myths of patriarchal marriage hanging on even after they have become obsolete.

But people like Charles Murray of course wish to revive the patriarchal marriage by telling us about the horrors which will occur without it. Hence the need to pay attention to those who use his framing.

Virginia Is For Leavers. Or On Political Activity.

That "Virginia Is For Leavers" is a quip on the old tourist slogan about "Virginia Is For Lovers" and also because I'm too much of a coward to write "Virginia Is For Rapists." So.

But the whole "forced vaginal ultrasound probe for all sluts who seek abortion" debacle has not only turned over that rock under which these kinds of creepy-crawlies wriggle:

The clumsy way in which conservatives have attempted to defend the legislation hasn’t helped. Economics professor Tyler Cowen’s tweet (“All of a sudden requiring consumers to be informed is extremely unpopular on ‘the pro-regulation side.’”) generated richly deserved outrage. And tea party favorite Dana Loesch took the position that once a women loses her virginity, she gives up the right to determine what should penetrate her vagina for the rest of her life.

It has also increased the awareness of the fact that We Are At War and that war is against women. My unscientific forays into the real world suggest that even apolitical people are getting angry at the Talibanish basic drives of the Republican Party. The linked article notes that 55% of Virginians are opposed to the vaginal penetration probe thingy.

Elizabeth Cotten

From Wikipedia:

A self-taught left-handed guitarist, Cotten developed her own original style. Her approach involved using a right-handed guitar (usually in standard tuning), not re-strung for left-handed playing, essentially, holding a right-handed guitar upside down. This position required her to play the bass lines with her fingers and the melody with her thumb. Her signature alternating bass style has become known as "Cotten picking".

Chicks Can't Play. On the Stereotype Threat in Popular Music.

The background to this post: I have read evo-psychos telling us that the reason most rock, blues and pop musicians are men is because evolution made men compete with each other for female attention, whereas women needed never to compete at all! Never, in all evolution!

This is supposed to be the reason why women don't have much interest in becoming musicians. The world, naturally, doesn't set any extra obstacles in the way of women who want to play the guitar professionally! Of course not. It's the inherited stone-age memes in our brains which make female guitarists, say, rarer than hen's teeth.

Well, not quite. But pretty rare. To highlight those societal differences, let me take you on a tour of YouTube videos of women playing contemporary music. Here's Orianthi:





The second comment when I accessed the song:

she is not that good, she plays equal to an average male guitarist. she is famous because she has boobs. jennifer batten rocks that bitch.

Though most recent comments on that piece are positive, it's hard for me to think of a situation where we would say something similar about a man by comparing his skills to the skills of an average woman.

To continue, here's a video of Ana Popovic playing the guitar. Her outfit is not what a male guitarist would wear and it might matter, given the comments she receives:





Some comments from the first few pages, picked to demonstrate my point:

very bad and boring , no groove, no dynamik but good legs, she should play in bikini, lol
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So boring...Women and blues guitar...
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this chick is just for looks no real show no real talent and CHICKS CANT PLAY!
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playing guitar its not a job for the girls specially with big boobs and busty ass...fucking shit....this lady is destroying the flavor of playing guitar.

what n accident...(:
but shes not bad.... for a womn"
----

I grant you that YouTube comments are the proverbial slime pond. Whatever crawls there is not sightly. Still, the frequency of these kinds of comments attached to videos of women in music or in sports tells me that their sentiments are not completely unshared in the wider world.

Those evo-psycho theories pretend that none of this ever happens, that women aren't perhaps told to show some leg or some tit to be acceptable to those parts of the audience who would otherwise refuse to pay attention to a female musician.

Likewise, if a young musician gets torpedoed with these kinds of assessments of her talents, it will require greater determination to continue than if the assessments acknowledge the fact that she is still young and developing.

For note that the criticisms are really saying that nobody born female can ever learn to play really well. No amount of practice helps! So pack it in already. Note also that a young girl watching those videos would get a very negative message about her own talents.

What I'm talking here is naturally the stereotype threat. If women get told, often enough, that "women" just can't do some particular thing then after a while that little whine has been installed inside your head and gets turned on whenever you do attempt a particular task. The evo-psycho argument ignores this altogether, just as it ignores the much more concrete barriers women in the past had to contend with.

But I think all this is slowly changing. I hope so, at least. This video of Tal Wilkenfeld playing Table for One didn't net me any nasty comments for the first few pages:

Back to the 1950s? But the Republican Party Never Left It.

You must have heard about Foster Freiss now. He's one of the Rich Boyz bankrolling Santorum in the presidential race. He's also firmly stuck in the 1950s locker-room mentality, making this statement concerning the recent contraceptive battle in the war against us wimminfolk:

“This contraception thing, my gosh, it's so inexpensive,” Freiss told host Andrea Mitchell. “You know, back in my days, they'd use Bayer aspirin for contraceptives. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn't that costly.”

My translation:
Don't spread your legs if you don't want to get pregnant, gals, and stop whining. Who cares about these trivial issues anyway.

This man lives in a bubble stinking of expensive after-shave.

Add the above to the now-famous Issa contraception hearings where 80% of those allowed to participate were men and 100% were opposed to insurance coverage for contraceptives, and then these musings on how even the conservative women fail to satisfy the stuffy gender expectations of the conservatives (choose between "frumpy" and "a two-bit whore"), and in a sane universe the Republican Party might get worried about its appeal among women.

But we don't live in a sane universe.

What does and does not heal (by Suzie)

I still remember the cold tile against my face, as I lay crying on the restroom floor. I had gone there to cry hard, force all the tears out, so that I could return to my desk and write about the killing of Todd Smith.

In November 1989, Todd and I sat next to each other at the Tampa Tribune. I had gone to Europe with my boyfriend, while Todd took a different vacation. Because he wanted to be a foreign correspondent, he went at his own expense to Peru to report on drug trafficking and terrorists.

I returned to work to find Todd missing. We learned that he had been tortured and garroted, his body left in the sun with a sign to warn U.S. agents. He wasn’t one. He just looked the part, and he asked questions. He was a tall, athletic 28-year-old blond, an Aryan poster child, as I used to joke, who must have stood out in Uchiza in the Upper Huallaga Valley.

The new boss didn’t seem to think much of me, and I got a lesser assignment, on the Shining Path, as I recall. I went to cry in the restroom by the back shop, where his story would glide out in long strips of paper to be hot-waxed onto 1A. Few women worked in the back shop, making the nearby women’s restroom a good place for privacy.

I had to cover cops that Thanksgiving week, and I was sent to the public hospital to find a family whose child was injured or dying. They angrily told me to get out of the waiting room. I wanted to fall into their arms, tell them that I was grieving, too.

I’ve come to despise the myth of objectivity in journalism – the idea that reporters and editors can lay aside feelings, beliefs and experiences. We can return to our desks, we can do our job, but we can’t stop being who we are.

This all came back to me at a concert Tuesday night, when Sam Baker performed “Broken Fingers.” He explained to the man who requested the song that it was his job to play it. His job to perform, perhaps. His job to remember, definitely.

He almost died in 1986, when the Shining Path blew up a tourist train in Cuzco. Among others, the explosion killed the German couple across from him, and their son at his side. Shrapnel severed Baker's left femoral artery. He had cranial bleeding, gangrene and renal failure. He lost his hearing in one ear, and most in the other. His left hand was mangled. He got brain damage and tinnitus, and he's undergone many surgeries.

Forget his eyes, his silhouette?
Of course I don't, of course I don't forget
There are blue eyes, a silhouette
There is a debt, it's a debt I don't forget

These broken fingers, some things don't heal
I can't wake up from a dream, when the dream is real

In the video, watch how he talks while preparing to play in a workmanlike way, as if people were killed every day, as if they were killed every day.

Smart and ambitious, Todd was a Southern gentleman, but not a good ol' boy. He had a dry wit, and his desire to do good had not been dulled by covering county government. He had begun a secret romance with a county commissioner's daughter, and we mused on the nature of love. We had favorite poems by W.H. Auden; mine was “Musee des Beaux Arts.”

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along

That was before my own suffering from sarcoma and my messed-up body. Baker's experience is worse than mine, so far. Still, I know what it's like to survive while others die.

I went to the concert to hear the wonderful Audrey Auld. I knew nothing about Baker, but I got to the place early, while people were still milling about. He's friendly and cheerful, with intense eyes. When my eyes met his, I couldn't turn away. It was as if we shared some secret, some secret I didn't yet know.

I know what he means when he calls this a pretty world. In exhaustion, I have lain on park benches, on the sidewalk, in the hospital, watching the world. Blue skies and storms have filled me with joy. And I understand the work of it all, how you have to make your way to your only window, dragging a web of IV tubing, to pull up the blinds.

Those Who Oppose Insurance Coverage For Contraception

Look like the people in the front rows of this picture:

The picture is from the Issa hearings:

This morning, the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is holding a hearing on President Obama's policy ensuring that all women can get contraceptive coverage without a copay.
The hearing will feature 10 witnesses--eight of whom are men; none of them is testifying in support of contraceptive coverage.

Ah! But the hearings are not about women's reproductive rights. They are about the curmudgeony religious guys' (and gals') determination to refuse to cover contraceptives. This is what we are told in a letter Rep. Elijah C. Cummings sent to Issa:

Rather than inviting witnesses on both sides of this issue to engage in a reasoned and balanced discussion, you have constructed one of the most one-sided hearings I have ever seen, stacking it only with witnesses who agree with your position.  Earlier this week, you informed Committee Members that you had invited nine witnesses, including officials from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and other religious entities that oppose the accommodation announced last week by the Administration to allow women employees of religiously-affiliated organizations such as hospitals and universities to obtain coverage for contraceptive services directly through their insurance companies.
    You did not invite officials from the Catholic Health Association, Catholic Charities USA, Catholics United, or a host of other Catholic groups that praised the White House for making this accommodation last week.  You also failed to invite any women to testify about the negative impact that restrictive insurance coverage has on them.
    When my staff inquired about requesting minority witnesses for this hearing, we were informed that you would allow only one.  Based on your decision, we requested as our minority witness a third-year Georgetown University Law Center student named Sandra Fluke.  I believed it was critical to have at least one woman at the witness table who could discuss the repercussions that denying coverage for contraceptives has on women across this country.
    In response, your staff relayed that you had decided as follows:
“As the hearing is not about reproductive rights and contraception but instead about the Administration’s actions as they relate to freedom of religion and conscience, he believes that Ms. Fluke is not an appropriate witness.”

Bolds are mine. It's not about religion and conscience because only those religious groups which oppose the Obama compromise are invited to come and speak.
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Added: And the Democratic women walk out of the hearing. It does look like the Catholic boys' no-girls-allowed tree-house. Except that the topic has to do with those lady parts.




 

Meanwhile, in Virginia, Egg-Americans Are Baaack! And Worse.

But that's not the worst of the wonderful Valentine's Day presents the Commonwealth of Virginia gave to its female citizens. This is worse (because the egg-Americans won't be tax deductible quite yet):

The House of Delegates has passed bills that define life as beginning at conception and that require a pregnant woman to submit to an ultrasound before an abortion, punctuating the first half of a legislative session that has been marked by heated debates over divisive social issues.
The crossfire escalated today as the House debated legislation that would require an ultrasound procedure prior to an abortion. The bill’s Democratic opponents have repeatedly argued that the bill amounts to a government mandate on physicians and patients and will require women to submit to an invasive procedure that may be medically unnecessary.
“This is the first time, if we pass this bill, that we will be dictating a medical procedure to a physician,” said Del. Charniele Herring, D-Alexandria. “You’re saying that it’s OK for the government to force its way into the relationship between doctor and patient.”
Del. Todd Gilbert, R-Shenandoah County, fired back at the criticism, asserting that most women who seek abortions are doing so for “lifestyle convenience.”

Gilbert later apologized for getting caught making an insensitive comment.

Nevertheless, this proposal attempts to make those lifestyle choices for slutty women more cumbersome (and more painful, as I have heard) by requiring that ultrasound. In the early stages of pregnancy the only way it can be performed is as transvaginal ultrasound. It looks like this:

So. We have a possibly painful and certainly invasive procedure which is not medically required. Can the women refuse to undergo it and still get an abortion in Virginia?

The answer is not only no, but hell no:

Another bill was advanced requiring a woman undergoing an abortion to have a “transvaginal ultrasound” — i.e., to require a doctor to insert a speculum and then an ultrasound probe into a her vagina against her will and reflect that image onscreen. Not only is a bill like this rather rape-y in its forcefulness — and yes, I realize that is a strong statement, and I mean it strongly — but there is no medically necessary reason to do so. And there are no exceptions. Gov. McDonnell has stated his intention to sign the “transvaginal ultrasound” bill if it lands on his desk.

Does the "no exceptions" rule apply to women who got pregnant from rape?

Today's Echidne Thought

Weirdness. Why is a certain type of weirdness highly remunerated (Rush Limbaugh) while other types of weirdness are all but ignored? Is it just a right-left thing where all things utterly bonkers are regarded as mainstream if they come from the rightmost precipice?

Or is there something more to all this?

I'd love to know because I'm quite weird, in a very satisfying way.

Masturbation Is A Gateway Drug

Vanessa at Feministing has a very funny post on this video:





It truly doesn't seem to be a parody. I'd be willing to bet you anything that the "research" for the video carefully omitted lots of stuff on the Planned Parenthood site. I'd also be willing to bet you anything that avoiding masturbation does not stop people from getting "addicted" to sex.

Any day now I'll figure how to get rid of my food addiction and learn to live on pure air.

Today's Teh Hilarious

Do watch the video where John Stewart and Samantha Bee discuss the right-wing take on women in the military.

But can't the anti-feminists finally make up their minds what feminists really want about women in the military?

On the one hand are the Ladies Against Feminism (as portrayed in the video) who argue that it's the horrible feminazis who are ruining men's war games by insisting that women be included.

On the other hand are the weirder types of Men's Rights Activists (MRAs) who argue that feminists don't want equality because they don't push for women to be given combat roles and such.

So what is it that we do? Destroy the military by insisting on women's participation or destroy the lives of certain types of MRAs by keeping women out of wars?

Probably both. Multi-tasking, you know.

I'm So Pretty, I'm So Witty...

*Dances around the Snakepit Inc., then settles down, in a girly and innocent way, while slowly lowering and raising those eyelashes and making pretty moues with the fanged mouf.*

You know, a real problem with blogging on all this stuff is that one survives only by creating a thick carapace of sarcastic humor. After a while every new insult just becomes yet another joke in the repertoire. So.

Atrios linked to a wonderful such present, an article about The Death Of Pretty. An excerpt:

Pretty, pretty is dying.

People will define pretty differently. For the purposes of this piece, I define pretty as a mutually enriching balanced combination of beauty and projected innocence.

Once upon a time, women wanted to project an innocence. I am not idealizing another age and I have no illusions about the virtues of our grandparents, concupiscence being what it is. But some things were different in the back then. First and foremost, many beautiful women, whatever the state of their souls, still wished to project a public innocence and virtue. And that combination of beauty and innocence is what I define as pretty.

By nature, generally when men see this combination in women it brings out their better qualities, their best in fact. That special combination of beauty and innocence, the pretty inspires men to protect and defend it.

...

As I said, pretty inspires men’s nobler instincts to protect and defend. Pretty is cherished. Hotness, on the other hand, is a commodity. Its value is temporary and must be used. It is a consumable.

Women are all sluts now. Men really want sluts but prefer them unopened. Only then will men protect and defend women. Opened sluts they will use up and won't defend.

What caused this horrendous change?

Most girls don’t want to be pretty anymore even if they understand what it is. It is ironic that 40 years of women’s liberation has succeeded only in turning women into a commodity. Something to be used up and thrown out.

Of course men play a role in this as well, but women should know better and they once did. Once upon a time you would hear girls talk about kind of women men date and the kind they marry. You don’t hear things like that anymore.

I love that quote. It's so innocent and pretty!

Women's open sluttiness is the fault of feminism. Feminists demanded that women be allowed to be treated as sluts! So what do you expect from men? Men, after all, cannot affect their own drives at all. Hence women are responsible for controlling those urges, and the way to do it is modesty in dress and in behavior. Burqas might help, too.

The comments to that post have more on the presumed innate differences of men and women. Somehow only the supposed innate characteristics of men cannot be changed. But the supposed innate characteristics of women MUST be brought back. That all this has a logical flaw (if those characteristics in women are so innate, how come are they not operating?) is a bit worrisome to me.

I'm going to interpret this article generously and assume that the author doesn't mean all that matters in women is beauty and innocence. Both of those are evanescent characteristics and neither will do you much good when you are sixty or seventy. Or in the labor force.

So let's pretend that this is only about women's role in the context of dating and marriage. Then it boils down to the old argument that men want an unopened package of goodies and are willing to protect that package. Against other men, presumably.

But it also boils down to that well-known argument that women, the supposedly frailer and weaker and more stupid sex, is the sex responsible for all control of sexuality. Never mind what one thinks of the basic assertion; it's simply not at all how sexuality works in reality. For instance, the majority of pron entrepreneurs are not women.

The comments are fun reading, more generally, though all points of view are presented. Still, I don't think feminists were working very hard for the objectification of women, and given my recent readings in the sixteenth century, that objectification seems to have been a bigger problem in the past. "Pretty" was just sold in a different marketplace than "slutty." But neither of those concepts were controlled by the commodity herself.

I could write something more meaningful about the premature sexualization of young girls, about the impact of popular culture on the way women are supposed to dress and act and about the impact of pron on that popular culture and how it all slowly seeps down to the private worlds of young girls who don't have the skills yet to read the wider culture.

Yes, there are real concerns in all that. But to pick feminism as the movement to blame for is like arguing that thermometers cause fever.

Happy Valentine's Day

Which it is today. I'm not in the mood for proper analysis of this phenomenon or anything of the sort. But thank you, my erudite and sweet readers, for being you.

E.J. Dionne, Catholics and Contraception. Wherein Echidne Loses Her Cool.

E.J. Dionne:

Those of us who are liberal Catholics have remained in the church for reasons beyond tribal loyalties or a desire to honor the traditions of our parents and grandparents. At the heart of the love many of us have for the church — despite our frustrations over its abysmal handling of the pedophilia scandal and its reluctance to grant women the rights they are due — is a profound respect for the fact on so many questions that count, Catholicism walks its talk and harnesses its faith to the good works the Gospel demands.
When it comes to lifting up the poor, healing the sick, assisting immigrants and refugees, educating the young (especially in inner cities), comforting orphaned and abandoned children, and organizing the needy to act in their own interest, the church has been there with resources and an astoundingly committed band of sisters, priests, brothers and lay people. Organizations such as Catholic Charities, the Catholic Health Association, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development and Catholic Relief Services make the words of Jesus come alive every day.

His post has "culture wars" in the title, grrr.

But I really got stuck in that one sentence: "At the heart of the love many of us have for the church — despite our frustrations over its abysmal handling of the pedophilia scandal and its reluctance to grant women the rights they are due — is a profound respect for the fact on so many questions that count, Catholicism walks its talk and harnesses its faith to the good works the Gospel demands."

Do a gender reversal on that. I know it's hard to even imagine something like any major guy religion run by women (in charge, that is) but do try. Would we ever find it perfectly acceptable that such imaginary Mother/Daughter/Holyspirit church refused to let men be priests and insisted that the priestesses and the Popess decide on those men's fertility?

And sure, religions do much good. But are we supposed to close our eyes to the evil they do? Or somehow treat the good they do as a justification for going along with the evil? Why can't they stop the evil and continue with the good? And why can't I have a freedom from other people's religious beliefs?

As an aside, the argument that the contraception debacle is all about the poor Catholic bishops being discriminated against makes me check the color of the sky, to see if I'm still in the same old reality. The one in which religions are the most powerful force in keeping women downtrodden on this earth.

The Subtle Ways "Medical" Turns Into "Moral"

Whitney Houston's death seems to have caused a discussion on the misuse of prescription medications for anxiety and similar disorders. I found this part of it very interesting:

Benzodiazepines, or “benzos” are highly addictive and should never be prescribed to someone with a history of addiction, said said Matt Eaken, director of admissions at the drug and alcohol rehab center Mountainside.

...

“A person struggling with anxiety shouldn’t just be taking an anti-anxiety medication, said Fred Keene, the clinic director at the drug rehabilitation center Mountainside. “They should be learning other skills to help them cope, such as talk or cognitive therapy or meditation.”
For some, it’s a quick escape from what is causing them to feel so deeply stressed about their lives.
“To learn to cope with life and anxiety, you have to put in real work,” said Eaken. “For some people, it’s easier to just take a pill.”

Bolding mine.

As I stated in the title of this post, medical problems turn into moral ones in subtle ways, and this is quite subtle. I have no problem with the message in the above quote, except for that bolded bit. It implies that the people who fail in controlling their addictions are not doing the real work, that they are lazy and simply go the easiest route.

That introduces a moral, non-medical dimension. Once we are comfortable with that dimension it has the tendency to leak into most things. It's most familiar these days in debates about obesity.

I find it very counter-productive in the medical context and especially so in the context of treating emotional and mental disturbances. Adding that moral disapproval is likely to make things worse, because if an addicted person cannot recover then perhaps she or he didn't work hard enough! Just took the easy way out. Deserved to fail, in fact, and should probably feel guilt now.

This is a tricky topic to write about because of course it's true that some people don't work very hard on their problems. It's also true that most of us would prefer a simple pill for all that ails us. Still, moving from those thoughts to a moral disapproval is pretty disturbing.

It reminds me of a story I read about the fish seeing one of them caught by an angler, struggling and squirming and fighting the embedded hook in its mouth. The other fish wonder why that stupid fish just doesn't swim away, wonder what's bothering it, even laugh at its weird behavior.

But that's because they cannot see the hook.

From Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artist.

Just because this is so funny. I'm reading books from the fifteen hundreds right now. Vasari on the Florentine painter Paolo Uccello (1396/7-1475):

Paolo decorated the vaulting of the Peruzzi in fresco with triangular sections in perspective, and in the angles of the corner he painted the four elements, representing each by an appropriate animal: a mole for earth, a fish for water, a salamander for fire, and for air the chameleon, which lives on air and assumes any colour. Since he had never seen a chameleon, Uccello painted instead a camel which is opening its mouth and filling its belly by swallowing air...

The Hunger Games

Have you read the book? It's a young adult novel (part of a series) by Suzanne Collins.

It could be fun to have a book-club-type discussion of the book and its meaning from various standpoints but certainly from a feminist one. Before some watered-down version appears in the movie theaters later this year.

Every Dollar Is Created Equal?

So the CPAC panel of conservative attorneys seems to think:

Anonymous political speech. Foreign money in U.S. elections. The proliferation of super PACs. How grave a threat do any of things pose to American democracy? Not much, according to a panel of conservative attorneys, who gathered Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C.
The high-profile legal minds on the CPAC panel largely agreed that the changes to the campaign finance landscape are grounds for celebration.
Thanks to the Citizens United decision, we've seen "more voices, more competition, and more accountability," said panelist Benjamin Barr, a senior fellow at the Goldwater Institute, a conservative think tank.
"Without SpeechNow.org, the Republican nomination would have been sewed up weeks ago," added Brad Smith, the former chairman of the Federal Election Commission who co-founded the Center for Competitive Politics, a nonprofit that promotes First Amendment political rights. "And in 2010, we would have had fewer competitive races."
In the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case in 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed corporations and unions to spend unlimited amounts of money from their treasuries on ads and other activities to influence the election or defeat of federal candidates so long as they are not coordinating with the candidates' campaigns.
A few months later, in SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission, used the Supreme Court's reasoning and decided that limits on individual contributions to groups that make independent expenditures are unconstitutional.
These rulings gave rise to the creation of what are called super PACs — political organizations that can receive unlimited corporate, union and individual contributions and make unlimited expenditures to advocate for the election or defeat federal candidates.

What the Citizens United ruling did was great for the political rights of corporations and unions. But those two institutions are not created equal. The Republicans are successfully strangling unions to death in this country and the laws about unionization are already draconian. Corporations, on the other hand, run this country already.

The outcome of the Citizens United ruling is to make each dollar equal in the political process. Those who have most dollars can determine who runs and on what platform. In extreme cases one person could bankroll a candidate, as seems to have happened with Newt Gingrich.

Anyone who cares about democracy should see why this is undesirable. But what is more undesirable is the difficulty a candidate would find in receiving funding if his or her platform does not cosset those rich corporations. Getting the money from thousands and thousands of twenty dollar contributions takes time and effort and can only be done by one or few candidates at a time. Finding one corporation to bankroll you takes little time. Provided, of course, that you are willing to play the corporation's tune.

The Voices We Hear On Contraceptive Coverage And Religious Opposition

I truly want to write about something else but this particular topic just will not go away. Here's another interesting aspect of it:

President Obama’s regulation mandating that health insurance plans offer free birth control is an issue that most directly affects women. And yet, the cable news chatter over this controversy has been driven mostly by men, according to a new ThinkProgress analysis.
From Monday through Thursday evening, the leading cable news channels – Fox, Fox Business, MSNBC, and CNN – invited almost twice as many men as women onto their shows to discuss contraceptive coverage.

Actually, the issue affects men almost as much, given that birth control is used in heterosexual intercourse which sorta involves men. But women also need the contraceptive pill for the treatment of some medical conditions.

Still, the point is a pertinent one. It comes from those who usually mouth on those programs. The same faces will be invited, naturally, and the tradition is that those faces belong to men, mostly. And to a few ladies who frown upon feminism. -- I would have liked to see the Bishops vs. the Women! In a boxing ring (which is a square, by the way).

But here's one man who will always have access to the public, our kind patriarch Rick Santorum. He stuck his toe in the turbulent waters of feminism:

Speaking to CNN’s John King, the former Pennsylvania senator said: “That’s the Church’s money, and forcing them to do something that they think is a grievous moral wrong. How can that be a right of a woman? That has nothing to do with the right of a woman.”

Funny that. Insert the idea of "no woman priests" into that thoughtlet and I bet Santorum would say exactly the same thing. The church thinks women as priests would be a major sin, too.

And The Bishops Won

This battle. They are not going to win the war against the wimmenfolk but they will keep trying. Obama has figured out a way to let the bishops win without too much suffering:

U.S. health insurers said on Friday they feared President Barack Obama had set a new precedent by making them responsible for providing free birth control to employees of religious groups as he sought to defuse an election-year landmine.
Obama on Friday announced the policy shift in an effort to accommodate religious organizations, such as Catholic hospitals and universities, whose leaders are outraged by a new rule that would have required them to offer free contraceptive coverage to employees.
Instead, the Obama administration ordered insurers to provide workers at religious-affiliated institutions with free family planning if they request it, without involving their employer at all. Insurance industry officials said the abrupt shift raised questions over how that requirement would be implemented.

I don't think we have heard the last of this yet.

This might be a good place to note that this whole mess is caused by that odd and history-tied aspect of the American health insurance: It's mostly offered by people's bosses.

For several reasons that arrangement is undesirable, and what we learn here about the power of employers to determine what will be covered is just one of those reasons. Others include the fact that workers become locked in jobs which may not be the best matches for them, just because of that desperately-needed health insurance for a chronically ill family member, say.

Entrepreneurship is more costly in a country where health insurance for entrepreneurs costs more, by definition, than it would in an employee group plan, so fewer people will take the risks of starting a firm on their own.

Finally, offering health insurance through work biases the market towards covering healthy people with the lowest costs, leaving the less healthy to the mercies of the private health insurance industry which charges much more.

The Spilled Semen Amendment

I love it, just love it.

More on the Spilled Semen Amendment here, by its creator, Constance Johnson.

Santorum, From The Weirdness Files, Again

Today's very funny post. Click and go straight to the video without reading the text first.

Hilarious. Too bad it's not meant as a joke but as a part of that Reality Show "Who's The Next Leader of The Western World?"

------
Added later, because even Santorum's funny jokes deserve analysis, given the context. Note that his revolutionary slogan would be "Liberty, Equality and Paternity," to replace the French Revolution slogan of "Liberty, Equality and Fraternity." So.

The "paternity" refers to Santorum's god. We can't rely on our fellow citizens to take care of us, as the French Revolution demonstrated with that guillotine. Because the so-called "Obamacare" would depend on the kindness of strangers, the obvious consequence would be guillotines here, too.

Instead, Santorum wants us to rely on what? For health care, I mean. Presumably health care provided not by his god but by the markets which, of course, are run by those same people who might guillotine us.

And as to religious revolutions being less violent??? History tells us otherwise.

And The Empire Strikes Back! Rubio on Contraception

Don't you simply love this threat by Sen. Marco Rubio* (R-Fla)?

On Friday the Department of Health and Human Services handed down the decision, sending shockwaves through religious circles that oppose the use of contraceptives. The rule exempts places of worship from providing such healthcare plans but does not make an exception for organizations like hospitals that are affiliated with religious institutions.

To the end of repealing HHS’s decision, Rubio said he and other GOP senators plan to introduce legislation, The Religious Freedom Act of 2012, that would simply compel the administration to provide exemptions for employers that object to providing contraceptives on moral grounds.

Oh please, please do it, Marco!

Because I'm pretty sure that if we start using moral grounds for exemptions, employers can also refuse to cover Viagra if they frown upon adultery and four-hour boners. Christian Scientist employers can refuse to provide any health insurance whatsoever except for someone to pray over the patient. Jehova's Witnesses can refuse to cover blood transfusions. And all employers could argue that moral grounds make it impossible for them to offer coverage for anything which might have been caused by immoral lifestyles. Venereal diseases, addictions to drugs, tobacco and alcohol. And the list goes on and on.

Or so it would be if "morality" wasn't equated with only the use of "lady parts."
-------
*Rubio seems to be in the forefront of the new movement for Careless Sex:

When Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) introduced legislation last week to repeal part of the Affordable Care Act requiring some religious institutions to offer their employees contraceptive services through their health insurance coverage, he found himself again at odds with two key constituencies: Catholics and Latinas/os.
Just a few weeks ago, the junior senator from Florida was the target of a campaign to raise awareness about his positions on immigration that are at odds with most Latinos. But, his latest policy proposal on birth control highlights yet another disconnection with two key constituencies this election year.
Rubio has always been known for his opposition to abortion, but he has started to heighten his involvement in reproductive health politics with a series of new statements. Last week, he told Politico: “I can tell you that none of my children were planned.”

F**k The Culture Wars

I've had enough of the mealy-mouthed mumblings about "culture wars." That is the worst euphemism of all euphemisms in American politics. Even worse than the Bush administration pollution initiative marketed under the label of "Clean Skies."

The "culture wars" are NOT about culture. By calling them that Serious People can ignore the issues. After all, they don't appear to be about money or civil liberties or anything else worthy of attention.

At the same time, the "culture wars" are NOT really wars in the sense the euphemism implies: As if the two sides in these wars are somehow balanced as enemies, as if the topic of the wars is of equal importance to both "extremes" and as if there is no way to tell who initiated those "wars" in the first place.

No. What is going on is very one-sided and initiated by the so-called social conservatives. That term is yet another euphemism. To see what I mean, think about the real agenda of social conservatives:

They don't want women to have access to abortion, many of them don't want women to have access to contraception and many of them don't want women to work outside the home. Some of them, at least, believe that men should be the heads of households and that women should gracefully accept the yoke of being their faithful helpmeets.

They oppose same-sex marriage, probably because it works against the hierarchical patriarchal traditional marriage.

There you have it. Or my interpretation of "social conservatism." It's not about the fashionable color this year or what artist or musician we are supposed to like. And it's not some war between two equal extremist groups while the rest of the country goes "duh, whatevah."

It's about the "social conservatives" trying to limit women's lives to certain carefully prescribed traditional roles. Here's where the economics enters, for those of you who rank political importance on the basis of money. If the "social conservatives" succeed in their demands, women will remain second class citizens with less access to good jobs, good income and good retirement benefits. Not to mention less ability to decide over their own lives.

And if the term "war" applies at all here, then it's in the sense of a defensive war from the other side of the political aisle and against the "social conservatives" whose attack consists of trying to force the rest of us to live our lives according to the tenets of "social conservatism."

Money Is Fungible?

I had to look up the definition of fungibility, to make sure that we all start from the same base. Here it is:

Fungibility is the property of a good or a commodity whose individual units are capable of mutual substitution, such as crude oil, shares in a company, bonds, precious metals or currencies. For example, if someone lends another person a $10 bill, it does not matter if they are given back the same $10 bill or a different one, since currency is fungible; if someone lends another person their car, however, they would not expect to be given back a different car, even of the same make and model, as cars are not fungible.

Get it? Bloggers are not fungible, for instance. Which is a good thing.

But money is. Nevertheless, that's not quite the way the term is currently used in politics, mostly by people who argue that any money given to Planned Parenthood will contribute to abortions because, you know, money is fungible. We've all heard the same about how tax-payers shouldn't have to subsidize abortions. This is interpreted as meaning that the government must never fund abortions, even if the money for them would come from some other source than the taxes of those who oppose abortions. Because, once again, money is fungible.

What these people mean is something slightly different. Not fungibility, after all. What they perhaps mean is that increasing an organization's (or an individual's) income in any way whatsoever will let them spend more of the rest of their income on Bad Things. For instance, one of these types of folk might argue against Food Stamps because getting them for food might let poor people spend the rest of their money on alcohol.

I'm not sure if that's the right interpretation*. But if it is I'd like to complain about my taxes going towards killing people in all these wars. Why aren't the so-called pro-life people up in arms (pardon the pun) about that anti-life part?

Even something like those ineffective abstinence programs of the Bush era were partly funded from my taxes! Money thrown down the well it was, or rather pork to the Christian fundamentalists. I want my fungible money for that back so that I can donate to the anti-war groups instead.

So why is this concept of fungibility seemingly used only when it's about forced birth issues?
-----
*The other one is naturally that certain groups wish to completely control the federal government or Planned Parenthood or the behavior of poor people.

But What Do The Ordinary Catholics Want?

I have written quite a bit about the demands of the American Catholic bishops when it comes to insurance coverage for contraceptives. But what do the ordinary Catholics want?

A new survey tells us:

• A majority (55%) of Americans agree that “employers should be required to provide their employees with health care plans that cover contraception and birth control at no cost.” Four-in-ten (40%) disagree with this requirement.
• There are major religious, generational and political divisions:
◦ Roughly 6-in-10 Catholics (58%) believe that employers should be required to provide their employees with health care plans that cover contraception.
◦ Among Catholic voters, support for this requirement is slightly lower at 52%.
◦ Only half (50%) of white Catholics support this requirement, compared to 47% who oppose it.

Fascinating. Overall Catholics are at least as likely to support contraceptive coverage as the majority of Americans.

But then what a religion requires is not determined by its ordinary members. I think they would do a better job of it.

As an example, take the Catholic church belief that artificial contraception is sinful. Who decided that? As far as I know it was celibate men and celibate men only. The one group which will never have to think about the practical consequences of that decision.

Now that is weird.

Tallulah Bankhead And Blogger's Block

I was trying to write about the former, got the latter for my pains and now try to write through the latter. Makes sense, right?

The backstory: Some time ago I read on the net the old story about one of the Marx brothers going to a party Tallulah Bankhead gave and asking, in the greeting line, whether he could f**k Tallulah that night. Her answer presumably was "So you shall, you old-fashioned boy, you."

Here's the cleaned up version of that story.

So I got interested in Bankhead, an American actor better known for her scandalous life and outrageous quips than her career. Because here was a woman who seemed to go through men (and women) in sex the way someone like James Bond might have.

I wanted to know more about her, from a feminist point of view, and for that I needed a good source. But, alas, the two books I found on her don't seem quite trustworthy. One is written by a woman who later made a living by forging letters from famous people and the other is written by a man, presumably a close friend of Bankhead, whom her relatives characterized as an annoying hanger-on and no friend at all.

That's the time to toss an idea into the divine garbage bin. But somehow I have not been able to do so. Probably because of quips like these:

Tallulah herself was not very interested in making films. The opportunity to make $50,000 per film, however, was too good to pass up. She later said, "The only reason I went to Hollywood was to fuck that divine Gary Cooper."

She did f**k that divine Gary Cooper, it seems:

Tallulah didn't waste any time jumping into a new project. After beginning rehearsals for Jezebel in August of 1933, she suddenly experienced excruciating abdominal pains and was rushed to a hospital. Her condition worsened and nine weeks later, after considerable bed rest and the halting of Jezebel, she was diagnosed with a life-threatening case of gonorrhea. An emergency hysterectomy had to be performed to save her life. It has been widely speculated that Tallulah got gonorrhea from Gary Cooper. However, she had so many sexual partners at the time that it is impossible to know the truth.

I wanted to understand how the media and the public treated someone like Bankhead as opposed to someone like Gary Cooper, purely on the basis of their private lives. And I wanted to know how much of Bankhead's reputation was a commercial creation and how much was based on her real behavior.

But the aspect of her I found most interesting was the fame and following she developed among young working class women while acting in London:

Tallulah's most fervent fans were young working class women. To them, Tallulah was the embodiment of their fantasies - a fashionable, beautiful girl living a glamorous life. The fans became somewhat of a cult, copying and emulating Tallulah's dress, hair and personality. They waited outside the theater forty-eight hours in advance of a new Tallulah opening. They attended her plays several times a week and never missed a premiere or a closing. They would become ecstatic when Tallulah appeared on stage, cheering wilding and chanting "Tallulah, Tallulah" or "Tallulah Hallelujah". The press wrote about them frequently and even gave them a name - "gallery girls".

Tallulah herself was an "accessible" icon. She reveled in her fans' idolatry and always acknowledged them, on-stage or off. She would blow them kisses from the stage and utter "thank you, dahlings", which would result in even more cheering. After a performance, Tallulah would greet her fans, sign autographs, chat with them and inquire about their family and loved ones. Sometimes, she would even invite them to her dressing room or to her home for a visit. One of the devoted gallery girls, Edie Smith, became a Tallulah employee and was with her for over thirty years.

I have bolded the statement I disagree with in that quote. Those women could have identified with almost any female star of that era if they simply wanted to emulate "a fashionable, beautiful girl living a glamorous life." That's what female stars did. My own theory is that the fans loved Tallulah because of her refusal to live according to the traditional code for women and because she was independent and assertive.

There you have it. The post that never quite came to life but kept blocking all the other posts up in that queue.

Eating The Seed Corn

Via Atrios, this news from Pennsylvania:

Pennsylvania's state universities would take another big funding cut under Gov. Corbett's 2012-13 budget proposal to be released Tuesday morning, according to sources familiar with the plan.
The 14 universities in the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, including West Chester and Cheyney, would see their state funding cut 20 percent under Corbett's proposed budget as of Monday, sources confirmed.
The four state-related universities - Temple, Penn State, Lincoln, and the University of Pittsburgh - would be cut 30 percent, sources said.
The proposed cuts follow a substantial decrease in funding to the state universities in the current year that led to tuition increases at all 18 schools, as well as a recently announced midyear, 5 percent retraction of funding.
"For the second year, we're going to force universities to raise tuition at a time when we should make access to education affordable," said Sen. Larry Farnese (D., Phila.) of the Republican governor's budget.
The governor last year proposed a 50 percent cut in funding to the state-related universities; ultimately a 19 percent cut was adopted after negotiations with the General Assembly.
"I don't know if the governor will do what he did last year - come out with a large number hoping he gets half of it," said Art Hochner, president of the 1,350-member Temple faculty union.

The governor probably expects smaller cuts than that. But it's still eating the seed corn and at a time when all this turns into another suck to keep the economic depression going. Besides, many young people can't find jobs right now so consider college as an option. The cuts make that less available.

I don't get the Republican thinking on this. First they tell us that the U.S. must stay competitive against China and India and so on. Then they decide to cut back on spending on higher education which makes it pretty hard for the U.S. to stay competitive with those countries. Unless the plan is to really lower wages here. Hmm.

A Winter View. Without Snow.

The tree in the foreground grows horizontally because that is the only space it had. The lake visible behind the tree is on an island in the Baltic Sea. Which makes it all a conundrum. Is this a seascape or a lakescape? Or both?

Domestic terrorism (by Suzie)

A man trying to burn his wife alive caught fire himself and is now in critical condition. The woman was unhurt.

That's the gist of newspaper articles that quoted sheriff's deputies in Hillsborough County, Fla., where I live. They said: He had covered windows in a rental car that held gloves, tape and a gasoline can. When his estranged wife left home this morning, she said, he was waiting with bottles of gasoline. He chased her through the apartment complex, trying to splash her, but getting gas on himself instead. A neighbor took her in, and he splashed gas outside the apartment and sparked a fire, but he went up in flames, too. Neighbors rescued him.

He had been arrested in 2000 for domestic battery, but the charges were dismissed. Deputies responded to a call at the home where the couple lived in 2010, but no one was arrested.

How many times have we read stories about controlling and abusive men "distraught over ... marital problems" who kill their wives and girlfriends, maybe even their children, once the women leave? What a relief that this woman survived.

In comments, readers have joked about the man, prompting a couple of people to ask for a little sympathy for the guy. But I can think only of the woman. Her youngest son is 18 -- did she wait until he reached adulthood to leave her husband? The man is suffering now, but how long did she suffer?

I hope the Associated Press doesn't classify this as Offbeat News.

Ooops. It's the Onion, Mr. Forced-Birth Congressman.

Congressman John Fleming (R-La) took an Onion article for a real one.

For those of you who don't know it, the Onion is a spoof site which, among other jokes, makes fun of American politics. Because of the Komen debacle, the site re-published its old Abortionplex story from last May. It begins like this:

Planned Parenthood announced Tuesday the grand opening of its long-planned $8 billion Abortionplex, a sprawling abortion facility that will allow the organization to terminate unborn lives with an efficiency never before thought possible.

During a press conference, Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards told reporters that the new state-of-the-art fetus-killing facility located in the nation's heartland offers quick, easy, in-and-out abortions to all women, and represents a bold reinvention of the group's long-standing mission and values.
"Although we've traditionally dedicated 97 percent of our resources to other important services such as contraception distribution, cancer screening, and STD testing, this new complex allows us to devote our full attention to what has always been our true passion: abortion," said Richards, standing under a banner emblazoned with Planned Parenthood's new slogan, "No Life Is Sacred." "And since Congress voted to retain our federal funding, it's going to be that much easier for us to maximize the number of tiny, beating hearts we stop every day."

Now if Mr. Fleming was for reproductive choice I'd understand the reason behind his tweet. But he is not.

Why bother writing about this? Well, it's pretty funny. But it also shows that at least some forced-birthers really do think that women slot abortions regularly in between pedicures and picking up the dry-cleaning and that abortions are a giant money-making industry where organizations such as Planned Parenthood can create new American wealth. But who the people are who supposedly get rich that way is never stated in the forced-birth propaganda I've read.

And What Happened Next? The Komen Tale Continues

As this Salon article shows, the Susan G. Komen Foundation is a babe-in-the-woods when it comes to the power of the social media.

I think the top officers lived in a tiny forced-birth bubble and were quite unprepared for the thousands of messages from quite ordinary people of all sorts who actually care about poor women's access to breast cancer screening.

So the Komen Foundation had to backtrack a bit. Do NOT take this as a complete surrender. Note the slippery language:

Komen for the Cure just released the following statement from Nancy Brinker and the Susan G. Komen Board of Directors:
We want to apologize to the American public for recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women's lives.
The events of this week have been deeply unsettling for our supporters, partners and friends and all of us at Susan G. Komen. We have been distressed at the presumption that the changes made to our funding criteria were done for political reasons or to specifically penalize Planned Parenthood. They were not.
Our original desire was to fulfill our fiduciary duty to our donors by not funding grant applications made by organizations under investigation. We will amend the criteria to make clear that disqualifying investigations must be criminal and conclusive in nature and not political. That is what is right and fair.
Our only goal for our granting process is to support women and families in the fight against breast cancer. Amending our criteria will ensure that politics has no place in our grant process. We will continue to fund existing grants, including those of Planned Parenthood, and preserve their eligibility to apply for future grants, while maintaining the ability of our affiliates to make funding decisions that meet the needs of their communities.
It is our hope and we believe it is time for everyone involved to pause, slow down and reflect on how grants can most effectively and directly be administered without controversies that hurt the cause of women. We urge everyone who has participated in this conversation across the country over the last few days to help us move past this issue. We do not want our mission marred or affected by politics - anyone's politics.
Starting this afternoon, we will have calls with our network and key supporters to refocus our attention on our mission and get back to doing our work. We ask for the public's understanding and patience as we gather our Komen affiliates from around the country to determine how to move forward in the best interests of the women and people we serve.
We extend our deepest thanks for the outpouring of support we have received from so many in the past few days and we sincerely hope that these changes will be welcomed by those who have expressed their concern.

Bolds are mine. See here for more discussion on the slipperiest bits.

Despite all this, this is a victory for those who want all women to get access to breast checkups, and we should not short-sell ourselves. What really matters should not be forgotten. The Komen people did.

Finally, think how little the money is that was at stake here. The totality of the Planned Parenthood grants on a national level is not even twice the compensation Nancy Brinker gets from running the Foundation! And even with that puny sum much could be done. Now imagine if we could install more mammography machines in the poorer areas! How about that, Komen people?

Nancy Griffith

How Awkward...

Now this is interesting:

The Susan G. Komen Foundation, which recently announced that it is ending grants to Planned Parenthood for breast cancer screening because of a controversial investigation launched by an anti-abortion Republican congressman, currently funds cancer research at the Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center to the tune of $7.5 million. Like Planned Parenthood, Penn State is currently the subject of a federal government investigation, and like the Planned Parenthood grant, the Penn State grant appears to violate a new internal rule at Komen that bans grants to organizations that are under investigation by federal, state, or local governments. But so far, only the Planned Parenthood grants appear to have been cancelled.

And so very awkward for the Susan G. Komen Foundation.

Having Forced-Birth Values Increases The Risk of Prostate Cancer in Men!

That's absolutely and totally true, my friends. I can prove it easily. Just call lots of men, ask them about their abortion views and then about whether they have prostate cancer or not, and I'm willing to bet you anything that you find a positive correlation between being opposed to abortion and having prostate cancer. This obviously means that forced-birth views cause prostate cancer. QED.

Except, of course, for that little problem which is that both anti-abortion views and prostate cancer increase with age. Drat.

But such considerations as bad study design never hold people back when it comes to women's cooties and other issues of no interest to anyone else but women. The august Washington Post decided to use the Susan G. Komen case to bring back the idea that abortions cause breast cancer in women. The piece concludes, after admitting that the "research is spotty (hah! blood in the panties)":

But the bulk of evidence appears to argue against abortion’s causing breast cancer. That’s according to the American Cancer Society and the National Cancer Institute, which offer overviews of existing research and conclusions scientists have come to after examining those studies. While research suggests a slight increased risk of breast cancer among women currently using oral contraceptives, that’s not the case with abortion and breast cancer risk. As the American Cancer Society’s Web site concludes: “Linking these 2 topics creates a great deal of emotion and debate. But scientific research studies have not found a cause-and-effect relationship between abortion and breast cancer.”
Komen’s decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood will certainly revive this debate.

Err. You just revived the debate, you idiot. I should have realized when the Washington Post published an utterly misogynist opinion piece of crap about the inanity of all women that it's not a newspaper that exactly cares about being objective on the topic of women (half of humanity and all that). I'm going to start attacking them from now on, by the way, because enough is enough.

Let's explain to that WaPo writer why all proper studies have failed to establish any kind of correlation between abortion and breast cancer. It's not terribly hard to do, and Googling can help you. Honest.

For instance, it's important to understand that retrospective surveys have serious problems in this context. "Retrospective" means that you look at the data at a point in time when at least some women already have developed breast cancer, and then you ask the women whether they ever had had abortions (including spontaneous abortions) or not in the past.

The bias that is introduced by this method goes like this: First, women in general under-report abortions because of societal disapproval. But second, those women who have breast cancer are less likely to under-report abortions. This is because it is human to try to explore one's past for possible reasons for the cancer, to repent all sorts of stuff and so on. These two things combined can create a spurious (false) correlation between breast cancer, and various types of abortions.

It's not difficult to see how an ideal study of this question should be performed. It needs to be prospective, meaning that the data on abortions is entered when they take place, not at the later time when breast cancers are diagnosed. And it should not be based on the memory and responses of the women themselves but actual medical records.

And you know what? Those ideal studies do exist! Here's what they have found:

Results from major prospective studies
The largest, and probably the most reliable, study on this topic was done during the 1990s in Denmark, a country with very detailed medical records on all its citizens. In this study, all Danish women born between 1935 and 1978 (a total of 1.5 million women) were linked with the National Registry of Induced Abortions and with the Danish Cancer Registry. All of the information about their abortions and their breast cancer came from registries – it was very complete and was not influenced by recall bias.
After adjusting for known breast cancer risk factors, the researchers found that induced abortion(s) had no overall effect on the risk of breast cancer. The size of this study and the manner in which it was done provide good evidence that induced abortion does not affect a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer.
Another large, prospective study was reported on by Harvard researchers in 2007. This study included more than 100,000 women who were between the ages of 29 and 46 at the start of the study in 1993. These women were followed until 2003.
Again, because they were asked about childbirths and abortions at the start of the study, recall bias was unlikely to be a problem. After adjusting for known breast cancer risk factors, the researchers found no link between either spontaneous or induced abortions and breast cancer.
The California Teachers Study also reported on more than 100,000 women in 2008. Researchers asked the women in 1995 about past induced and spontaneous abortions. While the women were being followed in the study, more than 3,300 developed invasive breast cancer. There was no difference in breast cancer risk between the group who had either spontaneous or induced abortions and those who had not had an abortion.

So how about that revival of a discredited hypothesis, Washington Post?

The Danish study, in particular, is as good as a study of this kind can be. All the data came from medical records and everyone knows that the Danes keep excellent records. It also looked at the one question forced-birthers are focused on which is induced abortions.

What is the theory the forced-birthers have in mind when they keep arguing that abortions cause later breast cancer? Probably a theory of divine retribution. The sluts are punished for their sluttery.

But the actual medical hypothesis is something quite different, and would apply equally to all women who have never had children and all women who have had miscarriages. That hypothesis is about the possible protective role that pregnancies before a certain age might have against later breast cancer, and it asks questions about how, exactly, being pregnant might convey such protections.

But those protections are not dependent on just one single pregnancy. Note that women who have had abortions or miscarriages are very likely to also have had completed pregnancies, with all those benefits. After all, many women who have abortions have already had children. Thus, what the hypothesis is really about is the possibility that a woman who has an abortion, whether induced or spontaneous, and no more children during that beneficial time window might have the same higher average risk of breast cancer as women who have no children.

Makes you see the whole thing a bit differently, right?

The Susan G. Komen for the Cure. For Some, Not For All.

You probably already heard that Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the largest breast-cancer charity in the country, has decided to defund Planned Parenthood:

According to the AP, the move will mean “a cutoff of hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants, mainly for breast exams.”Planned Parenthood confirms that Komen is the first, and only, organization to cut off funding since the Congress began debating the issue in earnest last winter.

Komen said it could not continue to fund Planned Parenthood because it has adopted new guidelines that bar it from funding organizations under congressional investigation. The House oversight and investigations subcommittee announced in the fall an investigation into Planned Parenthood’s funding.

The linked source suggests that Kamen folded under Republican hammering about abortion and Planned Parenthood and so on. And perhaps that is the case.

On the other hand, one of the top officers at Susan G. Komen for the Cure is Karen Handel, the senior vice-president of public policy. She is known for her forced-birth views. When she unsuccessfully ran in the Republican primaries for the governorship of Georgia she wrote this on her campaign site:

I believe that each and every unborn child has inherent dignity, that every abortion is a tragedy, and that government has a role, along with the faith community, in encouraging women to choose life in even the most difficult of circumstances. And while I will not seek to prohibit abortions in the extremely rare cases of rape, incest, or where there is a real threat to the life of the mother, I will do everything in my power to encourage and promote alternatives to abortion in these tragic situations. In this respect, I strongly support the noble work of crisis-pregnancy centers across the state and those who compassionately and lovingly counsel women on a daily basis.  Finally, I oppose embryonic stem cell research, which creates life solely for the purpose of destroying it. I do, however, strongly support adult stem cell research, which has produced numerous scientific achievements without terminating innocent lives in the process.
My opponents have recently recycled old attacks against me concerning Fulton County’s funding of some programs through Planned Parenthood.  They are doing so without providing any context and continue to omit several key and important facts.  First, let me be clear, since I am pro-life, I do not support the mission of Planned Parenthood. During my time as Chairman of Fulton County, there were federal and state pass-through grants that were awarded to Planned Parenthood for breast and cervical cancer screening, as well as a “Healthy Babies Initiative.”  The grant was authorized, regulated, administered and distributed through the State of Georgia.  Because of the criteria, regulations and parameters of the grant, Planned Parenthood was the only eligible vendor approved to meet the state criteria. Additionally, none of the services in any way involved abortions or abortion-related services.  In fact, state and federal law prohibits the use of taxpayer funds for abortions or abortion related services and I strongly support those laws.  Since grants like these are from the state I’ll eliminate them as your next Governor.

Bolds are mine.

Planned Parenthood is an important source of reproductive health care checkups for lower-income women, including breast examinations. Does Komen have an alternative plan to make sure that the necessary screening services that would be cut by this defunding are still available in those communities? I wonder.

Echoes of Egypt?

If this is true it brings to mind the virginity tests carried out on Egyptian demonstrators:

The National Lawyers Guild San Francisco Bay Area Chapter (NLGSF) condemns Oakland Police (OPD) and Alameda County Sheriff’s Office (ACSO) violence, mass arrests and abuses against Occupy demonstrators at Saturday’s demonstration. Police violently attacked activists with chemical weapons, so called Less-Lethal munitions, and physical assaults. Hundreds were arrested unlawfully, without opportunity to disperse, and then detained for many hours on the street and then in buses, in stress positions, and without bathrooms, food or water. Once in jail, protesters faced inhumanely crowded conditions, abusive treatment and were denied access to legal counsel. Many remain unaccounted for, though certainly arrested and awaiting booking two days after being detained.

...

Once in Alameda County custody, the arrestees have been held for a prolonged period under horrendous conditions, often remaining overnight in holding areas with no beds or blankets. Some arrestees were apparently held in a shower room. NLGSF has received many reports of injured persons being denied medical care and arrestees denied access to necessary medications. Women arrestees were forced to give urine samples in front of male officers, ostensibly for pregnancy testing.

Bolds mine.