A Baby in the Briefcase! Look What Feminism Did!

Here's something for you to ponder:  The role of the Atlantic Monthly in the gender wars.  I first spotted it when Caitlin Flanagan ruled supreme about the desirability of returning to imaginary 1950s gender roles, it continued with articles which told uppity women that the sky is falling (no good men), that men are going extinct  (The End of Men) and it may have culminated with that blog post about how men are discriminated against in the US economy.  Though perhaps that was not the culmination.  I may be just oversensitive because I got called feminist scum in the comments.

But most recently the Atlantic seems to try to eat its cake and save it, too, by posting two at least quasi-feminist takes on the issues of women and work.  Well, on the issues of pretty well-off educated women and the kind of work they are trained for.

This post is about one of those two articles, Anne-Marie Slaughter's piece fetchingly titled
Why Women Still Can't Have It All

 Too bad that the whole message for those sailing past the actual article is in what I have shown you here because the article is much more complicated though still essentialist.   But that short message is the usual one the Atlantic Monthly has been sending to uppity women.

I encourage you to read Slaughter's article because she makes several good points.  But I also urge you to notice that the scenario she discusses involves living apart from her family during the weekdays while her husband takes care of their two young sons.  It is this arrangement that raises her doubts about whether women can have it all.  Of course any parent living apart from his or her family cannot have it all, given that the family is in another geographic location.   That's also true for the Philippine nannies who come to the US while leaving their own children at home.

I'm utterly sick of something that crops up in this context, so sick that I need to write about it before discussing any of the issues Slaughter brings up in her piece.

This is the way feminism, out of all social justice movements, is the only one blamed for anything that might go wrong in women's lives.  Advocate for  wider avenues for women?  If they are not as wide as we may have hoped, blame feminists, that lazy work crew which should have fixed the roads by now!

Urge women who want to have a career to pursue it?  You get told off for "having sold a fiction to younger women."

You know, I have read extensively in the literature of the second wave of feminism and I don't recall anyone promising that all women can have it all or  that there would be no resistance for entrenched sexism.  Such a book probably exists somewhere but the "have-it-all"  phrase probably came out of silly popularizations.  Do people really believe that anyone,  man or woman, can have it all?  To rephrase the idea that women, just as men, have a right to have both a family and meaningful work has now become "have it all?"  And nope, you cannot have it!

All that feminism-bashing!   Even Slaughter refers to that silly study about why women are presumably less happy now than when they were all tethered to their traditional roles!  That must be the fault of feminism so let's turn back the clock!

Be my guest.  Better still, turn it back to Afghanistan-time and see whether the work of past feminists had any value at all.

It's enough to make a goddess want to give up.

Now to the meat in the article:  Slaughter's own personal example of "no-she-couldn't-have-it-all" is an extreme case because she clearly is having it all with her academic job (if "having it all" means both meaningful full-time  work and time with the family).  But the points she makes are relevant for women in less high-flying occupations:  The US labor market is still organized on the implicit assumption that every worker has a wife at home to take care of everything.

This can  amounts to structural discrimination  when combined with the expected gender of those who are responsible for the running of the household, the care of minor children and the care of elderly and sick relatives.

Slaughter's essentialist argument is a bit trickier to handle.  She appears to state that had it been her husband who spent weeks in Washington D.C. while she continued working at Princeton and taking care of the children it all would have worked out better.  Her reason is that she felt she cared more than her husband did, in essence.   In the attached video she argues for a different essentialist explanation:  That with three males in the house her presence was needed to balance the testosterone.

What about the implications of this piece, then?  It has several good points, about the arrangements in the labor market and about the fact that most of us do really want to have both love and work, just as we need both food and water.   It mentions that work-home balance is an issue younger men are also confronted with because of the more involved fathers of the current generation.  And it urges for societal change, not just individual adaptations.

On the other hand, it's about a very privileged situation and some of the undertow is not helpful for most mothers in the labor force who need the paycheck and need good and affordable daycare.  Things like flexible work arrangements tend not to seep down in these kinds of organizations.  They are mostly helpful in the more powerful types of jobs.  And it's still true that the employers are not going to reward women for being family-centered,  rather the reverse, because that is seen as a signal about someone planning to quit.

Which means that the societal change she is looking for might be slow in coming.

Oh, I nearly forgot!  Do read Rebecca Traister's take on this.

Life Is Complicated

Sometimes I despair of people's desire for very simple solutions to complicated problems.  Life is complicated, human behavior is complicated and the causes for many phenomena are myriad and interacting.  Yet what most people want are the kinds of explanations which can be made into television soundbites or which can be understood immediately by a person who has no training in the field.

Hence the popularity of, say,  evolutionary psychology where my guesses about the past are as good as your guesses about the past, and neither one of us needs actual data from that imaginary past!  We can just make up simple explanations.  That's partly why those theories apply to so many.  Why they apply to misogynists goes without saying.

Take that Search For Simple Answers to politics and you get Ron Paul believing in some weird god of free markets who will take care of everything for him.  He's not the only politician or public person who loves Simple-But-Wrong-Answers, and they are not all on the right side of the political aisle.  But that search for simplicity appears to be almost universal.  And very wrong.

I've been following the obesity debates and the same thing is going on there:  The Search For One Cause.  It's much more likely that the causes are many and that they, once again, interact, though I'm willing to bet quite a lot that the most important part of that puzzle is some change in the practices of the food industry, sometime before 1980s.  Other causes do, however, also exist.  But the change in extreme obesity levels, in particular, was too fast to be caused purely by lifestyle changes and the shape of obesity itself looks to me to have changed as well.  Fat deposits on the sides, even in an otherwise thin person, for instance.

The obesity debate is also interesting in revealing that unpleasant moralizing side of Americans (and probably people in general).  If only we all had enough willpower we'd all be slim and supple!  This turns the focus to purely individual solutions, purely individual failings and leaves the societal changes and frameworks unaffected.   Never mind that the food industry advertises soft drinks all the time!  Never mind that exercise has been cut in schools, that fears of pederasts make middle-class parents keep their children indoors and that the environment really is too dangerous for poor children to play outside.  Never mind that healthy food is expensive and bad food is cheap.  It's all about willpower and even that is assumed to be something you can acquire if you are good enough.

OK, that aside was more like a rant.  It's a hot day here at Snakepit Inc..

The Search For Simple Answers often has false duality built into it.  If the choices for an explanation are apples or bananas we tend to accept the initial setup and vote for either apples or bananas.  But what if the cause is in both?  Or in neither?   Public political debates are usually set up in those falsely dualistic terms and any attempt to explain that things are more complicated becomes inaudible.  For some weird reason.

Then take the reductio ad absurdum.  This is a common trick in political debates:  All liberals want to live off the government so that only conservatives end up working hard and paying all taxes.   All feminists want to kill unborn babies.

Substitute your own reverse argument for that one.  Then note how common such arguments are in political squabbling.  There's no good way of responding to those arguments, by the way, not because they were true (they are not) but because the debate would deteriorate into addressing an absurd argument.  Their point is not to present facts but to express loathing or hatred of the political opposition, and they work for that purpose.

The soundbite mode of public conversation makes things much worse, much more focused on short emotional comments.  Think of Twitter or television programs.  Television, in particular, may warp our understanding more than it aids it, given the short amount of time one has for presenting complex issues.  The one with the funniest soundbite wins!

Let's Drop Ron Paul Into A Jungle

Armed with a machete (I'm kinder than he would be) but nothing else.  That's the sort of world he desires, the sort of world he thinks we should all desire, the sort of world he believes he would thrive in.

Or so I surmise, from this:

During an interview on MSNBC Tuesday, Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul admitted that he got a monthly Social Security check, a program that he eventually wants to eliminate (video below).
Rep. Paul said: “I want young people to opt out of Social Security."
Guest Sam Stein then asked: “Are you on Social Security? Do you get Social Security checks?”
“I do,” Paul replied.
Stein countered: “You just told younger generations that they should wean themselves off of this social contract but you haven’t done it yourself. You’re not the wealthiest man in Congress, I’m not saying that. But you have enough means to take care of yourself in retirement. Shouldn’t you provide an example?”
Rep. Paul answered: “No. I think the programs are so designed, just as I use the post office too. I use government highways. I do that too. I use the banks. I use the Federal Reserve system. But that doesn’t mean you can’t work to remove this. The same way on Social Security, I am trying to make a transition. I personally don’t see any inconsistency in that."

Never mind the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do bit.  Focus on the fact that Paul wants to get rid of government highways,  the post office and Social Security.  He believes in some weird nonexistent god of "free" markets, without apparently ever having gotten far enough in Economics 101 to learn about externalities or  uncertainty or lack of information.   His "free" markets are a weird religious concept, defined by the Deus ex Machina of Greek plays.  The markets just work if you give them a chance! 

A guy who doesn't want federal highways really would be happy in that jungle.  He could cut his own roads, hang his own lanterns for street lights and fight the predators with that machete.

The video of his comments:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Mitch McConnell: Lying Accidentally On Purpose?

McConnell is the Senate Republican leader and he doesn't like the US tax system.  It's too progressive!

In an interview that aired on "CBS This Morning" Tuesday, the Kentucky Republican said he is ready to sit down with "this president or the next president" and have an animated discussion about the tax code to "reach a conclusion" that would bring down the ballooning U.S. deficit.
"Almost 70 percent of the federal revenue is provided by the top 10 percent of taxpayers now. Between 45 percent and 50 percent of Americans pay no income tax at all. We have an extraordinarily progressive tax code already. It is a mess and needs to be revisited again," McConnell said in the interview, taped Monday.

What McConnell wants is a less progressive system, one in which the tax burden of the poor will rise and the tax burden of the rich will drop.  This in a country where 400 people have more wealth  than 50% of all Americans.

Yes, I know wealth is not income.  I referred to the wealth comment because of the vast income and wealth inequalities in this country.  Given those inequalities, McConnell's comment is disgusting.

It's also false:

Claim: The top 10 percent wealthiest Americans pay 70 percent of federal income taxes.
Fact: This statistic presents a deeply misleading picture of the actual federal tax burden because (1) it fails to include payroll taxes, which every worker pays, and which fall disproportionately on the middle class, and (2) because it doesn’t reflect that high-income Americans earn a disproportionate share of income.    
    •    Payroll taxes account for 34 percent of federal revenues. They only apply to income earned on the job – not income from capital gains on investments, which make up a much greater share of the income of the top 10 percent. And payroll taxes for Social Security are capped at $106,800.
    •    For both of these reasons, wealthier Americans face a disproportionately lower burden from payroll taxes.   According to the independent, non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, the wealthiest 10 percent only pay 25 percent of all payroll taxes.
    •    Counting both payroll and income taxes, the top 10 percent only pay about 50 percent of that tax burden – not much larger than their share of our nation’s income (around 42 percent).
    •    The top 10 percent (households earning an average of nearly $400,000) has been earning a larger and larger share of our nation’s income. Twenty years ago, they accounted for 34 percent of our nation’s income. In the past twenty years – as tax rates have fallen for the highest earners – the income share of the top 10 percent has grown to 42 percent of our nation’s earnings.
    •    This aggregate figure also masks the fact that certain high-income Americans pay far less than others—and less than the middle class.  That’s what the Buffett Rule is meant to address.

Got it?  What the US has is a very mildly progressive tax system with respect to federal income taxes and payroll taxes combined.   It is NOT extraordinarily progressive, and if we add state taxes and sales taxes and all other taxes it comes out roughly proportional.

A small detour on the concepts of progressive, regressive and proportional taxes is in order.  A proportional tax means that the taxes you pay are the same percentage of each dollar you earn, whether you earn a lot or only a little.   The tax rate (e.g. 0.3 for a 30 cent tax on each dollar) remains constant.  This is the flat tax plan many conservatives support.  Sounds fair, right?  Everyone pays the same percentage!  But wait...

A regressive tax rate decreases as one's income rises.  The more you earn the less tax you pay on the last dollar you earned.  For instance, you might pay 30% on each dollar earned up to, say, 20,000 dollars a year, then 20% on each dollar earned for incomes between 20,000 and 50,000 and so on.  Regressive taxes are seldom sold that way because of their obvious unfairness.

A progressive tax rate increases as one's income rises.  The more you earn the more tax you pay on the last dollar you earned.  Thus, you might pay 20% on each dollar earned up to 20,000 dollars a year, then 30% on each dollar earned for incomes between 20,000 and 50,000 and so on.  Progressive tax systems are common in practice.

And there are good reasons for that.  The obvious one is that one cannot squeeze blood from a stone.  It is easier for the government to get money by going where the money is.  But there are deeper reasons for progressivity.

Consider someone very poor.  So poor that getting enough food and safe housing is extremely difficult.  If that person had to pay proportional income taxes those taxes could cause starvation.  To avoid that outcome, the government has two choices:  Either exempt the poor from paying income taxes (which turns the system into a  progressive one) or set the tax rate (percentage of taxes on each dollar) so low that even the poorest of the poor can afford to pay it.  The latter would mean a government which wouldn't be able to afford anything, not even the kinds of things drown-the-government-in-a-bathtub conservatives want it to be able to afford.

The deeper theoretical reason is this:  We want income taxes to be fair in terms of actual sacrifice.  But the sacrifice of, say,  an additional 100 dollars in taxes, is not the same for a person earning a million a year and a person earning 30,000 a year, because the value of money declines the more of it one has.  Just ask yourself under which income scenario you are more likely to take a cab when it rains.

What this means is that in order to have fair taxes (everybody contributes the same sacrifice) we need to have progressive taxes.  Probably even McConnell agrees on this.  But he regards the current, mildly progressive income tax system as extraordinarily progressive!

The real world tax system is messier than the simple case I've described, what with deductions and loopholes and so on.  Often (but not always)  those work to reduce progressivity.  For instance, to take advantage of the mortgage interest deduction you need to have enough money to get a loan from the bank for a house or an apartment, and only the wealthy can take advantage of intricate financial tax planning.

That's it from me, pretty much.  Except that I should note the reason why such a large percentage of taxpayers pay no federal income tax:  It's Republican tax cutting policies.  Those still cannot apply to only the rich so every such proposal has pushed more people into the group of non-payers.  Note, also that those Americans do pay other kinds of taxes, including payroll taxes.

Today's Picture

From the Michigan State Capitol, on the reading of the Vagina Monologues.  Thanks to knuckles for the link:

Credit.

This links to the Vagina Control Monologues ongoing in so many American states.

More On The Labor Market Sexism Study

After thinking about the results (i.e. that men with stay-at-home-wives have more sexist views of women in the labor force) I believer that the role of religion might be what drives the findings.  The researchers do mention religion in the preface to the study:

Finally, another benefit may be spiritual in nature since specific tenets within religious doctrines sometimes focus on gender relations and men’s and women’s roles for childrearing (Davis & Greenstein, 2009). So, for instance, a follower of a particular religion may feel more spiritually endowed by believing that it is women’s primary responsibility to nurture the children in her family (Hinckley, 1995).

They also indicate that they controlled for religion as a background variable but did not report the results on that due to space constraints.*  But the kind of religious impact I'm looking for would not be reflected in Christian/Jewish/Muslim etc. and not even in more specific denominational information.

What would be needed is knowledge about fundamental religions.  It's likely that fundamentalist believers would have stay-at-home-wives and it's also possible that those are the beliefs which drive the results.  After all, stating that one group exhibits more sexist opinions does not mean that all members of that group do so; simply that there are more such expressions in one group than in the other group.

This is just a guess and could be wrong.  But it might make sense to gather data on the fundamentalism axis of religions for a study of this type.

Are Men With Stay-At-Home-Wives More Sexist Than Men With Wives in the Labor Force?

An interesting study missed my snake-eye view in early June.  It's really a group of studies, done in different ways, but all on the same topic:  How married heterosexual men with stay-at-home wives differ from married heterosexual men who have wives who work (in the labor market)  when it comes to their views about women in the workforce.

Turns out that the former men express more sexist sentiments about women than the latter group of men.  The crucial question, for the researchers, is the chicken-and-egg problem:  Do men with more sexist values choose to have marriages where the wife stays at home?  Or does having a wife who stays at home make men more sexist in their opinions about women at work?

Perhaps both are true at the same time?

All the sub-studies are worth having a look at, but I'd like to address only one of them, the fourth study in the paper*:

Studies 1-3 focused on passive attitudes of men in different marriage structures toward women. In Study 4, we examined whether these men would actively engage in actions that would prevent women in the organization from advancing their careers. A second goal of the study was to examine our hypothesis using a sample of men who might be accustomed to making important decisions—managers. To this end, we conducted a controlled quasi- experiment using male managers that were married and working full time. In this study, we examined if compared to men from modern marriages, men from traditional marriages deny qualified female employees opportunities for promotion (Hypothesis 4).

I  picked this study for closer scrutiny because the subjects in it are managers which means that they might have real power to influence how their subordinates fare.  Also, this study is a pretty neat experiment.  It  consists of telling the 232 male accountants in the study that they are to judge the desirability of a candidate for a fictitious but fantastic MBA program (on full pay)  and a consecutive promotion at work.   The study subjects were asked to either recommend or not recommend the candidate for admission in the program, and they were told that accuracy is very important.

I bet you can guess what the researchers did next.  That's right.  Roughly half of those 232 accountants were given a package of information about a candidate called Diane Blake, the rest were given the same package but the candidate's name was David Blake.

I love these types of studies because they control for the possibility that David might, in fact, be the better candidate.  Given that the information about Diane is the same as the information about David, an unbiased assessment should find the two candidates equally good.

And indeed that is what happened in the current study.  A test attempting to establish whether the study subjects thought one person was more qualified than the other person showed no difference.  Thus, the study subjects did not attribute lower skills or ability to Diane or David.

Given this, it is fairly shocking that men with stay-at-home wives were significantly less likely to regard Diane a good fit with the MBA program than David.  Remember that this doesn't seem to arise from the kind of sexism where Diane is viewed as less able (even though she cannot be, given the same information for both candidates).

So what's going on here?   It could be that the men with stay-at-home wives believed that the fictitious Diane would be more likely to quit for family reasons than the fictitious David.  But as both pretend-people already  had 25 years of work experience this seems unlikely to be the main explanation.

Whatever the proper explanation,  this study suggests that managers with certain gender values could harm the career prospects of women.  Those values correlate with having what the researchers call "a traditional marriage."
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*Ever since I got the Mac I've had trouble with linking to pdf articles.  Let me know where I can find the link, please.  Also note that the methods in this paper come across as somewhat basic (off the statistics textbook) to me.  This is less of a problem because the different studies use different methods.  Thus, the findings are unlikely to be caused by simple methodological problems.  But one should be careful about not imputing too much power to the findings.

A Guest Post by Anna: A Feminist Literary Canon, Part Three: 1900-1950

Adeline Virginia Woolf (1882 –1941) was an English writer, considered one of the most important modernist  literary figures of the twentieth century. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925): Orlando: A Biography (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own.  (1929).  

Mrs. Dalloway concerns Clarissa Dalloway, a woman in post-WW1 England, in a single day in her life. Clarissa at first appears to be a typical housewife, though she finds ways to express herself in the parties she throws, and of course her thoughts find expression in the novel itself, challenging the idea that women do not think much on matters other than stereotypical ones. The novel also brings up homosexuality in the fact that Clarissa recalls being very attracted to her old friend Sally Seton, but “had not the option” to be with her; Virginia Woolf herself had several same-sex relationships, though she was married. The novel eventually reveals that Sally Seton is now married and has become a typical housewife, far from the independent figure she once was.  

Orlando: A Biography concerns an immortal man who magically changes sex. Despite the restrictions on women at the time (which the book acknowledges) the character Orlando concludes, “Praise God I’m a woman!” 

 A Room of One's Own is a nonfiction essay arguing for both literal and figurative space for women writers. It most famously declares that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,” noting that few women in the past did, so their failure to produce great literature should not be considered a failure of genius. It also discusses the low opinion in which women’s intellect and writing was often held, and their lack of access to education; Woolf herself was not sent to college, though her brothers were.

Mrs. Dalloway can be read in English here.

Orlando: A Biography can be read in English here.

A Room of One's Own can be read in English here.

Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir, often shortened to Simone de Beauvoir (1908 –1986), was a French existentialist philosopher, public intellectual, political activist, feminist theorist and social theorist.  

She is now best known for her metaphysical novels, including She Came to Stay and The Mandarins, and for her 1949 treatise The Second Sex, a detailed analysis of women's oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism. 

Beauvoir researched and wrote the book in about 14 months. It denounces Christianity as oppressive of women, and it is worth noting that the Vatican placed it on its List of Prohibited Books.In the first volume, in addition to denouncing Christianity, she rejects Freud – then very much in vogue – details the history of women’s oppression and accomplishments, and details myths against women (such as "It is an indisputable fact that meat goes bad when touched by menstruating women." This particular myth appeared in no less than the British Medical Journal, as late as 1878.) 

In the second volume Beauvoir discusses the then-contemporary oppression of women, for example in confining her to marriage and motherhood. She concludes by wishing for a time in which “women raised and educated exactly like men would work under the same conditions and for the same salaries; erotic freedom would be accepted by custom, but the sexual act would no longer be considered a remunerable "service"; women would be obliged to provide another livelihood [other than homemaker] for themselves; marriage would be based on a free engagement that the spouses could break when they wanted to; motherhood would be freely chosen—that is, birth control and abortion would be allowed—and in return all mothers and their children would be given the same rights; maternity leave would be paid for by the society that would have responsibility for the children, which does not mean that they would be taken from their parents but that they would not be abandoned to them.”

The Second Sex helped to inspire subsequent feminist arguments against psychoanalysis, including those of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, and Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch. However, it should be noted that the 1953 English translation of The Second Sex, often reissued, was greatly flawed and omitted a great deal of the text. A more accurate and unabridged translation into English, translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevalier, was at last published in 2009 and is widely available.
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For earlier posts in this series:  Part I is here, Part II here.
 

A Lullaby

This is a Carelian/Karelian folk song





If I understand it correctly, it was originally sung by Larin Paraske, a most interesting woman who could easily have been forgotten had she not happened to be sought out by a collector of folk songs and traditional poetry.

According to Wikipedia (her whole bio is well worth reading):

Larin Paraske (December 27, 1833–January 3, 1904) was an Izhorian^[1] oral poet. She is considered a key figure in Finnish folk poetry and has been called the "Finnish Mnemosyne".^[2] Her frequent listeners included several romantic nationalist artists, such as Jean Sibelius, seeking inspiration from her interpretations of Kalevala, an epic poem compiled from Finnish folklore by Elias Lönnrot.^[3]
Paraske could recite over 32,000 verses of poetry, which made her an important source for Karelian culture.^[4] Her poems were written down by Adolf Neovius in the 1880s, and after several years of work, approximately 1200 poems, 1750 proverbs and 336 riddles were documented, along with several Finnic lamentations known as itkuvirsi, performed by crying and sobbing.^[5]

The Vagina Control Monologues

Remember this, from yesterday?

State Reps. Lisa Brown, D-West Bloomfield, and Barb Byrum, D-Onondaga, were told today that they wouldn’t be recognized to publicly speak on any matters before the House because of comments they made Wednesday during an emotional debate on a bill that puts new restrictions on abortion providers.
Brown, who voted against the legislation, told supporters of the bill, “I’m flattered you’re all so concerned about my vagina. But no means no.”

If all this wasn't on a very serious attempt to control who controls reproduction it would be necessary to point out that the Michigan Republicans are giving us vagina-control monologues but the term itself cannot be mentioned.  It's not decorous or mature to mention that what these forced birthers wish to control is intimately tied to the control of vaginas and the control of women.

My Twitter machine has gone crazy on the theme of vaginas.  It may well be that ridicule is the best weapon in this particular case.  At the same time, the people who don't want vaginas mentioned but do want to control them are deadly serious about their business.

On Tipped Female Workers

Getting your earnings mostly from tips is the lot of many in service industries.  It turns out that the usual gender gap in wages can be found in those industries, too:

"The sub-minimum wage hits women hard because 72.9 percent of tipped workers are women compared to less than half the overall labor force," says Allegretto, co-chair of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment of the University of California, Berkeley. "The federal tipped minimum wage was originally 50 percent of the regular minimum wage, but it has eroded over time to just 29.4 percent of the current minimum wage for all workers because it has been frozen since 1991 unlike the federal minimum wage, which was raised in 2007."

Allegretto's research shows that female tipped workers, overall, average 50 cents less per hour than their male counterparts because they are employed in lower paying sectors, such as food service and home health.
Among wait staff, the wage gap is even worse: women earn 83 cents less per hour than do men because they are more likely to be employed by fast food restaurants than fine dining establishments.

...

Rep. Donna Edwards, a Maryland Democrat, introduced a bill in 2009 that would have increased the tipped minimum wage to 70 percent of the regular minimum wage by 2012. Opposition by Republicans and the restaurant and hospitality industry, which employs the largest number of tipped workers, stymied the bill. Edwards plans to reintroduce the bill this spring.
But advocates are looking past Congress and pinning more hope on the states, many of which have stepped ahead of federal lawmakers.
Over half the states and the District of Columbia have tipped credits that are higher than the federal standard. These range from $2.33 an hour in Wisconsin to $7 in Hawaii.
Washington is one of seven states that has no tipped credit law. Employees' tips are excluded from the calculation, so employers pay the state's full minimum wage, $9.04 an hour, the highest in the nation.

Thus, a hike in the basic wages for those jobs would help women.

This is an interesting example of the way the gender gap in wages often appears:  Women tend to be congregated in the jobs which pay less within each industry.

The reasons for this are likely to be many but at least one audit study in Philadelphia in the 1990s found that when actors pretending to have the same work experience and other credentials auditioned for server jobs men got better offers than women.  Discrimination, in other words, cannot be ruled out as one of the causes for earnings differentials.

Note, also, that the customers can decide how much each worker is worth.  That may be OK or not, depending on the reasons the customers have for tipping someone or not tipping someone.

Meanwhile, in Michigan, Only Anti-Woman Politicians May Speak

About this new Michigan House bill:

The House bill, passed on a 70-39 vote, provides for sweeping new regulations and insurance requirements for abortion providers, makes it a crime to coerce a woman into having an abortion and regulates the disposal of fetal remains. It won’t be taken up in the state Senate until at least September. A companion bill that would have outlawed abortions past 20 weeks, with only an exception to save the life of the mother, was tabled by the House.

When two Democratic women wanted to point out that this legislation is all about controlling women, what happened?  This:

State Reps. Lisa Brown, D-West Bloomfield, and Barb Byrum, D-Onondaga, were told today that they wouldn’t be recognized to publicly speak on any matters before the House because of comments they made Wednesday during an emotional debate on a bill that puts new restrictions on abortion providers.
Brown, who voted against the legislation, told supporters of the bill, “I’m flattered you’re all so concerned about my vagina. But no means no.”
And Byrum was gaveled out of order after she protested when she wasn’t allowed to speak on her amendment to the bill that would have required proof of a medical emergency or that a man’s life was in danger before a doctor could perform a vasectomy.
Today was the last day of session for the House before it takes a long summer break.

You can watch a video about this on the linked site.

From that article:

Ari Adler, spokesman for Speaker of the House Jase Bolger, R-Marshall, said it was the prerogative of Majority Floor Leader Jim Stamas, R-Midland, to maintain order and decorum during session of the House.
They “will not be recognized to speak on the House floor today after being gaveled down for their comments and actions yesterday that failed to maintain the decorum of the House of Representatives,” Adler said.
“House Republicans often go beyond simply allowing debate by welcoming open and passionate discussion of the issues before this chamber,” he added. “The only way we can continue doing so, however, is to ensure that the proper level of maturity and civility are maintained on the House floor.”

Discussing vaginas or men's reproductive health issues is not decorous or ladylike but discussing how to make sure that all women must give birth, whether they wish or not, is decorous and mature.  I get it.

The-God-Made-Me-Do-It Initiative Failed in North Dakota

North Dakotans voted down a law intended to reflect the desires of conservative Catholics:

Now, another conservative state has delivered a huge win in the effort to keep religious ideology out of personal medical decisions. Yesterday, by a margin of 69 66 percent to 34 percent, voters in North Dakota could not have been clearer in rejecting Measure 3, a ballot initiative promoted by, among others, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishop (USCCB), whose Orwellian campaign to promote "religious freedom" actually seeks to impose strict Catholic doctrine on everyone, no matter their professed religious affiliation (or lack thereof), via state and federal law. An editorial on Measure 3 in the North Dakota news site, Inforum, called the effort by the USCCB to pass it "an ecclesiastical mugging."
Laws such as Measure 3 are being pursued by religious fundamentalists throughout the country, and they have profound implications for the health and rights of individuals, and for public health. Measure 3, for example, would have allowed physicians, nurses, and pharmacists to refuse to provide care and medication which "conflicts with their religious beliefs," and would have extended "conscience protections" to virtually any employee of any medical facility, ensuring that one reilgious belief could prevail over another in the realm of health care. Measure 3, according to NARAL Pro-Choice America, would also have allowed "a man to claim that domestic-violence and child-abuse laws don’t apply to him because his religion tells him he has the right to discipline his wife and children as he sees fit," and would have allowed employers to use their personal religious beliefs to discriminate against their female employees by denying contraceptive coverage under insurance plans.

I haven't checked if the law actually would have protected a child abuser from punishment if that person gave religious grounds for beating a child.  But it seems to be the case:

Planned Parenthood and other abortion-rights groups praised the defeat of a North Dakota ballot measure on religious freedom that critics said would create a legal haven for law-breakers. 

Sixty-four percent voted down "Measure 3" on Tuesday, according to reports. It would have amended the state constitution to include an explicit protection for religious liberty against government interference. 

The president of the region's Planned Parenthood Action Fund warned that Measure 3 would have undercut state laws against child abuse, domestic violence and workplace discrimination by allowing North Dakotans to justify actions that do harm on religious grounds.

Let's not forget that initiatives like this one are part of the Catholic Church's war against women, at least to the extent that they firmly support them.

 

My Migraines

Have a caretaker role.  Echidne goes traveling, for instance, visits lots of people, some of them fierce wingnuts, eats lots of unfamiliar food (McDonald's), sleeps in weird beds, has conversations about the Christian god, not pleasant ones, and is late for several travel connections.

Echidne then returns to the Snakepit Inc., reads her e-mail, averts four malware attempts, finds that all the milk is now so sour it's dancing the f**k-you-dance in the fridge while the vegetables shrivel in fear.  She returns to her computer and accidentally-on-purpose reads one of those women-are-utter-shit articles which causes her to stay awake a total of thirty hours.

Mother Migraine then shakes her wise head and presses her painful fingers on Echidne's clammy forehead.  A blessed pain!  Giving her twenty-four hours of sweet sleep.

What do you think of that theory about Pain And Us?

The Icelandish Miracle

I bet you never read that before!  There has been the Irish miracle, of course, but not an Icelandish miracle.  Krugman reminds us that the latter also exists.

It's worth pondering why Iceland gets so little credit for its good survival of the crash or why we are supposed to discount that survival.  One of the first comments to Krugman's post argued that such a tiny, tiny country can teach the US nothing.  But if anything, a tiny country should not have been able to surf the economic horrors that well but should be found among the first that were drowned.

Here are my guesses:  As a very rough cartoon, the world's political powers now are shared between extreme capitalists and extreme fundamentalists.  The rest of us consist of the flock of sheep to be shepherded in one direction or the other.  We may baah miserably on our blogs and around our formica kitchen tables (to go all Brooksian here)  but we have no real power at all.

Except, for some reason, in Iceland where we the sheep were able to elect an Angry Sheep government.  Why that succeeded there but not elsewhere is fascinating.  Perhaps a very small country is harder to take over by the monied powers?  Everybody knows everybody else and one's ethical reputation cannot be hidden.  Or perhaps the fishy eyes of the very wealthy are not aimed at Iceland because a small country doesn't have very much to steal?

Then there are the political traditions.  The Nordic countries in Europe, in general, have not gone for political corruption and graft in the same way the countries in the south of Europe have.  Voters have less tolerance with bad behavior from their politicians or their capitalists.  Voters are more tied into the system.  The reasons for that are not clear to me but it is encouraging that the types of solutions I envisage indeed are possible, even if that is the case only in one very cold country.

And yes, women in Iceland are also tied into the system and aware of what is going on.

Write-Like-David-Brooks Day

Because I'm bored with dissecting his columns.

In the past  real Murkans were green and had leaves.  Now there are no leaves and the heartland of Murka is bare of trees and pollen.  The new baldness is caused by the vulgarity of Murkans who shave their heads and use foundation over all the greenery.  The government makes this so much worse by selling combs and skull polish, and the liberal elites of the two coasts hide their own leaves in the ivory towers which smell of marijuana.  Churches are the answer and they cost taxpayers nothing.


But wherever honest and real Murkans gather around their formica kitchen tables,   popcorn is still the national pastime and charity the way to finance war and peace alike.  Let us not steal from the future generations.  Let us steal from the present generation.

Today's Idiotic Evo-Psycho Popularization

It's in Finnish, and by "an evolution researcher" (a new euphemism for Evolutionary Psychologists of the weird type, I think).  He states that he has studied the horrible effects of the contraceptive pill on women and perhaps he has.  But here are a few of the quotes:

Ehkäisypillerillä on todettu olevan merkittäviä vaikutuksia parinvalintaan. Ehkäisypillerien vaikutuksia tutkinut Turun yliopiston evoluutiotutkija Markus Rantala kertoo Uudelle Suomelle, millaisia ongelmia ehkäisypillerit voivat aiheuttaa.
- Kaikki mikä muuttaa naisen hormonitasoa, sotkee parinvalintaa. Ehkäisypillerit vaikuttavat siihen, miten naiset valikovat parin ja miltä nainen näyttää. Se muuttaa koko systeemin, Rantala sanoo.

Translation:

The contraceptive pill has been found to have significant effects on mate selection.  Markus Rantala, a Turku university evolution researcher who has studied the effects of the pill,  tells Uusi Suomi  about its possible problems.

All which affects a woman's hormonal levels messes up mate selection.  The contraceptive pill has an impact on how women select their partners and what a woman looks like.  It changes the whole system, Rantala says.

And:

2. Naisellisuus vaarassa kadota

Ehkäisypillerien lisäksi ja etenkin niiden kanssa käytettynä alkoholi vaikuttaa Rantalan mukaan naisen estrogeenitasoon ja sitä kautta seksuaalikäyttäytymiseen.

 Alkoholi estää testosteronin hajoamisen maksassa, mikä saa naisen testosteronitason nousemaan ja naiset käyttäytyvät miehekkäämmin ja haluavat seksiä. Se johtuu hormonien vaikutuksesta.

Translation:

2.  Femininity at risk of disappearing

In addition to the contraceptive pill, and especially when used with it,  alcohol, according to Rantala, affects a woman's estrogen levels and through that sexual behavior.

Alcohol prevents the dissolution of testosterone in the liver which raises the woman's testosterone levels and women behave in a more masculine manner and want sex.  This is a hormonal influence.

Did you get it?   An evolution researcher pontificates on the impact of the contraceptive pill AND on the impact of alcohol.  Alcohol is dangerous for femininity and makes women behave in a masculine manner.  Women even desire sex when drunk!  Besides, human mate selection is wholly based on female choice.  And of course men drunk are no different from men sober...

Elsewhere in the piece Rantala argues that when a woman has picked wrong while being on the pill the relationship will collapse once she comes off the pill and her natural hormones once again rule.  Then the guy she picked earlier will bore her.

I'm almost 100% certain that not a single study has been carried out on the effects of hormones on actual mate selection and on the dissolution of relationships in this context.  But never mind, Rantala tells us how things are.

And here's the loveliest quote of them all:

1970- ja 1980-luvulla ehkäisypillerit olivat Rantalan mukaan 100-kertaa voimakkaampia nykyisiin verrattuna.
– Voisi kuvitella, että naiset olivat naisellisemman näköisiä, ennen kuin olivat saaneet hillittömän estrogeenibuustin pillerin takia.

Translation:

During the 1970s and 1980s the contraceptive pill was according to Rantala hundred times stronger than today.

One might speculate that women looked more feminine before they received this humongous estrogen boost from the pill.

It's a beauty.  Women today are somehow affected by the pill use of some women in the 1970s and 1980s!

Why do I bother translating a silly little writeup in an obscure Finnish web newspaper?

Because THIS, my friends, is an example of evolutionary psychology in action!   This is science, which should remind us to remain critical of the label "science."  Some science is sewn together from various patches, collected from diverse places without any attempt for internal consistency.  The total is then flavored with personal opinions, biases and even misogyny.

I can't help adding one more quote and its translation:

Naiset tuoksuvat Rantalan mukaan vetävämmiltä lähellä ovulaatiota eli silloin kun he voivat tulla raskaaksi, kuten muutkin eläimet. Ovulaation puuttumisen takia ehkäisypillereitä syövä nainen menettää tämän tuoksuvaikutuksen.

Translation:

According to Rantala women smell most appealing close to ovulation, i.e., when they can become pregnant, as is the case with other animals.  Because a woman on the contraceptive pill does not ovulate she loses this scent effect.

Brilliant!  How did they manage to study how other male animals rank the scents of the females of the same species?  Did they offer, say, male guinea pigs, scratch-n-sniff squares soaked in various female guinea pig smells?   And should women really care about losing the scent effect which might make her more appealing to potential inseminators out there?

Have you noticed that EP practitioners always, always overstate their case?  There's a whiff of defensiveness in all that, perhaps.  But it works in reverse because I, at least, am used to researchers stating their conclusions carefully and with reservations and so on.  This does not happen with EP.  Rather, the conclusions are hammered into our eyes like square blocks into round holes.

Why Women Pitch Less In Some Fields of Journalism

This story (which I wrote about earlier) got me thinking about various reasons why women might pitch fewer stories in certain fields of journalism than men.  Possible theories abound, of course, from essentialist arguments to the impact of culture and upbringing.

But one which might not occur to you right away is the impact of expectations.  For instance, if 80% of those who write on economics are men, might it not be possible for a woman to feel (on some unconscious level) that the probability of a randomly selected male economics journalist to get published is 0.8 but that the similar probability for a female economics journalist is only 0.2 (based on the 20% figure among those published)?

That wouldn't be the correct way to think about the odds.  Still, if a certain field has many more men than women a feeling like that could be created.

Or put in other terms,  how do our unconscious thoughts explain the scarcity of women in some field?
Might they account for it by assuming that the bar is raised quite high for women?  Or  that whatever ideas and thoughts women themselves might have obviously cannot be good enough, given the small numbers of women that do get published?

I started thinking about this based on conversations where others argued that women hold themselves to much higher standards than they should, that women are hesitant to put themselves forward and so on.

It should be possible to test this idea by looking at any differences in pitching percentages between fields in which many women publish (the so-called pink opinions) and fields in which they do not.   If women, in general, have higher standards for themselves or  more reluctance to put themselves (or less interest in getting published) the problems should be comparable across different fields of journalism, right?

That's not a fool-proof test and could not prove or disprove alternative explanations.  Still, it might be an interesting study to carry out, especially if the alternative is to assume that women just are that way and should shape up.

On Religious Freedom And Women

When I first read that headline for Sarah Posner's post I couldn't help thinking that religious freedom for women is an oxymoron.  Too many religions tell women that they must not have freedom.

But the topic is not about what religions offer to women.  It's about the inherent conflict between religious freedom and women's rights.  What makes it inherent (for literalists, at least)  are all those writings on us wimminz in the holy books.

Sarah Posner discusses these issues with constitutional scholar Marie Ashe on Bloggingheads:

On my most recent Bloggingheads program, I spoke with constitutional scholar Marie Ashe of Suffolk University Law School, about the history of the American conception of, and Supreme Court jurisprudence on religious freedom and what that means for women. Ashe has argued in two law review articles that the more case law (and statutory law) has expanded the religious liberty of mainstream religion, the less it has expanded legal protections for women.

I haven't had time to watch the program but it should be interesting.

A Weekend Thought

A croissant right out of the oven is food for goddesses and gods (never mind the health problems).  But almost as soon as that something horrible happens to it (unless it's happily eaten first.)

A one-day-old croissant is no longer edible, given the calories it packs.  It's better not to wait too long before devouring it. 

Aren't you glad for that advice?

Remember Galileo Galilei And The Inquisition?

A milder and gentler form (no pyres as the ultimate punishment) is affecting one Sister Margaret A. Farley:

The Vatican’s doctrinal office on Monday denounced an American nun who taught Christian ethics at Yale Divinity School for a book that attempted to present a theological rationale for same-sex relationships, masturbation and remarriage after divorce.
The Vatican office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said that the book, “Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics,” by Sister Margaret A. Farley, was “not consistent with authentic Catholic theology,” and should not be used by Roman Catholics.
Sister Farley, a past president of the Catholic Theological Society of America and an award-winning scholar, responded in a statement: “I can only clarify that the book was not intended to be an expression of current official Catholic teaching, nor was it aimed specifically against this teaching. It is of a different genre altogether.”

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the Vatican's war against uppity women has clearly intensified in the recent months.

Meanwhile, in Michigan, Republicans Work on Forced Births

Just to remind you  that the previous election wasn't supposed to be about the so-called social issues, either, but about jobs, and still the Republican domination of states has given us so many new laws about abortion!  These people do seem obsessed by who it is who can decide on procreation.

Some background.

What is hilarious about all this is the juxtaposition of these two issues in the Republican platform:  NEVAH regulate markets!  ALWAYS regulate wimminz!  That's what freedom means.

Or corporations are people.  Women?  The jury is still out on that.

Good News From California

This:

By this time in November, three women of color could be filling what are arguably the top three positions of justice and law enforcement in California -- the same state that was the first to send two women to the U.S. Senate.

Oh how I hope that Massachusetts sends a  woman to the US Senate this year...  The first ever, sigh.

From Wisconsin, With Love

That's  how the Republicans who send me e-mails interpret the failed attempt to recall governor Scott Walker  (also known to me as one of the Nazgûls).  To paraphrase those e-mails: 

Voters have declared that they love the idea of killing the unions, of stripping teachers, nurses, fire fighters and police officers of those "exorbitant" middle-class benefits (to quote David Brooks!)

Voters love the Republican messages and come fall, Obama will be history and Romney (also known as R-Money) will govern this country along the lines governor Walker laid out. 

Which are feudal lines.  Perhaps that's why I cannot help seeing governor Walker as one of the Nazgûls and ALEC as the Mordor where Sauron rules, from Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings. 

There's something medieval about the Republican platform, what with its desire to remove any resistance to the modern equivalents of the feudal overlords:  The Corporations.  Unions are the enemies of corporations (because firms cannot get wages really low with unionized labor), and thus the command to the Nazgûls is to destroy unions.  The easiest place to begin with that is to attack government workers.

But never mind that.  I was going to write about the recall election and why Walker survived it.  Given that all the polls suggested he would survive it the outcome didn't come as any kind of surprise.  What remains is the analysis of what voters may have meant in their choices.

In that context this is an important point:

 A solid majority of Wisconsin voters – 60 percent – said recall elections are appropriate only in cases of “official misconduct,” according to the Edison exit poll. Some 27 percent said recalls are OK for any reason, and 10 percent said they’re never acceptable.

Perhaps the Wisconsin voters voted on the recall elections and not only on who should be the governor?  Worth keeping in mind.

On the other hand:

Exit polling showed 54 percent of Wisconsin voters approved of Walker’s performance on job creation and 52 percent approved of the recent changes to state law limiting the ability of government workers to collectively bargain over pay and benefits. Wisconsin’s unemployment rate, 6.7 percent in April, is below the national average.

Walker's performance on job creation has been pretty miserable.  But whatever.

On the third hand:

3. Public employee unions are not under water in Wisconsin. Slightly more than half in the exit poll - 51 percent - said they have a favorable opinion of unions for government workers, compared with 45 percent who viewed them unfavorably. That's even though 52 percent said they approved of Walker's sharp cutback of collective bargaining rights.

I'm running out of hands here* and am nowhere nearer to learning what the majority of Wisconsin voters  had in mind.

Neither can I tell if the voters understand all the consequences of that "sharp cutback of collective bargaining rights."  Those are not just potential tax-breaks for the voters but also reduce the lifetime incomes of government workers.  When earnings for a particular job are slashed fewer people will apply for that job and those who do apply will be, on average, less qualified.   Something to think about, for the future of Wisconsin schools, say.
 ------
* Walker was certainly also helped by the humongous amounts of money he got from his rich friends in the Republican Party, including those who explicitly stated they want to kill unions.

Jen Sorensen's Cartoon on Health Insurance For Free Lancers

Can be found here.  It's funny and it's also pertinent.

The Morning-After Pill Is Not Abortion

The New York Times has a long article on whether the morning-after pill "kills babies" (in forced-birth jargon) or not.   In other words, can the pill prevent a fertilized egg from attaching itself to the uterine lining?  Because that would be murder in the Brave New No Abortions World.

And the conclusion?  It is becoming pretty clear that the morning-after pill does not prevent implantation of fertilized egg:

Labels inside every box of morning-after pills, drugs widely used to prevent pregnancy after sex, say they may work by blocking fertilized eggs from implanting in a woman’s uterus. Respected medical authorities, including the National Institutes of Health and the Mayo Clinic, have said the same thing on their Web sites.
Such descriptions have become kindling in the fiery debate over abortion and contraception.
Based on the belief that a fertilized egg is a person, some religious groups and conservative politicians say disrupting a fertilized egg’s ability to attach to the uterus is abortion, “the moral equivalent of homicide,” as Dr. Donna Harrison, who directs research for the American Association of Pro-life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, put it. Mitt Romney recently called emergency contraceptives “abortive pills.” And two former Republican presidential candidates, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, have made similar statements.
But an examination by The New York Times has found that the federally approved labels and medical Web sites do not reflect what the science shows. Studies have not established that emergency contraceptive pills prevent fertilized eggs from implanting in the womb, leading scientists say. Rather, the pills delay ovulation, the release of eggs from ovaries that occurs before eggs are fertilized, and some pills also thicken cervical mucus so sperm have trouble swimming.

The article cites several studies:

Experts say implantation was likely placed on the label partly because daily birth control pills, some of which contain Plan B’s active ingredient, appear to alter the endometrium, the lining of the uterus into which fertilized eggs implant. Altering the endometrium has not been proven to interfere with implantation. But in any case, scientists say that unlike the accumulating doses of daily birth control pills, the one-shot dose in morning-after pills does not have time to affect the uterine lining.
“It takes time for an endometrium to change, for its cells to divide,” said Susan Wood, a biochemist who, shortly after Plan B’s approval became the F.D.A.’s top women’s health official and later resigned, frustrated with the delay in making the pill available without prescription.
Implantation also likely wound up on the label because of what Dr. Gemzell-Danielsson called wishful thinking by some scientists, who thought that if it could also block implantation, it would be even better at preventing pregnancy.
By 2002, studies produced evidence that Plan B did not interrupt implantation.
Abortion opponents were also becoming more vocal about emergency contraception. In 2005-6, when the F.D.A. reviewed Plan B, making it available without prescription for ages 17 and over, some opponents said it was an abortion-inducing drug. Plan B’s maker again asked that implantation be removed from the label.
Addressing the issue in a 2005 memorandum, Dr. Steven Galson, director of the F.D.A.’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, wrote that studies “conclusively demonstrate” that Plan B’s ability to block ovulation, is “responsible for most, if not all, instances in which emergency contraception prevents pregnancy.” But he also said that studies at that time could not exclude the possibility the pills impeded implantation “in a small percentage of women.” He declined a request to be interviewed.
By 2007, scientific consensus was building that morning-after pills did not block implantation. In one study using fertilized eggs that would have been discarded from fertility clinics, Dr. Gemzell-Danielsson found that adding Plan B in a dish did not prevent them from attaching to cells that line the uterus.
Later, in 2007, 2009 and 2010, researchers in Australia and Chile gave Plan B to women after determining with hormone tests which women had ovulated and which had not.
None who took the drug before ovulation became pregnant, underscoring how Plan B delays ovulation. Women who had ovulated became pregnant at the same rate as if they had taken no drug at all. In those cases, there were no difficulties with implantation, said one of the researchers, Gabriela Noé, at the Instituto Chileno de Medicina Reproductiva in Santiago. Dr. Blithe of the N.I.H., said, “No one can say that it works to inhibit implantation based on these data.”

Here's the question:  Will those labels inside the morning-after pill boxes be changed or not?  And if they won't be changed, why not?  Could it be ---  hmm  --- ideological considerations?


Speaking of those:

Critics said they wondered if scientists and government agencies were debunking an implantation effect because they support abortion rights. Jonathan Imbody, vice president of government relations for the Christian Medical Association, wrote on LifeNews.com, that the fact sheets contradict Plan B’s abortion-inducing nature and raise questions about “whether ideological considerations are driving these decisions.”

Funny, that.   I happen to think that  "ideological considerations" are certainly driving the opposition to these decisions and "ideological considerations" are at the bottom of the abortion-causes-breast-cancer hoax!  I did lots of research on the breast-cancer-hoax and the well-done studies on that are crystal-clear in disproving a causative link from abortion to increased rates of breast cancer.

Yet in some US states women who seek abortions must be told about a possible breast cancer risk.  And in at least one case a rape victim was denied access to the morning-after pill in one hospital because of beliefs driven by the idea that  the pill prevents implantation of the fertilized eggs.

Now that's what I call "ideological considerations" driving decisions, even when the scientific data proves otherwise!

On Jung, Freud and Evolutionary Psychology

Sometimes  I'm astonished that I'm still fairly normal (well, as normal as a blogger pretending to be a snake goddess can be), given the places I go to read crap.  But the other night I was short of reading for the bed and picked up a thirty-year-old biography of C.G. Jung.  His opinions on women (at least as interpreted by Vincent Brome, the biographer)  were, to use current terminology, very sexist.

This made me cheerful.  The views he (and Freud with his theory of penis envy!) advanced on women would never fly today, never!

The cheer was because the world is changing, for the better, at least in some nooks and crannies (not including the comments sections of any articles about gender).

At the same time,  it is frightening to think how easy sexism could be and still is and  how smoothly Jung's subjective statements about women translated into something viewed as holy theory.

I see a reflection of this in the current EP (the anti-woman type of evolutionary psychology).  One day, I hope, those writings will appear as preposterous to others as Jung's statements about the two types* of women (either mother/wife or a professional collaborator/sexual partner for the man) seem to me.**

All those theories --  Freudian, Jungian and EP -- share the pseudo-science aspect:  They are not potentially falsifiable by actual experiments but defeat any such attempt.


----
*The list of types of women was later expanded by one of Jung's female collaborator to four.
**Though probably by then some brand-new way of keeping misogyny current in psychology will have been invented.  

The Real Problem: Not Lack of Jobs But Debt Indulgence!

David Brooks' most recent column is priceless, priceless, I say.   He begins as is his wont:  By stating an assertion as a fact and by shrouding it in such Republican-speech that any meaning it might have has just become impossible to spot:

Every generation has an incentive to borrow money from the future to spend on itself. But, until ours, no generation of Americans has done it to the same extent. Why?
A huge reason is that earlier generations were insecure. They lived without modern medicine, without modern technology and without modern welfare states. They lived one illness, one drought and one recession away from catastrophe. They developed a moral abhorrence about things like excessive debt, which would further magnify their vulnerability.
Recently, life has become better and more secure. But the aversion to debt has diminished amid the progress. Credit card companies seduced people into borrowing more. Politicians found that they could buy votes with borrowed money. People became more comfortable with red ink.
Today we are living in an era of indebtedness. Over the past several years, society has oscillated ever more wildly though three debt-fueled bubbles. First, there was the dot-com bubble. Then, in 2008, the mortgage-finance bubble. Now, we are living in the fiscal bubble.

Note how actual economic and political facts are noticeable by their absence?  All we are told is that people no longer fear dying in a debtor's prison and that's the reason for the dot-com and housing bubbles!  A  bit more suffering would do us all  good!  Except for the one percent, Brooks' own class.

Though given his arguments the rich should have always been borrowing far too much.  After all, they didn't face that survival scarcity even in the golden olden days.

Those paragraphs make a mash out of many things.  Private debt is mashed together with government spending, and the latter is equated with government debt.  Debt is increasing only because too much is spent.   What is completely absent in that quote are taxes:  The reluctance of the rich to pay for the government expenditures.  And although I'm not a historian I know that debt wasn't uncommon in the past though it was always more available for the wealthy than for the poor.

So.  Brooks has explained to us that the federal deficit is the fault of our own bad habits but not the fault of our bad habits of not wanting to pay taxes.  He then goes on to explain why he admires Scott Walker of Wisconsin, the governor with the worst job record of any governor last year, the governor who single-handedly is killing public unions and turning teaching into a minimum wage job.

Granted, Brooks would have preferred Walker not to reveal his allegiance to Sauron so very completely:

Today voters in Wisconsin go to the polls to decide whether to recall Gov. Scott Walker. I’m not a complete fan of the way Walker went about reducing debt. In an age of tough choices, one bedrock principle should be: We’re all in this together. If you are going to cut from the opposing party’s interest groups, you should also cut from some of your own. That’s how you build trust and sustain progress, one administration to the next.
Walker didn’t do that. He just sliced Democrats. But, in the real world, we don’t get to choose perfect test cases. And Walker did at least take on entrenched interest groups. He did turn a $3.6 billion deficit into a $150 million surplus, albeit with the help of a tax collection surge. He did make it possible for willing school districts to save money on health insurance so they could spend it on students.
Walker’s method was obnoxious, but if he is recalled that will send a broader message, with effects far beyond Wisconsin. It will be a signal that voters are, indeed, unwilling to tolerate tough decisions to reduce debt. In Washington and in state capitals, it will confirm the view that voters don’t really care about red ink. It will remove any hope this country might have of avoiding a fiscal catastrophe.

I love the term "entrenched interest groups!"  Let's apply that to the CEOs of the financial industry.  Let's apply that to the Catholic Church.  Let's apply that to people like David Brooks, too!

I also love "fiscal catastrophe!"  Brooks never worried about that during the eight years of reckless spending by one George Walker Bush.

But this is the very best part of the column, the part where the real Brooks shines through like a pearl:

A vote to keep Walker won’t be an antiunion vote. It will be a vote against any special interest that seeks to preserve exorbitant middle-class benefits at the expense of the public good.

"Exorbitant" middle class benefits?  How can they be exorbitant and still keep the receivers only in the middle class?  Brooks comes across as an Uncle Scrooge here, unwilling to have teachers and fire fighters and police officers retire without having to work as greeters at the nearest Walmart.

Indeed, he comes across as one of those who'd like the country to look like a Banana Republic.

Go Read Athenae

She writes about what is happening in Wisconsin and ultimately all over the so-called Western Civilization.  She writes from the head and the heart and the guts, too.

The Woman Problem of The Catholic Church

The Catholic Church has gone after the uppity "radical feminist" nuns and it has gone after the Girl Scouts, too.   This is beginning to look like a trend

Which began fifteen-or-so centuries ago, sigh.

Religion can be one of the three legs of the stool of women's oppression and it mostly has been.  Indeed, the right to subjugate women might be the main attraction of the more extremist fundamentalist screeds to some of the faithful.  This is so at least  in Christianity, in Judaism, in Islam and in Hinduism.

The current religious wars against women are nasty.  In Islam they aim to erase the existence of women outside the home.  In Catholicism they produce heinous ethical judgements:

Declaring that "life must always be protected", a senior Vatican cleric has defended the Catholic Church's decision to excommunicate the mother and doctors of a nine-year-old rape victim who had a life-saving abortion in Brazil.
Cardinal Giovanni Batista Re, who heads the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, told reporters that although the girl fell pregnant after apparently being abused by her stepfather, her twins had, "the right to live, and could not be eliminated".

In an interview with the Italian newspaper, La Stampa, the cardinal added: "It is a sad case but the real problem is that the twins conceived were two innocent persons. Life must always be protected."
 

...

Even the President, Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva, has waded into the row. "As a Christian and a Catholic, I deeply regret that a bishop of the Catholic Church has such a conservative attitude," he said "The doctors did what had to be done: save the life of a girl of nine years old. In this case, the medical profession was more right than the Church."

The bolds are mine.

What drives this callousness in so many religions?  The need to control the production of the next generation?  The need to offer  poor men something:  The right to rule over their wives and daughters? 

Men Invented The Internet So...

A New York Times article about a sex discrimination case in Silicon Valley opens with this paragraph:

MEN invented the Internet. And not just any men. Men with pocket protectors. Men who idolized Mr. Spock and cried when Steve Jobs died. Nerds. Geeks. Give them their due. Without men, we would never know what our friends were doing five minutes ago.
But are these men trapped in the past even as they create the future?

And history has been written!   Now we know who invented the Internet.  It was not the US government, it was not certain named individuals.  It was the menz!  With pocket protectors.

What an odd beginning for a piece about possible sexual harassment.  It's almost as if the ground is laid to suggest that men have the right to sexually harass women if those women dare to enter their tree house!  Almost as if the Internet belongs to men because they invented it and that should be taken into account in any discussion of a sexual harassment suit.  Of course those men who were involved in the development of the Internet are not the men currently working in the firm the article discusses ("But are these men trapped in the past even as they create the future?")

Never mind that.  Note how that quoted paragraph sweeps away all women who have ever worked in the field.   Xeni Jardin's righteously angry response:

You guys, ladies suck at technology and the New York Times is ON IT.
Radia "Mother of the Internet" Perlman and the ghosts of RADM Grace Hopper, Ada Lovelace and every woman who worked in technology for the past 150 years frown upon you, sir. Women may have been invisible, but the work we did laid the groundwork for more visible advancements now credited to more famous men.

The creators of the Internet have been mostly male (in numbers) but not universally so.   In any case, the inventors were specific individuals and the role of the US government was considerable in all that.  But that's not the reason why that opening paragraph is a bit like being tickled in the belly with a dagger.  It's what Jardin said in her rant:

You guys, ladies suck at technology and the New York Times is ON IT.

Add the stereotype threat to that and you see why it might be important not to sweep away every single vagina-human just to create a good feeling among the brotherhood of geeks.
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Added later:  More from Deanna and Soraya.

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