From The Republican Weirdness Files

I don't usually do this kind of writing but it seems deserved,  what with the recent Republican platform's Personhood Amendment (which, to me, appears to have the power to ban abortion even when the aquarium pregnant woman will die if the pregnancy is continued) and that National Review story (see post below) about how cruel age is to women and how cruel not being allowed to be the boss is to men and how the value of a man is in how many sons he sires and how daughters are truly icky and a sign that a man is not a Real Alpha Male.

But given the way all this seems to have turned our public conversation on that Pesky Woman Question into ponderings about whether a raped woman can ever conceive and whether Rapists' Fatherhood Rights are also going to be on the Republican Platform, I think it's time to cast a sharp light on some other aspects of the fringes of that party.  Though it does appear, these days, to consist mostly of weird fringe elements, rich old white men being one of those (though of course the one in power).

So here it goes:  The weirder news about Republicans in this country.

First,  in New Hampshire a  Republican candidate for Hillsborough County Sheriff Frank Szabo promises to use lethal force against doctors who perform abortions.  To uphold the Constitution, you know:

In the face of criticism from both New Hampshire Democrats and high-ranking members of his own party, Republican candidate for Hillsborough County Sheriff Frank Szabo is not backing off his comments that deadly force is an appropriate means to prevent abortion.
"Just because a law is on the books does not mean that it's lawful," said Szabo. "I talk about the difference of 'legal' and 'lawful.' It used to be legal to own slaves, but that didn't make it lawful. It used to be legal to restrict someone of color to the back of bus ... Just because a piece of legislation says it's legal to murder the unborn doesn't make it lawful."
Szabo contends it's the responsibility of the sheriff to protect the lives, property and citizens of the country and the state.
"The big issue here is the sheriff is supposed to protect all of its citizens," he said. "Just because a person is not born yet doesn't mean he or she shouldn't have same level of protection. Someone needs to stand up and tell federal and state officials they're wrong if it's in the best interest of citizens ... but my main point is deadly force is always a last resort."

Some Republican leaders, at least, have disowned Frank Zabo.

Second, in Lubbock County, Texas, a judge called Tom Head  worries about how he is going to cope with the violent revolution which would inevitably result if Obama gets a second term:

Judge Tom Head and Commissioner Mark Heinrich told the station this week that a 1.7 cent tax increase for the next fiscal year was necessary to prepare for many contingencies, including Obama's re-election. He also mentioned to the station that the county needs a pay increase is needed for the district attorney's office and more funds to pay for more sheriff's office deputies.
"He's going to try to hand over the sovereignty of the United States to the (United Nations), and what is going to happen when that happens?," Head asked the station during a Monday interview. "I'm thinking the worst. Civil unrest, civil disobedience, civil war maybe. And we're not just talking a few riots here and demonstrations, we're talking Lexington, Concord, take up arms and get rid of the guy."

Third, and this is really below the belt, a  masturbation story having to do with an anti-gay Republican pastor in New Orleans.  This story matters, because the pastor, Grant Storms, disapproves of the consensual sexuality of gays and lesbians:

A prominent Louisiana-based Christian pastor known for his anti-gay stance was convicted of obscenity yesterday after being caught masturbating at a public park near a children's playground last year.
As NOLA.com reports, Rev. Grant Storm was sentenced to three years' probation after the incident in Lafreniere Park. Storm is quoted as calling public masturbation "a thrill" in his confession. However, despite an eyewitness account cited by the New Orleans Times-Picayune which stated that 55-year-old pastor had been "looking at the playground area that contained children playing, with his zipper down" at the time of his arrest, authorities denied any suspicions that he was a pedophile.

I could go on.  These are low-hanging fruit, true, and I almost always leave them alone.  But when the higher fruit consist of Akin and Ryan and their other brothers-of-heart there's not that much difference in what I pick.

Any point to this post?  Perhaps to show you that I could do this.  But mostly to point out that it's someone else who sets the topics for public debates in this country, and that someone else is far too often a Republican game lord.  Thus we now discuss whether women who have been raped should have the right to an abortion if they so wish.  We actually discuss which exceptions to the abortion bans are possible!

And The Next Version of the Republican War On Women

The Republicans really do fight a war against women and all things with female cooties!  I find this truly fascinating!  Well, not the war on women but that the Republican women go along with it.  Perhaps the ability to ignore un-ladylike things is an evolutionary adaptation in them?

Just kidding.  I've been reading a National Review article on essentially why having daughters is icky and horrible and why having sons shows that one is a successful man.  The background is probably Kanazawa's work which has been shown to be false.  https://www.nationalreview.com/nrd/articles/313504/boss

What do women want? The conventional biological wisdom is that men select mates for fertility, while women select for status — thus the commonness of younger women’s pairing with well-established older men but the rarity of the converse. The Demi Moore–Ashton Kutcher model is an exception — the only 40-year-old woman Jack Nicholson has ever seen naked is Kathy Bates in that horrific hot-tub scene. Age is cruel to women, and subordination is cruel to men. Ellen Kullman is a very pretty woman, but at 56 years of age she probably would not turn a lot of heads in a college bar, and the fact that she is the chairman and CEO of Dupont isn’t going to change that.
It’s a good thing Mitt Romney doesn’t hang out in college bars.
You want off-the-charts status? Check out the curriculum vitae of one Willard M. Romney: $200 million in the bank (and a hell of a lot more if he didn’t give so much away), apex alpha executive, CEO, chairman of the board, governor, bishop, boss of everything he’s ever touched. Son of the same, father of more. It is a curious scientific fact (explained in evolutionary biology by the Trivers-Willard hypothesis — Willard, notice) that high-status animals tend to have more male offspring than female offspring, which holds true across many species, from red deer to mink to Homo sap. The offspring of rich families are statistically biased in favor of sons — the children of the general population are 51 percent male and 49 percent female, but the children of the Forbes billionaire list are 60 percent male. Have a gander at that Romney family picture: five sons, zero daughters. Romney has 18 grandchildren, and they exceed a 2:1 ratio of grandsons to granddaughters (13:5). When they go to church at their summer-vacation home, the Romney clan makes up a third of the congregation. He is basically a tribal chieftain.
Professor Obama? Two daughters. May as well give the guy a cardigan. And fallopian tubes.

Hilariouser and hilariouser!  

I'm not sure why the Republicans are so keen on making it absolutely clear that, yes, they do indeed hate women.

Dancing on the Edge of the Abyss. The Republican War on Women.

That would be the Republican platform on abortion:

The draft official platform strongly supports a "a human life amendment" to the Constitution:
"Faithful to the 'self-evident' truths enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, we assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed," the draft platform declares. "We support a human life amendment to the Constitution and endorse legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment's protections apply to unborn children."
Let's be very, very clear that such an amendment—which Mitt Romney has said unequivocally he would sign—would not only criminalize abortions of any kind for any reason, but also would outlaw many forms of contraception, in-vitro fertilization, and treatment of pregnant women with life-threatening conditions such as cancer. Moreover, it would also criminalize miscarriage.

I know that the Republican powers-that-be don't mean any of this quite seriously.  They rely on someone else pulling them back from the abyss, the one which is the desired destination of the forced-birthers in their party.  But let's look into that abyss, shall we?

What do the most extreme anti-choice forces in the Republican Party say?  They say that raped women must have the child if they become pregnant (even though that's almost impossible, given all those secret weapons women have).  They also say that the contraceptive pill, the Morning After Pill and the coil are all ways to kill a zygote or a fetus, and thus equal to abortion.

That means that in their extreme abyss-world all the ways women could protect themselves against becoming pregnant from rape would be illegal.  All female-managed contraception (except perhaps for the female condom which a rapist would naturally let you insert before rape) would be banned.

Put that all together,  and what do you get?  A world where any fertile woman could be made to carry a child to term without any consent from her.  Yes, this would be an extreme case but the Republican platform draft does not allow any alleviation of it.

Or put in another way, all rapists would have fatherhood rights.  The right to become a father, even if the woman doesn't want to become a mother.

As I mentioned above,  the Republicans don't really mean to enslave women this way.  Or rather, they don't really care, either way.  They are after the votes of the forced-birthers in general, and the forced-birthers do desire women to have no choice at all.  Even keeping your legs firmly crossed will not help you, given that a pregnancy arising from rape Must.  Result.  In.  Giving.  Birth.

Those are the folks the Big Money Republicans are in bed with, and nobody tries to limit what they can do in those bedrooms.

WOW. On When Magazine Covers Show Generic Women

WOW.


The things I learn by going through my posts for 2012 (so far) all in a row!  This is the way a woman gets on the cover of a general interest magazine in the United States of America, anno 2012:

Added later, some text which is most likely not necessary.

Note that these are generic women.  Not individual women when the story is about that individual.  Do these magazines use generic men this way on the covers?  To highlight a story about the trouble of, say, working men?  Fathers?

The answer is a firm and resounding no, naturally.  Because men are the default gender, women are the other, and it's perfectly acceptable to discuss the other as an outside group. 

Then note the baits.  They are all about women's proper roles, where those might be found and what they consist of.  Also, wimmenz are always in deep shit about everything.

And one more post about David Brooks

I almost forgot this post about David Brooks.

David Brooks On Gender. Through The Ages.

I do tend to dissect Brooks' writings often, don't I?  But the truth is that I stopped reading him so obsessively some years ago and mostly forgot what he actually says about women, girls and the wider question of gender. 

Working in my archives reminded me why I dislike him so.  Here's a smorgasbord of Brooks on the question of gender:

March 2006:

According to David Brooks, thymos is the secret ingredient in men, the thing that makes them tick. Not the puppydogs' tails, after all. Had there ever been a female Freud she might have had her question about what men want answered easily: men want to be recognized:*

Let me tell you what men want. Let me tell you why some middle-age men wear the sports jerseys of semiliterate behemoths half their age while others customize their cars with so many speakers they sound like the hip-hop version of the San Francisco earthquake as they roll down the street.

Recognition. Men want others to recognize their significance. They want to feel important and part of something important.

Some people believe men are motivated by greed for money or lust for power. But money and power are means to get recognition. They are markers of success, and success makes men feel important and causes others to pay attention when they walk in the room.

Plato famously divided the soul into three parts: reason, eros (desire) and thymos (the hunger for recognition). Thymos is what motivates the best and worst things men do. It drives them to seek glory and assert themselves aggressively for noble causes. It drives them to rage if others don't recognize their worth. Sometimes it even causes them to kill over a trifle if they feel disrespected.

Brooks is trying to hedge his bets about whether women might want similar things, too. On the one hand, he has just read a really fun and supportive book about Manliness. On the other hand, he wants recognition from women as the kind of guy who might not bash them on the head and drag them back to the cave for some... recognition.

April 2006:*

All great scandals occur twice, first as Tom Wolfe novels, then as real-life events that nightmarishly mimic them. And so after "I Am Charlotte Simmons," it was perhaps inevitable that Duke University would have to endure a mini-social explosion involving athletic thugs, resentful townies, nervous administrators, male predators, aggrieved professors, binge drinking and lust gone wild.
...

The educators who used this vocabulary several decades ago understood that when you concentrate young men, they have a tropism toward barbarism. That's why these educators cared less about academics than about instilling a formula for character building. The formula, then called chivalry, consisted first of manners, habits and self-imposed restraints to prevent the downward slide.

Furthermore, it was believed that each of us had a godlike and a demonic side, and that decent people perpetually strengthened the muscles of their virtuous side in order to restrain the deathless sinner within. If you read commencement addresses from, say, the 1920's, you can actually see college presidents exhorting their students to battle the beast within — a sentiment that if uttered by a contemporary administrator would cause the audience to gape and the earth to fall off its axis.

Today that old code of obsolete chivalry is gone, as is a whole vocabulary on how young people should think about character.

The concept of "chivalry" is offered to women in lieue of equality on several MRA sites, by the way.  So far we have learned that men want recognition and that they should be taught chivalry.

June 2006 (note that I wrote two posts on one column there), to analyze in greater detail this Brooks column:

Over the past two decades, there has been a steady accumulation of evidence that male and female brains work differently. Women use both sides of their brain more symmetrically than men. Men and women hear and smell differently (women are much more sensitive). Boys and girls process colors differently (young girls enjoy an array of red, green and orange crayons whereas young boys generally stick to black, gray and blue). Men and women experience risk differently (men enjoy it more).
It could be, in short, that biological factors influence reading tastes, even after accounting for culture. Women who have congenital adrenal hyperplasia, which leads to high male hormone secretions, are more likely to choose violent stories than other women.
This wouldn't be a problem if we all understood these biological factors and if teachers devised different curriculums to instill an equal love of reading in both boys and girls.
The problem is that even after the recent flurry of attention about why boys are falling behind, there is still intense social pressure not to talk about biological differences between boys and girls (ask Larry Summers). There is still resistance, especially in the educational world, to the findings of brain researchers. Despite some innovations here and there, in most classrooms boys and girls are taught the same books in the same ways.

That's a wonderful stew of all sorts of observations, some clearly proven false!   Brooks wants sex-segregated schools, of course, and believes that things like color preferences (pink!) are innate.   That Iran, with its sex-segregated schools, geared towards boys most likely, shows the same gender differences as the US doesn't matter to Brooks.  Neither does the fact that schools were created for boys, not for girls, initially, and that the sitting quietly in classrooms was a feature of all those boys' schools. 

September 2006:

That would be a good name for a movie, starring David Brooks as the earnest and impartial neuroscientist who finds, after all, that girls are icky. Brooks has written yet another column about how the old sexual stereotypes are all validated by science:

Over the past several weeks, I've found I can change the conversation at any social gathering by mentioning Louann Brizendine's book, "The Female Brain." Brizendine is a neuropsychiatrist and the founder of the Women's and Teen Girls' Mood and Hormone Clinic in San Francisco. She's written a breezy — maybe too breezy — summary of hundreds of studies on the neurological differences between men and women.

All human beings, she writes, start out with a brain that looks female. But around the eighth week in the womb, testosterone surges through male brains, killing cells in some regions (communications) and growing cells in others (sex and aggression).

By the time they are three months old, girls are, on average, much better at making eye contact with other people and picking up information from faces. During play, girls look back at their mothers, on average, 10 to 20 times more than boys, to check for emotional signals. Girls can also, on average, hear a broader range of sounds in the human voice, and can better discern changes in tone.

...

This shift in how we see human behavior is bound to have huge effects. Freudianism encouraged people to think about destroying inhibitions. This new understanding both validates ancient stereotypes about the sexes, and fuzzes up moral judgments about human responsibility (biology inclines individuals toward certain virtues and vices).

Once radicals dreamed of new ways of living, but now happiness seems to consist of living in harmony with the patterns that nature and evolution laid down long, long ago.

That's pretty hilarious, given the criticism Brizendine's books have received!  She is not a neuro-scientist, by the way.

October 2006:

This is a tale of two predators. The first is a congressman who befriended teenage pages. He sent them cajoling instant messages asking them to describe their sexual habits, so he could get his jollies.

The second is a secretary, who invited a 13-year-old girl from her neighborhood into her car and kissed her. Then she invited the girl up to her apartment, gave her some vodka, took off her underwear and gave her a satin teddy to wear.

Then she had sex with the girl, which was interrupted when the girl's mother called. Then she made the girl masturbate in front of her and taught her some new techniques.

The first predator, of course, is Mark Foley, the Florida congressman. The second predator is a character in Eve Ensler's play, "The Vagina Monologues."

Enough said.  A fictional story and actual events are treated as equal.

July 2007.

This was in response to a column where Brooks worried about the anger of women.

August 2007.

This, in turn, was a reaction to Brooks' attempt at creating a masculine mystique.

At this point I stopped following Brooks so obsessively and my mental health instantly improved.  I even spotted him changing some of his ingrained opinions on gender:

June 2009:

In 2000, Geoffrey Miller, a leading evolutionary psychologist, published a book called "The Mating Mind," in which he argued that the process of sexual selection among early human groups hardwired many of the behaviors we see in humans today. Some of the traits are physical. Men generally prefer women with a 0.7 waist-to-hip ratio (that's a 24-inch waist and 36-inch hips, for those of you reading this at the gym). Women generally prefer men who are taller and slightly older.

Some of these traits are more subtle. Men, Miller argues, tip better in restaurants, because they've been programmed to show how much surplus wealth they have. The average American adult knows 60,000 words, far more than we need. We have all those words because we like to mate with people who caress us with language.
....
 

But individuals aren't formed before they enter society. Individuals are created by social interaction. Our identities are formed by the particular rhythms of maternal attunement, by the shared webs of ideas, symbols and actions that vibrate through us second by second. Shopping isn't merely a way to broadcast permanent, inborn traits. For some people, it's also an activity of trying things on in the never-ending process of creating and discovering who they are.

The allure of evolutionary psychology is that it organizes all behavior into one eternal theory, impervious to the serendipity of time and place. But there's no escaping context. That's worth remembering next time somebody tells you we are hardwired to do this or that.

The allure of evolutionary psychology is actually in the fact that anyone can do it, over a cocktail wiener, and that it can be bent to support any bias one might have, given that evidence is impossible to obtain.  But I take whatever crumbs fell of Brooks' table here.

December 2010, however, shows Brooks back in his old form.

And in January, 2012, he seems to recommend wage subsidies for men so that they can get married to us the gold-digger females of Evolutionary Psychology.

Finally, in July 2012 Brooks was back to arguing that social engineering is an absolute necessity to save boys at school.

OK, that looks a bit like a laundry list.  It most likely omits many similar pieces, given that I stopped keeping a snake eye on our David, what with finding enough irritation elsewhere in my life.

But there are certain general patterns, more easily discerned in such a list.   Brooks believes in innate differences as the explanation for all gender-based stereotypes (which he regards as the truth), and he fishes in the rivers of academia for those studies (or pseudo-studies) that would support that belief.

Thus, what is is for reasons of biology and no government policies are necessary to correct it.  Women don't enter mathematics and the sciences because of innate gender differences, for instance.

The one exception to this can be found in Brooks' concern about boys at school.  There he urges social engineering of a type, albeit one based on his presumed gender stereotypes.

This contradiction is an interesting one and worth thinking about.  After all, evolutionary psychologists have argued that anything widespread across various cultures has a good chance of being innate.   Girls are doing better than boys in essentially all countries which allow girls entry to the school system.  Given this, one might propose that the observed gender differences in school success are innate, right?

That's rubbish, and I only present it here to point out that Brooks picks selectively from his menu of possibly biological sex differences.  The ones that hurt women are clearly biological, the ones that hurt men must be cultural or environmental and need correction.

So.  I was also struck by Brooks' pining for the golden era of chivalry.  Doesn't it sound wonderful?  Chivalrous men holding doors open for you and letting you get the best jobs going and so on? 

That's not what chivalry is all about.  From the column Brooks wrote it sounds more like a promise not to assault or rape someone, to be honest.
-----

The links to dates are to my old posts.  The links attached to the direct quotes go to Brooks' columns.
*I couldn't find the links to two of Brooks' original columns except as dead ones.

When Rape Is Not Legitimate

Rep. Todd Akin explains what he means by "legitimate" rape:

Akin explained — during a follow up interview with Dana Loesch — that he meant to argue that women sometimes lie about being raped:
AKIN: You know, Dr. Willke has just released a statement and part of his letter, I think he just stated it very clearly. He said, of course Akin never used the word legitimate to refer to the rapist, but to false claims like those made in Roe v. Wade and I think that simplifies it….. There isn’t any legitimate rapist…. [I was] making the point that there were people who use false claims, like those that basically created Roe v. Wade.

Mmm.  And this means that we could use pregnancy as a check on whether the rape was legitimate or  a false accusation?  If a woman becomes pregnant from a rape then it couldn't have been rape!

I knew what Akin meant when he used the term "legitimate".  Of course I knew!  I also visit the vicious types of misogynist sites!

This case reminds me of the earlier wingnut arguments about what constitutes a "legitimate" rape victim.  She's a virgin, young and attacked by someone rushing out of the bushes while she is coming home from church.   Come to think of it,  she should also be either dead or close to death to truly qualify.  If she isn't dead but becomes pregnant!  Perhaps she enjoyed it, after all?

It's all quite medieval,  in several ways.  The perfidy of women reminds me of the writings of some medieval Catholic priests and the assumption that women's bodies have secret weapons which keep them from conceiving while raped is also akin to various medieval beliefs.
----

Added later:  This song also explains when rape is legitimate....

Still Wallowing in My Archives! Or My External Memory

It's such fun, honest, except for also being extremely hard work.  I used to be very smart once, sigh.  And those archives can stand as my life's work, should I decide to enjoy my remaining life instead of always wearing the war helmet of the wrathful goddess.  Fighting for you, my sweet readers.

I'm researching my literary blog output for a longer-term project.  But as I mentioned before, this has had some really fun side-effects!  There will be posts on the  consistency of certain misogynists and also on their free access to Pulpits in High Places!

On the  negative side-effects:  I must stop complaining every time I get a head cold or a migraine.  It's most unattractive, as the archives tell me.  I must also stop pretending that I will ever do anything about this messy blog and all its problems.  I like the writing bit and the reading comments bit but I hate housekeeping of all types.  Though I will try to fix the most obvious problems (list: get a commenting system, find out how to solve the blog's appearance in other countries).  You might have to remind me to work on that.

Assuming that the archives will contain future posts.  I often wonder if I have anything left to say that I haven't already said much better before.  Of course, that didn't stop me on the first three or four posts on the same topic before.

What Todd Akin Said

You must have heard about the Todd Akin statement by now, right?   This:





A summary:

Rep. Todd Akin, the Republican nominee for Senate in Missouri who is running against Sen. Claire McCaskill, justified his opposition to abortion rights even in case of rape with a claim that victims of “legitimate rape” have unnamed biological defenses that prevent pregnancy.
“First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare,” Akin told KTVI-TV in an interview posted Sunday. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
Akin said that even in the worst-case scenario — when the supposed natural protections against unwanted pregnancy fail — abortion should still not be a legal option for the rape victim.

Garance has written an excellent history of similar claims among the forced-birthers in the past.

It is very funny, of course, Rep. Akin's views on those unnamed biological defenses that women have!  Could it be vagina dentata he thinks of?

Let's not go that way.  Let's, instead, look at what this statement reveals about Todd Akin otherwise.

Note the reference to "legitimate rape."  What does "illegitimate rape" look like?  What Akin really means here is that women cry rape when they are not raped, that many rapes (perhaps most?) in his mind are not real rapes at all but just an excuse for a woman to get an abortion or to punish an ex-husband in divorce proceedings:

Akin previously was the cosponsor of a bill to redefine rape, and it was recently reported that Akin opposed a state law against spousal rape because it might be used as a tool against husbands in a "messy divorce."

 Smells a bit of some MRA arguments, don't you think?

Then there's Akin's statement about who should be punished in the case of a "legitimate" rape:

But let's assume that maybe that didn't work or something. You know, I think there should be some punishment. But the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child.

Akin's desired punishment, of course, falls on the pregnant rape victim.  It is she who must go through nine months of a pregnancy and then a forced birth.  This can be dangerous.  It also means that the rapist's crime is allowed to continue, that the rape victim is made to give birth to a child the rapist decided she might as well  have, and to face all the health risks, physical as well as psychological, that the situation carries.

But that's not where Akin's sympathies lie, of course.

How odd that some wingnuts argue rape is an adaptation, something men practice because the mysterious genes for rape have survived from the distant past!  That view of rape ties it intimately with fertility.  Then there's this view of rape where someone who is raped doesn't even need contraception to protect her against pregnancy!

The two views have a connection, of course.  You can figure that one out easily enough.

I can't believe I wrote a serious post on this!

 

 

 

 

On Pussy Riot

(Reuters)




The name refers to a Russian feminist punk band:

Given how world famous Pussy Riot has become, people are sometimes surprised to learn that the entire oeuvre of the women’s punk band is made up of six songs and five videos.
Badly recorded, based on simple riffs and scream-like singing, the feminist singers were dismissed by many critics and listeners as amateur, provocative and obscene.
But the performance and release of each song’s video mirrored important steps in the rise of the opposition movement in Russia that protested Vladimir Putin’s return to power as president.
By Friday, when three members of the group were convicted of hooliganism for performing a “punk prayer” in Moscow’s main cathedral in February to protest the Russian Orthodox Church’s support of Putin, it was clear the group also has won support around the world, including from stars such as Madonna and Paul McCartney and Amnesty International.

The band members wear balaclavas which means that only three young women could be identified for the court case.  They received a two-year penal colony sentence.   This is the reason:

The three women, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alekhina, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, were picked up outside Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior last Feb. 21, after entering a priests-only section of the church and performing a 40-second "punk prayer" that called on the Virgin Mary to expel Putin. Police initially just took down their names and let them go, probably because the church was largely empty at the time, no one was hurt, no property damaged, and the women had left voluntarily when asked to do so.
The women claim their song was a political protest targeting Orthodox Patriarch Kirill who, in the midst of an election campaign, publicly described Putin as "a miracle of God," thus allegedly violating Russia's strictly secular constitution (Article 14).
 The lyrics of their song (English translation here) might well be seen as offensive on many levels, but do appear mainly directed at the moving political targets of Putin and Kirill.
Prosecutors, and in the end the court, saw things otherwise. They chose to view it as a conspiratorial "hate crime" motivated by anti-Christian loathing and directed at Russian Orthodox believers.
The verdict against the women reads in part: "The Pussy Riot singers colluded under unestablished circumstances, for the purpose of offensively violating public peace in a sign of flagrant disrespect for citizens.... The women were motivated by religious enmity and hatred, and acted provocatively and in an insulting manner inside a religious building in the presence of a large number of believers," it said.
According to court testimony, the church was almost empty at the time. But the Pussy Riot performance, filmed by a cameraperson, subsequently went viral on YouTube, and it was only after about two weeks – and, most experts believe, as a result of political intervention – that the women were rearrested and the stage was set for a controversy that shows every sign of enduring.

Based on that Monitor article, most Russians don't care.  But then most people in general don't care about protest movements.

The harsh sentences of the three women can be put in perspective by comparing the situation in Russia with that of the Occupy Wall Street movement.  What the role of feminism in all this might be is hard to say.  One of the Pussy Riot songs urged Virgin Mary to become a feminist and that could have angered the establishment boyz in the Orthodox Church.  But mostly this seems to be about squashing protests against the current Russian tzar, Vladimir Putin.

---

Added later, courtesy of stoat, the closing statements of the three sentenced members of the Pussy Riot.

Old Summer Pictures

From my files

A reminder that how we dress is not just an independent choice, totally uninfluenced by the culture we live in. 

Today's Deep Thought

A re-thought, in fact, because I found it in my archives.  Someone else probably said it before but it's still a delicious one!  Here it goes:

There are two kinds of observers in this world:  Those who find the world and its phenomena complicated, many-layered and hard to decipher and those who work in false dualisms. 

From The Memory Hole: John Tierney, The Meninist

I'm still going through my old archives.  Remember John Tierney?  For a while he was a conservative political opinion columnist at the New York Times.  In November 2006 he returned to writing about science in the same place.

Which is a truly frightening thought.

I only read Tierney during the year of 2006*, and this is what he wrote about women during those few months:

In January 2006:

Judge Samuel Alito is a reactionary - at least according to feminists horrified by his notion that a woman can be required to notify her husband before an abortion. But Alito's critics in the Senate face two big obstacles this week if they try to make that label stick.

The first is public opinion. Most Americans tell pollsters that they think a husband should be notified before an abortion, and the Pennsylvania law that Alito approved was hardly a draconian version of that principle. It merely required a woman to say, without presenting any proof, that she'd told her husband. If she said she feared physical abuse, she was exempted.

The second obstacle is the logic of feminism. Spousal notification has been denounced as retrograde by the same advocates who have been demanding gender equality in the workplace and at home. If men are expected to be parents with equal responsibilities, shouldn't they at least be allowed to discuss whether to have a child?

This is an easy question for those on the pro-life side of the abortion debate. They'd like men to be not only notified of pregnancies, but also given veto power over abortions.

Being pro-choice, I don't agree with that position, but I admire the logic. It's a gender-neutral policy: if either parent thinks it's wrong to end the pregnancy, then the pregnancy must proceed.

In February 2006:

Yes, husbands may usually make more money on the work front, but wives still typically make the important decisions on the home front, like where the children go to school or how to spend the family's money. Wives also (and Haltzman presents supporting data here on the gender gap in libido) tend to make the decision on whether to have sex.

And more in February 2006:

Freud confessed that his "thirty years of research into the feminine soul" left him unable to answer one great question: "What does a woman want?" Modern feminists have been arguing for decades over a variation of it: What should a woman want?

This week two sociologists from the University of Virginia are publishing the answer to a more manageable variation. Drawing on one of the most thorough surveys ever done of married couples, they've crunched the numbers and asked: What makes a woman happy with her marriage?
 

....

But it turns out that an equal division of labor didn't make husbands more affectionate or wives more fulfilled. The wives working outside the home reported less satisfaction with their husbands and their marriages than did the stay-at-home wives. And among those with outside jobs, the happiest wives, regardless of the family's overall income, were the ones whose husbands brought in at least two-thirds of the money.

In March 2006:

Some opponents of polygamy call it the exploitation of women by rich men, and that's true if the wives are coerced into the marriages. But many wives have willingly chosen it, like the three women on "Big Love," who have married a successful businessman.

These three wives, who live in adjacent houses, sound much like the women in polygamous marriages I've talked to in rural Africa. The African wives told me they had mixed feelings about the arrangement — and their fellow wives — but over all, they figured it was better to share one prosperous husband than to marry someone else without land, cows or a job.

That's the way social scientists figure it, too. Polygamy isn't the cause of women's low status in traditional societies, but rather a consequence of their trying to move up. The biggest losers from polygamy are the poorer men who end up with no wives. Women benefit because polygamy increases their number of marriage prospects — and in traditional societies, marriage is often the only way for a woman to improve her status.

And in July 2006:

When Title IX was enacted in 1972, women were a minority on college campuses, and it sounded reasonable to fight any discrimination against them. But now men are the underachieving minority on campus, as a series by The Times has been documenting. So why is it so important to cling to the myth behind Title IX: that women need sports as much as men do?

Yes, some women are dedicated athletes, and they should be encouraged with every opportunity. But a lot of others have better things to do, like study or work on other extracurricular activities that will be more useful to their careers. For decades, athletic directors have been creating women's sports teams and dangling scholarships and hoping to match the men's numbers, but they've learned that not even the Department of Education can eradicate gender differences.

At the University of Maryland, the women's lacrosse team won national championships year after year but still had a hard time getting 40 players to turn out for the team. The men's team had no such trouble, because guys were more than willing to warm the bench even if they weren't getting a scholarship, but the coach had to cut the extra ones to maintain the gender balance. The school satisfied Title IX, but to no one's benefit.

On or off campus, men play more team sports and watch more team sports. Besides enjoying the testosterone rushes, they have a better chance of glory — and of impressing the opposite sex. Thirty-four years after Title IX, most women's games still attract sparse audiences. Both sexes would still rather watch men play games, especially football.

I haven't checked if Tierney wrote anything more on the proper gender roles during that year.  But the guy does seem a bit obsessed by that Woman Question.    Seeing his posts like this, one after the other, is pretty shocking.  I'm sure he has kept up the good work even after 2006.

---------


*The first links go to my blog posts, the links in the body of the quoted material go to Tierney's NYT columns.

The Normal Breasts Gallery

I came across this link again in my archives.  The site is well worth visiting, for a reality correction.  Our views of what female breasts are supposed to look like are probably even more affected by pron and television and movies than are our views of what women are supposed to look like, in general.

Paul Ryan

Time to write about the Republican VP pick, right?  When I first saw the news I kept thinking that this is someone I know very little about and must research.  Vacations seem to mean an empty head for me.

Because I have, indeed, written quite a bit about the granny-starving poster boy of the Tea Party!  For a few examples, go here, here, here, here, here, and here. 

What's to say about this VP pick in general?  It's not unexpected.  A real extreme fringe warrior, to soothe the hearts of wingnuts who worry about Romney's political values.  Ryan has all the right characteristics!  He wants to work in the government to destroy it, he wants lots of freedom for firms and the NRA and zero freedom for women and so on.  He's not sufficiently religious, given that his proper religion appears to be AynRandianism, though his religion is quite acceptable for movement conservatives.

And what a clever time to announce that pick!  Just when people were asking for Romney to release his tax records for more years which he refused to do!  Now we have all forgotten about the tax records and talk about the topic ordered for the day.  Funny how the conservatives still determine every day's political topics.

Ryan doesn't believe in reproductive rights for women, of course.  He believes for those rights for rapists and for the government and so on, but not for women.  

In short, he's exactly what we might have expected.  And with that pick the Republicans are also back to the old and tested pattern of Two White Guys for the top posts.

The Man In A Dress

This is interesting:

An unusual angle to the question of why clothes must inform us about a person's gender.  My take on that is somewhat different but I'm still too jet-lagged to launch on a longer writing project.

A short summary of my ideas would begin with the question why it is so important for clothes to tell whether someone is a man or a woman, and the answer to that immediately dumps us into the jungle of different gender roles, different esteem and value and a different place in the societal hierarchies. 

That currently in the West boys and men are punished more than girls and women for wearing the traditional garb of the other sex  probably can be explained by two things:  Homophobia on the one hand and the lower value of all things female on the other hand.  A girl dressing in traditional boys' clothing (a tomboy) is aiming upwards, a boy dressing in traditional girls' clothing (a sissy)  is careening down a chasm.

The situation elsewhere is more complicated and that's where the longer post would be necessary.  But I think most of the dress rules in the West have been relaxed and that makes some people's discomfort of men wearing dresses etcetera stand out more.

Then, of course, various religious men have always worn dresses and nobody has complained... 

Digging in My Archives

I'm going through my old blog posts for a project I have in mind.  So far I've finished with the long-past year of 2006!

The toil has several unexpected side-effects.  For instance, I cried when re-reading my posts after my dog Hank died.   Those who leave holes in our hearts are always missed.

I also think I wrote better all those years ago.  Less condensed and more cheerful and less focused on Evil Questions.  So I'm trying to re-inject some of that into my posts now.  On the other hand, I'm older and wiser and have more scars than I did then.  Once burned, twice shy on certain topics and on blog wars and the like.  That's both good and bad, depending on the point of view but I kinda miss the early innocence and bubbliness.

A very interesting side-effect of this search will soon become evident!  I'm gathering some auxiliary material on a few NYT writers' opinions on women throughout the years.  The persistence of those opinions is something that I, at least, tend to forget over time.  Then I wonder why I detest some particular writer (coughDavidBrookscough) so very much!  My lovely archives show the strong foundations for that feeling!

I also noticed how very much time and effort I put on writing about people and events which are now completely irrelevant.  Politics has many ephemeral chunks.  Yet the articles on women, say,  seem still relevant to me.  That may support my decision to focus more on general theories and ideas than on the specific problems of a particular time and place, though I might be the only person moving my archive stacks of ideas.  Never mind.

Memory is a funny thing.  I read through long posts which clearly showed evidence of much research and thinking and had no recollection ever having written them, even though they clearly were mine and not by a guest blogger.  Yet some other posts I remember as clearly as what I had for breakfast this morning (nothing).

Is there any general point in this post?  Probably not, except that I'm beginning to appreciate those who keep a diary.  An external memory to stop that Memory Hole from sucking out so much of our past.

Academic Arguments

Given this recent (and very angry) post by Paul Krugman on three economists: Glenn Hubbard, Greg Mankiw, and John Taylor , I thought an old post of mine is worth linking to.

It demonstrates how a graph can be manipulated to give different messages.  The graph was used by Greg Mankiw in a blog post.

As an aside, the term "academic arguments' is pretty fascinating if I say so myself.  Because the word "academic" means both "unimportant or theoretical" and "pertaining to things in the academia."  It's the latter meaning here which applies.

Postcards from Finland

These are my vacation videos!  Aren't you glad that I offer them to you.  Sit down, over there and pay attention, now.

Just kidding.  This will be relatively painless and quick.  First, the sky there is a deeper color blue than here.  I don't know the reason, but I spent delicious hours on a balcony watching the white fluffy lamb clouds sail across the bright blue eternity.  While sipping nectar and reading useless and trashy books.

Second, the silence.  This is both because of a sparsely populated country but also because Finns mumble.

Third, the food!  How would you like a helping of nettle waffles with cauliflower puree and odd sauces?  Followed by chocolate mousse, liquorice soup and blackcurrant leaf ice-cream?  With one glass of champagne that will set you back only fifty Euros!

To be fair, that was the one fancy meal I had but all the locally grown food (my family's vegetable beds etc) was delicious.

An expensive country, most argue, and it can be, for tourists.  But Finns get stuff for their taxes, including such trifles as higher education and universal health care, so any proper comparison of taxes between the US and Finland should consider the education and health care costs here.   Tourists should note that the sandwiches and even full meals at gas stations and highway stops are quite decent and that the coffee is excellent (unless you prefer a pale beige liquid as coffee).  If you go, contact me for more tips.

I didn't see any government enforced camps or any of the supposed horrible effects of socialism though I looked hard.  They even have Clear Channel!  Perhaps not quite an unalloyed joy, that.

On issues that are of interest for feminists:  Mostly I was pleased with what I saw, in terms of increasing gender equality.  Young fathers were out with their children a lot more than where I live in the US,  and construction and road repair crews had more women than here.  The women weren't just holding up those warning flags, either, and seemed well-integrated and accepted.  The numbers of women were still much lower than those of men but greater than my observations suggest they are here.

On the not-so-pleased side of the ledger,  I saw several Muslim Somali couples  (Somalis are the main refugee group living in Finland) where the woman was completely shrouded, often including a face veil and gloves, while the man walking with her was dressed in hip-hop type street clothing.  Religious rules about modesty appear to have different bases for application by gender.  --  That's intended as a criticism of religion and not of the individuals involved.

The most central impression of my vacation was naturally the light.  The light!  The almost never-ending light!  The evenings, in particular, were mythical in their charm.  And after rain the frogs/toads were everywhere on the wet asphalt, for whatever frog/toad reason they might have had.  I had to shuffle my feet not to squash them, but they were still a welcome sight, given the recent worries about what environmental pollution might be doing to our froggie friends.

Today's Silly Thought

I saw a t-shirt somewhere with "#1 Wife" on the front.  Immediately imagined the t-shirts for #2, #3 and so on wives....

A Guest Post by Anna: A Feminist Literary Canon, Part Five: 1966-1969

(Echidne's note:  Part Four is here.  It links to earlier parts.)

Gloria Steinem (born 1934) is an feminist, journalist, and political activist, and is widely known as a spokesperson for feminism.  In 1969 she published the article, "After Black Power, Women's Liberation" which, along with her early support of abortion rights, brought her to national fame as a feminist leader. This article describes early feminist actions (such as demonstrations in favor of coed dorms and against bridal fairs) and how sexism in left wing movements led to second-wave feminism ass a separate and distinct movement, and sparked women thinking of themselves as a minority group, just as African-Americans are. The article concludes, however, with the assurance that "women's liberation will be men's liberation too", perhaps an acknowledgement that if feminism could not be made appealing to the men in charge it would not advance.

"After Black Power, Women's Liberation" can be read in its entirety here.

Naomi Weisstein (born 1939) is a psychology professor, and a cofounder of American Women in Psychology,  now Division 35 of the American Psychological Association.

She is probably best known for her pioneering essay, "Kinder, Küche, Kirche as Scientific Law: Psychology Constructs the Female," which was first published in 1968, and was read by activists throughout the feminist movement, as well as psychologists.
The title is taken from the German slogan Kinder, Küche, Kürche (meaning children, kitchen, church), describing what the Nazis believed was the proper domain of a woman. The paper, which has been reprinted over 42 times in six different languages, is a seminal paper in feminist psychology, criticizing psychologists for promoting stereotypes about women, and buttressing its conclusions with unproven theories and inapplicable biological research (shades of evolutionary psychology.) " It further criticizes psychology in general for not taking into account how much social context affects a person's feelings and actions.

 "Kinder, Küche, Kirche as Scientific Law: Psychology Constructs the Female" can be read in its entirety here.

Frances M. Beal (born 1940) is a political activist. She is perhaps best known for writing  "Double Jeopardy: To Be Black & Female," first published in 1969. This paper criticizes the oppression of all black people by racism, but also criticizes the oppression of black women by sexism, even within the the civil rights movement, which often tried to build black men up by putting women down.

Beal declared that this was a "counter-revolutionary position" and that blacks should be fighting for the end of all kinds of oppression, an endeavor which she notes will require everyone's help, women as well as men. She also blames capitalist exploitation for keeping black men in menial jobs and encouraging black women to strive for the life of a full-time housewife. She ends by declaring that revolutionaries against racism and capitalism must treat each other as equals, and that all are needed in the struggle.

 "Double Jeopardy: To Be Black & Female" can be read in its entirety here.

The National Organization for Women (founded 1966) adopted the "National Organization for Women (N.O.W.) Bill of Rights" at its national conference in 1967, and published it in 1968.

It is a sweeping document that shows how ambitious the feminist movement had become, and advocates for many things (such as removing all laws limiting access to contraceptive information and devices and laws governing abortion, and establishing national child care facilities) that still have not become law. An extended analysis of the "National Organization for Women (N.O.W.) Bill of Rights", also written by me, can be read here.

The "National Organization for Women (N.O.W.) Bill of Rights" can be read in its entirety here.

Music for Saturday, Instead of Paul Ryan Analysis

Because I'm still ignorant of recent American politics (o divine vacation!), I offer you instead the divine Nina Simone in a song which I find useful for the sublimation of all kinds of anger.

The Best Places To Eat

Appear to hang from heterosexual men's crotches if this Newsweek cover is to be taken seriously.

It's just asparagus, of course, and some people get funny-smelling pee from eating it.  Something to consider if you plan to follow the example of the female model on the cover.

I'm not actually bothered by attempts  to sell magazines through sex.  What bothers me is that the selling is so one-sided and so geared to the hidden desires of hetero guys.  Where's the guy/girl  who has just dumped his/her whole face into a luscious banana split with whipped cream and all? 

Today's Thought on Evolutionary Psychology

I recently got into a conversation where I was accused of being a creationist because I criticize evolutionary psychology of the misogynistic and simplistic type.  Indeed, I've seen variations of this argument from those very same EP researchers in their writing:  If you don't like their work you obviously don't believe in evolution at all.

Or in a more refined version:  If I believe that our bodies have evolved, how can I believe that our minds have not?

There is a logical error in those accusations, and that is very similar to this example:

If I don't believe in the horoscope I get from some magazine or newspaper as a guide to the future, does it mean that I don't believe we can predict any part of future events?  

Likewise, it's quite feasible to believe that our minds have evolved but not to believe that they have evolved into the particular cartoonish forms Kanazawa-type EP researchers offer us, especially given the almost total absence of actual data about the distant past and the social and economic arrangements which would have affected any sexual selection process.

Mmm.

On David Brooks, the Taliban and the Boy Crisis At School

What a way to get back into the saddle after a vacation!  Someone sent me a link to David Brooks' July column about the need to change schools so that boys do better.  Or perhaps that boys do better than girls, assuming that boys (excluding minority boys) are already doing quite well?

 Brooks' prescription is this:

Some of the decline in male performance may be genetic. The information age rewards people who mature early, who are verbally and socially sophisticated, who can control their impulses. Girls may, on average, do better at these things. After all, boys are falling behind not just in the U.S., but in all 35 member-nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
But the big story here is cultural and moral. If schools want to re-engage Henry, they can’t pretend they can turn him into a reflective Hamlet just by feeding him his meds and hoping he’ll sit quietly at story time. If schools want to educate a fiercely rambunctious girl, they can’t pretend they will successfully tame her by assigning some of those exquisitely sensitive Newbery award-winning novellas. Social engineering is just not that easy.
Schools have to engage people as they are. That requires leaders who insist on more cultural diversity in school: not just teachers who celebrate cooperation, but other teachers who celebrate competition; not just teachers who honor environmental virtues, but teachers who honor military virtues; not just curriculums that teach how to share, but curriculums that teach how to win and how to lose; not just programs that work like friendship circles, but programs that work like boot camp.

Bolds are mine.

Note the sly hint to the girls who would benefit from boot camps, too?  That there are boys who do better under the presumed cooperative model is ignored.  Assuming that it's cooperation at schools (is that the prevailing model?)  which causes the problem.  Also, I love the idea that using one model is social engineering, using the opposite model would not be.

But at last and at least here is one conservative writer who acknowledges that the boy crisis is not the fault of American feminists!  I've written myself sore on the topic, including the fact that more women than men graduate from college in Saudi Arabia and other similar places.  So kudos to Brooks on having learned enough to shift the goal posts a teeny weeny bit.  Perhaps next he will look at earnings statistics and realize that the reason more girls go to college is because girls must do so to earn as much as boys earn with just a high school certificate.  And so on.

I write about this now because of a piece of news about girls at school in an area of the world where the male values of competition, military hierarchies and a fierce desire to win are certainly dominant:

Far from fears that female education is on the decline after the Taliban campaign against girls’ schools, female students outclassed their male counterparts in the secondary school examination for 2012.
And participation itself was a success. In all 265,000 students sat the examinations, including 115,343 girls. The results were declared over a ten-day period earlier this month.
The results have come as a boost to authorities in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and nearby Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) regions of north Pakistan. “It’s great given the Taliban’s attitude towards female education,” KP Information Minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain told IPS.
“About 700 schools were damaged by miscreants in the last five years in KP and FATA. Despite that girls have got top positions in the secondary school certificate (SSC) examination.” The top 15 positions went to girls. This meant an outright rejection of Taliban calls against women education, Hussain said.
In militancy-riddled Malakand division in KP, girls grabbed 10 of the 20 top positions. Malakand saw destruction of 181 schools from 2007 to 2009, among them 118 were girls’ schools.
“For one-and-a-half years I sat idle due to Taliban’s opposition to female education but since their defeat in 2009, I have been studying vigorously,” Farzana Bibi, who got second place in the Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education (BISE) in Swat, one of the seven districts of Malakand division, told IPS over telephone. “Now, I intend to become a doctor and serve the women patients in my area.” The BISE is the examining body conducting the SSC examination.
The results are dramatic given that the literacy rate for women in KP is 17 percent, and in FATA 43 percent, compared to the national Pakistani average of 68 percent.

Bolds are mine. The girl who ranked third best in the examinations wants to become a police officer so that she can protect the schools against Taliban.  (Sorry about the link being in Finnish.)

Now put these two pieces together and what do you get?  A contradiction!   I very much doubt that the schools in the heartland of Taliban favor girls or promote a cooperative model of education.  Rather, girls are actively and violently discriminated against.  What is, however, true in both KP and FATA on the one hand and the US on the other hand is that women need education to have access to good salaries.  Men have other alternatives though of course education benefits them, too.

Brooks and other right-wing conservatives have this odd blind spot when it comes to their usual argument that all gender differences are genetic and that nothing should be done about them.  That blind spot is when the gender differences benefit girls or women.  That's the time to change the environment.  (If you don't believe me, just check conservative writing on women's dearth in science and mathematics.)

I must add the usual reminder that I want boys to do well at school.  What I don't want is this conservative game of pretending that the only way we can achieve that is by making it harder for girls to do well, too.

A Rant About Whoever Changes My Computer Stuff. A Repost.

From here.  My complaints still apply. 

They also  extend to Facebook and to all tools I use for blogging except for my machine itself, though the reasons are slightly different.  For instance, if Blogger won't take payment for me then I can't complain when Blogger decides to change the archiving system so that almost all old links to my posts are now decrepit or dead, right?  Or when blogger decides to change the address on my blog in other countries so that readers must scroll down like a million miles to find the first post on the page, right?   Or when the comments cannot be read by people in those countries, right?

Melissa did provide a remedy for that last problem.

I Have Returned

As one is supposed to say at a moment like this.  Sadly, my time clock thinks it's roughly 4am tomorrow and the poor avatar I (the goddess, natch) use has physically been traveling since about 4am yesterday.  Figure that one out!

But o my poor little blog!  What fickle thing is the love of readers, sigh.  Surely re-heated leftovers should have kept you all happy and eager...

Mostly just kidding there.  I'm glad to be back and actually look forward to writing again.

Women On Stilts. A Repost

A fairly recent one.

How The Buttocks Came To Be. Echidne Does Evolutionary Psychology.

This post is a very early one!  Most of the links are dead, sadly, and I don't have time to work on those right now.  It's just meant to be a funny example of EP thinking.

The Thirty-Percent Solution To Scarcity of Women in Politics. A Repost.

I wrote this post in the past and my views may have evolved slightly.   But I still agree with its basic arguments.  I have come to appreciate the Virginia Valian theory much more, however.  It really makes a difference if you are not the only woman in the room because then you look like WOMAN! instead of you.  And gender stops being a signaling factor when there are sizable minorities of the other gender.  That's one of the reasons why more stay-at-home-dads would make labor market discrimination against women of child-bearing age less likely:  The employers wouldn't use gender to predict who might quit to stay at home.  Because gender IS now used as part of that prediction, all women in that group will be treated as if they are a higher risk to the firm than men of a similar age.

A Repost: The Decline Effect

I recommend this as a complement to my critiques of EP studies and such.

Why Selective Popularizations of Gender Science Matter. A Repost.

Linked to the previous post and the earlier summer reruns of my gender science series, this post is well worth reading and thinking about. 

The Gender Studies Which Don't Get Popularized. A Repost.

This is a fun example of the kind of study we won't find screaming at us from every single channel when we wake up.

How To Judge Social Science Research

This post is still pretty much how I think of the salient points.  I should note that the promotion of papers before they are at all available is still ongoing, and that in at least one case  it has resulted in a widespread popularization of a working paper which seems not to have been published anywhere at all!   The most common reason for such non-publication is that the paper failed to pass peer-review.  Yet the popularizations are still available on the Internet!

Feel free to add any points I missed in my list.

On The Quest For Unattainable Perfection. A Repost.

 This rant is adapted from here.


The topic of this post is the view of eating and exercise as a moral or religious enterprise or a competition as to who can get closest to an almost nonexistent thinness without dying, without dying EVER!

These are two very different ideas and putting them together looks like an oxymoron. But it is not, or if it is, then life is full of oxymorons (oxymora?).

The first idea is the Puritanical one, still quite common in this country, the idea of life as a moral struggle against temptations, a religious walk through nonreligious sins. Everything, I have noticed, can be twisted into a moral failure by some people, often by experts. Who was it who said that only in the United States it is the fault of the elderly that they die? Because clearly, if you try hard enough, if you are earnest enough, pure enough, you will live forever. And your body will look like that of a twenty-year old, forever, too. If it does not you have sinned, and perhaps the health insurance shouldn't cover your sinning.

Why does this anger me so? Partly because I'm using my red-hot anger as a source of energy, but mostly because such sermons make life really horrible for those most vulnerable to its seductions. For note that the people who read articles on good eating and good exercise and how to take care of your health are not those sedentary and overweight Americans who might benefit from the advice the most. They are also, and perhaps most likely, those Americans who are already too thin and who already overexercise.

I've thought similar thoughts on the many articles on "good mothering" and the awful consequences of neglectful mothering. I'm willing to bet quite a lot that the wrong people are affected by these articles, people who already try too hard and feel too much guilt, and that the people who actually might learn something useful from them (and this does not only mean mothers) will not read the articles or if they do are not affected by them.

What is it about pleasure and enjoyment of life that is so very bad? Think about it. If your daily meals can't give you enough pleasure, because they have become part of the Puritan "religion" of striving, where are you going to get your good feelings from? And if all you see when you look at your children are the many ways you might fail in bringing them up correctly (did you play enough Beethoven? did you eat a pickle while pregnant?), how are you going to enjoy them and the time you spend with them?

And if moving and exercising and dancing are not making you feel a little like one of God's little acrobats, because you are busy writing down your pulse rate and your calorie consumption, when are you ever going to feel that divine breath on your nostrils? Or take sex. If sex is all about counting weekly frequencies and how good your orgasms are, when are you going to have fun?

All this confuses the trip with its destination, and as none of us knows the destination, why not enjoy the trip?

My plea is for moderation, of course, not for becoming a morbidly ill couch potato. But I don't really see the urgings of the fitness and health industries as pleas for moderation, most of the time. There is a slippage towards one extreme or another, all the time. And come to think about it, "moderation" isn't the right word, either, because it conveys the idea of temptations successfully avoided. We need a better word for what I think of as living life as a human being, eating wonderful and healthy (and sometimes not-so healthy) food, moving enough for your body to stay limber, enjoying the gifts this can give you in pure enjoyment of life. We need a word that makes it quite clear being alive is not just a time given to you so that you can leave the stringiest body possible when you die. And die you will.

So much for the first paradoxical idea. The second one has to do with the role of all this in the lives of women, in particular, rather than in the lives of people, in general. There is a whole sub-genre of writings and programs aimed at making women feel in the need of improvement. This sub-genre serves firms very well, as a worried woman is more likely to buy that expensive face-cream or that educational toy for her child or that Victoria's Secret bra for her husband's ogling enjoyment. The guilt industry, I sometimes think it should be called.

The guilt industry works especially well in affecting women, because the sub-genre is not that novel. You read the Bible and find Eve at fault. You watch movies such as "Educating Rita" and you find women in need of improvement. You read fashion magazines and find your body needs fixing. You read articles on child psychology and find that you are walking across a mine-field where every wrong step will cause your child to become a drug abuser who will hate you, the mother in later life. You read anti-feminist writings and find that some argue that women shouldn't have been given the vote. You read other anti-feminist articles and find that women are already ruling the whole world and that this is destroying EVERYTHING. You read articles about women in Afghanistan getting killed by their families for the crime of having been raped by some strangers first. You read articles about how the selfish and uppity women in Europe refuse to have enough children to perpetuate the White Ueberrace (and you wonder how much damage they would have done to those nonexistent children by forgetting to play Beethoven while pregnant). And so on.

It's one way of making a person into a pretzel. (And don't come in here giving me counterexamples or scolding me for my intemperance. I'm on a roll.) Even a woman can become a pretzel, and that is a painful process. So what's a girl to do? It's not that hard to see that on some subconscious level many women think that they can somehow prove that they are not so bad, that at least they, if not other women, can be good and upright and ordinary citizens. Maybe working on the body will help. Or committing to Motherhood. Or saying that YOU agree about how terrible other women are, but that YOU are one of the women with a mental penis. YOU are ok. You are not Britney Spears  or Hillary Clinton or Condie Rice or any of those other nasty uppity women who for some reason are seen as a stand-in for all women.

Added in 2012:  This comes across as a bit extreme, right now.  But getting immunized against the guilt industry is a very good idea for all of us.

A Repost: Why Would Wal-Mart Hire Any Men?

This is actually a pretty important post because a commonly heard argument from some people is that women can't be discriminated against!  Because if they were, the god of free markets would sweep in and turn all bigoted firms into bankruptcies.

The thinking goes like this:  If a man and a woman are equally good workers but the market pays the woman less than the man, just because of gender, what profit-making firm in its right mind would ever hire any men?

The simple answer is that things are much more complicated than that.  The proper answer can be found here.

A Repost: Your Inner Glass Ceiling

This post also addresses the possible reasons for the gender gap in wages.  Like it's your own fault and so on.

There Is No Gender Gap in Wages, Silly Women. Part 2.

The second post in this series can be found here.

There Is No Gender Gap in Wages, Silly Women! Part 1

This is the first of two posts which add to the arguments in the gender gap series.  It's based on more recent political debates than the series itself and also addresses some poorly made studies.

The Gender Gap Series: Addressing the Wingnuts and the MRAs

The third and last post in this series discusses the politicization of the gender gap concept and why almost all the treatments of it are tainted in political debate.  If you have waded through the two previous posts you will understand this much better.

In hindsight, had I known about the MRA arguments in 2006 I would have addressed some I don't in this post.  But despair not,  the next series will get into some of that!

The Gender Gap Series: Empirical Evidence

In this one I look in great detail at one study.  It's somewhat outdated by now but the point of the post is to explain how these kinds of studies are done and interpreted, and the study I picked is a fairly proficient one.  That it also tried to find no discrimination and failed in that is noteworthy.

The Gender Gap Series: Theories

This is a summer rerun.  The series consists of three posts, the first having to do with the theories about why women earn less than men, in general.  The second post will look at one empirical study in detail and discuss empirical evidence in general.

I strongly recommend this series  to all of those who have been taken in by facile arguments from one side or the other.

Statistics Series: Wrapping Up

This is the last post in the series.  As I mentioned in the context of the first post, this is not an actual course in statistics but a mere appetizer.  I hope it helped you understand some of the arguments about polling, for instance.

Statistics series. Constructing a confidence interval. Part 5

Getting into scrunchy stuff here.

Statistics Series. Sampling Distributions. Part 4.

The post is here.

Statistics Series: Sample Statistics. Part 3.

The post can be found here.

Statistics Series: Probability. Part 2

The post can be found here.

Statistics Series: Samples. Part 1

The first post can be found here.

This series is a summer rerun.  I recommend it if you have never taken statistics.  Note that it is NOT a substitute for an actual statistics course.  It dips into the material a bit and it tries to do it in a way which does not provoke math phobias.  At some points I skate on fairly thin ice because of my desire to keep things as simple as possible but I hope I didn't fall through.

On The Feminism Series, in Hindsight (2012)

The series is not complete and some of those posts do need editing and rewriting.  But I still agree with them.  I'd add something about the much intensified misogyny*, especially via the Internet.  That is a real problem.

If you doubt that, check out the Manboobs blog in the list on the right.  Then randomly look at a few YouTube comments which are linked to female athletes, say.

The misogyny is almost impossible to avoid.  This does not mean that most men or women are misogynists.  It's likely just a small percentage.  But they sure are loud.  Sadly, they are often pretty stupid.  For instance, I just (June 29th)  got back from reading an opinion piece which argued that women only write about trivial shit and that politics and economics are not fields that would interest those hen-brained chicks.

Very funny, given that I write on economics and politics.  But what's even funnier is that this man quite seriously gave as evidence for his arguments that some study found that girls between the ages of fifteen and seventeen mostly write blogs about clothes.

Why would the louder misogyny make feminism more important?  After all, the misogynists often argue that they are fighting feminism, not women, though they then lapse into bashing even very docile women who do all they are told.

Heh.  The reason is right there.  No misogynist will ever be satisfied that the level of oppression is adequate.  And the only way to fight misogyny is for right-thinking people to point it out and ridicule it whenever they come across it.

------
*Misogyny itself may not be more intense.  But the chances of  meeting it in one's daily life are much higher now that we are all on the net.  This holds even if that "one" religiously tries to avoid getting sprayed by it.   Like poison ivy or someone pissing on your shoes.

A Repost: The Longest Revolution

The last post in the feminism series.  At least so far.

Greetings from Europe

And my deepest apologies for all readers in other countries save the US.  The blog looks like real crap when read from here.  Things will change when I get back from frolicking in the sun rain.

A Repost: The Female Body As Property

The fifth post in the feminism series.

A Repost: The Invisible Women

The fourth post in the feminism series.

A Repost: Our Father Who Art in Heaven

The third post in the feminism series.

A Repost: The Planet of The Guys

The second post in the feminism series.

A Repost: The Right To Go Out. Part 1

This is my first post in the why-feminism-is-still-needed series.  The series will run for the next week.
I have added a 2012 assessment after the last post in the series.

On The Gender Science Series, in Hindsight (2012)

This is obviously an ongoing field in several different senses.  Sadly, those who wish to prejudge all women as inferior will always be among us.  Check out sometimes the weird history of misogyny in this context.  You will find everything from "women look more like chimpanzees than men," to "a uterus gone haywire because a woman studying will deplete her womb of nutrition."

If you think the mistakes of the past cannot be replicated in this scientific age, think again.  At least some of those past tales of woman-hatred were based on counting and calculating and other scientific methods.  And even Darwin thought that women hadn't evolved much at all, what with them never having had to compete for mates!

A Repost: The Stereotype Threat

The last post in the series.

A Repost: The Greater Male Variability Hypothesis

The sixth post in the series.

A Repost: Three-Dimensional Mental Rotation

The fifth post in the series.

A Repost: Studying Sex Differences in Science

The fourth post in the series.

A Repost: Looking For Sex Differences

The third post in the series.

A Repost: On Ballerinas and Football Players

Or the impossibility of bringing up children without teaching them the cultural attitudes about gender.
The second post in the series.

A Repost: Introduction to the Gender As A Topic For Research Series

It can be found here.

The whole series will be run this week as summer re-runs.

Echidne Goes on Vacation

And to take care of some family matters.  This blog will resume live on August 9th on a daily basis.

There will be summer reruns and most likely occasional posts from me when I get a chance.

I have selected through my old posts all the ones which I believe are important (and a few silly ones, too), to give you something to read.   The reruns include much material on the science of gender differences, on the reasons for the gender gap in wages, on statistics and other similar still-relevant questions.   Kind of granola posts, sadly.  I didn't get around to picking enough fun posts or music for which my apologies.

I wish you a most wonderful July.  Thanks for being my readers.

Heh. Ross the Riveter?

From here.

I read it as a fairly deep analysis of the way women's abilities to do certain things are judged on an apriori basis, whereas men are mostly assumed to be able to do anything should they wish to try it.

The original Rosie the Riveter poster was intended to reassure Americans during WWII that women could, indeed, do factory work.

Back to Mad Men

This is hilarious:

Republican Marty Golden, the only Brooklyn state senator to vote against marriage equality, has some thoughts on gender norms, too. In a planned event called "Posture, Deportment and the Feminine Presence," Golden, with the help of a "certified protocol consultant," promised to help misguided dames find a job by refining their god-given potential...

The event was cancelled after a "general uproar."  Yeah, this is 2012.