The End Of Men, Again

Some days ago I got an e-mail from Hanna Rosin's agents asking me if I wanted her book The End Of Men to review.  The same night I got a gastritis attack.

Such are the rewards of writing in this field.  What is it that made me ill, you ask (other than countless cups of coffee, caused by anger)?

The title of the book, for one thing.  It's an obscenity in this world where women in many countries have fewer rights than dogs or bicycles.  It's an outrage even more generally, because it has made a bet on flaming the gender wars and as we all know such wars are great fun and lucrative for the instigators.  Likewise, these topics don't get any attention whatsoever when they are flamed from the other side.  I don't think a book called The End Of Women would get the same attention, even though women are somewhat ending in China and India.  Men, on the other hand, are not ending.

Had the book been called The End Of Male Dominance? (which appears to be its actual topic), the potential numbers of readers would have quickly shrunk to a few beady-eyed feminists such as yours truly.  As things are, I will find reading it tough going because I know it's supposed to press all sorts of unseemly buttons about feminism having gone too far and so on.  Yet I hear that it's kinda disappointing in that it doesn't tell us how all those men are ending.  Indeed, it might even suggest that rigid definitions of masculinity are at fault here.

So thinks our David Brooks who has written a meditative piece on the book.  I started reading it because I already have too much stomach acid. But he isn't truly horrible in that piece, which disappointed me.  Still, it's always worthwhile to do research on our David's assertions:

Thanks to their lower skills, men are dropping out of the labor force. In 1954, 96 percent of the American men between the ages of 25 and 54 worked. Today, that number is down to 80 percent. In Friday’s jobs report, male labor force participation reached an all-time low.
Millions of men are collecting disability. Even many of those who do have a job are doing poorly. According to Michael Greenstone of the Hamilton Project, annual earnings for median prime-age males have dropped by 28 percent over the past 40 years.
Men still dominate the tippy-top of the corporate ladder because many women take time off to raise children, but women lead or are gaining nearly everywhere else. Women in their 20s outearn men in their 20s. Twelve out of the 15 fastest-growing professions are dominated by women.

 Derek Rose responds to those arguments:

Actually in 1954, the 92.8 percent — not 96 percent — of men aged 25 to 54 had a job, according to BLS statistics. In August that percentage was at 82.2 percent. A lot of that has to do with, y’know, the recession. As recently as 2007, 87.5 percent of men had jobs. Others were in school, being a housedad or, yes, collecting disability. More on that in a sec.
Meanwhile, the percentage of women aged 25-54 working (outside the home) has also been dropping — from a high of 74.9 percent in fourth quarter 1999, to 69.1 percent in the first half of this year.
In Friday’s jobs report, male labor force participation reached an all-time low.  True, but as the Atlantic explained, this has more to do with an aging population than anything else.

Millions of men are collecting disability.

True, but so are millions of women — about 300,000 more women than men, in fact. According to the Social Security Administration, 3.28 million males and 3.58 million females were receiving SSI disability payments in December 2011. (pdf, page 22).

What about the annual earnings of men dropping?  Derek Rose again;

Brooks misrepresents Greenstone’s work here. Greenstone does indeed conclude that when you adjust for inflation, average earnings for median prime-age [25-64] males did drop 28 percent from 1969 to 2009 — but that’s because fewer men are working, and so aren’t earning any wage. When you look at men working full-time, the mean earnings of men aged 25-64 has risen 13 percent (but the median has dropped 1 percent, a sign of growing inequality. (pdf, page 13).

 Here's recent data on the male-female earnings difference from the second quarter of 2012:

It doesn't look to me as if men are ending.  Or as if women are completely taking over, either, though with that paltry exception Brooks allows, the top of the societal ladders:

Men still dominate the tippy-top of the corporate ladder because many women take time off to raise children, but women lead or are gaining nearly everywhere else. Women in their 20s outearn men in their 20s. Twelve out of the 15 fastest-growing professions are dominated by women.

Child-related absence from the labor force only affects the high-flyers?????   How very odd that view is.

So what have we learned so far?  Both men and women have lower labor market participation rates because of the recession.  More women than men collect disability.  Men's real earnings may have fallen or not risen much, over time, but men are still earning more than women.

What about women in their 20s out-earning men in their 20s?  That, too, is rubbish.  You can see it from the above graph, of course.  You don't have to use a study which singled out large metropolitan areas, removed all married individuals from the study and then didn't compare like-with-like by not controlling for education.  Young unmarried women in those areas have, on average, higher educational qualifications than young, unmarried men, and it's the education difference, rather than gender, that matters in those findings.

I've written about that particular study so many times before but it simply refuses to die because it's such a fun study to believe in.  And fits the framework of the coming monstrous petticoat regime!

Finally, let's have a look at those 15 fastest growing professions which are dominated by women. It's not clear which list Rosin's book used as there are several ways of defining "fastest growing" (percentage increases or absolute numbers etc). The one Rosin probably used is Table 2 in this article (scroll down), although it lists twenty occupations, not fifteen.

It's worth noting the text under that table:

The education categories and wages of the occupations with the largest numbers of new jobs are considerably different than those of the fastest growing occupations. Only three of these occupations are in the associate’s degree or higher category. Fourteen of the 20 occupations with the largest numbers of new jobs paid less than the national median wage of $33,840 in May 2010.

Out of the top five listed (all female dominated, by the way), only the first occupation mentioned, registered nurses, has a highish median annual salary: 64, 690 dollars.  The next four:  retail salespersons,  home health aides, personal care aides and office clerks, general, have median annual salaries of $20,670, $20,560, $19,640 and $26,610, respectively.  In other words, dominating twelve out of the top fifteen categories doesn't actually make women the winners in some giant employment race.

That's enough on our David today.  I might read Rosin's book one day and then I will do more ranting here.
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Two post-scripts:  The first:  I spent time at the Bureau of Labor Statistics site trying to find labor market participation rates.  The ones I found for men and women aged 25-54 for 2010 don't exactly match the information Derek Rose provides but it is close.  All the labor market participation rates I could find (the most current ones were for men and women over the age twenty) demonstrate the same pattern:  Women have a lower labor market participation rate than men do.

The second, and more substantial:  This post is not meant to  belittle the troubles of men who are losing blue-collar jobs in this country, and there may well be something to the idea of rigid definitions of masculinity keeping some back.  At the same time, "flexibility" seems to mean accepting a very low-paid service job instead, and the losses in salary are real.  Women have had fewer opportunities for the better-paying jobs in the past and hence may be more accepting of low earnings opportunities than men.  Still, before we can discuss any of this properly we should drop the gender wars framework and at least get the basic data correct.

Today's Deep Thought

Is in this Twitter picture:

The small print says "Made in China."

Most likely Obama's campaign giveaways (if any) are also made in China.

The deep thought this picture obviously elicits has to do with reality smashing straight against that "rah-rah-we're-number-one" type of patriotism.  The latter can be all rainbows and butterflies and pretense and it still seems to work.  Reality is a bit different, given that most everything I see in the stores (even in food stores) comes from China, these days.

For The Sake Of The Child. Maternal Depression and Child Height.

I came across these headlines yesterday:

Mom’s Depression May Lead to Shorter Kids

Depressed moms might have shorter kids, new study suggests 

Postpartum Depression May Lead to Shorter Kids: Study

Mother's Depression Linked to Child's Shorter Height

Only that last headline is correct, in the sense that the study all these cover cannot prove causality of any kind.

I read through all those popularizations and then got hold of the article itself (thanks to the funding of you, my sweet readers!).  The study is not bad, as such studies go, but the way it is popularized and discussed is such a beautiful example of how and why certain studies are picked for wider dissemination and others are not.  It is also a beautiful example of the kinds of conclusions that we are offered, together with the gist of the study.

On those conclusions:  

"The hopelessness of depression often leads people not to seek the care that they need," said Robbins. "If [mothers] can make the connection that this is not just affecting them but also affecting their family, it may become motivation to get the proper treatment."

The person quoted there is a psychiatrist and not involved with this study.  I would have thought a psychiatrist would realize that the last thing a severely depressed woman will be motivated (to seek care, not suicide)  by is dumping more guilt feelings on her.  After all, here are some of the symptoms of post-natal depression:

According to the CDC, postpartum depression among women is characterized by the following:
    •    Trouble sleeping when your baby sleeps (more than the lack of sleep typical among new moms)
    •    Feeling numb or disconnected from your baby
    •    Having scary or negative thoughts about the baby; for example, thinking someone will take your baby away or hurt your baby
    •    Worrying that you will hurt the baby
    •    Feeling guilty about not being a good mom, or ashamed that you cannot care for your baby

Now add to those guilt feelings the idea that your child will be stunted because of you.  One has to tread very lightly indeed, to get the message home in a loving and non-blaming way, and I don't sense that from the various conclusions I've read, such as this:

The new research doesn’t explain how kids with depressed moms end up shorter. That’s something the researchers are looking into right now, said the study’s lead author Pamela J. Surkan, an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Surkan suspects, however, that depression might get in the way of nurturing.
“We think that mothers who are depressed or blue might have a hard time following through with caregiving tasks,” Surkan said.
“We know that children of depressed mothers often suffer from poor attachment and the depression seems to have effects on other developmental outcomes. It makes sense that mothers who have depressive symptoms might have reduced ability to take care of infants, that they might not always pick up cues from their kids.”

 It sounds very authoritative.  Until you learn (as I did) that this particular study has NO DATA on nurturing practices.  The conclusion about child-rearing practices is based on earlier studies, it seems.  Still, this is the first paragraph in one popularization of THIS study, after the headline
"Postpartum Depression May Lead to Shorter Kids: Study":

It's not certain why, but feeding practices might play a part, expert says

Rewind back to that symptom of post-natal depression:    Feeling guilty about not being a good mom, or ashamed that you cannot care for your baby.   I get that this topic is an important one.  But to put something which isn't even based on the study at the beginning of the popularization is kinda bad.  On the other hand,  these ruminations ARE based on the comments of one of the researchers....

What about the study itself?  As I mentioned above, it's not a bad study as such.  BUT it has no data on the heights of the child's parents, none at all.  This means that the results do not take into account the genetic component in children's heights.

And while the study stresses that it has not proved causality from the mother's depression to the child's lower stature it proceeds as if that has been done, by proposing various theories about how the former might cause the latter.  Yet the study also mentions past research into this topic:

Results from other developed countries on the association between maternal depressive symptoms and child growth have been mixed.27–32 Two studies from the United Kingdom examined failure-to- thrive in children age #1; one found no association,30 and the other reported an association only at 4 months that disappeared by 1 year of age.29

 In studies including children followed only until age 2, pooled data from 5 countries showed no differences by depressive symptoms for child weight, length, weight for length, or body mass index.32 However, a case-control study reported that children #2 years old with growth faltering were more likely to have depressed mothers.31

The only US study with follow-up until at least age 3 was from an affluent mostly white sample.27 Unlike other studies, Ertel et al found maternal depressive symptoms at 6 months postpartum associated with increased child height- for-age z scores at age 3.27 Using longitudinal growth models from birth to age 3 to examine weight-for-height z scores over time, they reported no difference between children with and without depressed mothers.28

Only one of the popularizations I've read mentions that other studies have had different findings.

The study controls for various socio-economic variables.  But as mentioned, it has no data on the parents' heights or on the parent's nurturing practices.  Neither has it any data on the father's mental or emotional state.  As is common in these studies, fathers and their behavior is not generally studied (in this study they are present only in the sense of the variable reflecting single-parenthood of the mother or not).

 That is because the job of nurturing is assigned to the mother.  But that omission may prove harmful if family dynamics are affecting the mother's depression.  For instance.

I write about this study not because of the study itself but because of the extent and type of popularization it acquired.  Those earlier studies with all sorts of findings about the relationship between maternal depression and child height did not get this kind of exposure.  Certain studies are pulled out of the file cabinets and highlighted, and those studies usually are interpreted as the whole knowledge of a particular field.  That the overall findings are much fuzzier is ignored.

I also write about this study because of the practical advice the popularizations include.  Those amount to the exhortation that severely depressed women should seek care because they might be hurting their children.  When one important symptom of post-natal depression consists of giant feelings of maternal guilt, this advice seems ignorant at best.

What is the take-home message from all this?  That post-natal depression can be a severe medical condition?  Didn't we know that already?  That it should be treated as a severe medical condition because it might affect the children and not just the mother?
 

On Body Decorations: Chris Brown and Spiders

Or what I have come across today while surfing for stories.

First, Chris Brown appears to have a tattoo of a battered woman's face on his neck, at a visible point.  Is this to serve as a warning signal in cultural exchanges or what?  Is it a sign of remorse?  Or an angry challenge?  Or what?

And do we care?

Second, here's a lovely body decoration demonstrated by a male spider in Australia while he woos his sweetheart.  The decoration clearly has a social role in that case.

I put these two topics together for no other reason than happenstance.  I went from one story to the other and noticed the odd commonality.  Make of that what you wish.

Stopping Those Tax Loopholes

This is a fun glimpse into an important Republican program about taxes:  The idea that we can lower taxes for everyone, close all the nasty tax loopholes, and then have government tax revenue either rise or stay constant.

That policy aspect requires two important questions:  First, is it really the case that the loopholes could be removed without increasing taxes for the middle classes?  After all, the mortgage deduction is pretty important for that class of taxpayers.

Second, would the Republicans actually pursue a policy of filling the loopholes?  My impression is that all details about that are left murky and hidden, and Paul Ryan in that interview follows the same pattern:

RYAN:

...

 

Now the question is, not necessarily what loopholes go, but who gets them. High-income earners use most of the loopholes. That means they can shelter their income from taxation. But if you take those loopholes, those tax shelters away from high-income earners, more of their income is subject to taxation. And that allows us to lower tax rates on everybody — small businesses, families, economic growth.

…

STEPHANOPOULOS: But, Congressman, as you know –
RYAN: When Reagan did this, it worked –
STEPHANOPOULOS: — many say it’s difficult –
RYAN: Go ahead, George.
STEPHANOPOULOS: — to accept your word if you’re not going to specify which tax loopholes you’re willing to close. Don’t voters have a right to know which loopholes you’re going to go after?
RYAN: So Mitt Romney and I, based on our experience, think the best way to do this is to show the framework, show the outlines of these plans, and then to work with Congress to do this. That’s how you get things done. The other thing, George, is–
STEPHANOPOULOS: Isn’t that a secret plan?
RYAN: — we don’t want to — no, no. No, no. What we don’t want is a secret plan. What we don’t want to do is cut some backroom deal like ObamaCare, and then hatch (ph) it (ph) to the country.
STEPHANOPOULOS: But why not specify the –
RYAN: We want to do this –
STEPHANOPOULOS: — loopholes now?
RYAN: — out in the open –
STEPHANOPOULOS: Why not say right now –
RYAN: — because we want to do this –
(CROSSTALK)
RYAN: — we want to have this — George, because we want to have this debate in the public. We want to have this debate with Congress. And we want to do this with the consent of the elected representatives of the people, and figure out what loopholes should stay or go and who should or should not get them.
And our priorities are high-income earners should not get these kinds of loopholes. And we should have broad-based policies that go to middle-class taxpayers, to make sure we can advance things that we care about, like charities. But that is a debate we shouldn’t cut in a back room, shouldn’t hatch a secret plan like ObamaCare. We should do it out in the public view where the public can participate.
STEPHANOPOULOS: That’s exactly what I’m suggesting, having it in public before the election so voters can have that information before they make up their minds.

I'm skeptical about the Republicans actually following suit on this part of their proposals, both because for it to work it the total taxes higher-income individuals pay (and those are the real base of the party) would have to rise and also because corporations would fight like mad to keep their loopholes:  All those corporate deductions which allow some large firms to pay essentially no taxes on their profits.

Today's Bowl of Gender Science Granola

It comes from researchers at York University, England.  They decided to have a look at the old evo-psycho saw about men seeking beauty and women being gold-diggers, when it comes to mating.  The popularizing writeup of that research prepares us with a few paragraphs of the usual pseudo-science:

Men seek youth and beauty, while women focus on wealth and status — evolutionary psychologists have long claimed that these general preferences in human mating are universal and based on biology. But new research suggests that they may in fact be malleable: as men and women achieve financial equality, in terms of earning power and economic freedom, these mate-seeking preferences by gender tend to wane.

Once again, I must remind you, my sweet readers (was going to type "sweet dreamers") that what meant "wealth" in the imagined nomadic African tribe or family group many thousands of years ago is most likely the same thing as youth and health in a man, just as "beauty" in a woman is youth and health.  Because groups on the go in that world could not amass wealth as such. 
 
Or put in other terms, to argue that something is based in biology without any actual genetic evidence or the ability to time-travel to whatever the Era and Area of Evolutionary Adaptations might have been is simply speculation, especially if the actual differences in women's and men's ability to acquire wealth in general are not taken into account.

Never mind.  What this new research appears to have found suggests the importance of culture in these mating customs:

In a study published in Psychological Science, researchers looked at two large samples of people who were surveyed about the qualities they most wanted in a mate: one survey was conducted in the late 1980s and included 8,953 people from 37 different cultures; the second survey was more current, administered to 3,177 people from 10 nations via the Internet. 

Noting prior research finding that women who expect to be employed full-time on their own put less emphasis on a man’s “provider” qualities, the authors write: “As the positioning of men and women in societal roles changes, gender differences in mate choice criteria should change because people look for mates who fit into their anticipated future lives under prevalent societal circumstances.” 

To figure out if that’s true, the researchers ranked nations according to a new measure of gender equity introduced by the World Economic Forum in 2006. Within various societies, they looked for relationships between the gender gap and how much of a difference there was between male and female mate preferences. And indeed, the researchers found, the greater the equality of power between the genders, the more similar were the traits that both men and women sought in potential mates. In Finland, the country with the greatest gender parity among the 10 countries included in the more current of the two surveys, there was a far smaller difference between male and female preferences than in Turkey, which had the biggest gender gap.

That means, basically, that the more equal men and women became, the less emphasis men placed on youth and beauty, and the less emphasis women put on wealth and power. These findings were borne out by the 37-culture survey as well; although it showed a definite gender difference in mate-seeking preferences, it also showed that these gender-based differences narrowed in countries with more equality. Further, it found that the top few most desired traits were shared by both men and women: most people first look for intelligence, kindness and sense of humor, even before men mention beauty or women mention wealth and status.

So.  It's possible that the ten-nation survey, at least, may have suffered from a self-selection bias if the respondents selected themselves into the study on the net.  But I find it difficult to see in what direction that bias might go.  People who like to respond to studies of that kind tend to hold stronger views on the questions.  Whether those views are of the EP type or not is unclear to me. 

I'd like to draw your attention to the part in the above quote I have bolded.  In fact, the early evo-psycho studies arguing for innately different mating preferences  by gender also found that other aspects of the potential partner mattered more than beauty or money.  Which is nice, given the cartoonish nature of so much being published under that label.

Looking for a Medicaid-Covered Pap Smear in Texas

This video demonstrates that without Planned Parenthood poor women will have a hard time finding preventive gyno checkups in Texas.

President Obama Speaks, Echidne Listens

The last speech of the Democratic National Convention was by Barack Obama.  Opinions on the speech vary, as they say, but it wasn't one of the best from this gifted orator.

Did it serve its intended purpose?

That depends on what the purpose is assumed to be.   I think his speech was aimed at the so-called undecided voters, not at the choir, but others disagree.  If I'm correct then the speech may have worked.  If it was intended to the base it sorta limped along.  But feel free to disagree.

Hmm.  Convention fatigue seems to have stepped into  my posts about the speeches.  The DNC beat the RNC in enthusiasm and in oratorial skills.  That was added for those of you who like bloggers to be style judges.


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And for all my non-American readers:  You and I, my friends, live in the bottom mud of this world.  This is because of American Exceptionalism.

The Republicans are big on American Exceptionalism,  humongous, in fact.  But even the Democrats must mention it every few seconds lest they be equated with the cheese-eating surrender monkeys (the French).  Here's the president on the topic of American Greatness:

We can choose a future where we export more products and outsource fewer jobs. After a decade that was defined by what we bought and borrowed, we’re getting back to basics, and doing what America has always done best:
We’re making things again.
(APPLAUSE)
I’ve met workers in Detroit and Toledo who feared they’d never build another American car. And today, they can’t build them fast enough, because we reinvented a dying auto industry that’s back on top of the world.
(APPLAUSE) I’ve worked with business leaders who are bringing jobs back to America, not because our workers make less pay, but because we make better products. Because we work harder and smarter than anyone else.

So I don't work hard and smart.  OK, better shuffle dejectedly into that dark crevice in the ground to hide my shame and sloth.

I get the point of all the rah-rah-we're-the-greatest.  It's akin to children buying their mom or dad a t-shirt which says "The World's Best Mom/Dad."  It's not meant for the consumption of outsiders.

Still, it wore me down a bit.






 

Meanwhile, in Arizona, Women Should Not Be in Bars

It's the year 2012.  In Arizona this means:

A woman who was groped by an off-duty DPS officer at a Flagstaff bar last summer says that comments to her by the judge during Wednesday’s sentencing were inappropriate and that the judge should apologize.
Before giving the officer two years’ probation on his conviction for sexual abuse, Coconino County Superior Court Judge Jacqueline Hatch said to victim: “If you wouldn’t have been there that night, none of this would have happened to you.”
Hatch said that the victim was not to blame in the case, but that all women must be vigilant against becoming victims. Hatch also said that even going to the grocery store after 10 p.m. can be dangerous for a woman.
“When you blame others, you give up your power to change,” Hatch said that her mother used to say.
Reached today by phone, the victim said: “It felt like she was saying to me, ‘If you wouldn’t have been there that night, it wouldn’t have happened to you.’ Yeah, well, it probably would have happened to someone else.”

Women should stay out of bar, I guess, and also out of grocery stores late at night.  Better still, women should never leave their homes unattended

I guess mugging victims should be scolded for being out on some street and burglary victims for not having installed extra-strong security systems.

Without knowing more about the details of this case, Hatch's statement sounds like a parody, something I might write as a form of satire.  Because she uses an argument which has merit (be vigilant, avoid bad situations and so on) and then merges it with the idea that transporting the vagina-carrying structure almost anywhere equals being in a bad situation, given that one IS a vagina-carrying structure and there will always be those gropers.

It's hard to know what got Judge Hatch going like this.  Perhaps her sympathies were on the side of the off-duty police officer who appears to have lost his job because of this case?

But that's not the fault of the victim.  It's the fault of the man himself.  If he had not been in that bar that night or if he had kept his hands to himself  he would still have his job and his good reputation!

See?  Two can dance that tango.

I also  liked the victim's point that had she not been in that bar that night, some other woman would probably have received the genital gropes.
----
Via DailyKos.

There's a petition to get Judge Hatch removed from the bench.

Added later:  Judge Hatch has now apologized for her comments. 

Advice, Please

I'm at the beginning of a book project*.  I need your opinions on the best type of writing style for a book which is going to have granola contents (i.e. facts and information).

Is the best style the slightly weird chatty style I use on this here blog?  Something academic and very neutral?  Or a compromise between the two?

And how much humor?

This picture below is not a specimen page from the book but one of my first efforts (from that Echidne-At-Five booklet) at teaching myself to write.  For those of you who read Finnish, it's a copy of a Christmas song or poem about Santa Claus and such, with no spacing and with a few of the letters flipped over.

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*The topic remains a secret right now and the 'book' may never become a proper book.  But I'm gonna write it, says she, determinedly.

Bill Clinton Speaks, Echidne Listens

Bill Clinton spoke a long time last night at the Democratic Convention, longer than was planned.  I thoroughly enjoyed his easy and simple chat.  Probably because I've said all those things before on this blog, at various times.  Hmmm.  I wonder if his speech writers read me?

Just joking though a goddess can always hope.  Still, I was surprised when some observers found his speech confusing or complicated.  He carried out the job that the Obama administration has utterly failed to perform, that of clearly and simply  listing its victories and defending its performance against the critics.  The major point to take home was this one:

In Tampa, the Republican argument against the president's re- election was actually pretty simple, pretty snappy. It went something like this: "We left him a total mess. He hasn't cleaned it up fast enough, so fire him and put us back in."

Which is true.   Additional good points:

We Democrats, we think the country works better with a strong middle class, with real opportunities for poor folks to work their way into it, with a relentless focus on the future, with business and government actually working together to promote growth and broadly shared prosperity. You see, we believe that "We're all in this together" is a far better philosophy than "You're on your own."

(APPLAUSE)

So who's right? Well, since 1961, for 52 years now, the Republicans have held the White House 28 years, the Democrats 24. In those 52 years, our private economy has produced 66 million private- sector jobs. So what's the job score? Republicans: twenty-four million. Democrats: forty-two. (APPLAUSE)

Now, there's -- there's a reason for this. It turns out that advancing equal opportunity and economic empowerment is both morally right and good economics. Why? Because poverty, discrimination, and ignorance restrict growth.

...

So let's get back to the story. In 2010, as the president's recovery program kicked in, the job losses stopped and things began to turn around. The Recovery Act saved or created millions of jobs and cut taxes -- let me say this again -- cut taxes for 95 percent of the American people.

(APPLAUSE)

And in the last 29 months, our economy has produced about 4.5 million private-sector jobs.

(APPLAUSE)

We could have done better, but last year the Republicans blocked the president's job plan, costing the economy more than a million new jobs. So here's another job score. President Obama: plus 4.5 million. Congressional Republicans: zero.

The Republicans in the House and Senate made quite sure that Obama couldn't do better with the economy.  This is important to stress, given the Republican campaign argument that the Obama administration is a failed administration.

What about Clinton's facts in general?  FactCheck.org finds the speech mostly factual, with a few exaggerations and a few debatable cause-effect assertions.

One might talk about the gaps in the speech, the things not said.  It's still true that Bill Clinton was the best moderate Republican president of the last fifty years and that Barack Obama is right now shaping to be the second best moderate Republican president.   The seeds of our current harvest of economic depression and increasing income inequality were eagerly sown by the previous Republican administrations, true, but Bill Clinton was also out there with his seed basket and trowel, when he expanded corporate access to easy outsourcing and helped to adjust the blinders on the regulators of the stock markets.   And the 1990's economy shared something with the economy of the early 2000s:  both were built on unsustainable bubbles, the first on the dotcom idea as Our Savior and the second on both war and housing bubbles.

Now I feel as if I'm complaining of a toothache from the DNC when the RNC offered me nothing but slow and painful end.  Thus, it's important to stress that the Republican alternatives to the Clinton and Obama administrations would have been much worse.  Just think of the eight years of George W. Bush, slipped between the two Democratic reigns.

In an ideal world we could do much better but then pigs could fly if they could buy boarding passes.
-----
One criticism which doesn't fit into the general discussion above:  The idea of a skill deficit among the United States workers and the need to fix it:

Of course, we need a lot more new jobs, but there are already more than 3 million jobs open and unfilled in America, mostly because the people who apply for them don't yet have the required skills to do them. So even as we get Americans more jobs, we have to prepare more Americans for the new jobs that are actually going to be created. The old economy is not coming back. We've got to build a new one and educate people to do those jobs.

(APPLAUSE)

The president and his education secretary have supported community colleges and employers in working together to train people for jobs that are actually open in their communities. And even more important, after a decade in which exploding college costs have increased the dropout rate so much that the percentage of our young people with four-year college degrees has gone down so much that we have dropped to 16th in the world in the percentage of young people with college degrees.

So the president's student loan reform is more important than ever. Here's what it does. Here's what it does. Here's what it does.

It's certainly the case that education in the US needs to be improved but I'm not at all sure that the mantra of "college for everybody" would work.  That seems to be based on a worldview where all American workers are managers or white-collar or pink-collar office workers.  Who is going to do all the rest of the necessary work?  Is it people in China and India?  Or computers and robots?

It's not the importance of education that I quibble with but the somewhat mythical idea that if we all had B.A.s and B.Sc.s then the labor market would boom.  Or in other terms, that firms would start hiring immediately if they could just find more college-educated workers.  We need better education for manual or blue-collar jobs, I think, and we need general education about how to be a human being (arts, music, sport, literature, political knowledge).  But I'm not convinced that having a higher and higher percentage of students spend four years in a college to learn how to work computers is the best way to achieve this.  Or the cheapest.

The Penis Monologues

A fun title, don't you think?   It refers to this, because tweets really are monologues, and Erick Erickson always speaks from the....er....heart of his being.  Short and sweet, Erickson called the first day of the Democratic Convention "Vagina Monologues."   If that's the way we are going then most of the Republican Convention consisted of "Penis Monologues."  Certainly their platform is exactly that.

There's a petition for CNN to fire Erickson, I hear.  I doubt that he will be fired as he is an important part of CNN's diversity!   But I could be wrong.

Photo-Shopping Classic Nudes

This is an interesting project: 

Anna Utopia has made several female nudes in old paintings more compliant with today's body ideals.  One example below, with the original work on the right:

left: anna utopia giordano's reinterpretation of 'venus, cupid, folly and time' by angelo bronzino , 2012
right: 'venus, cupid, folly and time' by angelo bronzino, 1545

Michelle Obama's Speech. A Feminist Look.

She spoke very well and her speech achieved the various goals pundits tell me a candidate's wife's speech has:  to humanize the candidate, to relate the love story of the couple and to inject into this human and emotional message as many subtle links to the policies of the candidate's party as possible.

Michelle Obama's speech was even cleverer than that because she managed to contrast her messages with those of the Republican candidate and his wife.  And yes, she looked fantastic and her dress was great and so on.

It would be better if Barack just resigned tomorrow and president Michelle Obama took over!  Michelle won the War of the Wives.

The above paragraphs are my summary of what I have learned about the general political opinions on this matter.   I agree with them, of course.  Michelle Obama is a great speaker, a beautiful woman and very intelligent.

But here's the reason why I can cheer as wildly as all those folks at the Democratic Convention one moment and go a bit sulky the next moment:  I need a feminism-ectomy!  Also:

Speeches by spouses are one of the many aspects of American electoral politics that puzzle the rest of the world. As a reporter from VG (The Way of the World), the largest newspaper in Norway, was heard to ask, "What do these women do that their men can't?"

In many western European contests, the voting public doesn't even know the names of the candidates' families -- but that's never been true in America. From the first, presidents' wives have been the focus of the public eye, much to the chagrin of Martha Washington, who never wanted her husband to be the leader of the new republic. Abigail Adams, wife of the second president, John Adams, had no time for "the people" and their curiosity about the family that led the nation. It would not be until Dolley Madison became the figurehead for her reticent and uncharismatic husband, James, that a new role for the first lady was born.

That's the way I grew up.  Having wives of candidates take the podium to discuss the candidates as husbands and fathers still sounds very weird to me.

But it's that feminism-ectomy need that truly bothers me.  I don't want to pee on the parade, I don't want to be a fanatic single-issue goddess and I don't want to be a curmudgeon.  I also understand that the role of the political spouse is but one role for women in politics, that women also give speeches as candidates on their own right, and I very much understand the specific trials and tribulations a woman of color would face in the role of the First First Lady of Color, what with various racist stereotypes about black women, in particular.  I don't blame Michelle Obama for the only track she can really take.  Besides, her speech did much more than that requisite get-to-know-my-husband.

Still.  The role of the First Lady does not translate into the role of the First Husband, and that's where the feminist problem with this tradition lies. 

Suppose that the roles were indeed reversed between the two Obamas (as courteous commentators suggest).  Would the First Gentleman, Barack Obama, then give a speech which would end in his vow that his most important role is to be Dad-in-Chief?  Michelle finished with the female equivalent, after all:

And I say all of this tonight not just as first lady.and not just as a wife.
You see, at the end of the day, my most important title is still “mom in chief.”

And would the viewers of that imaginary speech then discuss Barack's clothing and shoes and handsomeness?

My point is that this stuff does not translate, which means that the institution of the First Lady and all the baggage that comes with it is an essentially female one.  

And this is why the role of the First Lady cannot be the role of the First Gentleman.

That is a minor obstacle in the road of female politicians to the highest office in the country, the absent script for the role of the First Spouse.  Other obstacles are much more severe.  Perhaps the best way for me to look at my small sulks is to accept the times we live in.

Now that I got that off my chest,  let me point out that Michelle Obama works that difficult, ill-defined and unpaid job of a First Lady very well.   My grumbling is not about her (or about the earlier First Ladies, either) but about the expectations attached to that role.

 

On Angry White Guys And The Need For Liberals To Shut Up. Recent Immortal Statements.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.):

The tensions come amid a debate within the GOP on how best to lure new voters. The nation’s shifting demographics have caused some Republican leaders to worry not only about the party’s future but about winning in November, particularly in key swing states such as Virginia and Nevada.
“The demographics race we’re losing badly,” said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.). “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.”

Bolds are mine.  I saw a reference to this statement before and simply couldn't believe that it wasn't a hoax.  But nope.  It's real.  Note the verb "to generate" in that sentence.  Graham is taking credit for fueling the anger of the white guys, by presenting them with straw enemies.

An odd moment of honesty perhaps?

Then there's  Alessandra Stanley of New York Times:

You can agree with everything that Rachel Maddow or Ed Schultz say on MSNBC and still oppose their right to say it.
Especially when they and their hyped-up panelists shout that Republican claims are “lies,” or Chris Matthews says that Republicans view welfare recipients as “looters.” MSNBC panelists gave Mitt Romney his due on Thursday but mocked his audience. Mr. Matthews noted that when Mr. Romney called for Americans to give the poor a helping hand, Mr. Matthews said, “He got zero applause,” adding, “I think that’s so telling about tonight.”

Bolds are mine, again.  Some of Stanley's points in that piece are valid.  It's true that Fox News has pretty much destroyed informative and fact-based political debate, and it's true that others are now following suit.

But how come has Fox been allowed to say utterly disgusting things for years without much criticism from journalists in general?   As long as one meta-debating partner (Fox) is allowed to blow farts and breathe fire without any punishment but rather with the rewards of good profits, others will follow suit, right?  Unless rudeness and bias are only OK when carried out by Republicans?

Then there's that whole bit of opposing someone's right to say nasty things.  I have never seen that applied to Fox News, and if it were there would be very loud yells about the freedom of expression.

I guess my point is that if there ever was an idyllic era of polite and fact-based political debates in the American media, that era has been broken by the political right, a long time ago.  The intermediate outcome has been an odd one where your average political debate has consisted of a few fire-breathing monsters from the right, high on angry testosterone and furious at the whole world, and one vewy scawed pseudo-liberal whose point has been to act as a stupid mouse for the cats to play with.

Whether having monsters on both sides is better than the mouse-torture games depends on the spectator.  But the process towards general monstering appears unavoidable if the right are allowed to practice it.

Ramesh Ponnuru on False Choices

Ramesh Ponnuru, a conservative writer for the National Review, is cracking jokes!  Or making threats:

More Gridlock
The Republicans aren’t going to change. Judging from the interview, neither will the president. He said that after the election he would tell Republicans “you no longer need to be focused on trying to beat me; what you need to be focused on and what you should have been focused on from the start is how do we advance the American economy.” He would reiterate that he has always been open to compromise. And he would “look at how we can work around Congress,” if needed.
In other words, after winning he will lecture Republicans about how their positions are insincere and adopted purely for political reasons; he will insist that his existing positions are already a compromise with them; and he will try to govern unilaterally. These tactics seem unlikely to produce the desired results. Obama has, after all, adopted all of them, and they haven’t worked.
If the public renders a split verdict -- returning Obama to the presidency and giving Republicans more power in Congress -- both parties will insist that it’s the other that needs to “listen to the American people.” The choice before those people is looking more and more like one between Romney and a unified Republican government, or Obama and four more years that look a lot like the last two.

Or as Atrios puts it:

Or The Hostage Gets It

Yes there really is no other choice but to surrender to perpetual Republican one party rule.

This is one example of the kind of political writing I love to detest.  Here a guy goes on a rant about the Republicans going even more extreme if they are not allowed to govern unilaterally!  They will pee in the punch bowl nonstop, he swears, throw temper tantrums on the floor and otherwise act discourteously.  Better the people surrender right away so that all those crappy safety nets can be pulled down.  After all, you know they will be shredded apart eventually, so why not now?  And if you don't like it, well, you get another year of gridlock.

Hmmm.  To stay in gridlock or to careen off the cliff?  To stay in gridlock or to careen off the cliff?   Hard choices.

In any case, Ponnuru fails to point out that there's an alternative way out of that dreaded gridlock.  It's to give Democrats the majority in both the House and the Senate and then to re-elect Obama.

Let Us Now Celebrate Labor

Because it is Labor Day in the United States:

Labor Day: How it Came About; What it Means

Labor Day, the first Monday in September, is a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers. It constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country.

That's in our reality.  In the alternate reality, Eric Cantor tweets this:*

Today, we celebrate those who have taken a risk, worked hard, built a business and earned their own success.

I might be mistaken.  Maybe Cantor is not referring to  entrepreneurs in that statement but to the workers on whose backs corporations are ultimately made?  After all, GOP would like to transfer all the risks of entrepreneurship from the owners to the workers ("Right to Work" laws, lack of health insurance, lack of guaranteed annual vacations and so on).

I have nothing against entrepreneurs, by the way.  They carry out an important economic task by taking on certain types of financial risks, those which are used to justify high profits later on.  But today is not the Day of The Entrepreneur,  and workers also work very hard.  Anyone with three simultaneous jobs works hard, for instance.

Given the current lack of media coverage when it comes to workers' circumstances and rights, I really wish that Labor Day be allowed to be about workers.  At least it might remind some people about what the workers are losing in this country.

-----
*Thanks to trifecta for the link

 

Why I Am Pro-Choice

I have written about this topic at least twice before, first in 2005 and then on the day commemorating Roe in 2007.

As you can see from those posts, my stance is based on gender equity and fairness.  If women are largely treated as inanimate (i.e. powerless)  potential or actual containers of the more valuable fertilized eggs, women and men can never be socially or economically equal in the extreme forced-birth world.  Never.

If women are not allowed to be in control of their own fertility, other people will have that control.  And a person without the ability to decide on when she becomes pregnant will not have the same economic and social opportunities as someone who does have that control.   All written history shows us that very thing.

Which sex is it today which is urged to think of itself as living in the state of perpetual  pre-pregnancy when fertile and not actually pregnant, keeping the egg-aquarium clean and sparkly?   Which sex is it today whose contraceptive tools (the pill, the coil)  are blamed of causing abortions by the pro-life constituency?  Which sex is it which is sometimes denied access to contraception by pharmacists with consciences?   And which sex is it today which many employers suspect of just leaving when getting pregnant and therefore not worth hiring or promoting on the job?

All these minor aspects of modern American life would be thousandfold stronger in the world the pro-lifers desire.  Indeed, women's bodies would have to be guarded, miscarriages would have to be investigated as potential murders and going out at night might expose a woman not just to the same dangers a man might face but also a forced pregnancy and birth.

There is no way such a world could offer women equal social and economic opportunities.

How To Draw A Rocket

More art from me when I was little (click on the pic to make it bigger).  This is a picture of a rocket, though the text says "a rocket if it is."  The dot in the upper left-hand corner is probably a planet.

On The Life of Tomoe Goezen. A Guest Post By Anna.

These days female action heroes are becoming ever more popular. In addition to The Hunger Games book and movie trilogy, there is Black Widow of The Avengers, Snow White in the movie Snow White and the Huntsman, and more. 

 

Perhaps now is therefore a good time to take a look at an under-appreciated real-life warrior, Tomoe Goezen. 

 

She was a female samurai warrior (female samurai were known as onna bugeisha).

An example of the consummate woman warrior, Tomoe Goezen was a legendary fighter at the time of the Genpei War (1180-85), a period that saw the birth of the samurai tradition in Japan. Goezen is not a surname but an honorific applied principally to women. 

 

The sources differ on the details of her life. She was either the wife, concubine, or female attendant of the Japanese commander Minamoto no Yoshinaka. Skilled in the martial arts and fearless in battle, she was one on Yoshinaka's senior officers in the struggle for the control of Japan between the Taira and Minamoto clans.

Tomoe Goezen's beauty and prowess are described in the Hieke Monotogari (Tales of the Monotogari): "Tomoe was especially beautiful, with white skin, long hair and charming features. She was also a remarkably strong archer, and as a swordswoman she was a warrior worth a thousand, ready to confront a demon or a god, mounted or on foot. She handled unbroken horses with superb skill; she rode unscathed down perilous descents. Whenever a battle was imminent, Yoshinaka sent her out as his first captain, equipped with strong armor, an oversized sword, and a mighty bow; and she performed more deeds of valor than any of his other warriors. "

Minamoto no Yoshinaka's ambition to head the Minamoto clan eventually led to his downfall. The clan chieftain, Minamoto no Yoritomo, decided to nip his cousin's designs in the bud and dispatched his brothers to kill him. Yoshinaka did battle with Yoritomo's forces at Awazu in February 1184, where it was said that Tomoe Goezen decapitated at least one of the enemy. With only a few of his soldiers left standing, Yoshinaka ordered Tomoe Goezen to quit the field. One account has her remaining and meeting death at Yoshinaka's side. Another has her surviving to become a member of a religious order. In yet another she casts herself into the sea, clutching Yoshinaka's severed head.

In the 1980s Tomoe Goezen was used as a character in a trilogy of fantasy novels, known as "The Tomoe Goezen Saga", by American fantasy and horror author Jessica Amanda Salmonson. Here you can see her life told in fantasy form.

References: The Tale of the Heike, translated by Helen Craig McCullough, 1988.

Hell Hath No Fury by Rosalind Miles and Robin Cross (pgs. 22-23).

 

 

Things To Read

Shulamith Firestone has died.  You can read the first chapter of The Dialectic of Sex here.


This essay on children of rape (CONTENT WARNING FOR RAPE) sets Akin's stupid statement about the impossibility of conceiving from rape into its proper (and painful) perspective.  Despite its title, the essay is mostly not about the children  but about women who gave birth after rape.

This BBC piece about women accused of witchcraft in Ghana reminded me of a book I read about the likely characteristics of women who were caught in the European and late American witch hunts.  They tended to be elderly or without husbands, and in many cases they owned land someone else desired or had an argument with someone in the village:

"The camps are a dramatic manifestation of the status of women in Ghana," says Professor Dzodzi Tsikata of the University of Ghana. "Older women become a target because they are no longer useful to society."
Women who do not conform to society's expectations also fall victim to the accusations of witchcraft, according to Lamnatu Adam of the women's rights group Songtaba.

"Women are expected to be submissive so once you start to be outspoken in your views or even successful in your trade, people assume you must be possessed."

Note that these witch searches have the secondary outcome of controlling women, especially at an age when they might not otherwise be so easy to control.

Finally, Matthew Yglesias has written a piece on the  question: If Ann Romney's work at home is harder and more important (as Mitt has argued), why isn't it Ann who is running for president?

The answer is obvious, of course.  But a more interesting question would have been:  If Ann Romney's work at home is harder and more important (as Mitt has argued), why didn't he want to do it?

Duh.  The Anglo-Saxon cult of motherhood is rife with empty praise for those who parent but very few material rewards, barring a wealthy husband.  And the answer to both those questions can be found in the belief that gender roles are innate and god-given.

More About the Republican War on Women

This is a neat timeline (to June 2012) of the Republican political initiatives having to do with women.  Remember that Chris Christie argues that his party shouldn't have to cater to women?

Well, they do not.  Based on the last few years the Republican Party uses enormous amounts of time and effort on attempts to control women.  I see no reason why they would change that strategy in the future,  both because all that is meat thrown to the Christianist base and because limiting women's reproductive rights or their ability to seek legal redress to discrimination are no-money-cost initiatives.  The latter also leaves more money in the corporate wallets.

And yes, I promise to write about something else as soon as I'm able!  It's getting to a point where I bore myself.

The Evils of Central Planning: A Soviet Factory In Every Uterus!

Yeah, that headline makes little sense.  It's the thought I have after the Paul Ryan speech in which he mentions the evils of central planning in general and the great unbridled joys of jungle markets in particular. 

Except that none of that applies to wimminz and their womb factories.  Those, my sweetings, are to be run by central planning, not by the factories themselves.

The odd combination of anarchy in the markets and strict fundamentalism in social relations has been the central platform of the Republican Party for so long that few even think about how very odd it is, how very much the two basic blocks of that party contradict each other.  Freedom for some, forced births for others.

Kudos When Deserved

Last night I was grumbling about bad journalism.  This morning I saw a proper fact check article on the Paul Ryan speech.  I haven't fact-checked the fact checks...

Added later:  Two more fact check pieces.

Political Journalists Are Now Just Style Judges?

Atrios linked to a story which suggests that this the new job of political journalists:

Blitzer: So there he is, the republican vice presidential nominee and his beautiful family there. His mom is up there. This is exactly what this crowd of republicans here certainly republicans all across the country were hoping for. He delivered a powerful speech. Erin, a powerful speech. Although I marked at least seven or eight points I’m sure the fact checkers will have some opportunities to dispute if they want to go forward, I’m sure they will. As far as mitt romney’s campaign is concerned, paul ryan on this night delivered.

Judges, your style marks, please.

Chris Christie. Blind as A Bat?

This video of Chris Christie speaking about why the Republican Party shouldn't have to cater to women voters or the minorities made me grind my fangs.  Bad.

Christie is saying that there is no reason to have a different message to female voters than to male voters, that it is a fallacy to have to cater to a particular sector of the society, that it is condescending to expect to have a different message to women than to men.

Why I'm spouting flames right now:

First, the Republican Party does have a separate message to women.  No, they are not catered to.  They are catered as the main meal in that big fratboy-cum-Christianist dinner party of the GOP.

Women are supposed to give birth on demand, even when the pregnancy is caused by rape.  Women are not supposed to have access to laws which protect them against domestic violence.  Women are not supposed to have protection against labor market discrimination,  or to have maternity leaves or any chance of equal earnings and so on.  Indeed, women are supposed to do as they are told, to focus on Kinder, Küche und Kirche, and to leave the deciding bidness to men.

Second, the Republican Party does have a separate message to minorities.  Which is pretty much that minorities can go and f**k themselves.  There will be no protection against labor market discrimination based on race or ethnicity, and the hunt for "illegals" is certainly not about illegal Irish or Finnish immigrants to this country.

Third, the Republican Party caters very much to particular sectors of the society.  Those sectors are rich people, mostly older white men, and the Christianist hordes.  The latter are needed for their votes, and the former are the true base of the GOP.  But Republicans are quite willing to cater to misogynists, too.

Thus, Christie is full of crap.  He is insulting, perhaps because he wears blinders.

From the Fringes of The Republican Convention

A nasty racist incident led to the culprit being thrown out of the Convention. 

Then there was this:

An unscripted moment happened late this afternoon that caused the assembled mainstream media to turn away in the hope that it would disappear. As I was standing in line for a sandwich next to an Italian and a Puerto Rican correspondent, a controversy was unfolding on the floor. The RonPaulites, whose furious devotion to a single idea have made them the Ellen Jamesians of the right, were protesting a decision by RNC officials not to seat members of the Maine delegation, which was split between Paul and Romney supporters following rule changes made just prior to the convention. There were energetic shouts of “Aye!” and “Nay!” as a Puerto Rican party functionary—Zoraida Fonalledas, the chairwoman of the Committee on Permanent Organization—took her turn at the main-stage lectern. As she began speaking in her accented English, some in the crowd started shouting “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”The chanting carried on for nearly a minute while most of the other delegates and the media stood by in stunned silence. The Puerto Rican correspondent turned to me and asked, “Is this happening?” I said I honestly didn’t know what was happening—it was astonishing to see all the brittle work of narrative construction that is a modern political convention suddenly crack before our eyes. None of us could quite believe what we were seeing: A sea of twentysomething bowties and cowboy hats morphing into frat bros apparently shrieking over (or at) a Latina.

You can watch the video on the linked site.   Perhaps the chant wasn't occasioned by the Puerto Rican party functionary.  But perhaps they were.

Finally, and not really from the fringes, Bill Keller writes about the crude editing of Obama's statements in a video aired at the Convention.

Ann Romney Speaks. Echidne Listens.

More from the Republican Convention.  Ann Romney, the wife of Mitt Romney, gave a speech yesterday.  The transcript is here and the video here.

The purpose of the speech was to tell American women that if the Republican Party doesn't love them, well, Ann Romney does!  It's almost as good, honest.

I may be too nasty there, because Ann Romney wanted to speak about her husband and how much she loves him.  She also made this comment:

Sometimes, I think that, late at night, if we were all
silent for just a few moments and listened carefully, we could
hear a collective sigh from the moms and dads across America who
made it through another day, and know that they will make it
through another one tomorrow. But in the end of that day moment,
they are just aren't sure how.
   And if you listen carefully, you'll hear the men sighing
a little bit more than the women.  It's how it is, isn't it?  It's
the dads who have always had to work a little harder to make
everything right.  It's the dad's of this nation, single,
married, widowed, who really hold the country together.  We're
the fathers.  We're the husbands.  We're the grandfathers.  We're
the big brothers.  We're the little brothers and we are the
sons.
   You know it's true, don't you?
   (APPLAUSE)
   I love you,  men!
   (APPLAUSE)
   And I hear your voices.  Those are my favorite fans down
there.

OK, she didn't.  It was that Evil Echidne who switched all the gender signifiers to their opposites, to show you how ultimately insincere I found that particular part of the speech was.  Women are loved because they have kinship ties to other people and because  they worry a bit more about the economy than the men.  Who also, of course, have kinship ties to all sorts of other people, but that has never been used as a justification to love them, in general.  It suffices for us wimminfolk, however.

Ann Romney does give specific examples of the Americans who suffer from the current economic situation.  I looked at those examples more carefully, given the pro-woman angle of this speech.  Here are few of those examples:

  And the working moms who love their jobs, but would like to 
work just a little less to spend more time with the kids, but 
that is just out of the question with this economy.
   Or how about that couple who would like to have another
 child but wonder how they will afford it?  I have been all
 across this country and I know a lot of you guys.
   (APPLAUSE)
   And I have seen and heard stories of how hard it is to get
ahead now.  You know what?  I have heard your voices.  They have 
said to me, I am running in place and we just cannot get ahead.


...

 You are the ones that have to do a little bit more and you 
know what it is like to earn a little bit harder earn the 
respect you deserve at work and then you come home to help with 
the book report just because it has to be done.


Mmm.  Let's see what the Republican Party has done for those working women, recently:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Monday that Senate Republicans oppose equal pay for women, citing as evidence their expected opposition to the Democrats' Paycheck Fairness Act in a scheduled Tuesday vote.

"They don't agree with this, they don't want women to make the same amount of money, so they're filibustering this," Reid said on the Senate floor. "They are filibustering us even getting on the bill."

More examples from Ann Romney:

You know what those late-night phone calls with an elderly 
parent are like, and those long weekend drives just to see how
 they're doing.
   You know the fastest route to the local emergency room and
 which doctors actually answers the phone call when you call at
 night, and by the way, I know all about that.


The Republican Party is very much opposed to any changes in the old health care system which made the local emergency room the only place of care for many of those worried working mothers.

And yet more from Ann Romney:

I  am not sure if men really understand this, but I don't
 think there is a woman in America who really expects her life to 
be easy. In our own ways, we all know better.  You know what,
 and that's fine. We don't want easy.  But the last few years 
have been harder than they needed to be.  It is all the little 
things, the price of the pump you could not believe and the 
grocery bills that just get bigger, all those things that used
 to be free, like school sports are now one more bill to pay.
   It's all the little things become the big things.  And the 
big things, the good jobs, the chance at college and the home
 you want to buy just get harder.  Everything has become harder.
We're too smart and know that there are no easy answers, but
 we're not dumb enough to accept that there are not better
 answers.


So.  Given that the price at the pump went up partly because of the wars of the previous Republican president, what are we to conclude from this?  Given that the school costs are going up because of the decision of mostly Republican state governments with the desire to squash the public sector like an annoying gnat, what are we to conclude from this?  And given that college funding is also slashed by the same Republicans on state level, what are we to conclude from this?


The women Ann Romney speaks to (or so I imagine) are not at all worried that the Republican Party wanted to get rid of the Violence Against Women Act or that the draft platform of the Republican Party appears to include that bit about the Rapists' Fatherhood Rights.  Neither does she mention that her party is overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly male, and that there are good reasons for that to be the case.

But whatever.  The big thing seems to be to point out that women are necessary in their traditional roles for this particular economic and social system to work, and that to praise them for their traditional work suffices to keep them faithful to the GOP.

Governor Chris Christie Speaks. Echidne Listens.

I watched Chris Christie's speech at the RNC Convention.  My, he was good on the emotions!  Your task:  Find a transcript of that speech and circle around all the possibly factual assertions.

You will be astonished that they are so few.  He argues that the "truth" has to do with too large a government, one which needs to be shrunk to size, that this shrinking will require equal sacrifices from all (has it in the past?), that the Murkan people are unselfish and willing to do that very thing, all quite equally!  And that Murka will, once again, be exceptional!  That all grandchildren can be proud of living in the kind of exceptional banana republic Christie desires.

That the "truths" might also be about such unimportant matters as joblessness and suffering and the loss of much wealth in the Bush-abetted financial markets crash was not part of Christie's speech.

Then there was that odd bit about the need to cut the pay of teachers!  Teachers are really evil people and the cause of much suffering in this country because they are for teachers' unions and not for the children.  Christie even mentions, fleetingly, that teachers are not motivated by pay but by the love of children.  Or should be.

On the other hand, in the rest of the economy those who work hard should get paid well.   And the kind of education system Christie desires is the exact opposite of the education systems in this world which do well.

The Finnish system, for instance, is based on government funding, high salaries for teachers, and quite a bit of respect for the teaching profession.  Christie wants teachers to teach because of their love for children, Christie wants teachers to be rewarded only for the very best results (which, naturally, depend on the circumstances and problems of the children, and therefore results in differential teaching rewards in poorer areas where children have many more problems).

Despite the scarcity of factual assertions, Christie's speech was very good on all that hindbrain stuff.  FEEL GOOD!  Even if your life is not good.  FEEL UNSELFISH!  Even if the choices work for the selfish desires of the few on top.  SHARE EQUALLY IN SACRIFICES!  Even though this is impossible to achieve if those sacrifices mean unemployment and hunger for some,  one less yacht for some others.

Most importantly, the good feelings cost the Republicans nothing at all.  That's always an important consideration for that party.

On the other hand, Christie never mentioned the misogynistic policies of his party,  despite using the idea of the government not getting between a woman and her doctor in his reference to the health care policies of the Obama administration.

That up is down and east is west is to be expected from Christie and his ilk.  Still, I've been flabbergasted by the general Republican argument that women don't care about reproductive choice because the economic problems are more serious.  Why should these two be mutually exclusive alternatives?   How, exactly, do the Republican economic policies require that raped women give birth to the children of their rapists?

The answer, naturally, is that this is all bullshit.  Reproductive choice costs the Republican Party nothing in money, and might save the government some in later welfare payments.  But the lack of reproductive choice is a demand made by the extreme Christian patriarchs of that party, and it's something the misogynistic element in the party doesn't care about.  Hence, Republican women are told what they should choose:  American exceptionalism for their grandchildren!

What kind of exceptionalism that might be?  Especially for their granddaughters.
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Added later:  Here's a piece about the Christie economic miracle!

On Trigger Warnings

Roxane Gay has written a beautiful article on the futility of trigger warnings:

Many feminist communities use trigger warnings, particularly when discussing rape, sexual abuse, and violence. By using these warnings, these communities are saying, “This is a safe space. We will protect you from unexpected reminders of your history.” Members of these communities are given the illusion they can be protected.
There are a great many potential trigger warnings. Over the years, I have seen trigger warnings for eating disorders, poverty, self-injury, bullying, heteronormativity, suicide, sizeism, genocide, slavery, mental illness, explicit fiction, explicit discussions of sexuality, homosexuality, homophobia, addiction, alcoholism, racism, the Holocaust, ableism, and Dan Savage.
Life, apparently, requires a trigger warning.
This is the uncomfortable truth—everything is a trigger for someone. There are things you cannot tell just by looking at her or him.

And she has a point.  More than one point, because trigger warnings cannot guarantee a safe space and because almost everything can trigger a flood of memories in some reader.  She also makes a related point later in the article:

It all seems so futile, so impotent and, at times, belittling. When I see trigger warnings, I think, “How dare you presume what I need to be protected from?”
Trigger warnings also, when used in excess, start to feel like censorship. They suggest that there are experiences or perspectives too inappropriate, too explicit, too bare to be voiced publicly. As a writer, I bristle when people say, “This should have had a trigger warning.” I think, “For what?”
I do not understand the unspoken rules of trigger warnings. I cannot write the way I want to write and consider using trigger warnings. After a while, I would second guess myself, temper the intensity of what I have to say. I don’t want to do that. I don’t intend to ever do that.
Writers cannot protect their readers for themselves nor should they be expected to.
There is also this: maybe trigger warnings allow people to avoid learning how to deal with triggers, getting help. I say this with the understanding that having access to professional resources for getting help is a privilege. I say this with the understanding that sometimes there is not enough help in the world. That said, there is value in learning, where possible,  how to deal with and respond to the triggers that cut you open, the triggers that put you back in terrible places, that remind you of painful history.

These points all carry their own kind of truth.  It's a partial truth and a subjective truth but a truth.

My own use of trigger warnings is also partial.  It's based on trying not to set up sneaky assassin triggers for anybody, the kinds of triggers which could open up a flood of flashbacks in a PTSD sufferer, without any warning, without any time for her or him to set up the brick walls or to take up the defensive weaponry.

Thus, I use them when the topic of a blog is different from what readers might usually expect from this site.  I often (always?) write about hate and loathing and disgusting behaviors, and to label all those topics would require permanent trigger warnings.  But when a post describes human evil and human suffering in such detail that it can provoke flashbacks, that's when I put up the warning.

I don't know if it works, and I worry over the fact that I don't know which posts truly deserve those warnings.  My own history is not the same as the history of others, and I may happily skip across a topic of dire importance to someone else.  I know this because this has happened to me in other places and at other times.

But marking everything is not a feasible approach.  The general contents of this blog provide information about whether reading me is ever recommended (!).

No place can ultimately be a safe space, in the sense of being impermeable, of being able to take any attack.  People die in their own bedrooms, friends and family  can take us down.  But what I have tried to do with this blog  is to create a space of respect, a space where the fighting is fair when it happens.

I have failed miserably and frequently, of course.  Still, I think the conversations we have here are closer to that feeling of respect than they would have been without any such choices.

Precocious

Well, goddesses are.  When I was five I drew this picture of a horse.  As you can see I already questioned received wisdom in at least two ways: the udders and the best kind of tail. 

It's not very sharp because of damage from storage.  My  apologies for that.  The thing in the upper left-hand corner is a practice for drawing a foot, of course.  The thing below it is "horse" in Finnish.

On Those Alpha Males

The wolf ones.  The ones that the Pickup Artists tell us they emulate.  Manboobs has an interesting piece about actual wolves:

Because the qualities of the Alpha Male (such as social dominance and leadership) are attractive to women, many PUAs have adopted these ideals as models of emulation. In fact, the term “alpha” has come be shorthand for the qualities of an attractive man, and it is a common refrain among PUAs to be “more alpha” or to “out alpha” competitors.
There’s a certain logic to all this. But unfortunately for the PUAs and other manospherians the notion of the Alpha male is based on bad science. The notion of Alpha dominance, as the definition above notes, came originally from studies of wolf packs. Even if we assume that wolf behavior is somehow a good model upon which to base our understanding of human romance  – as manosphere men and evolutionary psychologists tend to do – the science behind the Alpha male wolf has now come completely undone, with many of those who promulgated the theory in the first place decades ago now explicitly repudiating it.
The problem, you see, is that the studies underlying the notion of the alpha male wolf, who aggressively asserts his dominance over beta males in order to rule the pack, were all based on observations of wolves in captivity. In the real world, wolf packs don’t work that way at all. Most wolf packs are basically wolf families, with a breeding pair and their pups. When male pups reach adulthood, they don’t fight their fathers for dominance — they go out and start their own families.

Presumably the female pups leave, too, to start their own families.  Otherwise those new families couldn't be created.


I haven't yet read the actual study but I have for some time been concerned with how much of our animal research has taken place with captive animals.  For instance, the early mother-infant bonding studies were carried out with caged chimpanzees.  In a sense humans studied how chimpanzees might mother in a concentration camp.

The Republican Party Loves Women!

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-Texas)  has told us that the Republican Party doesn't have a problem with women!   So that's all right then.

A letter-to-the-editor in my Google news (which I now can't find to link to) argued the same.  The reasons:  Republican men breed with women, you see!  And about a hundred years ago many suffragettes were Republicans.  So that's all right then.

Except that neponset in Eschaton comments brought up a few problems:

Stop insulting my intelligence.  When Rs had to choose between giving women the chance to sue for equal pay and employers they picked employers.  When they had to choose between women who need birth control and catholic employers' religious freedom they picked catholic employers.  When they had to choose between their anti-gay base and the Violence Against Women act they picked the anti gays.  When they had to choose between the anti choice movement and rape and incest victims they picked the anti choicers.  I could go on.

Add to that the types of stories that get published on the conservative site, Townhall.  I've read several stories there about the dreadful mistake that was the Nineteenth Amendment (voting rights for women).  In general, if I want to write on misogyny I just go to Townhall and push my cart along the aisles there.   Then the National Review can also be a bargain basement for misogyny.

The war on women is not a brand new thing with the Republican Party but a branding thing:

Much of the so-called “gender gap” is simply the natural order of American politics; women favor Democrats more, while men are closer to the GOP. Even as Republicans might struggle among women, they can make up for it by winning men by a bigger margin.

That's far too facile.   First, it's mostly only white men who vote reliably Republican, as a group.  Second, does the writer imply that Akin et al.  bash women to attract men?  That the misogyny of the Party is an intended feature to attract those men who are also misogynists?   Or does he imply that it's the rest of the Republican platform (no taxes!  lotsa wars!) which appeals to men?

I once read a rant about many women voting for the Democrats.  It explained to me that women are gold-diggers and unable to make it on their own so of course they look up to the Big Daddy for sustenance!   I think that was on Townhall...

In short, the interesting question here is to what extent the misogyny  is a planned part of the Republican brand.

It's also true that many, many women do vote for the Republican Party.  The gender gap in voting is not humongous.  People vote on many different issues and many people vote whatever their parents voted (or the exact opposite, depending on family dynamics).  And most people don't follow the political fights in any detail at all.  Thus, it's difficult to know if the open contempt of so many Republicans towards women matters much when it comes to actual voting choices.

But then all this is something which happens against the background of general societal misogynistic chatter.  The Republicans aren't that extreme in that context.