A Guest Post by Anna: A Feminist Literary Canon, Part Seven: 1980-1990

(Echidne's note:  Part 6 is here , part 5 here and Part 4 here.  Links to earlier posts can be found in Part 4 (assuming they still work..).  Wikipedia articles are used as a general source in this series.)

Audre Lourde (1934-1992) was a Caribbean-American lesbian writer, poet, librarian, and activist. 

Lourde criticized feminists of the 1960s for focusing on the particular experiences and values of white middle-class women. Her writings are based on the "theory of difference", the idea that the binary opposition between men and women is overly simplistic: although feminists have found it necessary to present the illusion of a solid, unified whole, the category of women itself is full of subdivisions. Among other works, Lourde wrote The Cancer Journals(1980), in which she describes her experience with cancer and calls on the reader to relinquish silence and speak out. She focuses on the importance of the love received from the women around her throughout her experience, and the comfort from talking about it with other lesbian cancer survivors. She also discusses coming to terms with the outcome of the operation, which left her with one breast. She explains that although it would be fine for women to resort to a prosthesis if they want to, she chooses not to, thinking that it seems like a cover-up in a society where women are solely judged on their looks. She also discusses the possibilities of alternative medicine, arguing that women should look at all the options. 

Her book Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982) began a new genre known as biomythography, a term she coined which means the weaving together of myth, history, and biography in epic narrative form, a style of composition meant to represent all the ways in which we perceive the world around us.

In Zami, Lourde discusses her upbringing and early life. The book describes the way lesbians lived in NYC, Connecticut, and Mexico. It also discusses Lourde's difficult relationship with her mother, whom she credits for imbuing her with a certain sense of strength; the book ends with a homage to her. Zami is a Caribbean name for women who work together as friends and lovers. 

In one of Lourde's most famous essays, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House"  from Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984), she attacks the underlying racism of feminism, describing it as unrecognized dependence on the patriarchy. She argues that, by denying difference in the category of women, feminists merely passed on old systems of oppression and that, in so doing, they were preventing any real, lasting change. Her argument aligns white feminists with white male slave-masters, describing both as "agents of oppression."

Margaret Atwood (born 1939) is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist.

 She is best known for The Handmaid's Tale (1985), a novel which won the 1985 Governor General's Award and the first Arthur C. Clarke award in 1987, and has been adapted for the cinema, radio, opera, and stage. 

It describes a dystopian sexist future in the former United States where women are forbidden to read and hold positions of authority, after a movement called the "Sons of Jacob" has used a staged terrorist attack (blamed on Islamic extremist terrorists) to kill the President and most of Congress, suspend the United States Constitution, and create a theocratic military dictatorship. 

The story is told from the point of view of a handmaid, or concubine, known as Offred, who serves a man called Fred. Although this book is often considered a feminist classic for its criticism of the sexism it depicts, it is worth noting that Atwood recently said (in 2009), "I don't know if I am a feminist." The book also depicts the narrator's feminist mother burning books in a flashback, and warns against anti-pornography feminists aligning themselves with the religious right, since the religious right is against feminism. Atwood also believes that the feminist label can only be applied to writers who consciously work within the framework of the feminist movement.

Gloria Anzaldúa (1942-2004) was an American scholar of Chicano cultural theory, queer theory, and feminist theory.

She is most famous for co-editing This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color (1981) with Cherrie Moraga. 

This anthology explores the feminist revolution from the perspective of women of color and addresses the cultural, class, and sexual differences that impact them.  It includes Anzaldúa's speech called "Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers" (1981), focusing on the shift towards an equal and just gender representation in literature, but away from racial and cultural issues due to the rise of female writers and theorists.

She also stresses in her speech the power of writing to create a world which would compensate for what the real world does not offer us. Anzaldúa has introduced the term "mestizaje" to United States academic audiences, meaning a state of being beyond binary (either-or) understanding. In her theoretical works,  Anzaldúa calls for a "new mestiza," which she describes as an individual aware of her conflicting and meshing identities and uses these "new angles of vision" to challenge binary thinking. This "new mestiza" way of thinking is part of postcolonial feminism. In "La Conciencia de la Mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness" (1987), a text often used in women's studies,  Anzaldúa insists that separatism for Chicanas and Chicanos is not furthering the cause, but instead keeping the same racial division in place.

Alice Walker (born 1944) is an American author and activist, as I mentioned before. In 1982 she published The Color Purple, which focuses on the life on black women in the 1930s in the United States, and includes themes of lesbianism and feminism. It is widely considered a feminist classic. 

In this book Walker portrays female friendships as a means for women to summon the courage to tell stories which allow women to resist oppression and dominance. Relationships among women form a refuge, providing reciprocal love in a world filled with male violence. The novel also shows the limitations of gender roles. 

In 1983 she published In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose, a collection composed of thirty-six separate pieces. In this book she coins the word "womanist", which she defines as, "A black feminist or feminist of color. From the black folk expression of mother to female children and also a woman who loves other women, sexually and/or nonsexually. Appreciates and prefers women's culture. Committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female." This has become a popular and influential concept among feminist women of color.

Andrea Dworkin (1946-2005) was an American author. During the late 1970s and the 1980s, she gained national fame as a spokeswoman for the feminist anti-pornography movement, and for her writing on pornography and sexuality, particularly in Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981) and Intercourse(1987), which remain her two most widely known books.

In Pornography: Men Possessing Women she argues that pornography and erotic literature in patriarchal societies consistently eroticize women's sexual subordination to men, and often overt acts of exploitation or violence.

In Intercourse, she went on to argue that that sort of sexual subordination is central to men's and women's experiences of sexual intercourse in male supremacist society, and reinforced throughout mainstream culture, including not only pornography but also in classic works of male-centric literature. Dworkin argues that the depictions of intercourse in mainstream art and culture consistently emphasize heterosexual intercourse as the only or the most genuine form of "real" sex; that they portray intercourse in violent or invasive terms; that they portray the violence or invasiveness as central to its eroticism; and that they often unite it with male contempt for, revulsion towards, or even murder of, the "carnal" woman.

bell hooks (aka Gloria Jean Watkins, born 1952) is an American author and activist. She took her pen name, which is intentionally uncapitalized, from her grandmother Bell Blair Hooks. She chose this because her grandmother "was known for her snappy and bold tongue, which I greatly admired." She put the name in lowercase letters "to distinguish myself from my grandmother." Her name's unconventional lowercasing signifies what is most important in her works: the "substance of books, not who I am." 

Her first major work Ain't I a Woman?: Black women and feminism (1981) examines the historical impact of sexism and racism on black women, devaluation of black womanhood, media roles and portrayal, the education system, the idea of a white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy, the marginalization of black women, and the disregard for issues of race and class within feminism. 

In 1984 she published Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center,which confirmed her importance as a leader in radical feminist thought. Throughout the book, hooks uses the term white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy as a lens through which to both critique various aspects of American culture and to offer potential solutions to the problems she explores. hooks addresses topics including the goals of feminist movement, the role of men in feminist struggle, the relevance of pacifism, solidarity among women, and the nature of revolution. 

hooks can be identified in her discussions of these topics as a radical feminist because of her arguments that the system itself is corrupt and that achieving equality in such a system is neither possible nor desirable. She promotes instead a complete transformation of society and all of its institutions as a result of protracted struggle, envisioning a life-affirming, peaceful tomorrow. 

A second edition of this book, featuring a new preface,  "Seeing the Light: Visionary Feminism,"  was published in 2000. 

In the preface to the first edition, hooks, talking about black Americans in her hometown, discusses the meaning of her title From Margin to Center: 

"Living as we did "on the edge" we developed a particular way of seeing reality. We looked from both the outside in and the inside out. We focused our attention on the center as well as the margin. We understood both. This mode of seeing reminded us of the existence of a whole universe, a main body made up of both margin and center."
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Note:  Much of the information here is taken from Wikipedia articles.

Reading for Thinking, on Saturday

This is an interesting article about a fundamentalist Christian man who decided to spend a year pretending to be gay and what he learned about it.   To what extent can similar experiments be done about the impact of gender on one's perceptions?  Or more importantly, about the impact of gender on the perceptions of others?

Remember those tax loopholes the Romney/Ryan plan vows to close, in some completely unspecified manner, preferably carried out by the Democrats in the Congress while Romney/Ryan would get the credit for the tax cuts?

Against that background this article in the Rolling Stone magazine is kinda fun:

Are Romney's tax dodges legal? It's impossible to say for sure, given how little he has disclosed. But tax experts note that there are plenty of red flags, including an investigation by New York prosecutors into tax abuses at Bain Capital that began on Romney's watch. "He aggressively exploits every loophole he can find," says Victor Fleischer, a professor of tax law at the University of Colorado. "He's pushing the limits of tax law beyond what many think is reasonable." Indeed, a look at Romney's finances reveals just how skilled he is at hiding his wealth – and paying a fraction of his fair share in taxes.

Finally, Huffington Post has a nasty piece about Goldie Hawn.   It's almost a concentrated shot of ageism and sexism mixed up and injected straight into the vein.  It's also a good basis for asking why actors are supposed to have no right to privacy, even when they are not working.

Romney v. Obama: Such Feistiness! Ryan v. Biden: Such Buffoonery!

What a difference a week or so makes!  After the first presidential debate Fox News wrote:

Mitt Romney energized his campaign for president Wednesday night, charging out of his first debate having by most accounts from both sides of the political spectrum dominated President Obama in a stand-off for which he was evidently well-prepared.
The Republican nominee was quick on his feet, polished and feisty as he repeatedly cut off the moderator and challenged his opponent on the facts. His central argument -- that Obama's economic policies have consigned the middle class to an eroding "status quo."

Bolds are mine.

This morning last night's vice-presidential debate was called a "slugfest" in the New York Times:

Mr. Biden’s smirking, emotional and aggressively sharp approach toward his rival, Representative Paul D. Ryan, prompted cheers from Democrats who had been desperate for the kind of in-your-face political rumble that President Obama did not deliver during his debate with Mitt Romney a week ago.
But Mr. Biden repeatedly mocked and interrupted Mr. Ryan in ways that led Republicans to use words like “unhinged” and “buffoon” and “disrespectful” in the hours after the fast-paced, 90-minute exchange ended.

These bolds, too, are mine.

No, I'm not equating the performances of Mitt Romney and Joe Biden.  But I wonder how the style points would have been awarded had Biden chosen the sort of  lethargic approach Obama adopted.  I think Ryan would have been declared the clear winner under that scenario.

And here comes the Times with a demand for a tightrope walk from the president:

Mr. Obama’s biggest challenge may now be the next debate with Mr. Romney on Tuesday in New York. The president must somehow thread the needle between the first two debates — demonstrate more energy than he did in the first one while avoiding the kind of sometimes sneering performance that Mr. Biden delivered. 

Mmm.

What about the contents of the debate?  You know, the stuff that matters more than those style points.

I'm a biased critic in this case because Paul Ryan frightens me.  A lot.

But  my meta-criticism of Ryan's economic arguments is this:  What he proposes is exactly what caused the current recession in the first place.  What he proposes is what the Bush administration did, and that was the cause of things going wrong in the first place:  Tax cuts which tilted towards the wealthier people and financial and housing markets which were allowed to go haywire because "markets know best."

Then there are the more detailed problems with the Romney/Ryan tax cut plan which supposedly remains revenue-neutral because some tax loopholes will be closed.  What, exactly, those loopholes are and how they might be closed is something neither Romney nor Ryan wants to talk about.  Given that silence, the proposal cannot be judged on any rational basis.   I think it's just an attempt to offer people lower taxes with no bad consequences.

But note that tax burdens will shift and some people will pay more  if some current deductions are disallowed, and it's pretty likely that those closed loopholes would have to include at least some of the popular deductions the middle class currently enjoys.*

The odd question in this debate had to do with the two men's personal religious beliefs about abortion:

“We have two Catholic candidates, first time, on a stage such as this. And I would like to ask you both to tell me what role your religion has played in your own personal views on abortion. And, please, this is such an emotional issue for so many people in this country…please talk personally about this, if you could.”
In a mostly exemplary performance, this was a lapse. Martha Raddatz could have asked about the voting gender gap, or maybe whether we have a “war on women” or a “war on religious liberty.” She could have asked about access to contraception to reduce unwanted pregnancies, or the rights of rape victims, or the stalled Violence Against Women Act, or equal pay for women.
Instead, she chose to frame the late-breaking, much-yearned for question about “social issues” in just the way Republicans prefer: in terms of religion. (Watch the clip below.) Everyone at Salon’s debate-watching party groaned, and with good reason. Please, let’s hear more from two religiously observant white men about their personal experiences with women’s reproductive freedom and access! It’s not that religion, or men, have no place in the debate over abortion rights; it’s that her question left women out of the equation from the start.

Paul Ryan would make an exception in his firm anti-abortion stance for a dying woman or in the case of a rape or incest which is noble of him, I guess, though the pregnant woman's health he would let suffer to any point short of death.

Of course he would never be held to such extremely rigorous parental standards of self-sacrifice, what with that absent uterus.

Nobody is proposing laws which require the father or the mother of a post-born child (sorry) to, say, donate a kidney to that child if she or he requires it to live.  But in Paul Ryan's ideal world pregnant women would be required  to sacrifice their own health on behalf of the embryo or fetus they carry.

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Added later:  This article tells us how unrealistic that plan is if it is supposed to keep tax revenues constant.

Did You Sleep Your Way To The Top? And Other Journalistic Questions.

The topic of this post is not of wide-reaching relevance, given the horrible problems of this world, but it opens a nice peephole to some of our cultural beliefs and customs about women, men and sex.  In particular, to what extent sex can be a topic for an interview with either men or women, and what type of questions can be asked.

It all started with a Twitter fight between Andrew Goldman and Jennifer Weiner.  The former writes for the New York Times, the latter is an author.   The fight begins:

And then it got worse, other people joined in and so on.

Margaret Sullivan, the NYT's public editor,  addressed the issue:

I asked Hugo Lindgren, the editor of the Times Magazine, about the incident, sending him a blog post that raised questions about some of Mr. Goldman’s earlier questions to women he interviewed, including one with the NPR journalist Terry Gross and one with Whitney Cummings, both of which had elicited criticism from some female readers.
My questions and his responses are below:
1. How do you respond to the complaints that Mr. Goldman’s questions are frequently sexist and misogynist?
We don’t publish material we believe to be misogynist or sexist. The blog post you sent me cited 3 examples, out of probably a thousand published questions that Andrew has asked since he took over the column. In the context of the full interviews, none of them struck me as sexist or misogynist. There were frank, sensitive questions, not declarations or assertions of his own. In the Terry Gross interview, Andrew is not making his own presumption about her sexuality. He is referring to an anecdote that was published in the introduction of her own book, which was made even clearer when she makes a joke about how widespread this misperception is. The Whitney Cummings question is perhaps a little cheekier but still refers to something other people have said about her — “On those Comedy Central roasts, your fellow comedians liked to joke about how you slept your way to fame. How accurate is that criticism?”
2. What is your view of the specific question to Ms. Hedren about sleeping her way to the top? Did you see it in advance? If not, would you have approved it?
I saw it and approved it. This is the full question: The worst abuse happened after you rebuffed his advances. Actors have been known to sleep with less powerful directors for advancement in show business. Did you ever consider it? The whole reason for the interview is a new HBO movie about how Hitchcock sexually harassed her. It was an unsavory decision she was actually faced with, so he asked her about it: He made no assertions about what she should or shouldn’t have done. Andrew’s questions acknowledge and refer to sexism in the world, but they are not, in and of themselves, sexist.
For what it’s worth, his editor and top editor are both women. They did not object to the question. But I take full responsibility for it all the same.
3. What is your response to the Twitter back and forth as detailed in the piece I’ve attached here?
I thought Andrew was needlessly rude and insulting, and I told him that. He apologized to Jennifer Weiner, and she accepted it.
4. Could you clarify Mr. Goldman’s position with the magazine? Is he a freelancer? A part-time staffer? Does he do other work than the Q&A?
He is a freelancer. He has not yet contributed to the magazine in other ways, but has an active assignment.
5. Is he in good standing at this point? Are you providing any coaching/feedback/disciplinary measures? Does all of this change his standing with The Times?
I made it clear to him that kind of behavior he exhibited in this Twitter exchange would not be tolerated, and he was contrite and accepted that without argument. My feeling is that he had an unfortunate outburst, and that he will learn from it. He works very hard on these interviews and does a good job. Readers are entitled to whatever opinions they have of his work, and he needs to be comfortable with that and engage thoughtfully when appropriate, or not at all.

John Cook responded:

Goldman was rapidly and roundly rebuked on Twitter by New Yorker critic Emily Nussbaum—"If you can't respond to criticism without embodying the very douchebaggery you're accused of... C'mon"—and many, many others. After briefly trying to explain the insult as an attempt to comically embrace the caricature he felt Weiner was painting, Goldman apologized for the comment and deactivated his Twitter account.
Last night, Sullivan weighed in. After interviewing Goldman's editor Hugo Lindgren and Weiner, she correctly criticized his "hideous misjudgment" in attacking Weiner personally on Twitter. But she went farther: She gave credence to Weiner's charges that Goldman had exhibited sexism in his interview questions, sending an angry and unhinged critique by blogger Ed Champion to Lindgren and asking him to respond. And she was eager to see Goldman disciplined, strongly suggesting that he should have been fired for the error: "It sounds as though he's going to get [a second] chance. Given his misbehavior on Twitter and his status as a highly replaceable freelancer, I think his editors are extraordinarily generous to give it to him." (She also, oddly, repeatedly harped on the "strong obscenities" Goldman used on Twitter, as though bad words are an offense worthy of disciplinary action. The obscenities he used were "shit" and "bullshit.")
Sullivan's condemnation of Goldman was smug and unforgiving. Calling for his head over one insult, for which he has apologized, is massive overkill. And the eagerness with which she contemplated Goldman losing his job over a mistake that he regrets—almost gleefully calling him "a highly replaceable freelancer"—was unbecoming. Astonishingly, Sullivan, who purports to be the Times' ethical line judge, didn't even contact Goldman for his thoughts before virtually calling for his firing.
But the worst part was Sullivan's seeming endorsement of the charge that Goldman is some sort of misogynist based on the questions he had asked various interview subjects in the past. As evidence of the purported controversy, she cited Champion, who called Goldman "vulgar" and "repulsive" and floated half-baked conspiracy theories about Harvey Weinstein's role in his career. If you're interested in checking out Champion's bona fides on the subject of misogyny, here he is joking about double-teaming the First Lady of the United States.
The rap against Goldman is this: He asked Hedren, "Actors have been known to sleep with less powerful directors [than Alfred Hitchcock] for advancement in show business. Did you ever consider it?" (In Sullivan's inaccurate framing, that became Goldman "asking a successful woman if she has slept her way to the top.") Goldman asked that question in the context of a new HBO movie about Hedren's relationship with Hitchcock, which was a bizarre and cruel sort of sexual slavery—he was obsessed with her and ruined her career over her refusal to give in to his vile advances. Asking did you ever consider it is a perfectly legitimate question—Hitchcock forced her into an awful choice, and he's asking her if she ever had second thoughts about the one that she made. It is most emphatically not, per Weiner, an "accusation" that Hedren slept her way to the top. After I went back and forth with her on Twitter today, Weiner acknowledged to that if she had been Goldman's editor, she wouldn't have thought twice about the question.
But Weiner is also upset about this question Goldman posed to the comic Whitney Cummings last year: "On those Comedy Central roasts, your fellow comedians liked to joke about how you slept your way to fame. How accurate is that criticism?" This was obviously not offered as a serious question. It was not an attempt by Goldman to assess the veracity of the claims being made by Cummings' fellow comedians. Any attempt to read it as such is willfully obtuse. It was a chance for Cummings to address the jokes, and to either riff on them or respond in earnest. (She riffed on them: "If sleeping with people worked, I would be doing it.") It was a provacative way of saying, "What's it like to constantly be accused by men of sleeping your way to the top?" Which is a question I'd imagine a lot of women would want her to be asked.
But there's more. Weiner also cited this Q-and-A with NPR's Terry Gross, in which Goldman asked: "I gather that people frequently assume you're a lesbian. Several years ago, it came up at a cocktail party for your husband, the writer Francis Davis, celebrating his Pew Fellowship." That question was premised on the book Gross was promoting. Here's what Gross herself wrote:
The second most frequently asked question about me is whether I'm straight or gay (this may be number one in San Francisco).... The confusion about my sexual orientation has led to some pretty amusing scenarios. About ten years ago, when my husband, the writer Francis Davis, won an arts fellowship, I went with him to a reception honoring him and the other recipients. My mother-in-law came with us, and at one point I saw her laughing at something the wife of one of the other fellows had just said to her. She later explained that the woman had pointed at me and whispered, 'Terry Gross is here. Did you know she's a lesbian?'"
Goldman's question was literally in invitation for Gross to tell a funny anecdote from her book. There's nothing remotely inappropriate about it. Goldman also asked Gross in the same interview whether she chose "'Fresh Air' over having children," which some may object to as somehow presuming that women are baby-making machines, or something. Of course it doesn't—it simply asks whether she considered her career and children as incompatible alternatives, which is a totally reasonable question. (The answer is no.)

I'm probably quoting too much above, but that's the quickest way to set the stage for what I want to say.  Perhaps it's worth adding that Goldman's assignments in the past have often included asking questions about sex, or at least that he has interpreted those assignments in that light.

OK.  That's enough stage-setting.  The basic issues here are three:  The first, and easiest to resolve is the Twitter brawl.  Goldman was clearly out of line there and pretty much every critic agrees on that, even John Cook.  And Goldman apologized.

The second question is about whether Goldman routinely asks sexist questions of women but not of men.  This matters because no one interview is enough for trend-spotting and because the specific questions in any one interview can easily be justified by stating that the interviewer had heard rumors and decided to ask about them.  The problem, of course, is that in a different interview there might be equivalent rumors but the interviewer does not ask about them.  The only way to solve that conundrum is by looking at masses and masses of interviews by Andrew Goldman and by analyzing them based on the sex of the interviewee.

This question embraces the narrower question about the possible sexism in the mentioned interviews in those quotes above.

The third issue is the widest and by far the easiest to judge!  Aren't you glad that I'm finally going to say something less fuzzy?  That issue has to do with the wider cultural values about women's proper roles and about who can be asked what.

For instance, consider a journalist interviewing a very powerful man in the movie industry.  Would that interview ever ask about whether he had ever made women give him blow jobs or other sex in exchange for a role?  Would an interview with a powerful male CEO ever ask how many women he had promoted only after they slept with him?

I don't see that happening in a general interview about the careers of those men.  Indeed, I can't even imagine interviews with women about possibly sleeping their way to the top asking for the names of those magnates that demanded it.

And asking Terri Gross about children vs. career can be shown to be a similar culturally driven question because men are not asked about choosing children OR a career:

Goldman also asked Gross in the same interview whether she chose "'Fresh Air' over having children," which some may object to as somehow presuming that women are baby-making machines, or something. Of course it doesn't—it simply asks whether she considered her career and children as incompatible alternatives, which is a totally reasonable question. (The answer is no.)

This question is perfectly unreasonable if addressed to famous men because they are not expected to be in charge of all childcare.

 

Voting is Not Like Buying A Pair of Shoes or A New Car

Three odd things I have recently noticed (again) when people talk politics, both in the media and in private lives:

The first has to do with the idea that voting is just like buying a new car or a pair of shoes!  If you decide not to make the purchase, you won't have to pay for it.  So it's all OK.

But voting is NOT like buying a new car.  If you don't vote in a political election you get someone ruling over you anyway, and if that person causes havoc the fact that you didn't vote for him or her makes no difference.  The consequences are there.  You pay for the shoes or the car and someone else picks them out for you.

It's also true that the American political system throws a humongous number of votes down the toilet and then flushes it, while happily telling us who the winner in each state was.  I get that voters become discouraged about that, but the answer is not to take a consumerist stance.

The second odd thing has to do with judging political candidates as "deserving" to lose because of bad campaigning or bad debate performance or similar ultimately non-essential aspects. 

Even that is OK if the task is to judge campaigning performance.  But when someone happily crows about a candidate "deserving to lose" they might spend a minute considering the fact that the political platform of that candidate then also loses, whether it deserves to lose or not, and that all those whom the platform would have helped more are among those losers.

I think both of these odd things (and several others) have to do with a confusion between our role as consumers and as citizens.  The former gets practiced all the time, the latter not so often.  But the media is not helping when they focus on the horse race aspect of politics.  The underlying policy questions are the crucial ones, after all, and I, for one, prefer to have a clumsy performer of the platform I prefer to a slick performer of the platform I frequently visit in my nightmares.

The third odd thing is not about voter or journalist behavior but about the way politicians offer us false dualistic choices.  For instance,  the Republicans tell us that women want jobs and a better economy for themselves and their families, not reproductive rights.

But reproductive rights don't clash with policies which push for jobs and such.  Indeed, providing women with reproductive rights is almost costless, as policies go, and the provision of free or subsidized contraceptives to poor women would save the government money in the long run (thus decreasing the deficit!).

We are asked to look elsewhere, pretty much.

Perhaps at the awfulness of the government subsidy to public television and radio?  The money that could be saved by killing Big Bird is miniscule.  The loss of information and childhood education would have an immense cost.  But the killing of public television is dear to the conservative hearts and the hunt goes on and on. 

The same reason applies to women's reproductive rights.  Conservatives don't want women to have those rights, and that's why women are told that they must choose between jobs and reproductive rights.  Because the Republicans don't want women to have the latter.

So.

The Shooting of Malala Yousafzai

It was carried out by the Taliban in Pakistan (or at least they took credit for it).  Malala Yousafzai is fourteen years old and an activist for girls' education.  The Taliban explains:

Public fury seems to have built up as the country's rolling news channels devoted considerable attention to the story and the Taliban announced they would make another attempt on her life if she survived.
Perhaps conscious of what one media pundit described as a "major PR disaster" for the Taliban, the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) circulated a lengthy statement that tried to justify the assassination with references to Islamic history and the Qur'an.
It said that although the TTP did not believe in attacking women, it was obliged to kill anyone "whosever leads campaign against Islam and sharia" and that her main crime was "because of her pioneer role in preaching secularism and so-called enlightened moderation".
It also said that Yousafzai had been guilty of inviting Muslims to hate the mujahideen, as the insurgents style themselves.
Yousafzai, who won Pakistan's first peace prize for her efforts, did indeed speak out against the Taliban, initially on a blog published under a pseudonym on the BBC Urdu service website. There she chronicled the terror of life in Swat when the area was being fought over by the Taliban and the government. Later she spoke confidently in public against extremism and spoke of her desire to enter national politics.

As a consequence of this shooting, Pakistan has erupted in anger against the Taliban,  the New York Times and other newspapers report.

It's useful to ask what the Taliban's real motives in the shooting were.  The religious explanations it offers  can be debated, even within the circle of Islamic scholars.  But of course they are on some level intricately bound with the need to control women because that control is necessary for the control of the next generation.

Whether the term "misogyny" adequately covers such opinions or whether we need a more specific term I cannot tell.  But I certainly agree that the desire to keep women uneducated has its roots deeply entangled with misogyny.

And no, this particular attack cannot be justified as a response to Western drones killing innocent civilians, horrible as it is.  Malala Yousafzai is not the person who caused that to happen.  Indeed, she is still a child and a Pakistani child at that.

Based on the most recent news I could find, Malala Yousafzai had emergency surgery to remove the bullet and her condition has stabilized.

A Dog Post

Here's my guess (at the age of five) of what a dog might look like:

The text says:  A dog if it is.

It looks like a horse, and that can be explained by the fact that my grandparents had horses but nobody near me owned a dog.  There are deep political insights  to be drawn from that!  The dangers of inferring wider questions from one's own life experiences, the dangers of using analogous thinking and the importance of direct evidence before making wider generalizations.

What I really wanted to write about is the way little children are asked "What does a dog say?" and the answer varies by language, though all the phrases are onomatopoetic.  So what does a dog say in your world?  And which of the many possible correct answers actually IS the correct one?

That's pretty tricky.  When I learned to "read" dog language better I also learned that there is no one single thing that "a dog" says.  They speak, and sometimes they speak in sentences.  The bark which tells a visitor is approaching sounds quite different from the one which asks someone to play with that dog or the one which asks for help.

Romney Leads on Women's Issues --- Back to the Nineteenth Century?

Via Jessica Valenti on Twitter, we learn this about Romney's views:

Mitt Romney today said no abortion legislation is part of his agenda, but he would prohibit federally-funded international nonprofits from providing abortions in other countries.
“There’s no legislation with regards to abortion that I’m familiar with that would become part of my agenda,” the GOP presidential candidate told The Des Moines Register’s editorial board during a meeting today before his campaign rally at a Van Meter farm.
But by executive order, not by legislation, he would reinstate the so-called Mexico City policy that bans U.S. foreign aid dollars from being used to do abortions, he said.
President Barack Obama dropped the policy on his tenth day in office, Romney said.
In response, Obama’s Iowa spokeswoman, Erin Seidler, said: “Mitt Romney’s not telling the truth about his positions. He’s said he would appoint Supreme Court justices who will overturn [Roe v. Wade]. Romney may try to change his image four weeks before Election Day, but can’t change the fact that women can’t trust him.”

Of course legislation is not what the president does, in any case.  Here's Romney in his own words, earlier this year:




And a year again he was firmly behind the Personhood Amendment, the one about Egg-Americans and their rights, combined with fewer rights for the aquaria, of course.
 
This is the time in elections when  the candidates pretend to move towards the imagined middle positions, when the bases have been fed with fresh meat and so on.   Given the short memory of many voters, it's useful to look back to see where Romney actually stands, on reproductive choice and other issues about women.

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Added later:  Romney's campaign has already reassured the conservative base that, indeed, women's repro rights will be up to them in the possible Romney administration.  So that's clear, then.

The Polling Games!

Have intensified.  I came back from a political break to the news that all is lost and we better flee, because the Pew poll for October shows Romney running away with the presidency.  And what's even more horrendous, it's the women's opinions which did that.  So.

What's the next stage in the divine self-defense against angst-and-emotion overflow?

To get hold of that poll and to look at it, naturally.  But first I took a short detour to Nate Silver's blog.  Here's what he says:

But were it not for the Pew poll, our forecast would have been unchanged from Monday, with Mr. Romney’s chances holding at 21.6 percent.
The Pew poll, however, may well be the single best polling result that Mr. Romney has seen all year. It comes from a strong polling firm, and had a reasonably large sample size. Just as important is the trendline. Pew’s polls have been Democratic-leaning relative to the consensus this year; its last poll, for instance, had Mr. Obama 8 points ahead among likely voters. So this represents a very sharp reversal.

...

There are two smarter questions to ask about the Pew poll. First, is it really likely that Mr. Romney leads the race by 4 points right now? The consensus of the evidence, particularly the national tracking polls, would suggest otherwise. Instead, the forecast model’s conclusion is that the whole of the data is still consistent with a very narrow lead for Mr. Obama, albeit one that is considerably diminished since Denver.
It might be granted that the situation is more ambiguous than usual right now. But our forecast model looks at literally all of the polls; it estimates Mr. Romney’s post-debate bounce as being 2.5 percentage points, not quite enough to erase Mr. Obama’s pre-debate advantage.
The other valid line of inquiry concerns the timing of the poll. The Pew poll was conducted from Thursday through Sunday, although more of the interviews were conducted in the earlier part of that period. There’s nothing in the poll that really refutes the story that Mr. Romney initially received a very large bounce after the debate (perhaps somewhere on the order of 4 or 5 points, if not quite as large as Pew shows it), which has since faded some between the news cycle turning over and the favorable jobs report on Friday.
The evidence that Mr. Romney’s bounce is receding some is only modestly strong — as opposed to the evidence that he got a significant bounce in the first place, which is very strong. Still, the order in which polls are published does not exactly match the order in which they were actually conducted — and at turning points in the race, these details can matter.

I also noticed that the Daily Kos/SEIU State of the Nation Poll found a somewhat similar shift towards Romney after the first presidential debate:

The candidates for President are Democrat Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney. If the election was today, who would you vote for? Obama 47 (49)
Romney 49 (45)

That's a pretty disastrous six-point net swing in just a week, and the first time we've ever had Romney in the lead. It is inline with all other national polling showing Romney making gains in the wake of his debate performance last week. Both the Gallup and Rasmussen trackers saw their Romney bounce evaporate on Sunday. In this poll, 75 percent of the sample was gathered on Thursday and Friday, at the height of Romney's bounce. This is because PPP does call-backs: It identifies a random range of numbers and begins calling them on Thursday. If they get no answer, they keep trying the same numbers on subsequent days until they get the required number of responses (we ask for at least 1,000). This avoids the old tropes about young liberals being out partying on Friday nights, while conservatives are at church on Sunday mornings, etc.
So this week, 47 percent of responses were on Thursday, 28 percent on Friday, 17 percent on Saturday, and just 8 percent on Sunday. Romney won Thursday 49-48 and Friday 49-44 before losing steam over the weekend. While Romney won Thursday and Friday by a combined 2.5 points, he won Saturday and Sunday by just 0.5 percent.
So where did Romney gain? Among women, Obama went from a 15-point lead to a slimmer 51-45 edge. Meanwhile, Romney went from winning independents 44-41 to winning them 48-42. And just like the Ipsos poll showed last week, Romney further consolidated his base. They went from supporting him 85-13 last week, to 87-11 this week while Obama lost some Democrats, going from 88-9 last week, to 87-11 this week.

In both cases the shift seems to be due to women's opinions, and in both cases the results appear to capture the immediate post-debate reactions.

The Pew poll results are available here (pdf).  I don't see anything major wrong with it, though I wonder how it got such a low number of Hispanic registered or likely voters and young likely voters.

The crucial question asks whom the respondent would vote for if the election was held on the date the poll questions were asked.  That date was sometime last week, from Thursday to Saturday.  The answers to that question:

Forty-four percent of registered male voters stated that they would vote for Obama, 47% for Romney.  Forty-nine percent of registered female voters stated that they would vote for Obama, 45% for Romney.  The percentages for likely voters benefited Romney more:  Among likely male voters 51% chose Romney and 43% Obama, while among likely female voters the percentages for Romney and Obama were both 47%, or a tie.

This means that women are still more likely to vote for Obama than men are.  On the other hand, among the white non-Hispanic (what happened to the Hispanic voters, again?)  respondents in this poll the usual gender gap has essentially disappeared.  Both men and women  would have picked Romney over Obama at roughly the same percentages.

So what's going on here?  I'm not on expert in polling, and probably should not have written about this at all.  But I'd wait and see what happens in the next week or so in all the different polls.  This is because the two I mentioned here were both taken right after the first presidential debate and could be measuring a debate bounce.  The only way to be sure is to see whether Romney's apparent advantage in these two polls turns up in other, later polls.

It's true, naturally, that  the first presidential debate completely protected Romney when it comes to his views on reproductive freedom and whether women should be treated fairly in the labor force and so on.  Obama didn't mention women, either, and not a single question was about this giant wedge issue between the parties (sorta like "are women partly human or not at all human").  Neither did anyone refer to Romney's comments about the 47% being leeches and parasites.

People not following politics that eagerly might have taken the message from the debate that nothing else distinguishes the two candidates except their policies on taxes, jobs and the deficit.  The Pew poll respondents, on average,  thought that Romney did better on all those three questions.  That he also lied a lot more might not matter to the respondents.  Or they may not even know about those lies.

What's the morale in this story?  I'm not sure but Obama should certainly start practicing his debate skills and perhaps even remember that his re-election is crucially dependent on women's votes.

Finally, the Pew results really hinge on the percentage of respondents who self-identified as Republicans: The September Pew poll had 39% Democrats, 29% Republicans and 30% Independents.  While the percentage of Independents stayed the same in the October poll, the percentage of Democrats dropped to 31% and the percentage of Republicans rose to 36%.

This could be a real change in how voters self-identify.  On the other hand, it's always possible that any particular sample fails to be representative, simply because of bad sampling luck.  That jump looks pretty huge for just one single month, though, but who knows.

Julia Gillard, the PM of Australia, Talks About Misogyny

Well worth watching, if not for any other reason than because in the US discussing any of this is utterly outside the mainstream politics.  Indeed, polite and courteous presidential debates on domestic policies never even mention women! 

More here.

Truth Is Weirder Than Fiction. Or On What Some Conservative Politicians Say.

Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) is a member of the House Committee on Science and Technology. This is how he describes his scientific beliefs:

All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell. And it’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior.

The Bible as a science textbook, in other words.  Broun is a tea party member.  By the way, you can find his votes on women's issues here.  Do watch some of the video at the linked site, just to see all those dead animals stare back at you in a religious meeting.  But be warned, Broun moves from a story about hunting a bear which was minding its own business to the importance of freedom for hunters to the necessity of getting to know Jesus on a personal level.

In Arkansas:

Arkansas Republicans tried to distance themselves Saturday from a Republican state representative's assertion that slavery was a "blessing in disguise" and a Republican state House candidate who advocates deporting all Muslims.
The claims were made in books written, respectively, by Rep. Jon Hubbard of Jonesboro and House candidate Charlie Fuqua of Batesville. Those books received attention on Internet news sites Friday.

House candidate Fuqua skips merrily to this conclusion on his website:

Fuqua blogs on his website. One post is titled, "Christianity in Retreat," and says "there is a strange alliance between the liberal left and the Muslim religion."
"Both are antichrist in that they both deny that Jesus is God in the flesh of man, and the savior of mankind. They both also hold that their cause should take over the entire world through violent, bloody, revolution," the post says.
In a separate passage, Fuqua wrote "we now have a president that has a well documented history with both the Muslim religion and Communism."

I love the intellectual dexterity of someone who can make a moderate Republican (which Obama really would be called in a saner world) into an Islamofascist communist.

Conspiracies in the Labor Department!

This piece of news has fun stuff about how common conspiracy theories have become:

The big drop in the unemployment rate a month before the presidential election brought cries of disbelief and conspiracy theories from Jack Welch and other critics of the Obama administration Friday. But the Labor Department was quick to dismiss such claims.
"Unbelievable jobs numbers..these Chicago guys will do anything..can't debate so change numbers," tweeted Welch, the former CEO of General Electric (GE, Fortune 500). Welch did not respond to a request for further comment on his tweet.

It's also a good reminder that practically anything one says online becomes public information.  Sorta like giving a press conference.

It's hard to say how seriously  Mr. Welch intended his tweet  to be taken, but the proper way of responding to data one doesn't believe in is to do that dratted and fearsome thing:  Research.

Go and find out if the basis for the calculations has changed from last year.  Go and check whether unemployment usually decreases this time of the year.  Think of alternative theories besides the conspiracy one, and test them against the same data.  And so on.  Or for people like  Mr. Welch, have your staff do this for you.

All that is much more work than tweeting, of course.  But I believe that conspiracy attitudes are becoming more common because of the way people use the Internet, by clustering in small circles of co-believers,  and because of the advent of politics-based news corporations which pre-filter reality for their audiences.  After a few years of that it's pretty hard to agree on what reality might be.

By the way, this works even across countries.  The US news media sometimes offer different takes on news than the news media in other countries.  Checking those alternative sources out can be informative, not the least because it helps in understanding why those furriners think the way they do.

Today's Funny Picture

From here:

It also serves to remind us of the default setting for human beings.  Looking at that picture does not make me think that it's men who might mess up the oceans but that it's  human beings.

If the cartoonist had depicted women,  I would read it as an argument about women only.  Because that's how the default  is set up in our minds.

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Added later:  The picture also uses a race default which got me, too.  I think the default race depends on the country one lives in and its racial makeup.  The default gender does not.

I Haven't Posted This One For A While

The First Presidential Debate. ZZZZZ.

Yeah,  it was boring, as performance art goes, and that's the way the debates are rated, I understand.  Like horse races or ballet or figure skating, and the journalists and talking heads are the judges.

Out of the trio on stage, Mitt Romney was the most awake, even hyper, and Jim Lehrer (the moderator)  perhaps the least awake.  Barack Obama seemed tired and only got going towards the end of the game.

That's enough of my scoring style points.   Fox News found Romney's performance beautiful:

Mitt Romney energized his campaign for president Wednesday night, charging out of his first debate having by most accounts from both sides of the political spectrum dominated President Obama in a stand-off for which he was evidently well-prepared.
The Republican nominee was quick on his feet, polished and feisty as he repeatedly cut off the moderator and challenged his opponent on the facts. His central argument -- that Obama's economic policies have consigned the middle class to an eroding "status quo."

Some voters might find cutting off the moderator disrespectful.  And of course one might wonder what Romney has in mind for the middle class, given the increasing income inequality in this country and his party's willingness to continue that trend.


What about the factual contents of the debate?  Those Romney challenges on Obama's facts, for instance?

Luckily, fact checks are getting pretty common among the mainstream media, though, sadly, that seems to mean that some of them end up a bit biased themselves.  Never mind.  Here are a bunch of sites you might want to look at.

The consensus appears to be fairly strong:  Romney won the debate and he also lied the most. 

I could also spot the usual Tweedledum-and-Tweedledee phenomenon:  The attempt of presidential candidates to place themselves in the middle, back-to-back, in order to catch that elusive Snark undecided voter.  Heh.

There was nothing in the debates about who should have the padlock-and-key to the American vaginas.  Jim Lehrer picked the questions himself, he tells us, so I guess he's not interested in women's reproductive rights and such.  Perhaps that will be the topic in one of the remaining two debates?

Was that too snarky?  My apologies.  I still much prefer Obama's policies to Romney's policies.

NononoNO. She Gets It Wrong.

That would be Hanna Rosin's response at Salon to Stephanie Coontz's op-ed in the New York Times.  Rosin argues that Coontz is wrong in her criticisms. 

But Rosin herself is wrong in quite a few places in her response.  For instance here:

I hesitate to get drawn into data wars (if you have an appetite for them you should visit the blog of University of Maryland professor Philip Cohen). I’ve learned over the course of my research that data can support many different stories. For example, one figure in my book, and in Liza Mundy’s The Richer Sex, that’s been much fought over is how many wives earn more money than their husbands.
We all agree that the number of female breadwinners leapt from only 4 percent in 1970 to nearly 30 percent in 2010. Coontz, however, discounts this gain by arguing that when we look at all married couples, not just dual-earner couples, the numbers look much weaker because some wives don’t work at all. This is a fair point. But if we are going to add on extra data samples, then I offer another, more relevant one: the growing number of single mothers. Trends in the United States do not point toward an explosion of full-time stay-at-home mothers but of single mothers who are, by default, for better or worse, often the main breadwinners of their families. We recently passed the threshold, for example, at which more than half of all births to mothers under 30 were to single mothers. I’m not sure this counts as feminist progress, but it does count as a profound shift in the traditional power dynamics of the American family.
In my book I call it “ambiguous independence.” The women are struggling financially but also learning by necessity to support themselves and their children. And because they are less economically dependent on men, these women are also less likely to stay in abusive relationships, as Coontz herself mentions.

Mostly the same data CANNOT support many different stories.  When people argues that it does, most of those stories are fables and not based on the data.  Now, different sets of data may well result in different conclusions.  One's task, then, is not to engage in data relativism but to figure out which data set is the best, which study the most careful and which conclusions therefore the most reliable.

In that quote Rosin begins with the question:  How many wives earn more than their husbands?  But she then argues that data on women without husbands is relevant for this argument.  It's not.  It may well be relevant for arguments about women's independence, but it's completely and totally irrelevant as an answer to the original question.

That's not picky, by the way.  If we move the ground under the questions we never get anywhere.

For another example of exactly that:

Coontz takes on another data set that I discuss in my book: that young, childless women in their 20s have a higher median income than the equivalent men in the vast majority of metropolitan areas. These findings by market researcher James Chung were first reported in a Time magazine story in 2010. Coontz cites a new analysis of similar data showing that this particular demographic includes a disproportionate number of low-earning Latino men, which explains why women in this age group earn more.
For one thing, it’s hard to say if this new data set she points to is a statistical anomaly. Unlike Chung’s, the new numbers only cover a single year. But even if her data is accurate, and young Latino men are weighting the data, should we not care about that? It seems like just a fine-tuning of my thesis, that certain men are struggling in this economy. And even by Coontz’s reading, these young, childless Latino women are out-earning the Latino men, and these young white women and men earn the same—which alone is a remarkable shift. The explanation for that is simple: At that age, many more women have college degrees, and there are generally better jobs available for college graduates.
Coontz mentions a new analysis that will be unveiled later this month proving a wage gap in various professions for that same young, childless set. But how is that new? We know there is a wage gap. We know that Suzy likely earns less money than Bill who sits in the cubicle next to her, for many complicated reasons that I discuss in the book. The new development is this: For many jobs there are a lot more young Suzies in those cubicles these days than young Bills. That’s why these young women as a group have a higher median income.

The ground is shifting!  Try to keep your balance!

What's happening here is a skip from one argument:  young single women earn more than young single men in large metropolitan areas, to a completely different one:  young single women in metropolitan areas are more likely to hold jobs which require education than young single men.

The latter argument could well be true.  But, and this is a huge, giant BUT:  The users of the original Chung study have adopted it as a signpost that we are approaching the era of the Reverse Gender Gap, the monstrous regimen of the petticoats and so on.  The study was rarely used to talk about education, probably because Chung did not control for education. 

This means that his comparisons were flawed from the beginning.  They did not compare men's and women's wages for that age group AND for a given level of education.  They omitted the education variable altogether.  The consequence was that Chung compared single oranges to single apples.  Of course the married apples and oranges never showed any kind of female earnings advantage but the reverse.

Do I sound a bit obsessed about that particular study and its uses?  I am, because not controlling for education in income comparisons makes the conclusions of the study useless.  Rosin tries to salvage her message by moving from the likely finding that female workers on every education level earn, on average, less than otherwise identical but male workers to the also-likely finding that metropolitan areas tend to have a higher percentage of educated young single women than educated young single men.

Note, also, that a proper treatment of the gender gap in wages compares the "net gap" which is arrived at after controlling for all those other variables (education, work experience, hours worked per week,  general occupation, geographical area, marital status, number of minor children etc) that also affect earnings.  The Chung study fails to control for education, and thus tells us nothing about the actual gender differences in the earnings of young metropolitan singles.

What's left of Rosin's argument?  That women are more likely to get educated than men.   But Coontz points out that women have good reasons to be more motivated that way:

Even women’s greater educational achievement stems partly from continuing gender inequities. Women get a smaller payoff than men for earning a high school degree, but a bigger payoff for completing college. This is not because of their higher grade point averages, the economist Christopher Dougherty concludes, but because women seem to need more education simply to counteract the impact of traditional job discrimination and traditional female career choices.

Just think about the kinds of jobs available for a high-school graduate with no further qualifications.  The traditionally male jobs of that type pay considerably better than the traditionally female jobs.

That's no excuse against tackling the problem of getting boys more focused on education, of course.  But neither does it presage a world where all the power lies in female hands.  Probably not even half of all power, even in the United States, given that women are still found over-represented in those academic fields which pay less well.

Or as Rosin puts it:

Coontz makes the broader point that women—and even college-educated women—are continuing to segregate themselves into less prestigious, lower-paid professions. She points out that women are even more concentrated now than they were before in the fields of legal secretaries or “managers of medicine and health occupations.” We can call this by its old disparaging name: “gender segregation.” But we can also see it through a new paradigm—as Coontz so successfully encouraged us to do when looking at marriage—as women making intelligent decisions about what jobs are available in this economy. (You can see this decision-making at work in community colleges, the training camps for the current workforce, where the gap between men and women is the greatest.)

As I write in the book, of the top 15 jobs projected to grow in the next several years, 12 of the categories are dominated by women. Maybe women are choosing health occupations because the health care field is booming, not because they are blindly walking into a female ghetto.

Gender segregation*, whether by choice or by steering, is actually a large chunk of the reason why women earn less than men, on average.  I don't care what Rosin might call this pattern but it is not something new and exciting.  Indeed, it's a pretty depressing pattern because the traditionally female occupations are poorly paying ones.  It may well be the case that they offer more opportunities for "balancing" family and work than the traditionally male occupations (as well as less harassment).

But choosing them for that  reason is not necessarily as laudable as, say, creating a labor market with proper parental leave, annual vacations and more humane working hours.

I wrote about those fifteen jobs which are growing most rapidly before, but here's a reminder:

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.

Sad to say, those are not the types of jobs which will result in women becoming the major breadwinners in married-couple families, in general. 

Far down in her column, Rosin seems to write about her reasons for writing about "the end of men:"

Now, of course, I live on this planet and, more specifically, I live in Washington, D.C. I can see that neither the corner suites of corporate America nor the halls of Congress echo with the clacking of heels. After doing dozens of radio shows and interviews to discuss my book, I have grown accustomed to being asked about why, if women are so hot and men are so not, there aren’t more women at the top. But I’m still searching for a way to answer without irritating the host (or op-ed contributor) who insists that it can’t be the end of men until we’ve had our first female president and Coke and Pepsi are both run by women.

But here’s the thing: The upheaval in gender dynamics I’ve spent three years reporting and writing about all points in one direction. Yes, there are zigs and zags. Yes, different sectors of the economy and society are moving at different rates. Yes, in the last decade progress has slowed down (it has slowed down for men, too). Yes, a female MBA earns less than a male MBA out of school (although the difference, before children, is now negligible). Yes, the richest of the rich are still almost exclusively male, or their wives. And yes, we have not yet remotely figured out how to make most American workplaces family-friendly.

But zoom the graph back a few decades and you can see how far we’ve come—and that the lines all point one way: Men’s wages have been stagnating, and by some measures declining, as women’s economic fortunes continue to rise. The wage gap has been slowly closing for women, but the education gap has not been closing for men. We can focus only and eternally on the fact that those lines have not yet crossed or even converged in many professions. But isn’t that vantage point a bit narrow? Why does we’re-not-there-yet mean we’re not headed there?

Headed where?  To a matriarchy?  That's my problem with Rosin's arguments.  To talk about "the end of men" when it is women, in fact, who are shrinking as a percentage of population in China and India seems utterly disgusting to me.  To imply that advances towards greater gender equality are a sign of the death of men or at least all male power seems equally weird to me.  If we take her stance here seriously, then any improvement  in women's relative position could be a sign of some sort of mass annihilation of men.  Women still earn less than men, on average, but the gender gap has shrunk some in the last thirty years:  Sign of the end of men!  And so on.

I don't like games and gambles with serious matters.  That's because I'm a humorless feminazi who believes in a fair world where people are not put into little boxes by gender (or by race or sexual preference etc.) when they try to decide which talents to nurture and which working lives to choose.

 Rosin appears to see the situation as a competition, a "winning-gender-takes-all" game.  But if that's the interpretation one chooses, then the data suggests that it's still not women who are winning.   Things are considerably better for women than they were, of course (though I wonder if anyone wrote about the end of women when women were one third of college graduates, in those halcyon days of yore), but no, men are not ending.  At all.

Let's put all this into a proper perspective in terms of time and place:  After thousands of years of pretty much male domination we suddenly worry about tipping into a matriarchy?  Because sixty percent of new college graduates are women?   That to me seems to be the one type of data which might (weakly) support Rosin's theory.  But then how does she explain Saudi Arabia or Iran (the latter until the government enforced gender quotas)?  Those countries have similar female domination in higher education.

Mentioning Iran and Saudi Arabia brings me to the proper place of Rosin's arguments:  The global one.  No end of men in that wider view.  Male domination seems to be doing very well in many, many countries on this earth.  Come to think of it, it's doing pretty well even in the US government.

I'm not particularly ecstatic when writing these criticisms about "The End of Men" and related topics.  But I feel I must,  because of those data problems and also because these calls sound like "the-sky-is-falling" to me or at least extremely premature.  The latter means that there will be those who argue that we've come to as close to gender equality as we can, without ending all those men.

At the same time, I sorta agree with Rosin's basic conclusions here:

The place I would like to arrive after the “end of men” is not Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s Herland, a mystical biological matriarchy in which the men are literally obsolete. It’s a place where my son’s girlfriend earns more money than he does and no one cares or interviews him about it for a story. It’s a place where he decides he wants to work four days a week and spend the fifth picking up the kids from school, or doing his sculpting, and no one thinks there is anything wrong with him. It’s also a place where, if he decides he wants to work all five days, and his wife decides she doesn’t, they can both make that work. It’s a place where the single standard for power and success is not hours logged and paychecks earned. It’s a place where we use our imagination to give men and women, both, a little more room to breathe.

I just don't think rigid definitions of masculinity can be changed by writing books about the "end of men."  Rather the reverse, to be honest.

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*This deserves a proper long and dry post, this topic.  I shall get to it one day.

What's For Breakfast? A Brand's Reputation!

I was reading about Mitt Romney and the Bain company, and came across this:

Companies like Bain Capital call themselves private equity firms, but as I explained in my book “The Buyout of America” they really provide no equity. They make money by putting businesses at risk. They say they turn struggling businesses around. But Sealy was not a turnaround — it was the market leader in its sector.
Romney first tried to boost Sealy’s profits, so it could pay its debt, by acquiring one of Sealy’s biggest retail customers, Mattress Discounters. But MD expanded too quickly and went bankrupt.
Bain then pushed Sealy to design the no-flip, or one-sided, bed. To cut costs they eliminated the bottom cover, making the bottom simply a foundation. With two-sided beds, consumers can flip their mattress, like they rotate a tire, for longer wear, so getting rid of the bottom would shorten the life of the mattress.
But Bain was more interested in cutting costs and boost short-term profits than in providing value to consumers. For a while, it didn’t seem to matter. Bain and co-investors sold — “harvested,” if you like — Sealy in 2004 to fellow private equity firm KKR for $1.5 billion, pocketing $741 million for its $140 million investment.

That's not quite the same thing as those firms which acquire another firm with a good reputation for quality or durability and which then eat up that reputation by lowering the quality or durability of the product.  Doing that makes a nice short-term profit for the acquiring firm and its owners but of course it makes the consumers ultimately angry and destroys the brand.

All this is easiest with so-called experience goods:  Those things which you have to use for quite a while before learning how good they are.

Mattresses certainly qualify.  If a mattress used to last ten years and now only lasts five years, you wouldn't want to pay as much for it, right?  But it takes five years to learn that a previously ten-year mattress now only survives five years.  This gap lets the acquiring firm milk down that reputation bank account.

Closer at home, I use Arabia's Teema mugs as the divine-coffee containers.  They are expensive, yes (22 dollars for a mug though I get mine for less while in Finland)  but they are so smooth on the eye and what's most important, they used to last almost forever.  The glazing was very thick.  I have dropped these mugs on tiled floors several times (accidentally!)  and never could break one (except for once the handle breaking off).

All this means that my china choice was probably saving me money, despite the high initial purchase price.

But the two I bought this summer seemed different to me.  When I got back to Snakepit Inc.  I weighed them and compared the weights to the old mugs.  The new ones are much, much lighter.  And they have small chips (from the dishwasher) after less than two months' use.

Now, whether this is a conscious policy of milking down Arabia's reputation (for high design and high quality in the past) by the new owner, Iittala,  I don't know.  But  when a brand is mostly known for, say, high quality, choosing to lower that quality to cut costs may have the same effect as a conscious policy of reputation-eating.

OK.  After glancing this through I just wanted to complain about my mugs...



 

Thanks, Distance Readers

Information about your existence is very helpful.  From where I sit, all I get told are the actual visits to this blog.  All others are invisible to me.  That can create weird incentives.  For instance, suppose that a hundred regular readers all switch to Google Reader, say, simultaneously.  What I would then observe is a drop of hundred readers.  Then I'd wonder what I'm doing wrong and if I should stop this shitty blog right away and so on.  That's what comes with being a neurotic goddess.

More precisely, I need that information for the purposes of possibly  getting an agent for the so-far imaginary book  (they want a "pre-market," heh), and also for the purposes of figuring out funding for what goes on here (and the chocolates).

But essentially the problem is that I have no way of knowing my total readership right now.  The Google Reader suggests that I have over 1400 subscribers but who knows what that means, and in any case it's just Google Reader.  On the other hand, perhaps many of those subscriptions are never read.  On the other hand, much bigger blogs have fewer subscribers.  And so on and so on.

None of this is of interest to you but since I'm still working on the old comments transfer and similar matters my creative juices are running slow. 

Let me also say that I'm honored by every one of my readers.  Smart lot, you are.

Technology Sucks And Other Blog News

That's my divine opinion today, and it has direct roots in this business of changing everything about the blog in less than a week.  My fault, naturally,  for waking up only a few days before the demise of Echo, but there must be some excitement in life, right?


Or just call me the goddess of procrastination.  Anyway, the reason why technology sucks today is not because I'm a Luddite (which I am, in some ways) or opposed to technology (I love washing machines!  And fast cars!).

Nope.  The reason why I am so exhausted and disgruntled has to do with the One Time Only aspect of almost all changes that I have been forced to obey during my blogging career.  From an economist's angle the learning costs are always a new hurdle to scale, and once all that necessary learning is over it's pretty much useless for the future.  Because the next change is also One Time Only with brand new learning costs.

After a dozen or so of these event one gets jaundiced.   And becomes a procrastinator.

Returning to the recent changes, most things should be working by now.  I will go through the blogroll in the near future to update it.  Whether the old comments will appear or not is unclear right now.  I gave my weekend to them, including having to learn how to edit xml files.  We shall see.  Or not, depending on the gods of blogging.  But I got rid of quite a few gremlins.

I'm planning to put links to some of the series I have written in the right-hand column.  If you can think of any other improvements, please let me know.

The Myth of Male Decline

Stephanie Coontz has written a good opinion column, "The Myth of Male Decline",  on the recent rush of those oh-my-god-men-are-dying books.  I recommend reading it and also my earlier post on the Hanna Rosin book.

This, for instance, is quite important in Coontz's piece:

Proponents of the “women as the richer sex” scenario often note that in several metropolitan areas, never-married childless women in their 20s now earn more, on average, than their male age-mates. 

But this is because of the demographic anomaly that such areas have exceptionally large percentages of highly educated single white women and young, poorly educated, low-wage Latino men. Earning more than a man with less education is not the same as earning as much as an equally educated man. 

Among never-married, childless 22- to 30-year-old metropolitan-area workers with the same educational credentials, males out-earn females in every category, according to a reanalysis of census data to be presented next month at Boston University by Philip Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland. Similarly, a 2010 Catalyst survey found that female M.B.A.’s were paid an average of $4,600 less than men in starting salaries and continue to be outpaced by men in rank and salary growth throughout their careers, even if they remain childless. 

Among married couples when both partners are employed, wives earned an average of 38.5 percent of family income in 2010. In that year nearly 30 percent of working wives out-earned their working husbands, a huge increase from just 4 percent in 1970. But when we include all married-couple families, not just dual-earner ones, the economic clout of wives looks a lot weaker. 

In only 20 percent of all married-couple families does the wife earn half or more of all family income, according to Professor Cohen, and in 35 percent of marriages, the wife earns less than 10 percent.

The bolds are mine.  This is important, because that earlier study got wings and an ability to carry bombs (to kill all men)  and so on, all the time being a  gender comparison only within single, childless workers without any standardizing for education levels.  Sorta like comparing the earnings of a man without a high school diploma to the earnings of a woman with an MBA, to make the example extreme.

The reanalysis compares like with like, and seems to find that men earn more, on average, in each educational category.  As men earn more among those young workers who are married and/or have children, the overall reading is that young women, as a group,  earn less than young men, as a group, even in metropolitan areas.