Kudos To Sara Volz

This is good news:

Sara Volz of Colorado Springs won first place — and $100,000 — in an Intel Foundation science competition for her research into algae biofuels. (Courtesy of Sara Volz)
Sara Volz has lived and breathed her science project on algae biofuels since ninth grade — in fact, she has literally slept the research, in a loft bed just above her home lab lined with flasks of experimental cultures.
That self-driven dedication helped earn 17-year-old Volz, a senior at Cheyenne Mountain High School in Colorado Springs, the top honors in the prestigious Intel Science Talent Search, a national competition that features a $100,000 award.

Why is this good news for other women and girls except for  Sara Volz herself?  Because it is an entry into one kind of conversation, the kind that some misogynist sites conduct, the kind that the weird evolutionary psychologists (Satori Kanazawa and Roy Baumeister ) support, the kind which argues that women have never invented or created anything whatsoever, that, indeed, women are biologically and innately incapable of creating anything at all because it is the men who have had the need in the past to create things or otherwise they would not have gotten laid.

This particular conversation is linked to the idea that men have evolved more than women, due to sexual competition for mates and other similar poorly-studied and unscientific arguments.  The crux of that argument is that men are creative because our ancestors had to be, to get mates, but women are not creative because men f**k anything that moves.  So even quite stupid women passed their genes on but only the Einsteins among the Pleistocene men managed to pass their genes on.  And as today's evo-psychos think that smart genes (if they exist) are inherited solely from the same-sex parent, well, there you are!

It never occurred to me that publicizing creative and intellectual ventures by women could be taken in any other way than as a response to that continuous muttering I have had in my life from the beginning, the idea that Roy Baumeister summarized as men having created all of culture.  To take it in any other way seemed just utterly and totally weird.

But the same anti-women sites who tell me that women cannot as much as draw a stick figure also tell me that the tiniest, silliest little research project by women is now publicized, whereas men get no support at all. 

Which is, naturally, utter and total rubbish.  But what they really mean is that the success stories of individual men are written up as just that, success stories of individual men, not as stories about the whole gender.  The reason for doing it differently for women and girls is naturally in that misogynistic background muttering.  If some people really believe that women cannot be creative, well, then we must remind them of the facts that contradict that belief.

The New Pope

Is Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the former archbishop of Buenos Aires, who takes the name Pope Francis.  He is the first non-European Pope (of the modern era) and the first Jesuit Pope.

He is not, however, the first female Pope or the first non-white Pope.  Neither his he anything much but very conservative:

Here's more about Pope Francis, the former Cardinal Bergoglio of Argentina: He is 76, and is considered a straight-shooter who calls things as he sees them, and a follower of the church's most conservative wing. He is a former archbishop of Buenos Aires.
He has clashed with the government of President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner over his opposition to gay marriage and free distribution of contraceptives.

On the other hand, he is believed to care more about the poor than your average run-of-the-mill Pope:

Back in 2005, Bergoglio drew high marks as an accomplished intellectual, having studied theology in Germany. His leading role during the Argentine economic crisis burnished his reputation as a voice of conscience, and made him a potent symbol of the costs globalization can impose on the world's poor.
Bergoglio's reputation for personal simplicity also exercised an undeniable appeal – a Prince of the Church who chose to live in a simple apartment rather than the archbishop's palace, who gave up his chauffeured limousine in favor of taking the bus to work, and who cooked his own meals.

...

Bergoglio has supported the social justice ethos of Latin American Catholicism, including a robust defense of the poor.
"We live in the most unequal part of the world, which has grown the most yet reduced misery the least," Bergoglio said during a gathering of Latin American bishops in 2007. "The unjust distribution of goods persists, creating a situation of social sin that cries out to Heaven and limits the possibilities of a fuller life for so many of our brothers."
At the same time, he has generally tended to accent growth in personal holiness over efforts for structural reform.
Bergoglio is seen an unwaveringly orthodox on matters of sexual morality, staunchly opposing abortion, same-sex marriage, and contraception. In 2010 he asserted that gay adoption is a form of discrimination against children, earning a public rebuke from Argentina's President, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.
Nevertheless, he has shown deep compassion for the victims of HIV-AIDS; in 2001, he visited a hospice to kiss and wash the feet of 12 AIDS patients.

Bolds are mine.
 
On the third hand, kissing and washing feet doesn't cure AIDS and neither does expressing concern for the poor help the poor, in itself.

We shall see what we shall see, as wiser people say.

I watched some of the BBC coverage of the people waiting for the new Pope to come to the balcony.  Very nice marching by several groups of men dressed in medieval clothing, very nice music by several groups of men, too.  Then a group of men came to the balcony to open the doors and pull the curtains aside so that three men could come to the balcony, one of whom told us the new Pope's new name.  Then more men and the Pope who is a man.

None of it is very interesting or even worth pointing out, except that this large church is a church of men when it comes to its hierarchy, and it is celibate men who decide that there should be no contraception.  But probably the majority of the believers are women who do much of the grunt work for the church, in the hope of eternal life, I guess.

Even that is none of my business, being a pagan goddess, except that the tentacles of the Catholic Church (as do the tentacles of Islam and other large religions) directly and indirectly reach into  my life and the lives of all women on this earth.

In the United States the Catholic Church has a strong influence on government policies concerning women's bodies, and not being a Catholic doesn't release one from that influence.  In other countries religions that one might not belong to can influence how one must dress or whether one can go out alone (at least in the sense that the religion justifies treating a woman alone as somehow sinful and therefore a fair target) or have a job and so on.

All of it makes watching the pomp and circumstance of the papal elections a weird experience.  In one sense it is nothing to do with me.  In another, deeper sense, it is very much to do with me and people like me. 

On Crime And Aging

I have written about this before, but a new crime where the sought culprit is 64 years old makes me wonder about the same thing again:  Have violent crimes committed by older men risen in numbers in the last decade?

Or have I just not been aware of them?  What I learned once was that crimes are hardly ever committed by the oldest age groups or the very youngest, and that the vast majority of violent crimes are committed by men in their twenties and thirties.  It could be that "hardly ever" in a high-crime country such as the US would amount to so many publicized cases in the last few years where the culprit is a man in his sixties.  But somehow I doubt that.

I suspect that there has been a real change.

Writer's Block. Or The Vida Counts.

I don't really have a writer's block of the usual type,  but last week I wrote fourteen hours one day (my fingertips still hurt!) and then got food poisoning the next day (monsters really should have better hygiene if they wish to be divine food).  And the overall effect is to quiet me down.

Which means that you will be spared the long litany about the multiple causes of the lack of reviews of women's books in all sorts of serious places.  You can look at which magazines do well and which do not do terribly well here.  And here's more information about the count.  And here's an article which argues that the scarcity of women is linked to the scarcity of women in sciences and such.  And, finally, this article   is linked to in the previous one.

As I mentioned, addressing all this properly is complicated (what is the role women's "choice or preference"?  what role does the invisibility of women play?  is it OK to argue that discrimination is not a problem if it hits in earlier stages of the game?  can we even define a "good and important book" without noting that anything about war is by definition going to be important, anything about childbirth is by definition going to be of lesser universal significance, despite the fact that we are all born but we don't all experience war).  And I really should have more energy to write about it.

Instead, I steer you to a piece by one of the sites which has done much better in recent years.  This is what they say:

It really isn’t rocket science. For us, the VIDA count was a spur, a call to action. Our staff is 50/50 male-female, and we thought we were gender blind. However, the numbers didn’t bear this out.” So why not?
“We did a thorough analysis of our internal submission numbers and found that the unsolicited numbers are evenly split, while the solicited (agented, previous contributors, etc.) were 67/33 male to female. We found that women contributors and women we rejected with solicitations to resubmit were five times less likely to submit than their male counterparts. So we basically stopped asking men, because we knew they were going to submit anyway, and at the same time made a concerted effort to re-ask women to contribute. We also adjusted our Lost & Found section, which featured short pieces on under-appreciated writers or books. We had been asking 50/50 writers, but the subjects were coming back 80/20 male to female, meaning that both men and women were writing about men versus women writers. We then started asking both male and female writers if there are any women writers they would like to champion. It has been a total editorial team effort, and each editorial meeting we take a look at our upcoming issues to see where we are for balance. Again, these are all simple solutions. What I found interesting was that we had all assumed that we were gender balanced, when in fact we weren’t. Now, with a concerted effort, we know that we are.”

Women's Role in The Selection of The New Pope

Here it is:

The cardinals locked away to choose the next pope will be served plain but wholesome food — and nothing so delicious that they will want to drag out their deliberations, an Italian newspaper reported on its website on Tuesday.
The nuns who will cook for the 115 cardinals during the papal conclave at their Casa Santa Marta residence “are already preparing meals of soup, spaghetti, small meat kebabs and boiled vegetables”, the Corriere della Sera reported.
“All of the cardinals consider these dishes as rather forgettable compared to the menus at the restaurants in Rome,” the paper added.

So it goes.

And The Other Side Reacts to the International Women's Day

That would be Rush Limbaugh:



He takes the opportunity the day offered to discuss why he loves the term "feminazis" (which he invented) and then he tells us that feminism is the movement which made women want to dress like men, have men's jobs and grab for power just like men do.  Instead of being properly veiled and silently at home, I guess.

Rush is such a sweetheart.  I'm proud of being a feminazi.  I braid my long armpit hair into whips ready for the detesticularization of the Rush Limbaughs of this world.  That, dear Rush, is your true nightmare.  Not the fear of queen bees.

That was a joke.  I have to add an explanation because we feminazis are commonly without any sense of humor at all, so a rare exception needs to be pointed out.

On The International Women's Day, 2013

The meaning of this day seems to be changing to something a little like Mothers' Day.  I spot people congratulating women on this day and such.  That's not the intention of the day.  It also feeds directly into the argument that having a day for women but not a special set-aside day for men is sexist.

Of course the traditional tongue-in-cheek response to that argument is that we have 364 other annual days for men, and this is true on several levels. 

Just read a few newspapers and observe what the sections cover, whose pictures they mostly publish and whose opinions they record.  The sections of a newspaper used to cover domestic and foreign politics (mostly men), the economy and the stock market (mostly men), sports (almost completely men) and then a few areas (local news, cooking, tourism) which might have had a few more women.  Start paying attention to the male-female percentages in various panel discussions on television.  Notice how the role of women in many movies were deemed covered if there was one of each necessary type (girlfriend, mother, evil slut).

Things are not quite that bad in the US and Europe today but you can still easily spot the difference.  And the new VIDA counts on book reviews and book reviewers, by gender, tells us that even in an area which the evo-psychos and other essentialists argue belongs to the girls by their innate excellence, language use, it is the girls who fail to get much attention in most of those august newspapers.

In a more global sense women are still mostly in deep s**t.  The laws of many countries disadvantage them from birth and assign their ownership to their fathers, brothers, husbands and sons.  Rape and other forms of sexual violence can be ignored or even result in the punishment of the victims.  Still-living traditions having to do with the way one acquires a wife and how one treats a daughter-in-law can be monstrous.  Women in some countries cannot inherit the land when their husbands die, women in other countries need the husband's permission to go out alone.

And most significantly for me:  Women are looked down upon, despised, in far too places on this planet.  A little girl's birth is a failed experiment, something of lower value.  Because of social traditions, it can burden a poor family so much that the family chooses to kill the child or abandon her when that would not have been done to a boy baby.

I don't usually go all righteous on these topics though they cut my heart like knives most days.  But the point of the International Women's Day is to remember those horrors, to remember the injustices, to start persuading people that girls and women are human beings, too, to fix the injustices.  The point is not, as some fairly oblivious people argue, to give women their very own day when men do not have one.  That would be a reasonable argument if women and men were already treated equally  all over the world.

The problem the International Women's Day was created to solve is not that we didn't have a day like Mothers' Day for all women.  That would be silly.  Neither is the International Women's Day supposed to be there to shame the men who live today.  They are, after all, born into the same societies as the women and absorb the same rules and those who uphold the unfair structures include women.  No, those are not the intentions.  The intentions are to keep in mind one widespread injustice that we have not been able to fix yet.

A Meta-Post On Income Inequality

Or utterly weird.  You decide.  This post is based on some pictures I have on my desktop and my desire to randomly pick two of them and write a post tying them together!  Here are the pictures:

And:

The top one is a fantastic knitting creation:  A blue tit.  The bottom picture compares the actual wealth inequality in the United States to what Americans think it is and to what they would like it to be.  That graph is based on a somewhat older study that I wrote about at the time.  It turns out that Americans (those right-wing conservative Americans!) like the wealth inequality that Sweden happens to have.

So what ties the two pictures together?

The way we are deceived.  In the charming knitted tit we initially might see a real living tit.  But that deception is fine because it doesn't matter. 

In the wealth inequality bars we see the ability of the US Powers That Be to hoodwink Americans into not seeing the real wealth inequality of this country, for selling them the idea that there is too much income redistribution towards the lower rungs already, and the whole kit and kaboodle about the Big Bad Government.

Most Americans, at least on the basis of that survey, don't realize how very unequally wealth is divided in this country, and they don't want it divided that way.  But they are offered a knitted blue tit instead of a living one.

Duh.  It sorta worked, did it not, this exercise of mine?

Good News/Bad News On Violence Against Women

Good news:  Tunisia establishes the first public domestic violence center.
Bad news:  That it is only the first one, and this:

Resistance to confronting the problem is deeply rooted in Tunisian culture, says Badi, whose hold on her post could change as the government, which has been undergoing turmoil, restructures. “Some people,” the minister says, “are afraid to see women gain autonomy; they fear it’s going to break families.”

There's the hidden nut in almost all the discussions in any country about the evil feminism has caused:  The break-up of the families.  An observer from outer space would ask why the concept of a family must be built upon the backs of women, including those women whose backs get whipped in the process.  Why not make families more democratic institutions?  That question is rhetorical, natch.

Bad news:

Amnesty International has launched a petition calling on the Maldivian government to overturn a court ruling sentencing a 15 year-old rape victim to 100 lashes for an unrelated fornication offence.

The story of the girl from Feydhoo in Shaviyani Atoll, who was convicted of premarital sex in the Juvenile Court February 26 and sentenced to 100 lashes and eight months of house arrest, has been reported by media around the world and been widely condemned by international NGOs and embassies.

'It's so horrific that it's hard to believe it's true: a 15 year old rape survivor has been sentenced to 100 lashes for 'fornication' in the Maldives,' stated Amnesty International, which has followed the case since January.

'The traumatised girl was allegedly sexually abused by her step-father for many years. He has since been charged with sexually assaulting a minor. During the investigation however, authorities came across evidence to support separate charges of fornication against the girl for pre-marital sex,' Amnesty stated, demanding the government overturn the 'disgraceful' sentence.

Good news:  The international reaction to this and the domestic critics of the sentence in the Maldives.

Good news:  The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) was reauthorized.

Bad news:  Rush Limbaugh's take on it.   VAWA addresses crimes which were not adequately addressed in earlier laws, and those crimes have predominantly female victims.  The point of  VAWA is not to argue that all women get beaten to a pulp or that women face more violence, on average, than men do.  The point of VAWA is to adequately address behaviors such as stalking which affects female victims more than male victims and which has been shown to be linked to violence, including homicide.

Gaming While Female

In Internet games, that is.  Alphabet Hotel found these two sites which reproduce some of the comments players who are deemed to be women or girls get.

The first one is called fatuglyorslutty.com.  The name is shorthand for the most common slurs.  The other site is called notinthekitchenanymore.com, and the name also refers to those "make me a sammitch bitch" and "who let you out of the kitchen" jokes.

I don't play any of those games the sites describe so I have no idea about how common these comments are and whether men get somehow the reverse of these insults.  But I doubt the latter, because men are more often treated as individuals (though there are racist and homophobic exceptions to that rule).  In any case, there is no reverse slur meaning whore or slutty for men (that would be badge of honor) and I'm pretty sure that ugly and fat are not insults aimed at men, either.

With the warning that I have no knowledge of the actual frequency of these kinds of insults (they are collected in a few places in large numbers but may not be common for any one female gamer to receive)  and so on, it's worth looking at what they consist of.

After reading several pages of them I can divide them into groups.  The two main groups are the kitchen jokes and the sexuality insults.  The former "put women in their place" in the guise of a joke.  The latter argue that the gamer in question is either sexually promiscuous (slut, whore, slag) or that the gamer is not sexually attractive (ugly, fat).  Some of the latter group sound frightening or violent but most are just overall statements about an unknown woman obviously being a slut, ugly or fat.

I think all that shows a real lack of imagination.  People should create better insults, and in gaming they should relate to the game.  But it also shows that generalization I've written about before:

Women are viewed as spoonfuls of their sex and so insults about the sex seem appropriate.  You can't do that with men in gaming, both because men are the majority and also because men are insulted not as men but as individuals or as members of a racial or sexual minority.  It's that spoonfuls-of-vagina idea which makes the insults so boring and so predictable, after a while.

This post has a minor link to my previous post about How To Fight Politely.
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P.S. I'm aware of the custom of initial hazing in some male groups and I get that a female gamer who survives through this kind of hazing might be accepted as a member of the group afterwards.  But the hazing is sexist in itself.

How To Fight Politely

Probably you kick someone in the groin and then mutter a polite "excuse me" and offer them a cucumber sandwich and some China tea?

Fighting politely on the Internet can be a real problem for us womenz because the rules are different.  If you fight nasty, then you are a horrible bitch.  If the opponent is also a woman, then it's a cat fight (Have you, by the way, ever seen a real cat fight?  It's a frightening experience.).

But if you don't fight at all you a) become inaudible and invisible and b) lose the argument.  So it goes.

Still, the question of good manners doesn't apply to just women, as this opinion  on Paul Krugman shows us:*

Bloomberg's Sara Eisen reached out to author and global thinker Niall Ferguson, who had this to say about the New York Times columnist and Princeton Nobel laureate (emphasis ours):
In my view Paul Krugman has done fundamental damage to the quality of public discourse on economics. He can be forgiven for being wrong, as he frequently is--though he never admits it. He can be forgiven for relentlessly and monotonously politicizing every issue. What is unforgivable is the total absence of civility that characterizes his writing. His inability to debate a question without insulting his opponent suggests some kind of deep insecurity perhaps the result of a childhood trauma. It is a pity that a once talented scholar should demean himself in this way.

Krugman's answer:

What a pathetic response. Notice that he is doing precisely what I never do, and making it about the person as opposed to his ideas. All I have ever done to him is point out that he seems to not know what he is talking about, and that he has been repeatedly wrong. I would never stoop to speculating about his childhood! If he can't handle professional criticism -- which is all that I have ever offered -- he should go find another profession.

Hmm.  If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.  Which is, interestingly, one of the few saws about aggressiveness that is set in a female setting.

This whole topic is quite complicated and I find myself skipping all over the place:

1.  In principle, I believe in politeness, in the idea that whoever I debate is most likely a human being (there might be demons and hence the reservation) and should be treated with that basic courtesy.

2.  But, and this is a big but:  I have learned, in the course of my long blogging career, that the fact of my femaleness elicits aggression and comments (a foaming c**t) that I would not get had I blogged under a handle such as Brawny Bob For Christ.  No amount of divine politeness completely works to rescue me from those comments or the very nasty threats.  So how to respond to all that?  Should I employ my viper tongue?  I have that gift but it's largely kept under lock-and-key.

Despite my explicit endeavors to be polite, I came across one site where my writing was described as vitriolic and vicious.  And me such a sweet and gentle and caring goddess!  The world is so unfair.

3.  The further implication of the gender difference in attacks is a troubling one.  If women are attacked more (which seems to be the case) then those attacks can have a silencing effect on women and may reduce their participation in online debates.  Or require the veil of a false handle, at least.

4.  The wider problem with politeness on the Internet is an obvious one.  We have now learned what people might say when they can say it anonymously, and much of that is truly nasty.  Read enough comments threads, and no amount of chanting "these are outliers, these are the extremists" will stop you wondering if you live in a world inhabited largely by a breed of secret bigots and misogynists.

5.  But the Ferguson-Krugman exchange is not about that.  It's about what quite famous male experts can say in public debates, and in that sense it poses an interesting question.  It also notes one of the no-nos in public debates (personal insults), followed by a possible insult about not being equipped to participate in hard give-and-take debates.

I think there is a difference in how right-wing and left-wing debaters are treated in this sense.  Think of Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh.  One can get away with real rudeness on the right, whereas the same level of rudeness from the left is pointed out.

6.  Finally, one can have the most polite debate in the whole world on some topic such as "Are people like  Echidne persons or just vacuum cleaners for penises?" and that, my friends, is the type of rudeness that mostly goes unnoticed.  Witness also the debates about race, about group differences in IQs,  about whether criminality has a racial genetic component, about whether women are essentially rather stupid and so on.  The participants in such debates are all assumed to hold the same level of politeness but the debate itself is extremely rude to only one side.  That side is not expected to take any kind of offense at all.

And it's a great principle.  If only we could apply it in reverse a bit more often, to see how well the required calmness prevails on the other side.

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*To be honest, I often speculate (silently) about the childhoods of some vociferous misogynists out there, because of the few cases I happen to know in which the basis for the hatred of a whole gender is in the mother relationship.  Sorta like taking one's revenge on the whole world.  If that's the case, by the way, the person should seek therapy.  Whatever happened in one's childhood is no justification for spreading vengeance on the innocent later on.  We all are responsible for what we decide on such questions as adults.

But that has nothing at all to do with the Ferguson-Krugman exchange, of course.  

Funny Feminist Stuff For Tuesday

This cartoon is very funny because it is so very true.

This rant about how hard it is to be a man, these days, is also pretty funny:

For most of American history an uneducated but hardworking man could get a job that would support him, his wife and a family. He might not be rich or have the best of the best, but he could get by. Since few women were educated or able to earn a good living, their surest path to success was to find a man who could provide for them. This led to an implicit arrangement: The woman stayed home, took care of the kids and the house, and treated the man as the king of the castle. In return, he was expected to work as much as necessary to provide for his family.

The writer pines for those days when men were the rulers of their wives and then were treated as the king of the castle.  He doesn't seem to note that the system was extremely unsatisfactory for those  women he sees as essentially being bought in that implicit arrangement.  Besides, that whole argument is rubbish.  Most women have always worked, on the family firm, in factories, in the family shop and so on.

The piece also has funny stuff about violence and Ramboism and other similar essential markers of masculinity.  What's sad about it is that the system which the writer desires would offer the men on the lower rungs of the totem pole only the promise that they would be treated like the king of the castle at home, even if they were treated like serfs at work. (Hmm.  An interesting connection to pursue to explain why the right-wingers are both pro-corporations and anti-women's-rights.)

But the strongest impression I got from that piece was one of entitlement.  The writer expected to become the king of the castle one day.  I don't think I have ever assumed that I would just easily find a partner who would worship me like that, and I don't think most people have had that feeling of entitlement.  It's probably that which makes the guy so very angry about everything.  After all, he was promised!

Now he may actually have to work on how to become a better partner for a woman.  Gasp, he might even have to participate in the chores at home if he wants to find a partner.

Divorce, Iowa-Style?

Republicans in Iowa are proposing to make divorce more difficult for people who have children under eighteen:

Republican lawmakers in Iowa's House of Representatives have proposed a bill that would make it more difficult for a married couple with children to get a divorce. A subcommittee debated the bill Monday, Radio Iowa reported.
From Radio Iowa's report:
Under the proposed legislation, parents with kids under the age of 18 could not get a no-fault divorce. Instead, they’d have to show a spouse was guilty of adultery, had been sent to prison on a felony conviction, had physically or sexually abused someone in the family, or had abandoned the family for at least a year.
According to the report, state Rep. Tedd Gassman (R) said during the debate that he is worried about the negative effects of divorce on children. Gassman said his daughter recently got a divorce.
“There’s a 16-year-old girl in this whole mix now," he said. "Guess what? What are the possibilities of her being more promiscuous? What are the possibilities of all these other things surrounding her life that a 16-year-old girl, with hormones raging, can get herself into?”

Something unsavory about the Gassman comment.  I don't think talking about his own granddaughter that way is appropriate at all, and his focus on her possible sexuality also smells off to me.  If I was the girl I'd never talk to that particular grandpa again.

Which neatly segues into my next comment:  Sometimes married partners who hate each other wage constant warfare in the house, whether the children are present or not.  To grow up under those circumstances can be somewhat similar to growing up in a war zone.   But the list of "legitimate" reasons for divorce in that list do not cover that case at all.

The problem with many of the  studies of the impact of divorce on children is this: 

The proper comparison is not to children growing up in well-functioning "intact" families.  The proper comparison is to families where the adult partners have the same problems but choose not to divorce.  Everyone agrees that children from happy families do better (or at least no worse) than children from quarreling and unhappy families.  But happy couples are not contemplating divorce in the first place.

The best approach for reducing divorce is educating the young (before they are married)  about relationships and teaching them how to choose a good match and how to solve disagreements when they crop up.  Mostly the Republican approach seems to be to assume that all families are wonderful and then to demand that people  must be locked up inside them if they are not wonderful.

On Leaning-In And Sheryl Sandberg. Or Leaning-Away.

Sheryl Sandberg,  Facebook’s chief operating officer, has written a book about what she calls leaning-in for women who have some power at work, as opposed to dropping out or staying silent, I assume.  Assertiveness, asking for what one needs, and so on.

This book and the associated ideas are a fervent topic of debate in many feminist circles

The reason why I have not written about any of that is that I want to be contrarian is that I've heard  the book is hard to get hold of so I never actually tried to get a review copy.  Also, I'm writing my own book.   Sorta leaning away.

Those are also the reasons why I haven't participated in the debates about the book.  It's tough to be anal-retentive (and lazy) in this fast-moving world, even if you are a  goddess and don't actually eat anything but monsters.*

Anyway. Anna Holmes has written a piece about the problems created by that need to comment on everything at lightning-speed and the fact that the book isn't very available for review purposes.  Or that the time is too short to read the book if it is available, given the 24/7 news cycle. 

Or perhaps because the topic is one of those on which different feminists have opposite takes, given that the vast majority of women in the work force, just as the vast majority of men in the work force, have little power to personally lean in (though men probably have a bit more power in that direction, what with the assertive male gender norm)  and so a book about the need to lean in might offer a gourmet recipe to those who can't afford to buy food.

Or perhaps not.  The point is that what Sandberg says is in the book.  Which is essentially pre-advertised before its actual publication date.  The sales of the book probably benefit from all the debates and arguments, of course.  It's the debates and arguments themselves that get muddied by the scarcity of review copies.

This problem of speed and the resulting inaccuracy is  a topic I face daily because I'm writing on how research on women gets reported, so Anna's piece has wider relevance than just the Lean-In proposal.

And opposed to many other problems I write about on this blog, this particular annoyance does have an easy solution: 

Make it a rule not to publish and advertise some study or book when it's hard to get hold of.  It's bad in the field of research (incorrect results get published and the corrections go by unnoticed because they happen too late) and it's bad in the field of opinion writing if the actual opinions cannot be scrutinized.  The discussion begins with the first mention, and there's no real time to equip oneself with the needed facts. 

Of course those who summarize research or discuss new books or studies must also do their bit and read the stuff.
-----
*The furious rate of the news-as-opinions business makes it really tough to be as slow as molasses in January in one's thinking.  You don't get hired to write on some well-paying (hah!) website but have to keep eating the lower quality monsters in loneliness and isolation.

Why can't I stay serious with a serious topic?  That's probably the real reason why I'm not paid humongous amounts for these words of wisdom.

An Odd Coincidence: Mark Sandford and Empathy

The coincidence is with the just-for-fun post I wrote on Friday about the need for an empathy pill.  Ed Kilgore writes about this article on Mark Sanford, an American politician who went through a marital infidelity scandal of more than ordinary proportions.  He is now returning to politics.  The quote that matters:

Wherever possible, Sanford steered his answers toward his own difficulties. At one point, he began talking about the importance of empathy. “Unless you’ve felt pain at some level of life, whether it’s self-imposed or otherwise, I don’t think you have the same level of empathy for people who have gone through some level of suffering,” Sanford said. “I empathize with people at a level that I never did before in part because of some pain in my own life.”

Empathy is a dominant theme of Sanford’s campaign, and it came up in my own conversations with him. “I would argue, and again I’m not recommending the curriculum to my worst enemy, but if one fails publicly at something, there’s a new level of empathy toward others that could not have been there before,” he told me.

When I asked Sanford how that new empathy had changed his views on public policy—whether it had made him, for instance, more inclined to support public-assistance programs he’s long denounced as unnecessary—he said it had not. “Convictions are convictions,” he explained. His empathy is for other public figures recovering from sex scandals and personal humiliations. “I used to open the paper and think, How did this person do that? Now it’s all, But by the grace of God go I.”

That's one way of learning empathy, of course.   But it sounds fairly low-level for someone of his age.

Though I'm sure that he feels that limited type of empathy.  Which makes me think of something related:

I think there is a difference between the intellectual "feeling" of empathy and the emotional "feeling" of empathy inside our heads.  I don't really have proper words for how the difference feels but I've "felt" both types.  The closer some situation is to our own experiences, the easier the emotional empathy becomes.  But everyone should be able to figure out the intellectual "feeling."

Just For Fun

While doing the laundry I started thinking about detergents and then naturally about anti-depressants (like a brighter, cleaner mind) and then, equally naturally, about the lack of the sort of medications (better living through chemistry!) that we really need.

Imagine if we could give Rush Limbaugh an empathy pill, for instance.  Well, don't imagine if you don't care to, but I did.  And then obviously wondered what would happen if it was on overdose.  Would he sob and sob and sob and apologize and bawl?

What if there were guilt pills and anti-guilt pills?  So that the people who have something to actually feel guilty about could be made to experience that wonderful cloggy-anger-angst-shame feeling just once?  And anti-guilt pills, those I'd consume by the handful.  I once felt guilt about having forgotten to turn the stars off.

All that is rather silly.  But so much of the emotional and mental health knowledge we have isn't that much better.  One day, I hope, this era will be regarded as the dark ages of mental and emotional medicine.

Friday Reading

Or things I might have written about had I more energy and time:

First, heartening news from Saudi Arabia:

An influential Saudi cleric has issued a religious edict, commonly known as Fatwa, allowing women to travel without a male guardian, uncover their faces and eat alongside men.

In statements posted on Twitter, Sheikh Ahmed Bin Qassim al-Ghamdi, the former head of Mecca's Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice committee, said: “It is permissible for people to look at what is not forbidden in women like their faces and their arms.”

Of course the article later calls him a liberal cleric.  But baby steps.

Second, this survey sounds interesting, though I haven't looked at it for the signs of any possible bias:

When the Business Insider polled registered voters and asked for their preferences among three Congressional plans floated to avoid the looming "sequestration" cuts in Washington, they found that when stripped of their partisan labels, the policies most favorable to the majority were those offered by the progressive wing of the Democratic caucus.
Strikingly, the plan offered by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, called The Balancing Act and introduced in early February, is the plan that has received the least attention in the corporate media's coverage of the ongoing and latest "invented" Beltway crisis.
The poll found that in addition to beating the House Republican plan and the Senate Democrat's plan overall, "more than half of respondents supported [the Balancing Act] compared to sequestration and [only] a fifth of respondents were opposed."

Finally, this article possibly about the weak form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is interesting.  In particular:

4.    Gender in Finnish and Hebrew


In Hebrew, gender markers are all over the place, whereas Finnish doesn’t mark gender at all, Boroditsky writes in Scientific American (PDF). A study done in the 1980s found that, yup, thought follows suit: kids who spoke Hebrew knew their own genders a year earlier than those who grew up speaking Finnish. (Speakers of English, in which gender referents fall in the middle, were in between on that timeline, too.)

One of the hardest things for me to learn about English were, a) articles (who needs them?) and b) the gendered nature of the third person singular.

Busy...

That's a red squirrel, busy rummaging in its refrigerator. 

On the Skills Gap in the US Labor Markets

This interview (via Balloon Juice)  gives quite a bit of food for thought about what might be happening in American labor markets.  It steps past the usual assumptions of the god-from-the-machine economics where the markets are just assumed to be competitive and where all participants are assumed to have perfect information about everything.

But in reality someone hiring a worker has very little real knowledge about that worker's skills.  There's always a risk in hiring someone, because that person might turn out not to be sufficiently skilled, whatever the original paperwork and interviews might suggest.

The interview (with Peter Cappelli) is about something slightly different, viz. the idea that firms no longer want to do much on-the-job-training.  I'm not sure what the data shows about this, but Cappelli's basic ideas are intuitively appealing:

He argues that the so-called skills gap in the United States (between what workers can do and what firms need them to do) is nowhere near as large as it is touted to be.  Rather, firms in the past hired people and then trained them for the job.  Now they want the workers to come ready-trained.

That would explain the recent trend of firms refusing to even look at those applicants who are unemployed.  Perhaps their skills have already rusted? 

Though an alternative explanation works, too:  The labor markets are still the buyers' markets so firms can be as picky as they wish.

And that alternative explanation also accounts for the reduced willingness on the firms' behalf to train workers.  Why bother doing that if you can find people who are already trained at the same wage rate?

But hold your horses.  There's something else going on, because if those well-trained people are willing to work at fairly low wages, why can't firms find them?

And then we know that employers are basically not paying very much, so if you are the least bit economically oriented, then you say ‘ok, they can’t find what they want, but they’re not willing to raise their prices (wages in this case) so gee, that’s not a surprise.’ 


Cappelli proposes that firms are artificially narrowing the supply of labor they consider so that only those who are a perfect fit need apply.  But that narrow segment of the market will not take the jobs at the low wages the firms are offering.  Hence the paradox of a buyers' labor market where the buyers cannot find what they search for.

I'm not sure what's going on here within the usual framework of a labor market.  It could be that the markets are not clearing.  It could be that the particular market Cappelli has in mind has few large firms buying the labor, and those firms have market power to set wages and to restrict employment.  Or it could be that the ordinary market framework fails to explain the kind of limited rationality that underlies employment decisions.

Perpetuation of Racial Entitlement!

That's what Justice Scalia of the Supremes called the Voting Rights Act.  The Guardian story I link to tells more about the reasons for that astonishing comment.  Well, astonishing to anyone living in the real world where racial entitlement mostly goes in the opposite direction.

The basic conservative argument is that the disease (Southern laws and other attempts to make it harder for blacks to vote) have been cured and the remedy should no longer be administered.

If we take that medical approach seriously, the obvious step is to establish whether the disease in fact has been cured.  Are there no attempts to make voting harder in minority areas, for example?

Now I'm Truly Worried!

Because Google co-founder tells us this:

Google co-founder Sergey Brin on Wednesday described his misgivings with smartphones, saying that using them makes him feel less manly.
During a speech at the TED Conference in Long Beach, Calif., Brin called smartphones "emasculating."
"You're standing around and just rubbing this featureless piece of glass," Brin said of smartphones, according to CNET. Brin talked about his company's head-mounted device, known as Google Glass, that has been set up to compete with smartphones.

Eeeek!  What's happening to mah testosterone???  And what's happening to me, a female goddess, if I'm further emasculated?  My masculinity feels so fragile and vulnerable already.  Better go out to have beer, fart, burp and kick some ass, right?  Or grab some ass.

Douthattery

Ross Douthat seldom fails to give me (unhealthy) food for my blogging, and his last column is no different.  Ross sounds like a Victorian preacher in most of it, at least the sort of a Victorian preacher I imagine:  A stern patriarchal figure regarding the poor as immoral children, in need of the preacher's ability to interpret the divine will when it comes to the poor, but without any direct experience of the lives of the poor.

It's fun.  Douthat begins by stating that despite all the science-fiction ideas about the future of unlimited leisure time, what we have now is an upside-down world where the rich work hard and the poor do not.  That's the first fib in his story:  Most poor people work, many work very hard, and there are rich people who don't lift a finger, except to have it manicured by someone else.

A slight exaggeration, but you should get my point:  Douthat exaggerates in the other direction.  He also assumes that only the work that is compensated with money is real work.

Anyway, the column continues like this, about the vast riches of the United States:

Those riches mean that we can probably find ways to subsidize — through public means and private — a continuing decline in blue-collar work. Many of the Americans dropping out of the work force are not destitute: they’re receiving disability payments and food stamps, living with relatives, cobbling together work here and there, and often doing as well as they might with a low-wage job. By historical standards their lives are more comfortable than the left often allows, and the fiscal cost of their situation is more sustainable than the right tends to admits. (Medicare may bankrupt us, but food stamps probably will not.)

So if the available jobs are no better than scrounging in the garbage tips or living off relatives, why bother?  In any case, people used to starve to death so what does the left complain about?  And we can afford the food stamps and the garbage dump sources of food.

Here's the thing which made me think of that mythical Victorian out-of-touch preacher:  The column tells us nothing about what happened to those blue-collar jobs, nothing about why real wages are not rising but rather declining, nothing about multinational corporations, outsourcing and so on.  All these things just are, and the only thing Ross bemoans is that they might be bad for the morals and morale of the poor.


 

We Saw Your Boobs

Seth MacFarlane sang "We Saw Your Boobs" at the Oscars of 2013 where he hosted the event.   You can listen to and watch the performance here.

A catchy song, and MacFarlane is not too bad at singing it.  I sat mesmerized expecting the bit where he would sing "But We Did Not See Your Willies."  You know, with the same listing of movies and the actors in them.  For each woman whose boobs were seen, give me a guy whose willie was not seen in a movie.

Because that would have been hootingly hilarious!  Well I think so.

Of course humor is in the eye of the beholder, like a mote or a beam, to mix my metaphors.  And it may well be, as these gentlemen tell us, that humor is meant to be goofy or edgy or subversive:

• Seth Rogen and Andy Samberg, from the more Hollywood insider of comic camps, qualified their comments, insisting that hosting an awards show can be difficult, and that MacFarlane's schtick was about being weird than anything mean. Rogen said: "Good comedy is subversive." Samberg? "I always like the goofier stuff."

But come on, humor about boobs is not subversive.  Humor about willies would have been, actually, if we define subversion as going against the stream.  Like the salmon.

Now forget the rest of MacFarlane's performance (which would have been pretty good from any knuckle-dragger) and ask yourself what the meta-joke might be in the Boob Song. 

Is it that these serious female actors are defined as mere boob carriers, and that this is why they are watched on the screen?  Or is it a deeper joke about the men (I assume it's heterosexual men MacFarlane means by "we") who pay attention to nothing but bare boobs and are very proud of that, the way MacFarlane played it?  Or is it even something deeper than that,  a synechdoche for women of all types, not just those in the acting business?   The way The Onion tweet perhaps implied in that extremely nasty tweet about a child (though a female child) which was removed and for which The Onion apologized?

Nah.  I think MacFarlane wanted to shock.  That's why the built-in false-angry reactions by a few of the women mentioned in the song.  We are supposed to admire his gall at shocking those famous actors and being naughty while doing so.  Except that jokes about boobs or talking about boobs or pictures about boobs are not shocking.  They are boringly universal and impossible to avoid on the Internet.  There's nothing subversive about such jokes.  Indeed, they are as traditional as white sliced bread and Miracle Whip.

If there was anything subversive about MacFarlane's whole performance,  it was his perseverance, his insistence at sticking it to the female gender in those jokes, and most of them were like white bread with Miracle Whip on top, boring and bland to me.  "A woman's innate ability to never let anything go?"

I thought that women could never make up their minds about anything?  But perhaps that's for the next time MacFarlane hosts this show.  --  The point is, of course, that our Seth saw his audience as hetero guys, pretty much.  Perhaps white, hetero guys?

And yes, he was pretty mean to several individual men, too.  But not really to the male gender, as far as I could tell.  Of course, the default value for an individual is still a man, so it's hard to see what one man does as somehow indicative of all men, though there is little difficulty of drawing conclusions about all women from a handful of female actors.

The really interesting bit about this all is this, by the way :

To an extent, MacFarlane gave the academy exactly what it deserved. (And let’s remember, people, his script was pre-approved, probably by many layers of powerful vetters.)

 

Meanwhile, in Oklahoma. Who Is Dr. Dominic Pedulla?

In Oklahoma, fascinating political stuff about contraception:

Under State Sen. Clark Jolley (R)’s measure, “no employer shall be required to provide or pay for any benefit or service related to abortion or contraception through the provision of health insurance to his or her employees.” According to the Tulsa World, Jolley’s inspiration for his bill came from one of his male constituents who is morally opposed to birth control, and wanted to find a small group insurance plan for himself and his family that didn’t include coverage for those services:
Jolley said the measure is the result of a request from a constituent, Dr. Dominic Pedulla, an Oklahoma City cardiologist who describes himself as a natural family planning medical consultant and women’s health researcher. [...]
Women are worse off with contraception because it suppresses and disables who they are, Pedulla said.
“Part of their identity is the potential to be a mother,” Pedulla said. “They are being asked to suppress and radically contradict part of their own identity, and if that wasn’t bad enough, they are being asked to poison their bodies.”
The bill has already cleared a Senate Health committee and now makes it way to Oklahoma’s full Senate. It is unlikely that either Jolley and Pedulla themselves rely on insurance coverage for hormonal contraceptive services — but if the measure becomes law, the two men could limit the health insurance options for the nearly two million women who live in Oklahoma.

 The bolds are in the original.

All this made me most eager to meet Dr. Dominic Pedulla.  If he is the same doctor Pedulla I've found on the Google, he is the founder of the Edith Stein Foundation. 

Who was Edith Stein and what does she have to do with this foundation?

As a brilliant feminist scholar she was able to challenge certain assumptions of the day, arguing for greater involvement of women in the liturgical life of the Church, in the professions, and in the workplace. She was an intellectual leader of the fledgling women’s movement in Germany after World War I. It is a remarkable tribute to her persona that she was able to harmonize these feminist aspirations with her abiding belief that at the deepest core of woman’s personality one will find receptivity and motherhood. Not a ”barefoot and pregnant” reductionist view of motherhood, the kind which sees woman as a passive prisoner of her biology, and slave to her tyrant fertility. Rather, she saw receptivity and motherliness as woman’s unique power, a power capable of transforming a home, workplace, professional environment, country, or society in ways that men cannot.
One of the prescient original insights was derived from her exegesis of the Genesis biblical narratives as well as from her intuitive analysis of the lived experience of woman. This insight was that procreation would always be a more consuming and psychologically preoccupying concern for the woman. This prophetic analysis anticipated the work of later experts of the psychology of woman, who recognized the procreation and childbearing can be anxiety-provoking challenges to integration in a woman’s life.
We think that if Edith Stein were alive today she would be a zealous promoter of fertility consciousness and appreciation, and would see this issue as an existential core feminist issue. She would see this alternative as the only authentic and empowering way of satisfying modern woman’s fertility-control needs in a way that fulfills also the deepest needs of her person. She would also see contraception and sterilization as a deeply traumatizing form of rejection of woman’s core self. She would see them as debilitating compromises with fear and therefore contrary to reproductive freedom. She would not view contraception and sterilization as liberating technologies, but rather cruel instruments of woman’s personal degradation and enslavement to the will and desires of others.
We therefore look to Edith Stein as patroness of our Foundation and movement. We believe it most fitting that this great feminist and saint inspire all efforts to empower the world’s women in an authentic way in this new millennium. We think her ideas, articulated within the woman’s movement, will have great power to influence the cultural dialogue concerning woman, sexuality, marriage, and family.

Bolds here are mine.  In short, the Edith Stein Foundation is a Catholic Foundation, opposed to contraception and sterilization and pretty much created by Dr. Pedulla.  The rest of the leadership consists of two men and one woman, the latter the wife of Dr. Pedulla.  How odd that something like a foundation can be just another name for one couple...

The mission of the Edith Stein Foundation:

In 1968, an Italian scholar predicted that if contraception were to become a cultural norm, four things would result: a general lowering of moral standards, an increase in promiscuousness and infidelity, a rise in the disrespect men have for women, and the coercive use of reproductive technologies by governments. Strikingly, in the more than forty years since that portentous prognosis, all four of these have been realized. Social science not only shows it, but is showing the connection between a contraceptive culture and the social maladies of our day.
What’s more, medical research has shown and is continuing to show the far reaching ill effects of all methods of contraception. Not many people have heard about the 1968 predictions, and the growing body of evidence against contraceptives. For the dignity and health of women, this has got to stop. This is where the Edith Stein Foundation comes in to educate, advocate, research, connect, and heal.

Thus, fighting for the eradication of contraceptives is the reason why we have this proposal in Oklahoma.  Truly fascinating stuff!  And think of how much power one man has in getting something like this into the political system!

Note also the code-word "dignity" in that last quote.  It's customarily used by various religions as a replacement for equality when talking about women.  

A Simple Proposal: Have Elections On Weekends

This I don't get about the US elections:  That they are held on a weekday.   By doing that, the American system maximizes the costs of voting for all hourly workers, for all those who need transportation (by a friend or a relative) to go to vote and for all who are minding small children.

Why not have elections over the weekend?  They can be made two days long and that way nobody's religion should stand in the way.   That solution is not complete as there are people who work over the weekends.  But it would reduce the costs of voting to many more people.

What To Read And Why Echidne Is Tired

If I could go back to the beginning of my blogging life I would make a few changes.  For one, I'd make different blogs for different topics.  For another, I'd probably call myself Average Bob or something similar on one of those blogs and Lettuce Prey on another.  I could have carried out amateur studies of the impact of one's handle!

Alas, even goddesses cannot go backwards.  But I wish I hadn't started to write about everything under the sun or at least far too many areas.  When I debate stuff with people it's like fighting enemies on all fronts, ultimately.  Very very exhausting.  I should have stuck to the areas in which I have decades of study.  But of course that is boring.

Here are some interesting things for you to read.  Some of them require no extra writing, others I'm too tired to write about, and the first link most of you can't read at all so you must just trust me!

Sweden's stock-market-quoted companies have more men named Johan than all women, whatever their names,  in their leadership. (Link is to a yellow Finnish rag paper so take with a ladle of salt without checking).

What is happening in Egypt, as seen through the eyes of one Tom Friedman and the fact that the bellydancing channel there has been closed.

On the age-old question:  Are women responsible for how men react to their clothing?

Interesting ideas on how languages might affect our thinking.  I have lots more ideas about that based on my bilingual life.

A fascinating story about found photographs and the unknown taker of them:  A 1950s nanny.

More on the Baby Dearth And Selfishness

That "Where Are All The Babies Gone" article made me think of this genre as a whole.  With very few exceptions, these pieces discuss the horrible consequences of not enough babies, focusing on "you-are-going-to-die-alone-in-your-own-filth" and "who's going to pay for you when you are old" as the two major be-very-afraid triggers.

But most of them also mention some version of the fear what might happen if liberal women don't start having a lot of children in the United States (conservatives will take over) or if non-Muslim women don't start having a lot of children in Europe (extreme Islamists will take over):  If you thought you have something to complain now about sexism and rigid gender roles, just you wait.

Which means that a voluntary return to traditional gender roles is required in order for us to avoid a compulsory return to those gender roles.

All of that is naturally aimed at the hidden (but very real) assumption that it is the selfishness of women which is causing all this.  Women must stop being so selfish because either liberalism or the white race or the Western Civilization will die if they don't.  That the solution sorta resembles the death of liberalism or the death of modernity for women is not a part of those articles.

I put it all in somewhat sharper terms than any of the articles I've read does, just so that you can see what I mean.  The basic setup means that we will NOT look at certain solutions.

For example, if the lower fertility rates are because people are too selfish, the only clear solution is for them to stop being so selfish!  An article which digs more deeply into that question might ask what other reasons people might have for not procreating than selfishness, and that digging would bring up all the stuff about the United States having no paid parental leave, about the high costs of college in this country, about the nonexistent or very expensive daycare, about women still being assumed to do all the hands-on childcare and so on.

But by positing selfishness as the explanation, very little of that needs to seep into the articles.

Japan is an interesting test case of many of those ideas.  Japan pretty much HAS traditional gender roles and that has not helped in raising fertility rates.  Indeed, it is those very gender roles which probably cause the low fertility rates, because the Japanese still view mothering as a full-time occupation and because women in the labor force suffer from fewer promotions etc. after they get married.

Likewise, the countries in Europe which experience the greatest birth dearth are Catholic countries in the south and Germany.  What those share are traditional assumptions about how mothering should be carried out.  One study noticed that a very large number of Italian men has never operated a washing machine.  And another pointed out that mothers who don't dedicate themselves sufficiently to their children are called Raven Mothers in Germany.

I find this all very interesting!  Women are selfish (all people, yes, but mostly women) and should stop being so selfish.  That's the solution, and the motivation is linked to a certain kind of far-future society or one's own hypothesized suffering in old age.  And there the conclusions pretty much end.

But if we asked WHY women don't have more children we could get solutions which actually work.  For instance, those guys writing books about this could start daycare facilities!  They could lobby for better parental leave!  They could lobby for lower college costs!  They could really change the world rather than complaining about it in a way which costs themselves nothing.

Facebook And Taxes

Do you know how much Facebook paid in federal and state income taxes in 2012?  Assuming this article has it right a total of zero dollars:

It’s good to be a corporation in America. Despite making $1.1 billion after going public last year, Facebook didn’t pay a dime in state or federal income taxes in 2012. Instead, thanks to the social media company’s use of a single tax break—the tax deductibility of executive stock options—it anticipates getting a massive refund from the government totaling $429 million.

I don't know if that $1.1 billion is profit or revenue.  But this is interesting information in any case.  It's like that saw about financial markets being too big to fail in that now firms can be too big to pay taxes.

But taxes are (ideally) the cost we pay for the infrastructure, the police, the firefighters, the public health services and so on.  They are the price of civilization, and watching large firms get away without paying their fair share also gnaws on the ties that bind us to each other.  Because the outcome is unfair.

Where Have All The Babies Gone, Ask Joel Kotkin And Harry Siegel.

At the Daily Beast.  The article is about:

Sitting around a table at a hookah bar in New York’s East Village with three women and a gay man, all of them in their 20s and 30s and all resolved to remain childless, a few things quickly became clear: First, for many younger Americans and especially those in cities, having children is no longer an obvious or inevitable choice. Second, many of those opting for childlessness have legitimate, if perhaps selfish, reasons for their decision.

Indeed, that opening tells you almost everything you need to know about this article.  It's about the baby dearth and the selfishness of those who don't have children.  It's also about who's-gonna-pay-for-you-when-you-are-old:

As younger Americans individually eschew families of their own, they are contributing to the ever-growing imbalance between older retirees—basically their parents—and working-age Americans, potentially propelling both into a spiral of soaring entitlement costs and diminished economic vigor and creating a culture marked by hyperindividualism and dependence on the state as the family unit erodes.

Crudely put, the lack of productive screwing could further be screwing the screwed generation.

So.  The family will be in the dustbin of the history and nobody will take care of all the elderly.  But note that the women who in the past had many children and stayed at home taking care of them tended to be the poorest in old age because of the way retirement benefits are calculated.  I'm pointing that one out because the article tends to ignore all the costs to women in the various alternatives.

Lest you haven't been scared enough by now, the authors also suggest that:

In the long run, notes Eric Kaufmann, the author of Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, high birthrates among such conservative, religious populations as Mormons and evangelical Christians will slant our politics against the secular young, childless voting bloc as well. Even among generally liberal groups like Jews, the most religious are vastly out-birthing their secular counterparts; by some estimates roughly two in five New York Jews are Orthodox—as are three in four of the city’s Jewish children. If these trends continue, and if these children share their parents’ politics—two big ifs, to be sure—even the Democratic stronghold of Gotham will be pulled rightward.

This prospect would pose dangers to our society as a whole, and singletons in particular, including a potential reversion to a more rigidly traditionalist worldview.

What's quite funny about that quote is that the very large families of some of the fundamentalist sects are made possible with the help of the government.  And note that stick (rather than carrots) in the last sentence:  If the liberal young people don't breed more then they will get rigid traditional gender roles back!

The authors then mention a few countries with lower fertility rates than the United States.  Germany and Japan, in particular.

You know, I'm always grateful for Japan having such a low fertility rate, not because I don't care about Japan, but because Japan is not a feminist country.  Neither are Italy or Spain terribly feminist places but they are also places with very low fertility rates.  Of course what all those three countries share are pretty "rigid traditionalist worldviews" when it comes to sexual division of child care tasks.  In short, they are not divided at all but fall to the woman.  This means her costs have risen in a world where two incomes may be necessary.

What are the solutions to this Baby Dearth, then? Joel and Harry tell us:

There are several steps our government could take that might mitigate postfamilialism without aspiring to return to some imagined “golden age” of traditional marriage and family. These include such things as reforming the tax code to encourage marriage and children; allowing continued single-family home construction on the urban periphery and renovation of more child-friendly and moderate-density urban neighborhoods; creating extended-leave policies that encourage fathers to take more time with family, as has been modestly successfully in Scandinavia; and other actions to make having children as economically viable, and pleasant, as possible. Men, in particular, will also have to embrace a greater role in sharing child-related chores with women who, increasingly, have careers and interests of their own.

Perhaps those "other actions" only hinted at include good quality daycare, longer maternity leaves, less financial punishment (in terms of lowered future earnings and retirement incomes) for women who either take time off from the labor force or work part-time.  Perhaps those "other actions" might be doing something about college costs which can now average $40,000  per year?  Or the expectation in this country that all parents should support their children through college?

In short, having children in the United States is expensive and has little concrete support from the society.  At the same time, mothering, as defined in various popular media articles, has almost become an extreme sport:  All-consuming and never sufficient.  No wonder if young women hesitate to join those races.  Incidentally, this article isn't alone in trying to turn people off parenting.  Neither is it alone in that definition of parenting problems as purely individual ones.

Not all of the Kotkin-Siegel article is bad or wrong.  But I find it astonishing that one important aspect of the whole question is simply omitted, or replaced by stories about young women in a hookah bar.  And yes, we can question whether lower fertility rates indeed might not be the best solution to what is ailing Mother Earth.  As I've mentioned before, it would be hard to bring all people to a high standard of living (and leave some place for the rest of nature) without reducing the number of people on this earth.

Today's Fun Fact

I had to hover near the computer, waiting for something to finish, so I went to I fucking love science.  It has a story about Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, with this picture:

 
Oops, I thought.  

If you don't get why I thought that way, go and read the comments attached to the post. Or a sample of them.  That's what I did.  And then I read all the 2944 comments that were posted at the time.

Here's the fun fact:  Three percent of those comments consist of some version of the "get back into the kitchen and make me a sammitch, biatch" joke.

Take One For The Team, Republican Ladiez

I must scratch my head over these Republican boys' antics.  Here's the recent joke column at the National Review by Michael Walsh:

Nevertheless, you’re on to something I’ve been advocating for years now. And that is the repeal of all four of the so-called “Progressive Era” amendments, including the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th, which were passed between 1911 and 1920.
The income-tax amendment was a self-evident attack on capitalism and led to the explosive growth of the federal government we currently enjoy today. (Without it, there’d be no need for a Balanced Budget Amendment.) Direct elections of senators has given us, among other wonders, the elevation of John F. Kerry to, now, secretary of state. Prohibition was directly responsible for the rise of organized crime and its unholy alliance with the big-city Democratic machines. And women’s suffrage . . . well, let’s just observe that without it Barack Obama could never have become president. Time for the ladies to take one for the team.
Who’s with me?

A party which is currently known best for supporting rapists' fatherhood rights and for demanding vaginal ultrasounds before abortions and for trying to block the VAWA then comes out with public jokes about how women's suffrage should be abolished?

They couldn't be clearer about their views if they erected a banner over their headquarters saying No GURLZ Allowed.  Well, that was overly nice of me.  The banner would say something like "bitches are dumb, women are inferior, and egg Americans rule."

But I think Michael Walsh is dumb.  Or rather blind and deaf and living in a little locker-room bubble rather than in the real world.  Because what his joking tells us is that he thinks it would be easier to ban women from voting than to change those things about his party platform which are against most women's interests.  But perhaps the Republicans have figured out that if they have the money boys and the fundies, all they need are the misogynists, and this might be part of the courting of those haters.

To put things into some perspective, I have never read a Democratic pundit or politician proposing the abolition of male suffrage, even though that, too, would benefit one party.  That the Republicans have done the reverse several times tells us something.

Meanwhile, in Saudi Arabia

(The "meanwhile, in x" posts are about negative news concerning women's lives in various places. )

Content Warning:  Violence, Sexual Violence

These news explain why laws which treat men and women differently can create horrible outcomes:

• Religious scholar "sentenced to pay blood money to mother after serving short jail term" for daughter's death.
• A Saudi man who raped his five-year-old daughter and tortured her to death has been sentenced to pay "blood money" to the mother after having served a short jail term, according to activists.
• The man, said to be a religious scholar who is also a regular guest on Islamic television networks, confessed to having used cables and a cane to inflict the injuries, activists from the group Women to Drive said in a statement on Saturday.
• Lamia was admitted to hospital on December 25, 2011, with multiple injuries, including a crushed skull, broken ribs and left arm, extensive bruising and burns, the activists said.
• They said the father had doubted his daughter Lama's virginity and had her checked up by a medic.

The torture and killing could happen anywhere.  But in this case two aspects of the way the shariah law is applied in Saudi Arabia makes things much worse:

 First, the couple was divorced and the father had automatic control of the child.  The mother asked him for custody but he refused, and that was that.

 Second, the way the Saudi clerics interpret shariah, a father killing his child cannot be considered an ordinary murderer:

As for fathers, the matter is different; a father cannot be executed for killing his child. This is because a father is the considered the origin of his child and the child is the branch; and the branch cannot be used to eliminate the origin.
It was narrated that the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) said, “No father should be killed (executed) for killing his son.” (At-Tirmidhi)
Having said this, it should be also pointed out that Imam Malik has a different opinion: if a father kills his son definitely on purpose without any doubt, he may be executed.
Allah Almighty knows best.

I'm not an expert and therefore don't know why the alternative is a few months in prison and the payment of blood money (half of the amount that would be given in the case of the killing of a son), but the first linked article states that the same principle applies to husbands killing their wives, even though he cannot be the origin of her.

Those rulings create bad incentives.  Why not just kill a troublesome wife  rather than divorce her?  They also give a green light to extreme forms of pedophile violence as long as the perpetrator only attacks his own children.

Activists in Saudi Arabia have raised objections to the ruling.  I was unable to find English-language news stories about general reactions and what most people thought about the ruling.

What Lindsay Graham Said

Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) today:

During an appearance on Fox News Sunday, Graham suggested that the sequester’s across-the-board cuts to federal spending, including about a roughly 7.5 percent reduction in military spending, would be “destroying the military.” But rather than agree to President Obama’s proposed alternatives to the sequester, the South Carolina Republican said we should save money by eliminating health care for the 30 million people covered by the Affordable Care Act:
CHRIS WALLACE: Let me just ask you one more question about the sequestration before we let you go, Senator. You know if we go into the sequester, the president is going to hammer Republicans, the White House already put out a list of all the things, terrible things that will happen if a sequester kicks in, 70,000 children losing Head Start. 2100 fewer food inspectors and small business will lose $900 million in loan guarantees and you know, Senator, the president will say your party is forcing this to protect tax cuts for the wealthy.
GRAHAM: Well, all i can say is the commander-in-chief thought — came up with the idea of sequestration, destroying the military and putting a lot of good programs at risk. It is my belief — take Obamacare and put it on the table. You can make $86,000 a year in income and still get a government subsidy under Obamacare. Obamacare is destroying health care in this country and people are leaving the private sector, because their companies cannot afford to offer Obamacare and if you want to look at ways to find $1.2 trillion in savings over the next decade, look at Obamacare, don’t destroy the military and cut blindly across the board. There are many ways to do it but the president is the commander-in-chief and on his watch we’ll begin to unravel the finest military in the history of the world, at a time when we need it most. The Iranians are watching us, we are allowing people to be destroyed in Syria, and i’m disappointed in our commander-in-chief.

Bolds are in the original.   Here's that fun picture of the US military spending:

Somehow I don't think that a 7.5% cut in the budgeted amounts for defense would destroy the  US military.



I tried to find that reference to $86,000.  Perhaps I didn't search hard enough, because this is the closest I found to it:

• For example, a family of four earning just below $88,000, or 400 percent of the poverty level, will receive about $5,000 in annual subsidies to purchase insurance in 2016. Once that threshold is crossed, the subsidy immediately drops to zero. So for a family of four in that income range, a raise in wages would actually result in a significant reduction in take-home pay.

Or it could be a reference to this:

And it turns out that there’s a problem there. Whereas many welfare and government programs take into account the number of people involved in a household, Obamacare does not. Analysts testifying before Congress yesterday discussed the disincentives:
“The way this bill is structured, there are disincentives for women to marry and disincentives for women to work,” said Diana Furchtgott-Roth, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.
“Two singles would each be able to earn $43,000 and still receive help to purchase health insurance, but if they got married and combined their earnings to $86,000, they would be far above the limit,” Furchtgott-Roth explained. So those with that much income as a couple would lose the government subsidies and be on their own for thousands of dollars in health coverage.

???  The two appear to contradict each other, despite the fact that the latter links to the former.  I'm too tired to figure that one out.  Perhaps you can do so in the comments.