More on the UN Commission on The Status of Women

Women's eNews reports that the head of the commission has resigned:

The 17-page document produced by the latest global gathering here on women's rights leaves open what appears to be a long-term fight between conservative and progressive factions within the Commission on the Status of Women.
"It's turning into a battle ground over women's rights and that was not the original intention of the Commission on the Status of Women," said Savi Bisnath, associate director of the Rutgers University-based Center for Women's Global Leadership, in New Jersey, in a phone interview. "It was supposed to be a forum in which we can discuss and negotiate and advance women's rights."
UN Women's Executive Director Michelle Bachelet announced her resignation as the head of the gender equality superagency on March 15, the same day 131 U.N. member nations jointly issued the outcome document.
In parting words, the former president of Chile said she was "particularly heartened" that conclusions were reached, given that in 2003, when the commission also tacked the thematic issue of violence against women, it ended without an agreement.
The rights of women are becoming more prominent and contentious at the U.N., as more agencies, offices and initiatives are expected to work together on gender equality, sexual violence in armed conflict and maternal health.
Member nations of the U.N. sit in on the Commission on the Status of Women, a policy-making body of the U.N. Economic and Social Council. They negotiate mostly as regional factions.

What is more interesting is the fight the author of this piece believes is taking place within the commission:

Shannon Kowalski is director of advocacy and policy of the New York-based International Women's Health Coalition.
"One of the biggest challenges was that the African group, which includes Egypt and a number of ultra-conservative countries, continued to work together as a group," Kowalski said. "The more progressive countries, like Kenya, Zambia and South Africa, were not able to moderate those positions in the way we would have hoped."
Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood criticized a draft agreement last week, calling the document misleading, deceptive and contradictory to the principles of Islam. It listed free contraceptives for adolescent girls, equal rights for adulterous wives, equal rights for homosexuals and the right for women to file legal complaints against their husbands accusing them of sexual assault as "destructive tools meant to undermine the family as an important institution."
The Observer Permanent Mission of the Holy See also mustered strong conservative positions on sexual and reproductive health. The mission was unable to respond to an interview request to meet this publication's deadline.

I have  bolded the sentence which seems crucial in so many debates about women's rights.  There are two general arguments opposing feminism (other than the men-are-better-people-than-women argument or the women-suffer-under-equality argument), and those are the focus on some presumed ideal family which cannot survive without the oppression of women and the assumed pushmi-pullyu aspect of gender equality:  If the lot of women improves, then by definition the lot of men gets worse.  The latter usually ignores the fact that the two lots are not identical, to begin with.

These arguments come together in countries with patriarchal laws and beliefs about marriage and family.  That women's increasing equality IS a real threat for the kind of marriage where the husband has all rights is true, of course.  But that shouldn't imply that no alternative family arrangements are possible, arrangements of greater equality and ultimately greater well-being for all, and to regard this as a threat suggests that the speaker ignores the negative aspects of the patriarchal marriage or privileges the husband's role in such marriages.

What struck me about that bolded part of the quote is that it is just a somewhat more exaggerated form of much of the debate about the role of women in the society everywhere.  

What about the children?  Who is going to take care of the children (on a salary of just bed and board) if women can earn a living wage or decide to go for careers?

What about the men who are falling behind in the labor markets (well, not leading by as much as before, actually)?  The writing on these issues often implicitly argues that it would be sufficient if women did less well, not that men should objectively get more education or learn to share more in childcare or anything of that sort.  It's a pushmi-pullyu kind of argument.

Ultimately the debate really is about who is deemed valuable and in what role.  But I have never really understood the privileging of a concept, such as family, over the well-being of all the individuals in it.  Families are not living creatures but social arrangements.  It is the members of a family who should matter, and the mothers should not matter any less than other members of the family.

Is Violence Ever The Proper Response? Thoughts About A Photograph.

I saw this picture yesterday and it haunted me.  It was taken by a Swedish photographer, Hans Runesson,  in 1985, during a march in Sweden by a small number of neo-nazis:

Everything else I was able to find about the picture is rumors.  One rumor states that the woman hitting the flag-carrying neo-nazi with her handbag is a concentration camp survivor. 

Because I don't have the names of the people in the picture, I cannot falsify or verify that or any of the other rumors, including some which suggest that the neo-nazi in the picture is currently in prison for murder.

But it is really the picture itself which haunts me, because it proposes difficult questions:  Is violence ever the proper response?  What if one is the survivor of horrible violence and others are free to celebrate that violence in public?  Does it matter that the violence in the picture is clearly more symbolic than real?

Fun With Christina Hoff Sommers

She is best known as an anti-feminist who wrote a book attributing the world-wide phenomenon of boys doing worse at school than girls to American feminists, pretty much.  Now she has joined the Lean-In debate, centered around Sheryl Sandberg's book (which I still haven't bought).

Guess what her message might be?  It's not very hard if you know that she is an anti-feminist.

Yup.  She argues for innate differences between men and women as the cause why women don't really want to lean in.  That's a rather weird response, given that nobody is forcing women to lean in.  The approach is aimed at women who want to advance at work.  It's not some new feminazi law or anything similar.

But Hoff Sommers does have a deeper goal here, I think, and that is to argue that there is no actual need for businesses to change, because the reason women CEOs are almost as rare as hen's teeth is that women don't want to be CEOs.  And of course most women don't want to be CEOs, at least after they figure how unlikely that outcome might be.  But then that's true of most men, too,  I would guess.

Never mind.  Us girls get a separate treatment, because not giving us such a separate treatment is ignoring the fact that men are innately and immutably different.  With which I agree, of course.  Only women can give birth, for example.   The other possibly innate characteristics are much trickier to analyze.  The state of the arts right now seems to be that everyone and their aunt Agatha decides on an opinion and then believes that it is a fact.  I prefer to stay skeptical.

Anyway, Hoff Sommers uses two pieces of evidence for her arguments.  One is the Pew survey I discussed in an earlier post. Hoff Sommers:

In a 2013 national poll on modern parenthood, the Pew Research Center asked mothers and fathers to identify their "ideal" working arrangement. Fifty percent of mothers said they would prefer to work part-time and 11 percent said they would prefer not to work at all. Fathers answered differently: 75 percent preferred full-time work. And the higher the socio-economic status of women, the more likely they were to reject full-time employment. Among women with annual family incomes of $50,000 or higher, only 25 percent identified full-time work as their ideal. Sandberg regards such attitudes as evidence of women's fear of success, double standards, gender bias, sexual harassment, and glass ceilings. But what if they are the triumph of prosperity and opportunity?

Or what if they are traditional gender role requirements?  I think*  that she makes a mistake here.  The parents were not asked what they themselves would prefer to do about work.  They were asked what they thought was in general better for mothers and fathers.  The distinction is subtle but it does make a difference, because the way the question was framed means that general gender role norms could enter the answer.  That is less likely if people were asked what they themselves wanted to do.

But the major piece of evidence Hoff Sommers uses is a 2008 international study about gender differences:

Sandberg's goal is to liberate her fellow Americans from the stereotypes of gender. But is that truly liberating? In a 2008 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a group of international researchers compared data on gender and personality across 55 nations. Throughout the world, women tend to be more nurturing, risk averse and emotionally expressive, while men are usually more competitive, risk taking, and emotionally flat. But the most fascinating finding is this: Personality differences between men and women are the largest and most robust in the more prosperous, egalitarian, and educated societies. According to the authors, "Higher levels of human development—including long and healthy life, equal access to knowledge and education, and economic wealth—were the main nation-level predictors of sex difference variation across cultures." New York Times science columnist John Tierney summarized the study this way: "It looks as if personality differences between men and women are smaller in traditional cultures like India's or Zimbabwe's than in the Netherlands or the United States. A husband and a stay-at-home wife in a patriarchal Botswanan clan seem to be more alike than a working couple in Denmark or France."

Why should that be? The authors of the study hypothesize that prosperity and equality bring greater opportunities for self-actualization. Wealth, freedom, and education empower men and women to be who they are. It is conspicuously the case that gay liberation is a feature of advanced, prosperous societies: but such societies also afford heterosexuals more opportunities to embrace their gender identities. This cross-cultural research is far from conclusive, but it is intriguing and has great explanatory power. Just think: What if gender difference turns out to be a phenomenon not of oppression, but rather of social well-being?

I got the study** and skimmed it, fairly quickly.  Then I had to go back and check that my reference was correct, because the study doesn't look at nurturing, risk aversion or competitiveness.  It looks at four characteristics:  extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and neuroticism, and finds that men and women differ along those dimensions, on average.

The measure of difference, the d-value, ranges overall from 0.4 for neuroticism to 0.1 for extraversion.  These are fairly small gender differences.  The d-value for the difference between the average heights of adult men and women is 2.6, for example.  A value of zero denotes no average gender difference.

The researchers argue that more egalitarian societies (which are economically more developed societies)  exhibit larger differences than traditional and more hierarchical societies.  BUT the result is completely driven by differences between men in the two types of societies,  NOT by differences between women.

So assuming that all calculations in that study are correct, what do the results tell us?  That women and men in traditional cultures are closer to each other in extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and neuroticism than women in more egalitarian societies, and that this result is driven by differences in men.  How does this relate to Hoff Sommers' argument that women are freer to be what they are innately meant to be in the more egalitarian societies?

I can't think of any actual relevance of the study to her argument, unless she argues that men in more egalitarian societies are freer to assume the male breadwinner role?  But that is rubbish.  It is the hierarchical societies where men are more likely to assume that role.

Neither can I see what relevance the traits of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and neuroticism have to do with women's desire to lean in (unless neuroticism makes work impossible, of course) .

In short, that particular evo-psycho study does not support Hoff Sommers' argument.  Even if the characteristics it studies were directly relevant for labor market participation rates of men and women, the average difference values are pretty small.  But I do admire the web she weaves from rather unlikely bits and pieces!

Sigh.  None of what I say here will have any influence on the debate.



------
The first footnote is added later, to clarify that point:
*I wrote "I think that Hoff Sommers made a mistake" because I couldn't match her data.  The closest I got was with the questions about what is ideal for mothers and fathers in general.  But a second search unearthed the most likely bit she refers to.  Only it doesn't apply to all  mothers but to mothers who work either part-time or full-time.  The Pew report states this:

 The recent shift toward a preference for full-time work has been more pronounced among working mothers themselves than among those who are not employed. Fully 37% of today’s working mothers say their ideal situation would be to work full time, up from 21% of working mothers in 2007. (Among non-working mothers, the increase from 16% to 22% is not statistically significant.)
Only 11% of working mothers say their ideal situation would be not to work at all, down from 19% in 2007. Part-time work remains the most appealing option for working mothers; 50% now say working part time would be ideal for them, down marginally from 60% in 2007.
Among mothers who do not work outside the home, in 2007, roughly half (48%) said not working was their ideal situation. Today only 36% of these mothers say the same. The share saying they would prefer to work either full or part time has increased slightly over the same period (from 49% in 2007 to 63% now).
For their part, fathers prefer full-time work. Fully 75% of fathers with children under age 18 say working full time is ideal for them. Some 15% say working part time would be ideal, and
10% say they would prefer not to work at all. In general, fathers’ views about what is ideal for them have not changed significantly in recent years.

**To get the pdf file, Google Why Can't A Man Be More Like A Woman. Sex Differences in Big Five Personality Traits Across 55 Cultures.

Some News on Violence Against Women

1.  This picture, from Ms. Foundation for Women, gives quite a nice summary of the television coverage concerning the Steubenville rape sentencing:

As I wrote before, think whether such things would be reported about someone who got his wallet stolen while inebriated, or about his hypothetical young attackers.

2.  When I read about this year's meeting of the UN Commission of the Status of Women  which did, happily, end up with a document aimed at reducing violence against women, I noticed that the group of countries which opposed such a document didn't just include the usual suspects (the Vatican, Iran and some other Muslim countries) but also Russia.  In addition to that, Egypt's new government was vocal in its opposition to the document.

About the latter:

It's not just Russia, Iran and the Vatican that are alarmed at the prospect of gender equality and women living lives free of violence. They found an ally in Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, which issued one of the most odious – and telling – responses to the CSW, claiming:
"This declaration, if ratified, would lead to the complete disintegration of society."
Why? Because, according to the Brotherhood, the proposed language granted women basic sexual rights and bodily autonomy; gave wives the right to report marital rape and requires law enforcement "to deal husbands punishments similar to those prescribed for raping or sexually harassing a stranger"; required equal inheritance rights for men and women; replaced "guardianship with partnership, and full sharing of roles within the family between men and women such as: spending, child care and home chores"; recognized the rights of marginalized groups like lesbians, trans women and sex workers; and removed "the need for a husband's consent in matters like: travel, work, or use of contraception".

But it was Russia's new fervor in this camp which interested me the most.  After all, Egypt was pretty predictable, given who is in power there, but Putin has been in power in Russia (whether formally or not) for a very long time.  So how come this shift in Russia's policies?

What I found in my research is the argument that Putin doesn't like abortion or homosexuality because he wants people to have more children.  As is the custom in such cases, the government tries to pressure women (and men) into doing that or tries to make not doing that impossible.  The government (as is also the global custom in almost all such cases) refuses to try to understand why people have fewer children and what could be done to change that, if so desired:

Russia's difficulties with language on sexual, reproductive and gay rights appears to be driven by what critics have described as a bid by President Vladimir Putin to shore up support in his country's largely conservative society.
Putin has criticized gays for failing to help reverse a population decline. Putin has also drawn closer to the Russian Orthodox Church, one of the most influential institutions in Russia.

 On the positive side, the document was adopted, and:

Suffice it to say that bringing all 193 countries into consensus wasn't easy, and it didn't happen without hard work and drama. There were many member states who expressed reservations about the document, including Russia and the non-voting but permanent member, the Holy See.
Those who disagreed most vehemently with the UN's Commission on the Status of Women's document were mostly from conservative Muslim countries, which focused their ire on references to women's sexual and reproductive rights, and equality in marriage and other human rights. There were moments during the negotiations when media reports from Egypt grew inflammatory, with the Muslim Brotherhood proclaiming that adopting such a proposal would result in "the compete disintegration of Egyptian society." Well, Egyptian women would have none of that. Protests erupted in Egypt, and work at the UN continued.
The strong-willed women, girls, and men at the conference were determined to work through the many complications, cultural differences, and language nuances, and dedicated the long hours it took to tediously parse every paragraph -- word by word, to arrive at a document that could finally be adopted by all 193 countries. In the end, the only member state that apparently didn't agree to the final document was Libya, and they, gratefully, did not block adoption of the 18-page text.

Brainless Politics. The Cyprus Example and Others

Reading about events in Cyprus reminded me once again about the weird illogical aspect of so much politics.  Stuff, where you have to put your brain away to keep going.

The list can be very long but these are the items that I could think of right away:

1.  The United States spends humongous amounts of money on its military, more than the next ten (or more) biggest spenders put together.  Yet that military spending is a Holy Cow for both parties, pretty much, whereas this country of great riches cannot afford health care for the poor or retirement for anyone below the one percent.  A related Holy Cow is that the contributions to social security must remain regressive so that the burden is mostly on those who have lower incomes.

2.  The largest funder of Islamic terrorism is Saudi Arabia.  And Saudi funding of mosques and schools and such in other countries comes with a link to an extreme form of Islam, the form which spreads the kind of thought basis from which terrorism can grow:  An extreme one.  Yet George Bush responded to the 911 attacks by attacking Iraq, pretty much, and we pretend to ignore the Saudi influence here because it's the largest oil producer.

For similar reasons, the extreme sex segregation and oppression of women in Saudi Arabia is not really addressed.  The West wants the oil, not fairness and justice without the oil.

3.  The whole financial markets sausage.  Those who prepared the poisonous sausage and served it to the rest of us really did not get punished at all.  They got bailouts and high bonuses and are largely back in the saddle.  Those who ate that poisonous sausage, not knowing any better, are punished, however.

Indeed, the remedies the government had adopted seem to be going to those who should have gotten the punishments, not more money.

4.  This whole silly "equal sacrifice" bullshit.  The sacrifice is not equal if we demand equal monetary sacrifices from the very poor and the billionaires, or larger sacrifices from those with lower incomes.  In the former case, the billionaires hardly feel the sting whereas the lives of the poor are destroyed, and in the latter case (which seems more realistic) those in power can make more money from the so-called sacrifices by gaming the system again.

Now add to this the collapse of the ethical base for the sacrifice.  In Cyprus, people who acted the way that was assumed to good and careful, by saving and by not spending, by acting responsibly rather than by gaming the market, those are the people who are now made to pay for the fun others had.  It is irrelevant if the real target of the saving taxes is the Russian savings in Cyprus.  The sacrifice demanded will be greater on the poor and it makes no difference how ethically one may have acted.

Then, of course, freezing the bank deposits in Cyprus so that the tax can be applied to all is the same as telling people in Spain, Greece and other similar countries to do a run on the banks.  Which is truly an odd thing to want to initiate.

Feminism Is Dead. Take 4358.

These stories are as regular as a menstrual cycle, you know.  And about as exciting.  Feminism is dead so often that I wonder what kind of a zombie it must be to be able to die again and again.

Another interesting aspect of these stories is that they always focus on the upper class women,  mostly white ones and with lots of education.  Yet even such highly blessed women toss their careers into the corner!  They did so in the early 2000s, they did so in the 1990s, and now they do it in 2013.

The novel aspect of these newest death throes is that the article mentions a famous evolutionary psychologist, David Buss, who firmly believes in the innateness of sex roles.  You see, our prehistoric women suddenly don't seem to have been gatherers, after all,  who might have provided most of the calories in that gathering/hunting mix but cavewives:

All those bachelors’ vows of future bathroom cleanings, it turns out, may be no more than a contemporary mating call. “People espouse equality because they conform to the current normative values of our culture,” says University of Texas evolutionary psychologist David Buss. “Any man who did not do so would alienate many women—yes, espousing values is partly a mating tactic, and this is just one example.” At least in one area, there’s scant penalty for this bait and switch. Last year, sociologists at the University of Washington found that the less cooking, cleaning, and laundry a married man does, the more frequently he gets laid.

...

 “My sense,” says Buss, “is that younger women are more open to the idea that there might exist evolved psychological gender differences.” Among my friends, many women behave as though the evolutionary imperative extends not just to birthing and breast-­feeding but to administrative household tasks as well, as if only they can properly plan birthday parties, make doctors’ appointments, wrap presents, communicate with the teacher, buy the new school shoes. A number of those I spoke to for this article reminded me of a 2010 British study showing that men lack the same mental bandwidth for multitasking as women.

In other words, women belong in the home because of evolution.  That cannot be proved, of course, but it's enough if women believe in it, because then they will stay at home. Or will feel guilt for not doing so.

I am bored with these kinds of stories as is pretty apparent from what I wrote above.  The reason is this:

Not all women are ambitious in the job sense.  Not all women want those kinds of jobs.  But then neither do all men.  The society condones the lack of ambition in women but disapproves of it in men.  Thus, the number of men who would report a desire to be a stay-at-home-dad will probably be lower than the number of men who really would prefer to be a stay-at-home-dad, and to some extent the reverse is true for women.

The point is that we have different talents and different desires.  And the previous paragraph could equally well have been written by saying that not all women are suited to taking care of small children or wish to do that full-time, even if they love their own children more than anything in the world.  And the same applies for men.  And so on.

But the stories are not written that way.  They are written to apply to all women on one side, and all men on the other side.  Thus, all men obviously somehow wish to work in the labor force 24/7 and all women obviously get kidnapped by their maternal instincts and toss their jobs overboard if they possibly can.

Thus, the basic setup is this:  Men will work in the office or the factory or in the fields 24/7, no matter what.  If that is taken as a given, how should women behave? 

The other reason I'm utterly bored with these kinds of stories is that the way labor markets are arranged is kept as the invisible elephant in them.  Those stresses the article speaks about are arranged stresses, largely caused by impossible expectations about working hours and the absence of good childcare and proper vacation time.

Though I must admit that this story is slightly more interesting than the usual one because it hints at the idea that the ability to organize children's birthdays and the ability to cook and clean is somehow genetically wired in women but not in men.  Which is unlikely when you consider that the most famous people in those types of fields tend to be men.  Like the most famous chefs.  Even the most famous childcare experts of the past are men.

We should also see enormous catastrophies in the families of all single fathers.  If men lack the necessary hard-wiring to remember children's physician and dentist appointments, how come the studies I've seen of single-father families suggest that those fathers do a pretty good job, on average?

So I fell for this "controversial" post in the way it was intended:  Get a lot of links, create a lot of discussion, and the advertising income will flow in!  Bad Echidne.  She will get no chocolate mousse today.
----
Added later:  This is a good take on the article.

The Rape Culture Inside CNN. We Are All Steubenville Football Players Today.

Content Warning:  Sexual Violence


This, my friends is rape culture.  I have been sitting on the fence about the general validity of the term, for various reasons, but CNN's coverage of the guilty verdict in the Steubenville rape case certainly tells us something about CNN's own rape culture.

Do watch the video at Raw Story.

Then consider how a similar story would have been reported if the two young men had been accused of, say, armed burglary or the severe beating of someone or other crimes deemed as real.

Huffington Post has more on CNN's determination to focus its sympathy on the perpetrators of this crime.

I would be the last person to argue that one shouldn't feel sorry for those who have been found guilty of crimes.  The consequences to them, when caught, are awful.  As the CNN coverage states:

Candy then asked CNN legal contributor Paul Callan what the verdict meant for “a 16 year old, sobbing in court, regardless of what big football players they are, they still sound like 16 year olds.”
“What’s the lasting effect though on two young men being found guilty juvenile court of rape essentially?” Crowley wondered.
“There’s always that moment of just — lives are destroyed,” Callan remarked. “But in terms of what happens now, the most severe thing with these young men is being labeled as registered sex offenders. That label is now placed on them by Ohio law.”
“That will haunt them for the rest of their lives.”

But note that the rape didn't somehow grab these young men or force them to act in a certain way.  They did it.  Just as young men sometimes commit burglaries or robberies.  A rape is a crime.  But the way CNN approached it was qualitatively different from how they would cover the sentencing of a teenager who, say, robbed a bank.  We would not then hear how a young life is ruined and so on.

I can see no reason for the difference except for something which must be called a rape culture.  A rape is not deemed a serious enough crime for the punishment  the two young men received, despite the fact that the actual punishment ranged from one to two years; not a terribly heavy sentence.

Indeed, underneath this treatment squirms something truly nasty:  The idea that these school athletes shouldn't have been taken to court at all, that the crime they committed cannot justify the sentence they were given.  That they should have been forgiven for the greater good.  Which does not apparently include rape victims.

I also get that CNN wants to pull all the emotional strings it can, for the sake of those viewership figures, and because the victim is unavailable those emotions must be obtained in other ways.  But something really is wrong when we are asked to extend our sympathies to those found guilty with only a fleeting comment about the victim's life, too, having been severely damaged if not ruined, and that in the hands of the two football players, not as a consequence of the crime they themselves committed.

And what about the victim and our sympathies for her?  Will she be perfectly fine tomorrow morning?  Did CNN report that her mother earlier told how her daughter stays in her room, doesn't want to go to school and cries herself to sleep, night after night?  That her daughter feels alone, except for her family, and ostracized?

There are rape victims who never quite recover, who never quite trust anyone enough to let them come close.  There are rape victims who, years later, have no feeling in the pelvic area.  There are rape victims who resort to narcotics to self-medicate or who spend years in therapy.  Whether this case is one of those is something I cannot tell, but the point CNN almost ignores is that at least one life could have been destroyed even before this case came to court at all.

This article is a good general introduction to the case.  This post  at Jezebel gives an example of the lack of support surrounding the rape and the great enjoyment at least one person present had in discussing it.  Warning, the video at Jezebel can be upsetting.  And it certainly gives one example of a rape culture.

Here is an early article about the events with more examples of what is hard to see as anything but a metaphoric further rape of the girl in social media.  Rape culture in action, that is.

A Liberal Plant?

(Content warning:  Racism and sexism)


That was my first instinct when I viewed this recent video of an audience question at a panel of the Conservative Political Action Committee on Republican minority outreach :



But perhaps he is a real thing.  Often the "real thing" is as bad as any sarcasm I might be able to create, after all.  (For instance, just try to create a sarcastic story about the advice the American Taliban would give to the mothers of America.  I once did that and couldn't get it to differ from reality by exaggeration.)

Think Progress reports:

ThinkProgress spoke with Terry, who sported a Rick Santorum sticker and attended CPAC with a friend who wore a Confederate Flag-emblazoned t-shirt, about his views after the panel. Terry maintained that white people have been “systematically disenfranchised” by federal legislation.
When asked by ThinkProgress if he’d accept a society where African-Americans were permanently subservient to whites, he said “I’d be fine with that.” He also claimed that African-Americans “should be allowed to vote in Africa,” and that “all the Tea Parties” were concerned with the same racial problems that he was.
At one point, a woman challenged him on the Republican Party’s roots, to which Terry responded, “I didn’t know the legacy of the Republican Party included women correcting men in public.”
He claimed to be a direct descendent of Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

Bolds are mine.

Lawyers, Guns&Money also wonders if Terry is a liberal plant.  Probably the guy is not a liberal plant, only someone who manages to make conservatives look really bad by expressing his sincere opinions in that place.  If so, he is just as extreme as sarcasm would write him.  Which is very unfair for all us writers and bloggers.

I wandered from that blog to all sorts of pretty disgusting places by following the initial references and then by digging some more.  If you choose to do that, remember the bleach and the iron brush for cleaning yourself later on. 

The Hand That Rocks The Cradle

In the US belongs more often to the daddy than in the past.  That's the main take from a new Pew Research study on parenting opinions, or at least the optimistic take from it.  The roles of parents are becoming more similar, compared to the olden times:

Balancing Work and Family
The Pew Research survey finds that about half (53%) of all working parents with children under age 18 say it is difficult for them to balance the responsibilities of their job with the responsibilities of their family. There is no significant gap in attitudes between mothers and fathers: 56% of mothers and 50% of fathers say juggling work and family life is difficult for them. 

Feeling rushed is also a part of everyday life for today’s mothers and fathers. Among those with children under age 18, 40% of working mothers and 34% of working fathers say they always feel rushed. 

With so many demands on their time, many parents wonder whether they are spending the right amount of time with their children. Overall, 33% of parents with children under age 18 say they are not spending enough time with their children. Fathers are much more likely than mothers to feel this way. Some 46% of fathers say they are not spending enough time with their children, compared with 23% of mothers. Analysis of time use data shows that fathers devote significantly less time than mothers to child care (an average of seven hours per week for fathers, compared with 14 hours per week for mothers). Among mothers, 68% say they spend the right amount of time with their children. Only half of fathers say the same. Relatively few mothers (8%) or fathers (3%) say they spend too much time with their children. 

Mothers, Fathers and Time Use 

A lot has changed for women and men in the 50 years since Betty Friedan wrote “The Feminine Mystique.” Women have made major strides in education and employment, and the American workplace has been transformed. But with these changes have come the added pressures of balancing work and family life, for mothers and fathers alike. Trends in time use going back to 1965 clearly show how the increased participation of women in the workforce has affected the amount of time mothers devote to paid work. In 2011, mothers spent, on average, 21 hours per week on paid work, up from eight hours in 1965. Over the same period, the total amount of time mothers spend in non-paid work has gone down somewhat. 

For their part, fathers now spend more time engaged in housework and child care than they did half a century ago. And the amount of time they devote to paid work has decreased slightly over that period. Fathers have by no means caught up to mothers in terms of time spent caring for children and doing household chores, but there has been some gender convergence in the way they divide their time between work and home.

Roughly 60% of two-parent households with children under age 18 have two working parents. In those households, on average, fathers spend more time than mothers in paid work, while mothers spend more time on child care and household chores. However, when their paid work is combined with the work they do at home, fathers and mothers are carrying an almost equal workload.

What still remains unchanged is interesting, too.  Consider the public opinion question (asked of all respondents, whether they were parents with children under eighteen at home or not) about the ideal amount of work for mothers and fathers who have children (not sure of the age of those children, by the way):  Is it best for mothers to work in the labor force full-time, part-time or stay at home?  And then (kudos for Pew to ask about this) the same question about fathers.

The answers, about mothers and work:

Survey respondents were also asked what the ideal situation is for mothers and fathers with young children. Among all adults, only 12% say it’s best for mothers of young children to work full time. A 47% plurality say working part time is the ideal situation for mothers of young children, and one-third say it’s best if these mothers not work at all outside the home.

The answers, about fathers and work:

The public has much different views about what is best for fathers of young children. Fully seven-in-ten adults say the ideal situation for men with young children is to work full time. One-in-five endorse part-time work for fathers of young children, and only 4% say the ideal situation for these dads would be not to work at all.

Fathers themselves are bigger proponents than mothers of full-time work for parents with young children. Among fathers with children under age 18, 17% say the ideal situation for mothers of young children is to work full time. Only 7% of mothers agree with this. When it comes to what’s ideal for fathers, there is somewhat more agreement: 75% of fathers say the ideal situation for fathers of young children is to work full time; 66% of mothers agree.
 

The latter answer, about what is ideal for fathers,  has not changed much over the decades, whereas the former, what is ideal for mothers,  has.  In other words,  expectations about the gendered division of labor have changed when it comes to mothers but have not changed when it comes to fathers.  That creates some very obvious problems.

There are differences in the answers from demographic groups in this study:

Views on What’s Best for Children Differ by Race, Age 

Among all adults, blacks (31%) are much more likely than whites (13%) to say that the ideal situation for young children is to have a mother who works full time. Only one-in-four blacks say it’s best for young children if their mother does not work at all outside the home; this compares with 36% of whites. The gap on this issue between black men and white men is particularly large. While 40% of white men say the ideal situation for a young child is to have a mother who stays home, only 21% of black men agree. The views of Hispanics are similar to those of whites. 

There is also an age gap in views about what’s best for children. Adults under age 50 are more likely than those ages 50 and older to say having a working mother is the best thing for a young child. Some 18% of those under age 50 say having a mother who works full time is the ideal situation for a young child, and an additional 47% say having a mother who works part time is ideal. 

By contrast, among those ages 50 and older, only 13% say having a full-time working mother is ideal for children, and 37% say having a mother who works part time would be best. Fully 40% of those ages 50 and older say the ideal situation for a young child is to have a mother who doesn’t work at all outside the home. Only 28% of adults under age 50 agree. The age differences are more pronounced among men than among women.

Note that those differences are about a slightly different question than what might be best for the fathers and mothers.  It's about what might be best for the children, and on that the general public holds the views shown in the following graph when it comes to mothers:

The research report mentions in several places that the percentage of both the general public and parents which supports the single breadwinner models has declined from 2007 or from 2009.  That is probably a consequence of the recession which has demonstrated the dangers of that pattern when economic times are bad.

The wider connections this research report suggests are fairly obvious.  As long as the ideal division of labor is seen in terms like these we are going to struggle with having women in the kinds of decision-making roles which require having a history of many years of full-time work.  We are also going to struggle with the attempt to see childcare as a general problem for parents rather than as a problem women have in trying to balance family and work.

Still, I'm optimistic about the direction of the changes and also about the fact that the fathers in this study are roughly as likely as the mothers to admit struggling with their dual roles.  And many fathers would prefer to spend more time with their children than their work commitments allow them.
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The whole report (fairly long) is worth reading.  It has interesting data on the amount of leisure time mothers and fathers have.  On the whole, fathers have more leisure time than mothers, except for sole breadwinner fathers who have quite a bit less leisure time than their partners:

When paid work, child care and housework are combined, parents in dual-income households have a more equal division of labor than parents in single-earner households. In dual-income households, fathers put in, on average, 58 hours of total work time a week, compared with 59 hours for mothers. In households where the father is the sole breadwinner, his total workload exceeds that of his spouse or partner by roughly 11 hours (57 vs. 46 hours per week). In households where the mother is the sole breadwinner, her total workload exceeds that of her spouse or partner by about 25 hours (58 vs. 33 hours per week).
    •    Men spend more time than women in leisure activities (such as watching TV, playing games, socializing and exercising). The gender gap in leisure time is bigger among men and women who do not have children in the house (37 hours per week for men vs. 32 hours per week for women). Among parents with children under age 18, fathers spend, on average, 28 hours per week on leisure activities, while mothers spend 25 hours on leisure.

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.
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*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."