But That's Different! On the Horror of Air Traffic Delays And Related Matters.

I've followed with some dark mirth the recent complaints about the flight delays caused by the sequestration law in the US.  From Huffington Post:

Lawmakers passed a bill Friday to ease air traffic delays before catching their own flights home for a week off, leaving unchanged other painful effects of the across-the-board spending cuts mandated by Congress' sequestration law.
While the legislators likely improved their chances for on-time flights when they return to work next month, cuts that are harming care for cancer patients, closing children out of preschool and ending food programs for the elderly remain in place.

The $85 billion in mandatory cuts this year are a result of the Budget Control Act of 2011, which Congress passed after its standoff over raising the nation's debt limit. The sequester was proposed as a fallback in case Congress could not come up with a more rational way to achieve at least $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction over a decade -- the theory being that sequestration would be so painful that Congress wouldn't let it happen.
But Congress and the "super committee" tasked with the budget-cutting job failed anyway.

Why would flight delays be something to fix while the cuts to cancer patients are not, hmh?

I think we meet two old friends here.  Let me introduce you to this tall guy with safety pins through his cheeks and ears.  He's called Lack Of Empathy,  and he often sits at the Congressional Bar and works out at the gym there.  He finds the poor undeserving because he is not poor and he is deserving!  He is proud of his logical thinking and his good work ethic, but he seldom dwells on the trust fund he grew up with.  It's possible that he used to pull wings off flies as a little boy to study what they would do without wings.

And here's Lack of Imagination!  She looks almost exactly like a human-sized Barbie doll, and cannot possibly imagine why any woman wouldn't.  All you need is some silicone, a diet of lettuce leaves and discipline!  She doesn't know anybody who is poor or really sick.  When she tries to think about how poverty might feel she comes up against an inner wall.  If she hasn't experienced something it doesn't exist, and so far she has experienced very little, having been cushioned by money and lots of family help and good connections.  Because her family helped her, that help is now invisible, just the way all families obviously automatically work.

Both of these critters find political decision-making very easy, and neither has any trouble with ethical or moral judgments about other people. 

You may have met them.  Their genders can be reversed, because Lack of Empathy and Lack of Imagination can be both male and female names, and often one individual carries both names.

When one of these types of politicians disapproves of gays and lesbians but then  learns that his (or her) son is gay, suddenly being gay is no longer an abomination but simply one form of sexuality.  Suddenly that politician no longer opposes same-sex marriage, suddenly that politician opposes discrimination against gays and lesbians.  Because it is different.

A pro-life politician with either or both of these names may regard abortion as murder when other people choose it but  a necessity when it is chosen by a family member of that politician or the politician herself.   Because it is different.

And although such politicians might deem the evil consequences of the sequestration law as lamentable, intellectually speaking, the emotional message only hits home when it...hits home.  When the plane they must take is delayed, for example, and they cannot get home.

That was a political fairly tale (better leave the typo in).  An alternative interpretation of all this is to point out the bubble our politicians live in, a bubble made out of money and sycophants and comfortable protection from such hunting monsters out there as Unemployment and No Access to Health Care.  Even politicians with empathy and imaginative abilities might get used to living in that bubble, might forget the other realities and might then complain about those few consequences of the sequestration act which hurt even them.





 

 

Today's Action Alerts

First, the Accreditation Council of Graduate Medical Education in the US is considering dropping the requirement that family doctors know how to prescribe contraceptives.  That would not be a good thing. 

Today is the last day you can comment on the idea.  The link.

Second, the Koch brothers (sorta like Sauron in the Lord of the Rings or at least extreme conservative money boys) are considering buying the Tribune Company, the owner of such newspapers as the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times.  If that idea makes you a bit concerned, you can express our views here.

I haven't carefully scrutinized the actual danger in those initiatives but the time spent opposing them (if you are in the US) is very little. 

But just imagine a world where our news come from two or three of the richest guys on the planet!

The Bitch From Hell?

Now that's a controversial title for a blog post!  A piece by Dylan Byers about the reign of Jill Abramson, the executive editor of the  New York Times, subtly hints at the possibility of Abramson's bitchiness.

Some snippets from Byers' article:

One Monday morning in April, Jill Abramson called Dean Baquet into her office to complain. The executive editor of The New York Times was upset about the paper’s recent news coverage — she felt it wasn’t “buzzy” enough, a source there said — and placed blame on Baquet, her managing editor. A debate ensued, which gave way to an argument.
Minutes later, Baquet burst out of Abramson’s office, slammed his hand against a wall and stormed out of the newsroom. He would be gone for the rest of the day, absent from the editors’ daily 4 p.m. meeting, at which he is a fixture

...

In recent months, Abramson has become a source of widespread frustration and anxiety within the Times newsroom. More than a dozen current and former members of the editorial staff, all of whom spoke to POLITICO on the condition of anonymity, described her as stubborn and condescending, saying they found her difficult to work with. If Baquet had burst out of the office in a huff, many said, it was likely because Abramson had been unreasonable.
“Every editor has a story about how she’s blown up in a meeting,” one reporter said. “Jill can be impossible,” said another staffer.
Just a year and a half into her tenure as executive editor, Abramson is already on the verge of losing the support of the newsroom. Staffers commend her skills and her experience but question whether she has the temperament to lead the paper. At times, they say, her attitude toward editors and reporters leaves everyone feeling demoralized; on other occasions, she can seem disengaged or uncaring.

...

If Abramson is disengaged, Baquet is just the opposite: He cares about newsroom morale and he cares about being liked, staffers say. That’s not to say he doesn’t have his own issues. As Washington bureau chief, he got so upset when a story didn’t make the front page that he drove his fist through the wall. (“I never lose my temper at a person,” he said. “I lose my temper at walls.”) But even this anecdote is recalled fondly.

Bolds are mine.

Note the different characterization of Abramson and Baquet.  I'm wondering how that characterization would have sounded if Baquet had been a woman who stormed out of the room bashing walls and Abramson her male boss.  It's not difficult to assume that the female Baquet could have been seen as overly emotional, unable to control her feelings, going as far as punching the walls, and that the male Abramson would have been seen as a decisive and cool boss type.  Ann Friedman thinks so.

I don't know these people which means that I have no way of judging whether Abramson's gender affects the way she is judged in Byers' article.  Perhaps not.  On the other hand, if we have different patterns for men and women in the world of work, as we seem to have, then it's not impossible that Abramson is expected to act more kindly and to be more accessible than the case would be for a male boss.  That expectation, if we hold it, will be a subconscious one and doesn't preclude the aware assessment of her as "impossible."  Even if she wouldn't be regarded as impossible with a first name like Dylan.

This is what makes it  difficult to judge arguments about individual female and male bosses.  Of course there are terrible  bosses of both genders, but it's also likely that female bosses are held to higher and contradictory standards:  Be kind!  Be motherly!  But if you act that way you are indecisive, dithering, not strong enough.  

And we may weigh the requirements of kindness and accessibility more when the boss is female, given that on some level we believe those are "natural" for women to possess.

In any case, several studies have demonstrated that women leaders are held to contradictory standards.  Ultimately this is because the pattern for a leader has to do with characteristics we associate with men, not with women.

Those contradictions are not so present when we assess male leaders.  A man can show kindness and that's a bonus because it is in some ways not what his pattern makes us demand.  It's just an extra nice aspect of an otherwise ambitious and firm boss.
------
For more on this, see Lawyers, Guns and Money.

Yardwork

I was cleaning the yard the other day, raking together the ghosts of last summer's plants, pulling out the ivy aiming at world domination and so on.  As usual, I ended up sitting on my heels in the dead flower beds, with my hands muddy and full of thorns. 

I heard a rustling sound, turned my head, expecting a neighbor, and looked up into the face of a wild tom turkey.  Polite good days were exchanged.

The Reinhart-Rogoff Paper And Steven Colbert

If you are one of those people who think economics is about the most boring thing since spreadsheets, watch last night's Colbert show from 3:23 to 15:16.  That segment is all about how a UMass economics graduate student, Thomas Herndon, tried to replicate a very influential paper by Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff.  That paper has been used as one of the launching pads for the current austerity policies.

Herndon was assigned the task of replicating the Reinhart-Rogoff paper in his econometrics class.  He tried and could not reproduce the original results.  Some background:

From the beginning there have been complaints that Reinhart and Rogoff weren't releasing the data for their results (e.g. Dean Baker). I knew of several people trying to replicate the results who were bumping into walls left and right - it couldn't be done. In a new paper, "Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff," Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst successfully replicate the results. After trying to replicate the Reinhart-Rogoff results and failing, they reached out to Reinhart and Rogoff and they were willing to share their data spreadhseet. This allowed Herndon et al. to see how how Reinhart and Rogoff's data was constructed.
They find that three main issues stand out. First, Reinhart and Rogoff selectively exclude years of high debt and average growth. Second, they use a debatable method to weight the countries. Third, there also appears to be a coding error that excludes high-debt and average-growth countries. All three bias in favor of their result, and without them you don't get their controversial result.

The Reinhart-Rogoff paper wasn't peer reviewed because it appeared in the Papers and Proceedings section of the American Economic Review (AER).  Ordinary papers in the AER are peer reviewed but not the Papers and Proceedings ones.

But a peer review would not have caught those spreadsheet mistakes, given that the "peers" rarely (never?) review studies by replicating all the calculations.  The reasons for that are many:  In many cases such replication would be a giant amount of work,  peer reviews are unpaid, and, until quite recently, the original data was rarely made available by the researchers.

What are needed are more replications of studies, and not only in economics but in all sciences and social sciences.  The snag is that replication is time-consuming and academics have few incentives to spend time on repeating already existing findings, given that neither promotions nor tenure are likely to drop into the laps of replicators (unless they happen to disprove famous findings). 

But at a minimum, data used in such studies should be made available on the Internet.

This is not because I  think that researchers  do sloppy work or carefully stitch bias into their calculations and observations and so on, although that, too, probably happens.  It's because the incentives we provide for research will be improved if it is understood that any particular study can be subjected to scrutiny and replication.

While I'm writing about this topic, I also want to make a plea for assigning more value to studies which do not find anything startlingly different or new.  Indeed, finding that, say, a new treatment in medicine is no better than the old treatment is valuable information.  Similarly, finding that one's pet theory is rejected is important to publish, however painful that might be.  The file drawer effect is bad for real scientific advances.

Meet James Taranto

James Taranto has uttered something nasty again*:

TARANTO: One fascinating thing about this is this piece was published no later than 9:03 PM on Wednesday evening, because that's when it first appears on the New York Times' Twitter feed. The last Senate vote on amendments to the gun bill was a bit after 6 [PM]. Giffords appeared at the White House at 5:35 [PM] when we saw that enraged rant by the president. The Manchin-Toomey [background check] provision was the first vote. That was at 4:04 PM. So if you read this piece it's presented as a cry from the heart, as Giffords' personal reaction as somebody who's been wounded by gun violence to the betrayal of these Senators. So we are supposed to believe that somehow in less than five hours a woman who has severe impairments of her motor and speech functions was able to produce 900 publishable words and put in an appearance in the White House in the course of it. So I think that's a little bit odd.

Taranto is pretty good at nastiness.  I keep coming across his writings on us wimminfolk, on minorities and on various other groups he detests.  He is a believer in evolutionary psychology views of women as gold-diggers who are not really interested in having mutually enjoyable sex, only in marrying upwards and such.

But that's not especially nasty, just the usual crud.  This, however, IS nasty:

On July 25, 2012, Taranto sparked outrage online by posting the following comment to his Twitter account, in reference to the victims and survivors of the July 2012 Aurora, Colorado mass shooting: "I hope the girls whose boyfriends died to save them were worthy of the sacrifice".[18][19]

Taranto then tries to explain that tweet:

We intended this to be thought-provoking, but to judge by the response, very few people received it that way. The vast majority found it offensive and insulting. This column has often argued that a failure of public communication is the fault of the public communicator, and that's certainly true in this case. What follows is an attempt to answer for this failure with a circumspect accounting of our thoughts.

What makes the stories of Jansen Young, Samantha Yowler and Amanda Lindgren especially poignant is that their boyfriends' dying acts simultaneously dealt them an unfathomable loss and gave them an invaluable gift—a gift of life. Their loss is all the more profound because the gift was one of love as well. In instinctively making the ultimate sacrifice, each of these men proved the depth of his devotion. They passed a test to which most men, thankfully, are never put—and then they were gone.

These three women owe their lives to their men. That debt can never be repaid in kind, because life is for the living and cannot be returned to the dead. The closest they can come to redeeming it is to use the gift of their survival well – to live good, full, happy lives.

People live on after death in the memories of those who loved them. Sometimes when this columnist does something we consider worthwhile, our thoughts turn to our father, who died four years ago: "Dad would be proud." That is our hope for Young, Yowler and Lindgren: that in the years to come, each of them will have many opportunities to reflect that Jon or Matt or Alex would be proud of her.

But that doesn't work, because he used the past tense of the verb "to be."  The obvious reading of his tweet is an MRA one:

Men sacrifice themselves for women All The Time, then a mention of the Titanic and not a mention of the fact that the Titanic was a very unusual shipwreck in that sense.  Therefore, women, as a group,  should be grateful to men, as a group, and probably should graciously subjugate themselves as a way to show that  gratefulness.

Or this is what I've read on many, many MRA sites, and Taranto's tweet fits right into that ideology.

The problem with his tweet is not the incredible acts of self-sacrifice of those young men.  That is astonishing and worth respecting.  The problem with Taranto's tweet is that the girlfriends (who probably had no say in what took place) should now be judged as to whether they were worthy of such a final sacrifice.  Apply that same thinking to any other disaster where someone saves a life at the cost of his or her own.  Do we then read anyone writing to ask whether those who were saved are worthy of the sacrifice?

We do not.  And that's what is so nasty about Taranto's view.  It's sexist at the least, perhaps even misogynist.  On the other hand, his tweet says nothing about the shooter in that massacre or the shooter's gender.  Just like the MRA sites never mention whom it is that the brave men are defending women against.  Because it is very very rarely against other women.

I have no interest in framing such questions as part of the battle of the sexes or any other ridiculous term people use for sexual politics.  But that's how Taranto's tweet reads to me, and the only way to explain why it is nasty is to clarify the background.

Then to this most recent Taranto nastiness:

His insinuation that Gabrielle Gifford couldn't have written her op-ed herself,  in the time window she had, given her brain damage.  Now, I suspect that most politicians don't actually write the op-eds that bear their names all on their own.  Never mind.  Let's suppose that they do.

Media Matters does mention that she could have written her op-ed earlier.  But the op-ed itself mentions that she has trouble speaking, not that she has trouble thinking:

Speaking is physically difficult for me. But my feelings are clear: I’m furious.

She says nothing about how difficult or easy writing is for her.  It is Taranto who decides that because she has difficulty speaking she must not be able to write, either.  And therefore, what?

That she doesn't hold the opinions stated in the piece?  That she is a marionette operated by someone else?  What is it, exactly, that Taranto intends to say with that quote which began this post?
----
*Via Eschaton.

Gender Similarity Studies

This is a pretty sparse field, given the human tendency to look for and to magnify any gender differences and the similar tendency to ignore gender similarity as a similarity.  When the two sexes are the same, the category "gender" drops out of the analysis altogether.

Usually.  But I spotted two studies which are about gender similarity.  I haven't vetted either one of them, but the point is to popularize some studies from the other side of the fence, so to speak, the types which tend not to get popularized much.

First,  one study has analyzed whether sex differences are something that can be analyzed as taxonic:

But what of all those published studies, many of which claim to find differences between the sexes? In our research, published recently in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, we shed an empirical light on this question by using a method called taxometric analysis.
This method asks whether data from two groups are likely to be taxonic — a classification that distinguishes one group from another in a nonarbitrary, fundamental manner, called a “taxon” — or whether they are more likely to be dimensional, with individuals’ scores dispersed along a single continuum.
The existence of a taxon implies a fundamental distinction, akin to the difference between species. As the clinical psychologist Paul Meehl famously put it, “There are gophers, there are chipmunks, but there are no gophmunks.”
A dimensional model, in contrast, indicates that men and women come from the same general pool, differing relatively, trait by trait, much as any two individuals from the same group might differ.
We applied such techniques to the data from 13 studies, conducted earlier by other researchers. In each, significant differences had been found. We then looked more closely at these differences to ask whether they were more likely to be of degree (a dimension) or kind (a taxon).
The studies looked at diverse attributes, including sexual attitudes and behavior, desired mate characteristics, interest in and ease of learning science, and intimacy, empathy, social support and caregiving in relationships.
Across analyses spanning 122 attributes from more than 13,000 individuals, one conclusion stood out: instead of dividing into two groups, men and women overlapped considerably on attributes like the frequency of science-related activities, interest in casual sex, or the allure of a potential mate’s virginity.
Even stereotypical traits, like assertiveness or valuing close friendships, fell along a continuum. In other words, we found little or no evidence of categorical distinctions based on sex.

The authors point out that some other characteristics indeed seemed to be taxonic in their study: physical size, athletic ability and sex-stereotyped hobbies like playing video games and scrapbooking. 

Though I think the reasons for the sex-stereotyped hobbies themselves may not be taxonic but based on complex societal influences and individual interests and the dance between the two of them.  For example, video games have been coded as male and they also mostly have topics which are traditionally male-linked.  Likewise, scrapbooking has been coded as female and is largely about children.  Yet it would be easy enough to think of topics for scrap books which would appeal to men or boys and it would also be easy to create video games that would appeal to women and men.  In short, it's not that there is something inherently sex-linked about the acts of  playing video games or scrapbooking.

In any case, this study seems to me to repeat something that might be obvious:  Individuals differ in all sorts of ways and very few schema allow us to put all women into one class and all men into another class.  But of course those who believe that men and women are inherently and eternally two different types of creatures altogether will never be persuaded by anything of this sort.

Another study of interest in this context has to do with whether fathers can tell when it is their child who is crying, rather than some other child.  Past studies have suggested that mothers are better at this than fathers.  This study finds no difference.  Here is the abstract:

Previous investigations of parents’ abilities to recognize the cries of their own babies have identified substantial and significant sex differences, with mothers showing greater correct recognition rates than fathers. Such sex differences in parenting abilities are common in non-human mammals and usually attributed to differential evolutionary pressures on male and female parental investment. However, in humans the traditional concept of ‘maternal instinct’ has received little empirical support and is incongruous given our evolutionary past as cooperative breeders. Here we use a controlled experimental design to show that both fathers and mothers can reliably and equally recognize their own baby from their cries, and that the only crucial factor affecting this ability is the amount of time spent by the parent with their own baby. These results highlight the importance of exposure and learning in the development of this ability, which may rely on shared auditory and cognitive abilities rather than sex-specific innate predispositions.

The whole question of how human mothers differ from other animal mothers is fascinating.  I haven't read enough in the field to say much, yet, but it seems that some applications to human child-rearing from the rest of the animal kingdom are based on theories which might not apply to primate mothers in the first place. 

For example, the early theories of the importance of bonding seem to have come from species where bonding (almost an imprinting, along the Konrad Lorenz lines)  is crucial for proper mothering.  But those species are not primates, and primate studies suggest that cultural learning is an important part of learning how to mother in chimpanzees, for example. 

As I mentioned above, I haven't looked at this study in detail.  But what it seems to suggest is that those parents who spend time with their children get good at recognizing that child's cry, whether they are mothers or fathers.  If earlier studies did not take into account the time spent with the child, their results could have followed from the fact that most infant care is done by mothers, not from some difference in parenting instincts between mothers and fathers.

A Criminal Vs. An Enemy Combatant. Words Have Consequences.

I have been following the Boston Marathon bombings and its aftermath.  I'm glad that at least one of the alleged bombers was captured alive, for the sake of more information and clarity and, of course, for the sake of carrying out the tasks of a proper system of justice.  Those tasks are important for civilization to exist.

My political awakening coincided with two events:  The election of the second Georgie Porgie and the political events following 911.  The latter, in particular, was a rough awakening:  Plans to attack Iraq, a country which had nothing to do with the 911 massacres, pushed everything else into a hasty foreplay before the intended war could be started.

But there was so much else wrong with those "everything else" events, including invading Afghanistan without an exit plan, not mentioning the country which in fact produced (and produces) the terrorists and the hasty creation of an enemy for the wars this country is still waging.

This enemy is a nebulous one, hiding under different names and inside different groups, not defined by much anything than one religion, and sometimes not even that.  We were told to create an image of the enemy in childish political terms (they want our toys, our freedoms/it is our sexual license that makes them do it) which omits US foreign policy from all consideration,  and we were told to look elsewhere when actual information could have clarified that frightening enemy lurking in the shades, could have made it less frightening, more objective and thus more possible to actually conquer.

I get the great advantages the Bush administration reaped from placing the country on a permanent war status.  For one thing, he probably got re-selected because of that, and he also got free hands to do almost anything he wished to do.

But from the very beginning of this  I was adamantly opposed to that framing.  The correct approach seemed to me then to treat the criminals as criminals.

This is still true, and the reasons are many.  First, the real terrorists regard themselves as soldiers in a holy war. By giving them that label voluntarily, they get greater recruiting potential, greater fame, greater martyrdom.  They were taken seriously, in the sense of an honorable opponent, someone we could declare a war against.  But in reality that group IS undefined, nebulous, and ultimately quite small.  What the US administration chose to do in 2001 elevated it, gave it mythical importance and a greater justification for existing.

Being declared a criminal has less glory attached to it than being declared an enemy combatant.  Thus, by choosing the latter (as would want to do) we are giving the terrorists exactly what they want.

Second,  the position of permanent and eternal war gives the US government powers to breach civil rights and human rights, a blank license to do things we would never accept done in ordinary crime prevention and crime-solving.  But because the danger is now existential, almost anything, from water boarding to sending suspects to torture in other countries, can at least be debated.  Once again, this gives the terrorists pretty much what they want if they happened to be motivated by the belief that Americans have too much freedom.

Third,  that treatment creates the foundation for illogical reptile-brain fears to fog out logical thinking.  If this danger is existential, it matters much more than the types of catastrophies (the Texas plant explosions) which cost us many more lives.  If this danger is existential, almost any amount of money can be spent on averting it, whereas the causes which cost many more lives are regarded as "spending we cannot afford."  This danger can be used to prop up utterly preposterous divisions of the federal budget pie and it can be used to fatten up parts of the bureaucracy which really do not need any more fattening.

Fourth, and this is a reason I only started thinking about recently, after reading articles about what might follow these events among American Muslims, Sikhs, or almost anyone who might look like whatever the imagination decides a frightening terrorist looks like:  Harassment, perhaps even violence aimed at those who might look like that nebulous enemy in the hind-brain of some frightened television-overloaded asshat.

Some of that bigotry and fear is unrelated to the use of war terms, but some is strengthened by that.  If the terrorists were regarded as mere criminals, they would be a clearly defined group.  Once they are defined as enemy combatants, even when they are American citizens, the idea of a fifth column is supported, grows horrible tentacles and infects the minds of individuals who might not otherwise have reacted that way:  If this is a real enemy, how can we tell who belongs to it?  They might be everywhere!  Help!

And because of that nebulous aspect of the enemy, anything the known cases might share with groups in the society becomes focal, becomes the criterion used to differentiate between "us" and "them."

As I mentioned, this is not the only reason for racial or religious profiling, and it has never worked for the white Christian terrorists (because whites and Christians are too large groups in the US, perhaps, but also because they are the home-group of many of those who practice the profiling).

Neither does it work for the one aspect of terrorists which in some ways is the most informative:  They are overwhelmingly male.  That, too, may be because the category is too wide but also because being male is the default category in our thinking and in that sense uninformative.  For instance, if most terrorists were female we would have hundreds of books on that because being female is not the default category.

Had we gone down the road of defining these horrors as crimes and their perpetrators as nasty criminals I think we might have had less bigotry and anger aimed at vast groups of innocent Americans and citizens of other countries.  International cooperation might have been strengthened, too.

These are my thoughts after reading this:

At the same time, some Republican senators, including John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, argued that using the criminal-justice system was a mistake and that Mr. Tsarnaev should instead be held indefinitely by the military as an “enemy combatant,” under the laws of war, and questioned without any Miranda warning or legal representation, in order to gain intelligence.Still, there is not yet any public evidence suggesting that Mr. Tsarnaev was part of Al Qaeda or its associated forces — the specific enemy with which the United States is engaged in an armed conflict. And some legal specialists also doubted that the Constitution would permit holding a suspect like Mr. Tsarnaev as an enemy combatant.
“This is an American citizen being tried for a crime that occurred domestically, and there is simply no way to treat him like an enemy combatant — not even close,” said Alan M. Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor and seasoned defense lawyer.

So.  At the time I write this we don't know what may have motivated the Tsarnaev brothers, in any case, but the flag of war has already been raised.   Even if the older brother had raised such a flag himself, taking that seriously would be a mistake.  It would give him (and any copycats) exactly the kind of martyrdom and glory they desire.  Being called a criminal is not glamorous.  It is also much closer to the truth.

The Shame Of Dressing in Women's Clothes

An interesting story from Maravan, Iran:

A group of Kurdish activist women from Marivan, along with a few citizens of the city, held a demonstration April 16 on the main streets of the city in protest of the authorities’ parading a man in Marivan after dressing him in the traditional women’s clothing of Kurdistan, a local source told the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran. The Special Guard Unit violently confronted the demonstrators.
According to the human rights activist, the women activists clad themselves in red Kurdish costumes to protest the red Kurdish clothes the man, T. Daabaashi, was forced to wear for what the authorities called punishment of “hoodlums.” The women carried placards and called the act of parading the man an insult to women and to Kurdish people, an act they strongly condemned. After the initial gathering and the flow of the demonstrators from Moosak Square towards the Shabrang intersection, Special Guard forces surrounded the protesters and attacked them in the 12 Sawareh Square of Marivan, injuring a number of the participants with pepper gas and batons. According to an eyewitness, the severe attack resulted in a broken leg for one of the female protesters and severe head injuries for several others.
... 

The human rights activist added that the man who had been dressed in female Kurdish clothing was accused of quarreling and wielding a knife, and by the orders of the Mariwan prosecutor, was forced to wear a headscarf, Kurdish pants, and red women’s clothes as security forces paraded him on the main streets of Marivan on April 15. The widespread protest in the city caused several Kurdish Members of Parliament to write a letter and demand admonishment of the Interior and Justice Ministers.

The basis of the sentence is the assumption that men are "lowered" or shamed by being forced to dress as women.  By the way, this does not work in reverse.  Try a thought experiment.  Thus, this is about the fact that being a woman is regarded as lower than being a man and men can be punished by making them temporarily dress as women.

Here is the Facebook response from many Kurdish men who want to support women:

One participant writes:

To show my solidarity and support to the “womanhood” and their suffers and torments during the history mostly have done by “men” [sic]. as we have faced recently a stupid judge”s order to punish a person by putting on him the feminine customs, so it is one of the times that we should gather around each other and condemn this stupidity, brutality and inhumanity against the womanhood; the half of society as well as at least half of the human being on the earth. I am supporting womanhood by the at least I can do for them.

What makes this interesting is that the power of social shaming does depend on others implicitly believing in something being shameful.  If enough people refuse to go along with that, the connection between the punishment and the shame is reduced.

In one of those bouts of serendipity I noticed something similar working in quite a different story, this one about slut shaming:

It all started when the good folks at George Washington High School decided to address this rampant problem of teen sluttery by having a guest speaker come in to yell at their students about their whorish ways. No for reals the speaker, Pam Stenzel… decided that the best way to get her message across to these kids requires a healthy dose of apoplectic misogyny with a sprinkling of utter bullshit:
At GW’s assembly, Stenzel allegedly told students that “if you take birth control, your mother probably hates you” and “I could look at any one of you in the eyes right now and tell if you’re going to be promiscuous.” She also asserted that condoms aren’t safe, and every instance of sexual contact will lead to a sexually transmitted infection…

Katelyn Campbell, a senior at the school and the student body vice president, took the initiative on her own to make sure that future classes aren’t subjected to that level of derp:
Campbell refused to attend the assembly, which was funded by a conservative religious organization called “Believe in West Virginia” and advertised with fliers that proclaimed “God’s plan for sexual purity.” Instead, she filed a complaint with the ACLU and began to speak out about her objections to this type of school-sponsored event. Campbell called Stenzel’s presentation “slut shaming” and said that it made many students uncomfortable.

Shaming is a weapon much used in female socialization.  Perhaps more than in socialization in general.

Dog-Sitting...

That's the reason for no deep, meaningful or boring posts today.  I love this arrangement.  It might be a bit like being the grandparent and not the parent:  I can pamper the dog and have fun but nobody expects me to train her out of any of her bad habits in one weekend!

But the dog needs to be exercised and then I have to follow her around the house because one of her not-so-good habits is eating everything that fits in her mouth, whether it's food or not, and the Snakepit Inc. is not exactly the sort of place where one can eat off the floors...

What Should Be Written

Articles that should be written and researched:

1.  What actually happened to the culprits in the aftermath of the financial and housing markets collapses.  Which culprits were punished and how?  How many scapegoats were sacrificed?  Is the power now removed from those who caused the collapses?  What corrective mechanisms have been put in place to prevent similar collapses in the near future?  Who rules the stock markets?

Writing this should begin with the promises made, by the way.  I believe that the major culprits got no punishment and are still holding the reins.

2.  An easier but similar article:  What was the reaction to the need for gun control after the Newtown massacre?  And where are we now, in terms of that reaction?  Is anything going to change, except for more armed people milling around in elementary schools?  How does real power operate in this area?

There are researchers and writers who have done work on these topics, but I yearn for a very wide-angle take of the processes, the way power actually sticks exactly where it was originally, while the powers that be wait for the public memory to evaporate.

Today's Research Snack

Here's a fun study about how men find it more difficult to judge women's emotions than men's emotions and how different parts of their brains light up in the two cases.  The study has photographs of eyes only, twenty-two men looking at them and a humongous amount of statistical manipulation to produce the results.  It is summarized here.

I'm not saying that the results are wrong.  I can't tell, actually, given that the raw data isn't there, and I'm too tired to try to sleuth through the statistics.  But with 22 cases it should have been possible to post the success rates of each individual man.  This is important, because a few outliers could seriously affect the findings.

The discussion of the results is fascinating, too.  The authors mostly address the possibility that these men are better at getting emotions expressed by men's eyes right, because, roughly, they learn them by looking at the mirror in the morning.  Or, rather, we are better at deciphering people most like ourselves.

But then at the very end of the report they give a nod to evolutionary psychology:

The finding that men are superior in recognizing emotions/mental states of other men, as compared to women, might be surprising. From an evolutionary point of view, accurate interpretations of other men’s rather than women’s thoughts and intentions, especially threatening cues (also related to amygdala responsiveness [40]), may have been a factor contributing to survival in ancient times. As men were more involved in hunting and territory fights, it would have been important for them to be able to predict and foresee the intentions and actions of their male rivals.

Perhaps.  But note that usually evolutionary psychology is all about the necessity to pass one's genes on, and the prelude to that requires to find someone of the opposite sex to mate with.  Suddenly understanding that opposite sex (women) matters not a whit but male aggression does.

I guess I have trouble with articles which are all about brain imaging and technical language and suddenly the discussion adds a few hypotheses that nobody can ever confirm, based on the assumption that men were more involved in hunting and territory fights and that those fights were so crucial for survival that they created an adaptation which made men better at reading emotions in other men than in women.  What about all that need to find women to mate with?

There are alternative explanations, including the theory that one is best at interpreting emotions in people who are most similar to oneself, but also the fact that even in today's society it is more important to understand the emotional cues given by more powerful people.  Because they matter more.

Pope Francis And the Uppity Nuns of America

Well, we learn that in some ways the New Pope Is The Old Pope:

In a statement issued Monday, the Vatican said Francis had “reaffirmed” the doctrinal evaluation and criticism of U.S. nuns carried out last year by the Vatican under his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI. The assessment accused the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an umbrella organization that represents most U.S. female Catholic orders, of promoting “radical feminism” and of ignoring the Vatican’s hard line on same-sex marriage and abortion.


What stinks about all that is naturally the fact that the church=boyz in all this, and celibate boyz at that.  Thus, the control and command of the nuns with their "radical feminism" is in the hands of guys who absolutely do not want any kind of gender equality inside the church.

The Ghouls

That would be a lot of the US media covering the Boston Marathon bombings.  Because of 911, I was aware of certain things to look for, even without intending to look for them, and I spotted them very very fast.  For example, a local television station showing injured people being pushed in wheelchairs by emergency personnel seemed to apologize for the fact that these were the people being helped later because they were less hurt.  So we got told there was a lot of blood and missing limbs earlier.

We are invited to participate in a disaster vicariously.  For that to work, the coverage must focus on suffering, the more gruesome the better, and repetition of the worst possible shots.  As I mentioned in earlier comments, one television station told the viewers: "And now you can watch the bombings one more time."

Even the people on the site only watched the bombings once.

All this is very bad, for four reasons:  First, acting ghoulish serves the goals of any terrorists.  They want to terrorize us, the media participates in producing maximum fear in its audiences.

Second, as I have written elsewhere, watching the disaster unfolding, over and over again, is very harmful.  It may give the viewer vicarious PTSD, and that benefits nobody, but may cost money one day to treat and may also warp our thinking about the events.  Our bodies think we were there, our bodies store the memories, for them to crop up later at certain cues.

Third, if it doesn't cause PTSD in someone, it may cause a confusion between reality and movies, hardening the viewer, making the events seem altogether unreal and contrived.  From that it's not a big step to the assumption that all disasters are unreal, conspiracies created by this government or some other nefarious group, rather than terrorists of whatever stripe.

Fourth, there is a flavor of pain pron in much of the coverage:  Looking for the most heart-breaking case, repeating it over and over again, shifting from that to the next most heart-breaking case and so on.

I get that we are all drawn to be ghouls, that our natural reactions are to watch, mesmerized and shocked.  I get that, because it would be a somewhat useful reaction if we were on the site and unable to help, because some learning could come from all that.  But it's not helpful when the events unfold elsewhere, when we are not there, and when our watching doesn't help anyone but may harm us.

On the Boston Marathon Bombs

My thoughts are with those who suffer, both in Boston and in Iraq.  It is far too early to conclude anything about the Boston bombings, except that the events qualify as terrorism.

So let's not get terrorized.  Note the kindness of strangers, in the aftermath, ranging from the runners who continued to run after the end of the race, straight to the hospital to donate blood to those who have opened their houses and apartments as safe havens to other strangers.  And note the excellent work of the first responders.

Risotto

Love it.  Our affair began fairly recently but the food sex has never been better.  It's worth all that foreplay, standing by the stove with the boiling broth and the wooden spatula, stirring, stirring, stirring...

The rice needs to be of the right type, the type which remains firm but moist, which coagulates and slowly, slowly, agonizingly slowly falls apart at the very moment when the taste buds explode in orgasmic enjoyment.

Anything can be gently massaged into a risotto: peas, mushrooms, garlic, herbs.  The flavors intermingle but remain subtle, the waiting for it to be ready is a delicious agony.  Risotto day!

And if you ever tire of the wholesome food sex of risotto, buy a bottle of truffle oil*.  Gently dribble some of it on your heaped portion right before eating and prepare for a whole new world of taste.

----
*It's pricy per bottle but not expensive per meal, especially if compared to the price of actual truffles.

The She's-A-Slut Culture

Contents:  Sexual Violence, Suicide, Ostracism

Rehtaeh Parsons in Canada and Audrie Potts in the United States were teenage girls.  Both alleged that they were gang-raped by teenage boys while being  unconscious from alcohol.   Both also seem to have been the victims of social media and real world ostracism after the events took place.  And both took their own lives, Audrie last September and Rehtaeh this April.

In Parsons' case the initial police investigation about the alleged gang-rape  ended in no charges though the case has now been reopened, apparently because of new information.  The rumors are that a witness or one of the alleged rapists has come forward because of Rehtaeh's suicide.  In Potts' case the police has made recent arrests.

That is all a very neutral summary of the events which otherwise bring Steubenville to mind.  The shared aspects of these three cases (and many more)  are a) the alleged unconsciousness or near-unconsciousness of the girls, b) the gang aspect of the alleged rapes, and c) the destruction of the girls' reputations via social media and real world ostracism, including the spread of photos about the alleged rapes or the otherwise disgusting treatment of an alleged rape victim.  At least two of the cases also suggest a fairly lethargic involvement by the police and all three cases demonstrate that the schools failed in their duties.

Reading about all these cases is painful and difficult.  Writing those cut-and-dry statements is extremely insufficient.   But it is a necessary prelude for what I want to talk about:  The second Act in the play titled "How To Ruin A Young Girl's Life."

The First Act of the play is a sexual act, or an act which some parts of the society labels as mutually voluntary sex, even if it really is a gang-rape where one "participant" is unconscious and has given no consent.  More generally, almost any kind of sexual behavior by the young woman or girl may suffice the get the play going.

The Second Act is what articles about these cases call bullying.  But it's something more vicious than that term can convey.  It is ostracism combined with the destruction of someone's external reputation.  Mere ostracism at least leaves the target alone.  What the treatment of these teenagers suggests is more abhorrent:  The target is isolated, left almost friendless but still continuously harassed, ridiculed, gossiped about. 

Rehteah Parsons received text messages from strangers asking her for sex months after the alleged gang-rape.  The Steubenville rape victim was described as a whore and a slut in many tweets I read a month after the rape, and those who described her that way were her age and both male and female.  The Facebook messages I also scrutinized at that time described her as a slut and the boys as innocent victims of the naturally-must-hump-a-slut instinct.

Did the Steubenville victim not get supportive messages in the social media then?  Perhaps, but despite my attempts I couldn't unearth any.  This suggests (only suggests, as support could have been offered in personal channels only) that the view of sexually active women as sluts and whores is widespread among the young, that many teenagers think being unconscious or extremely drunk is not a valid excuse for becoming the object of sexual treatment by others and that men cannot help themselves in sexual matters, cannot abstain from having sex with inanimate human beings.  In short, the responsibility for gate-keeping sex is clearly seen as belonging to women.

What in olden days used to be called victim-blaming (why did she go to that party?  why did she drink so much?  how come was she dressed like that?) is not seen as victim-blaming but as The Way Things Are.  Boys are supposed to try to get sex, at almost any cost, good girls are supposed to cross their legs and somehow have that hold, whereas bad girls are stamped with the slut label and are then free game forevermore.

I was shocked to find all that so very much alive in the social media.  I naively thought that the past discussions about victim-blaming were now knitted into the wider society.  But that does not seem to be the case.  There are still good women (not for public sexual consumption) and bad women (for public sexual consumption).

What makes all this so horrible is that we are discussing minors in most of the better-known cases.  Children, really.  Teenagers whose lives revolve around their peer groups and for whom the sentence of that peer group can well mean death.  At the same time, those teenage boys got their understanding of the rules of the sex game from somewhere.  Who taught them that unconscious girls can be used that way?  Was it their parents?  The general culture?  Pornography?  I think the answer matters tremendously.

But it's not just the boys we need to reach.  The girls with those Twitter and Facebook accounts too often shared a similar understanding:  In some odd way boys and men are entitled to try for sex, by hook or crook, and if they succeed then the girl or a woman is a slut or a whore but he got lucky.

We need to do something about those values, and the need is urgent.

In the final and Third Act of the play the wider consequences of all this play out.   What they are depends on the individuals involved, on whether the woman or girl ever tells anyone about what happened, on her mental and emotional strength, on the severity of the hatred she must bear from her culture, on the support she receives and on the whole larger culture.  If the police is informed about the case as an alleged rape,  the values the police officers hold enter the story, and finally the values of those who decide whether a case can go to court or not.

At all those stages we must be aware of those underlying values, of the submerged belief that the destruction of some lives (such as the  student athletes in the Steubenville case) really counts for more than the destruction of other lives (such as that of the Steubenville victim) and of the deep, deep roots of the belief that women really are responsible for sex that happened, except if she lost an arm or her life while fighting against it.

The least helpful of all reactions I have read is the recommendation that girls not be allowed to go to parties, that alcohol should be kept away from teenagers, that parents are to blame for not supervising their children (usually their daughters) better.  This is not because it wouldn't be good to monitor teenagers but because all those assumptions are the same as saying that young men really all are rapists, that nothing can be done about that except to make sure that it's not your daughter who gets raped by them.  Besides, the advice usually boils down to limiting girls' freedoms as a solution to something that really isn't their fault.

All that is preposterous.  It is also highly insulting to all the young men who would never try to have sex with an unconscious woman or man, while doing nothing to the suggestion that perhaps that IS how young men are expected to act.

The Capitalists' Flexibility Act of 2013

This is a truly rotten proposal:

This week House Republicans will introduce the misleadingly titled “Working Families Flexibility Act of 2013.” Touted by Republicans as a new comp time initiative that will give hourly-paid workers the flexibility to meet family responsibilities, it is neither new nor about giving these workers much needed time off to care for their families. The bill rehashes legislation Republicans passed in the House in 1997, some 16 years ago, and that they introduced again in most subsequent Congresses. Its major effect would be to hamstring workers – likely increasing overtime hours for those who don’t want them and cutting pay for those who do.

The proposed legislation undermines the 40-hour work week that workers have long relied on to give them time to spend with their kids. The flexibility in this comp time bill would have employees working unpaid overtime hours beyond the 40-hour workweek and accruing as many as 160 hours of compensatory time. A low-paid worker making $10 an hour who accrued that much comp time in lieu of overtime pay would effectively give his or her employer an interest-free loan of $1,600 – equal to a month’s pay. That’s a lot to ask of a worker making about $20,000 a year. Indeed, any worker who accrues 160 hours of comp time will in effect have loaned his or her employer a month’s pay. This same arithmetic provides employers with a powerful incentive to increase workers’ overtime hours. Instead of having to pay time-and-a-half wages when an hourly-paid employee works longer than the standard 40-hour work week, the employer incurs no financial cost at the time the extra hours are worked.

Let's smell the rot.  Note that what the bill actually does is give more flexibility and financial savings to the firms, not to the workers!  Imagine that, from the Republican Party.  The whole thing is like those environmental pollution initiatives called "Clean Skies" which aim to turn the skies permanently gray and poisonous.

And yes, this is a direct attempt to take away the 40-hour work week.  Even if agreeing to do overtime is voluntary under this bill, the current reality is that an employee graciously refusing such a wonderful opportunity would soon be looking for a new job.

Then the real jab-in-the-back of that wonderful flexibility:

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) is right when he says that working parents have a hard time being home when their kids really need them.  Parents need the flexibility to take a child who suddenly develops a high fever to the doctor or to attend a meeting with their child’s teacher to develop his or her educational plan for the coming school year. The comp time bill House Republicans will introduce this Thursday does not address these needs at all. Employees cannot just take comp time when they need it. Rather, the bill lets an employer who receives a request for comp time decide when the employee gets to take it. The employer can even refuse the request and defer it to a later time if, in the employer’s view, letting the employee take comp time will “unduly disrupt the operations of the employer.”

Bolds are mine, and so is the anger.

Never Thin Enough? Thoughts About What We Can Sell in the Labor Market.

Content Warning:  Body Images and Anorexia


Joan Smith in the UK Independent reviews The Vogue Factor, a book about the eating requirements in the modeling industry.  Or,  rather, its  not-eating requirements.

I haven't read the book but the picture attached to Smith's article stuck in my mind.  Here it is:

Who knows how representative the model in the picture is.  I'd guess she is more malnourished than most models.  What I cannot get off my mind is the possibility that her liver is visible in that picture.  I think it is, and anyone that thin is in dire danger.

Smith writes:

Imagine a factory where the employees are regularly being starved.

Some are so desperate with hunger that they pick up tissues from the floor and stuff them into their mouths, while a few become so weak that they have to be admitted to hospital and put on a drip. Any industry which treated workers so badly would be targeted by undercover reporters. Photographs of emaciated workers would cause an outcry, questions would be asked in parliament and the factory would be closed down.

But that doesn't happen in the fashion industry.  Not really, despite all the PR campaigns in that direction, and we all know why:  The extreme thinness is an occupational requirement.

This topic is an octopus with a thousand (thin) legs, all of which are worth following.  I have written about the deep reasons for female body modifications before and certainly will write about them again.  The way our bodies are never good enough, never pretty enough, never satisfactory, the way we ARE our bodies, in far too many aspects of our lives and the way we end up having at most a ceasefire with them.  The "we" being a literary construct here.

But this time I want to write about something different:  The question how to react when jobs require the workers to engage in quite unhealthy activities but when the jobs are not in themselves coercive, forced labor or extremely poorly paid.  Do we have empathy for the fashion models who appear to go along with the risky bargains which are expected of them?  Do we have empathy for those professional athletes who take dangerous substances in order to grow muscle mass far above and beyond the bearing capacity of their joints and muscles?  And how should we react to the well-paid executive officer who is expected to spend sixteen hours working every day of his or her year?

In some ways all this is about what kinds of contracts people can make with each other.  If a firm wants to pay a worker well for that worker's loss of health, is such a job contract acceptable to us?  Is there a difference between the wealthy over-working executive and a teenager starting a modeling career?  What about the indication that professional football players, for example, tend to die younger than otherwise similar men?  What can we sell in the labor markets?

The required thinness of fashion models may have more serious consequences because these women are "models" of how desirable women should look.  In that sense the health dangers their job involves affect not only themselves but countless numbers of young girls.  Still, to some extent similar dangers exist for young boys and girls who wish to emulate professional athletes.

Balancing The Federal Budget on the Backs of the Seniors. Obama's Fault!

This would be hilarious if it wasn't so awful:

Ladies and gentlemen, here's your preview of the 2014 Republican campaign commercials, from Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR), who is chairman of the NRCC, the GOP's House re-election committee.
BLITZER: Well, let's talk about these proposed changes that the president is putting forward when it comes to Social Security and Medicare, the shocking proposals that you say the president's putting forward that could affect seniors. What's so shocking about changing that CPI, that consumer price index the way that you would determine how much inflation would go ahead with increases for Social Security recipients, for example?
WALDEN: Well, once again, you're trying to balance this budget on the backs of seniors and I just think it's not the right way to go.

Imagine me having to write that it is the Republicans who always want to cut "entitlements", it is the Republicans who want to kill Social Security dead and get rid of Medicare (switching it to those vouchers which are like the scratch-and-sniff cards in seriousness) and it is the Republicans that Obama tried to appease with these proposals!  But soon these proposals could be the Democrats' proposals, because they truly are unpopular.

OK.  That is exaggerated, because other Republicans are less critical of the chained CPI part of Obama's budget proposal:

Even as GOP leaders slammed Obama’s budget as a whole Wednesday, they found room to offer some praise for his approach to entitlements, which includes Social Security.
“The President seems prepared to finally concede this time that at least something needs to be done to save entitlements from their inevitable slide toward bankruptcy,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said Obama “does deserve some credit for some incremental entitlement reforms that he has outlined in his budget.”

Should I do a post on the chained Consumer Price Index (CPI)?  The short-and-sour part of it is that using it to calculate Social Security payments will lower them.  Another short-and-bitter part is that the general CPI doesn't have a terrible amount of relevance for the retired people because the consumption bundle it is based on doesn't accurately reflect the cost items which are most important for the elderly, such as health care costs.

The Most Glamorous Outfit For This Blog

Is Google Analytics.  It gives me almost three times the number of visits as Sitemeter does.  Blogger numbers are somewhere in the middle.  So what I clearly want to do is to seek advertisers on the basis of the Google Analytics, right?

None of the three is right, because there is no such thing anymore.  Sitemeter doesn't measure anyone who has the do-not-follow thingy on her or his browser, and wise people tell me that Blogger counts robots whereas Google Analytics is not supposed to.  So how come it gives me more clicks?  Even Sitemeter records the Googlebot.

Add to that people who read through the many and various feeds, and the result is that I had no idea if anyone reads me or if my readership is growing or shrinking or staying constant.  This shouldn't matter, but it does, both because I need "a platform" for the book to be published one day in the next millennium and because advertising income is nice for chocolate purchases and depends on those clicks.

Still, the most crucial reason for me having worried about those numbers is internal.  I'm not gonna write if nobody wants to read me.  Which explains why I have been quite happy (cheerful! elated! dancing under the moon!) when I found out that the Sitemeter numbers are not the only possible ones.  Indeed, all the information taken together suggests that I'm getting more adulators as all goddesses should.  Or that's what I have decided.

Speaking of outfits, did I ever show you this 1940s dress I bought (for thirty dollars and the trouble of fixing one cigarette burn)?  It looks like a proper Vivian Leigh outfit on me.

Echidne Finally Leans In. On Sheryl Sandberg's book.

Running after the train that passed the station is my frequent and sad lot.  Now that I have finally read Sheryl Sandberg's (and Nell Scovell's) Lean In.  Women, Work, and The Will To Lead,  a very quick and easy read, the conversation has moved on to Margaret Thatcher's influence and other similar matters.

Better late than never, eh?  Two warnings:

First, I couldn't avoid reading a ton of criticisms and reviews of the book before I got my own claws on it.  That's bound to have an impact, if not for any other reason than for raising my expectations about both its message and how controversial it might be.

Second,  I have read a large cartload of self-help books for women at work over my lifetime, and thus I come to this particular book with a different history than most people might.  It's hard for me to ignore  that context, even when the context is irrelevant for those who don't have my history of reading.

The combined effect of those two warnings was to make me feel a bit deflated after reading the book.  It's not that different from many of its predecessor books, except for the fame and position of Sandberg.  All self-help books about women in the world of work are aimed at women who want to climb the corporate ladders, not at poor women holding those ladders up, and all such books skirt the issue of sexism or institutional constraints and focus on only what the woman herself can do.  All such books also give her strivings a happy ending.  The change in how I operated worked!  I got the corner office!  The only problem was me not acting correctly before!

Having said that, the book is also very good in parts.  Sandberg explicitly defines her market as the women who do have some power,  and she admits that this may not apply to poor women.  She also discusses institutional constraints and the need to affect the whole system of gender roles and expectations, and then states that this is not the goal of her book.   It has a narrower objective:  To make women aware of their internalized gender roles and in what way they serve to damage their ability to do well at work.

Her practical examples of how to ask for a raise, how the thing is rigged against women but why women still should persevere is useful and well sourced, and I learned a few things from that chapter.

Her discussion of the ways some women sabotage their careers in expectation of one day having children is also very important.  If ambitious women decide to refuse opportunities or challenges years before they even have children, just because one day they might have them, the career they sacrifice later on won't require much of a sacrifice after all those compromises.

Seeing all that spelled out was beneficial for me, because it highlighted a different side of the very common practice of women "preparing" themselves for the fact that they will be the hands-on caregivers for children one day.  But why sabotage the before-children part of your life, too?

I have noted that this can begin as early as the time when students decide on their majors at college, though it's also true that some jobs allow more flexibility for entry and re-exit than others.  Still, when that is not the case, what useful purpose does not taking risks in one's job serve, for those who can afford such risks, especially if there is a possibility of a soft landing if the risk fails?

Sandberg is also good at demanding men as fathers and as partners to step up to the plate, and not just to eat the dinner off it.  It's not possible for women to do it all.  That it is utterly impossible for any parent, mother or father,  to do what the top jobs in industries require is something Sandberg discusses much less than she should have.  She states that she is always available for her firm and that she goes back to work after coming home at the (gasp!) enormously early hour of 5.30 pm.

All that is ridiculous and preposterous and also probably quite unnecessary in real productivity terms.  It's a way of hazing among adults, a way of stating that one's blood and bones belong to the factory store, only this time the factory store pays you handsomely for that ownership.  And a way to tell the yes-men and yes-women of the corporation apart from the ones who might not be willing to go equally far in showing their obedience. 

This is the part of the book which rang most false to me, the part which required institutional criticism.  Today's expectations of working hours in the well-paid jobs are not sustainable, as a form of life with partners and children and aging parents and even rest and relaxation.  They simply are not, and it doesn't matter if you are a man or a woman.  If that's how you are expected to work, you will one day go home and wonder who those people sleeping there might be.

On the other hand, Sandberg also points out the need for mothers to let the fathers be real partners in childcare.  If the mother expects to be in total control of it, she will soon be left to do it on her own.  Sandberg's discussion of the way some women sabotage other women's careers at work is also good.  It's not really the Queen Bee syndrome that is work at here, I think (though some of that always will exist, as there are King Bees, too), but the Smurfette Principle:  There can be many Smurfs but one Smurfette is plenty.

What else did I like about the book?  The references.  Sandberg credits Marianne Cooper, a sociologist at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University for them, and they are extensive.  Indeed, one could do worse than read the references as a start of studying this whole problem.

And Sandberg's discussion of the importance of risk-taking.  She distinguishes between bad risks, the kinds which can cause a bare table at dinner or the loss of the house, and good risks, the kinds which really don't have a terrible downside but require perhaps a lateral move at work or taking a new job, and she argues that women are too hesitant to try the latter types of endeavors.

This links to the games more men play in the world of work, games which women may not have been taught.  For example, in journalism a rejection of an article doesn't have to mean anything more than the need to resubmit it to another site.  Women are more likely to regard such a rejection as a real judgement and to stop submitting that piece altogether, and women are also more likely to hold their own work to tougher standards than men seem to do, on average.  That internal judge should take a break and go to the beach.  Just have a look at some of the stuff that gets published (me, even!) and think of it as a game, at least in the first round of rejections.   If a sufficient number of rejections complain about the same problem, then fix it and submit again!

Then to the criticisms, which I hope are read as constructive.  Several other reviews have pointed out that Sandberg focuses on what individual women can do, not on the systemic inequities, and that can easily read as suggesting that individual solutions alone might work.  Sandberg herself states, however, that both approaches are needed at the same time.

In short, I wouldn't make that a strong criticism against this particular book.  Many different approaches are necessary, and the Lean In approach has the advantage of making some women, at least, think about these issues in a way which could empower them and improve their lives.  The need for positive thinking and activism can come in many disguises.

The criticism that the book is elitist is a valid one.  Sandberg belongs to the business elite of this country, and it's hard to see how she could have written a book with all those personal examples that such books seem to require without peppering the text with references which come across as elitist.

The whole focus of the book is on women who have careers, not dead-end jobs.  Books of this type do not get written for women (or men)  in dead-end jobs because such jobs offer very little individual power for those who work them.  You have no real negotiating power while applying for a counter-job at McDonald's, and you certainly cannot get away with crying at work there, as Sandberg relates she has done at Facebook.

On the other hand, the Introduction to the book states that Sandberg is aware of this, that her book is written for those women who do have some moving-room at work.  And it is possible that some of her messages would work in other types of jobs, too, such as the practical examples of how to frame a request in a way which is more likely to get it approved.

There is a sub-text to many of the criticisms of Sandberg's book from the elitist angle.  Women who have nannies and cleaning ladies and so on, in order to succeed at work, seem to be doing it on the backs of other women (though they are also the employers of those women), and since upper-class women already do better than the other women, why focus on ways to make them do even better?

Did you notice what I did in that paragraph?  I framed everything as the woman's duty so that Sandberg's husband wasn't mentioned at all!  It's Sheryl who exploits her nanny and her cleaning lady, because we ultimately think that it's Sheryl who is responsible for any children she and her husband have.

This may be a type of intersectionality, but it's one which looks at class across one gender, rather than looking at class across both genders or both genders across class.  Those cases ARE different.

Whether that nuance matters or not depends on your definition of feminism.  Whether there is any value to looking at the lives of already-privileged women also depends on your angle.  If your viewpoint is across social classes your conclusions are different than they are if your viewpoint is comparing men and women on the same social class rung.

Some of that may be too theoretical to matter to you.  The real question, of course, is how to get more books of this sort about the women at the bottom rungs and how to get that message out there as a form of Lean In or whatever the movement might be called.  And the other real question is whether it matters to poorer women and women of color to  have more women in positions of power if those women were not initially poor and/or non-white.  Note that I'm not answering that question because the answer can be difficult to fathom.

Structural activism is probably more important for women who don't have much power at work.  In that sense this book and most of the other self-help books are not relevant for those women.  Unionization might work much better for domestic workers, hotel cleaners and counter-staff at fast food restaurants.  Federal paid parental leave, subsidized health care and good annual vacations are part of the answer, too.

Then the criticism that the book focuses on women with children:  I don't hold the focus on mothers as a misplaced one, because the majority of women will be mothers, and all women are or have been viewed as "potential mothers."  Thus, our assumptions about who cares for children affect most, if not all women, at paid work.  They are the mutterings in the cultural background:  If I promote her, will she leave?  What will it cost my firm to cover for her maternity leave?

Whether Sandberg's focus on combining motherhood and work is excessive can be debated.  On the other hand,  she certainly lets the corporations and corporate cultures off far too easily.  That's what felt quite false in the book.  Your curmudgeony boss won't suddenly see the light and give you six months of paid maternity leave just because you learned to negotiate effectively,  unless you really are the brightest star in the night sky, and even then he or she will check on those lumens, to see if you truly shine.  And while the initial example in the book about getting nearby parking for pregnant women was a great introduction to Leaning In (ask for it!), the fact is that providing such parking is almost costless for the firm and increases their reputation.  If you ask for decent working hours for all workers, not just parents, you might be packing up your desk in no time.

Finally, I liked this take on why the book is not that meaningful for women of color:

For professional black women, the performances that they feel compelled to give are shaped by the ways intersections of race and gender isolate them and place them under greater scrutiny. As they take stock of their work environments and perceive colleagues’ stereotypes, beliefs, and preconceptions, these women learn that, like Michelle Obama, they must repackage themselves in ways that are more palatable to their white co-workers. As these colleagues’ goodwill and collegiality is necessary for advancement and occupational stability, black women professionals find themselves doing both surface acting and emotional labor in order to successfully integrate their work spaces.

Perhaps put in another way, Tressie points out that the advice on how to ask for a raise might not apply to professional black women, because the cultural mutterings for them are somewhat different from the cultural mutterings about professional white women.  The expected forms of behavior differ and hence what might work in "leaning in" would differ.  But Sandberg doesn't discuss that, and it's possible that the advice she gives in the book would not work.  It could be even counterproductive.













 

Art Post, Sort of

This is my take (as a five-year old) of the fairy tale Puss in Boots.  For some reason I remember worrying about the fact that the cat would drown in the boots.  I had in mind my grandfather's riding boots which were almost as tall as I was.  Which might be of some interest in thinking about the development of thought in children.  Like the much earlier drawing experience I had (maybe around three) when I was supposed to draw a house and only drew the door handle on the paper as nothing else would fit.

You can see that I copied!  So young and so depraved...

Margaret Thatcher

Has died.  Melissa McEwan at Shakesville has a thoughtful article on Thatcher's role as the first (and still the only) female Prime Minister of Britain, pointing out the role of misogyny in the public criticisms of Thatcher.

Margaret Thatcher is often given as an example of the thesis that the only way women can get into power as the First in some important job is to act like honorary men and preferably reactionary honorary men.  Any sign of feminism in such a woman is an absolute no-no, because opening the door  for one carefully groomed woman might be acceptable (the Smurfette principle), but the gates should not be left unbolted against the rest of the wild hordes.  It is therefore not surprising that she made only one high-level female appointment during her long rule or that her policies carefully avoided upsetting the existing gendered power structures in the British society.

I am not a fan of Thatcher's politics, and neither am I a fan of the way she pulled up the drawbridge after her own successful invasion of the corridors of power.  But I understood that at a particular time (from the 1950s to the 1990s) and in a particular place (the British Conservative Party) the way she was, felt and acted was the only way for a woman to reach real political power.

Thatcher was not a feminist, of course.  She is famous for openly disliking feminism, partly because she was blind to what feminism had given her:  The right to run for office, the right to vote.  She believed that her successes were based on nothing but her own talents and her own hard work.  Women's concerns she brushed off like so much dandruff on the shoulders of her black suit.

Given all this, what should feminism think about Thatcher if feminism was a person?  Embrace her for showing us at least one powerful woman?  Reject her because she rejected feminism? Wonder about the fact that in at least one survey more men than women ranked her as capable and that the man woman* writing about that also wrote this:

Feminism has long been associated with talk: combative rhetoric about equal rights, academic analysis of whether men and women are the same or whether women are actually better, that moldy debate over whether it’s possible for women to “have it all,” both career and family. Many a feminist like Germaine Greer or Betty Friedan, and more recently Sheryl Sandberg and Anne Marie Slaughter, has made her mark through writing about gender issues—sometimes to considerable cultural effect, but still more talk.  Connotatively, a “feminist” has a chip on her shoulder the size of a two-by-four, never shuts up about “empowerment,” is eternally on the look out for sexist slights, and never considers the possibility that other people might deny her a job or dismiss her opinions because she is personally insufferable. The movement has often obsessed with language, leaving a legacy of awkward “him/her” constructions or faddish but equally sexist Bibles whose God is a “she.”  Given the humorless blah-blah-blah the term feminist evokes, it’s little wonder that many young women today avoid the label.

Margaret Thatcher was a real feminist. Not for what she said but for what she did. She did not pursue justice for her gender; women’s rights per se was clearly a low priority for her. She was out for herself and for what she believed in. 

I find that delicious!  The very definition of the exceptional woman and the oddest definition of feminism yet (and there are really weird ones out there!).

So what is Thatcher's legacy for women?  I would imagine that she would be angry at such a question.  Those women, always pestering her when she was nothing like them!  She was one of the boys, or at least a Smurfette among Smurfs.

I think Irin Carmon stated the answer to that question best:

By the same token, it’s possible to have the following measured approach to what Thatcher did for women’s representation in power: It’s better to have women in public life, even when we vehemently disagree with them, than to have no women in public life at all. Every single one counts toward the normalization of women in charge, however abhorrent their policies. Thatcher herself was a necessary rebuke to essentialism, to the humanity-constricting idea that women are inherently more collaborative, peaceful or nurturing. Bella Abzug once said, “Our struggle today is not to have a female Einstein get appointed as an assistant professor. It is for a woman schlemiel to get as quickly promoted as a male schlemiel.” She was talking about female mediocrity, but the same goes for female wrongness.

-----
*Apologies for getting Shriver's gender wrong there and thanks for grrljock for the correction.