The Most Oppressed People in America: White Men!

So tells us Suzanne Venker,*  the resident misogynist at Fox News.  Her whole article is deliciously hilarious, but the best bit is this:

Yet it is males who suffer in our society. From boyhood through adulthood, the White American Male must fight his way through a litany of taunts, assumptions and grievances about his very existence. His oppression is unlike anything American women have faced. Unlike women, however, men don’t organize and form groups when they’ve been persecuted. They just bow out of the game.

I especially LOVE the idea that the oppression of white Murkan  men is unlike anything Murkan women have faced! ** Given that universities didn't even use to let women in as students, Venker's long paragraphs about boys doing worse at school are pretty interesting.  At least nobody is banning men from colleges by law.  Indeed, many colleges practice hidden affirmative action to admit more men.

Venker's article is a good example of how to write propaganda.  You ignore all evidence which does not support your argument and you replace statistical evidence with anecdotes.

As examples of the former, Venker says nothing about the fact that white men are the vast majority of all Americans with real power:  Most CEOs are white men, most stockbrokers are white men, the military is led by white men, almost all religious leaders are men and most of them are white men.  The majority of professors are white men and so is the majority of famous writers, painters and sculptors.  There are more men on television than women, and men have more speaking roles in movies.

Indeed,  it is very hard  to think of any powerful roles which are not held by that horribly oppressed group: white American men.

According to Venker,  the oppression of men begins in childhood:

The war on men actually begins in grade school, where boys are at a distinct disadvantage. Not only are curriculums centered on girls’, rather than boys,’ interests, the emphasis in these grades is on sitting still at a desk. 
Plus, many schools have eliminated recess. Such an environment is unhealthy for boys, for they are active by nature and need to run around. And when they can’t sit still teachers and administrators often wrongly attribute their restlessness to ADD or ADHD. The message is clear: boys are just unruly girls.

So girls don't need recess?  Eliminating it was done as part of the war on boys, I guess.  And the design of the curriculum and the requirement to sit still are part of the same war.  There's only one snag:  The schools were, in fact, created only for boys a long time ago, and the current system is just a continuation of that design.  Put in a different way, boys were always expected to sit still during classes, even when girls weren't allowed in at all.

I have written many times about the fact that even extremely patriarchal countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia have the same gender imbalance in colleges (until maximum quotas are put on girls/women) as the US.  It's hard to see how any of this could be caused by some war on boys in the US.  The real reasons are elsewhere.

But Venker doesn't care!  She moves on to explain why Title IX, which bans sex discrimination in college, is oppressing men.  There are two reasons.

First, demanding equal athletic resources to both sexes oppresses men because Venker believes that men are inherently more interested in sports.  She applies familiar right-wing language to all this: we want equal opportunities, not forced equal outcomes:

Things are no better in college. There, young men face the perils of Title IX, the 1972 law designed to ban sex discrimination in all educational programs. 
Under Title IX, the ratio of female athletes is supposed to match the ratio of female students. So if not enough women sign up for, say, wrestling and ice hockey, well then: no more wrestling and ice hockey. 
What was once viewed equal opportunity for women has become something else altogether: a demand for equal outcomes. Those are not the same thing at all.

I think I'm in love with this woman because she is sooo funny!

What is the role of athletics in college?  Either they are an important part of education, in which case male and female students should be required to participate in them equally, OR they are a benefit akin to swimming pools in hotels:  A convenience.  If they are the latter, and if men actually are more likely to enjoy sports for some innate reasons, why is this convenience provided without offering women something roughly equivalent?  

That's a deep point, by the way, though the actual situation in US colleges is complicated by the fact that some male sports are also money-makers for colleges.  Still, in many colleges providing athletic opportunities costs money.  One might argue that requiring female students to pay for sports of the kind Venker wishes to see (where more men participate for innate reasons) could be unfair.

The other peril of Title IX, according to Venker, is utterly frightening for every single man in America:

Title IX is also abused when it comes to sex. In 1977, a group of women at Yale used Title IX to claim sexual harassment and violence constitute discrimination against women. 
Genuine harassment and violence should be punishable offenses, obviously. But the college campus is a breeding ground for sexual activity, which makes determining wrongdoing (and using Title IX to prove it) extremely difficult. Sexual misconduct does not necessarily constitute harassment—and women have as much of a role to play as men do.
Here again men are in an impossible situation, for there’s an unspoken commandment when it comes to sex in America: thou shalt never blame the woman. If you’re a man who’s sexually involved with a woman and something goes wrong, it’s your fault. Simple as that.

Bolds are mine.   We are now wading in very  muddy waters, where crocodiles suddenly lift their heads with gaping maws full of frightening teeth.   To snap up innocent penises, probably.

The above quote and what follows it in Venker's article lacks any statistical data.  She uses the opinion piece of one woman whose son was accused of sexual misdoings in college as evidence that college sexual harassment investigations always find men guilty.

If I wasn't on vacation and away from my archives I'd link here to at least two cases where the college procedures freed the accused men and I'd also link to the case (perhaps a school case) where a cheerleader who had accused one of the players of rape was made to cheer while the alleged rapist was in the field.  And so on.

The point here is that anecdotal evidence tells us nothing.  We don't even know if the young man in that opinion piece Venker mentions is innocent or guilty.

But  according to Venker, whenever something "goes wrong" in  a sexual relationship, it's the man who goes to prison.  That is why American prisons are chock full of sentenced rapists and sexual harassers and so on and so on, and that is why women report every single rape so religiously.

Except that they do not report most rapes, and even the cases that are reported rarely lead to a conviction.  But I'd really like to know what Venker means by something "going wrong" in a sexual relationship.  Is it a euphemism for rape or for unsatisfactory sex or what?  A malfunction??  And who decides when harassment is genuine and violence real?  Suzanne Venker?

Poor, poor men.  If the lack of recess didn't stifle them they got caught in the False Rape Accusation Conspiracy in college.  And if they somehow got through all that still free and feisty, the Family Courts certainly finish them off:

When men become husbands and fathers, things get really bad. In family courts throughout America, men are routinely stripped of their rights and due process. The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) is easily used against them since its definition of violence is so broad that virtually any conflict between partners can be considered abuse.
“If a woman gets angry for any reason, she can simply accuse a man and men are just assumed guilty in our society,” notes Dr. Helen Smith, author of the new book, "Men on Strike." This is particularly heinous since, as Smith adds, violence in domestic relations “is almost 50% from men and 50% from women.”

Note the generalizing tone of the argument:  "when men become husbands and fathers..."  Every man appears to have his rights stripped in family courts, usually because some horrible woman accuses him of violence.  And every man loses in the family court!  

That is utter crap, of course.  In fact, when divorcing spouses disagree on child custody, fathers are awarded custody in more than half the cases (I have links to this in my home archives).

And there are violent ex-partners.   In Pennsylvania some years ago  a  mentally ill non-custodial father killed his children  during one of his weekends with them.  His ex-wife had tried to stop his visitation rights because of the danger caused by his particular state of mind but the Family Court sided with the man in that case.

The question of bias in family courts is an empirical question.  In other words, it requires research, not stupid and unsupported statements such as  “If a woman gets angry for any reason, she can simply accuse a man and men are just assumed guilty in our society,” 

Venker's stuff is really weird.  Here's another sweet thing:  She argues that the VAWA defines violence so broadly that virtually any conflict between partners can be considered abuse.  But the reference to the50/50 split in who initiates domestic violence is to a study which defines violence so broadly that almost anything qualifies as abuse. That study is also about the dating of quite young individuals, not about family violence.  Data on the murders of men and women by their intimate partners  does not show equal numbers of male and female perpetrators.

And the usual declaration:
None of what I say here is intended to mean that men are never mistreated or that there aren't serious problems that go with the traditional male gender role.

 

 -------------------


*Venker has earlier written that women should stop competing with men:

Contrary to what feminists like Hanna Rosin, author of The End of Men, say, the so-called rise of women has not threatened men. It has pissed them off. It has also undermined their ability to become self-sufficient in the hopes of someday supporting a family. Men want to love women, not compete with them. They want to provide for and protect their families – it’s in their DNA. But modern women won’t let them.

And:

 Fortunately, there is good news: women have the power to turn everything around. All they have to do is surrender to their nature – their femininity – and let men surrender to theirs.
If they do, marriageable men will come out of the woodwork.

 In another article for Fox News Venker argues that women must accept inequality to be happy.

**If we go back far enough, married women had no rights to their own property or their own earnings, women were routinely barred from several types of occupations, night-work etc., female teachers could be fired when they got married or when they got pregnant, married women couldn't open a bank account without their husband's signature or get a loan  without it, until quite recently, and so on.

Is Higher Education A Good Thing?

That seems to be the new question in education debates.  I wrote about it in February and then again in May.

I have some extra thoughts about education in general.   We should NOT accept the new view of education as pretty much just what corporations want their workers to learn.  We should fight that view, because real education matters far too much to be given such a narrow interpretation.  Besides, what the corporations want from us can change in a flash.

Education should teach us how to think and how to judge information we receive.  And all children should be taught arts, music and physical education, because they make our lives better and are an important part of being members of homo sapiens.

On Picking Nits

This old post from 2008 tells the reasons why I sometimes write about issues which seem trivial.  My views haven't changed too much from those times, though today I'd probably write more on the battles within feminisms.  What a worthy topic or subject is can be debated more widely than on the terms I took five years ago.

Little Red Rooster

By Big Mama Thornton

Vacation Post 1

I am all red and peeling which means that the vacation is working.  Today I visited Hattula church.  It has wonderful medieval wall paintings.  According to the female minister I spoke with, the paintings may be the work of Bridgettine nuns, so there's even a feminist flavor to my day.

The small wooden sculptures are also charming.  This is the Hattula Madonna, from around  1300 C.E.

In other gender news, young dads here seem very involved with their children.

The new potatoes are heavenly.  Why that is the case is a mystery.  It may have something to do with the long days of the short but intense summer.

Gotta go and swim....

Roman Concrete

An older piece of news, but fascinating, about people figuring out the formula for Roman concrete.  Knowledge can also be lost over time.  That's a stupid statement, but we humans often seem to think that everything gets better all the time.

Many things do, of course.  Still, I would love to be able to read the writings in the ancient library of Alexandria, though more for what they would have taught us about the people of that era.

Three Posts Worth Reading About The End of Men

This one, which discusses many of Hannah Rosin's arguments.  And then a post about Stephanie Coontz' take on them and a post about Rosin's response to her.

They are all on economics but digestible.  Like oatmeal with chocolate drops.

Mademoiselles Who Dabble With Paints

This is a four-part series I wrote about nineteenth century (into the twentieth century) Finnish female painters.  It's not about artistic criticism as much as about social criticism.  Or trying to use one specific example to increase our understanding of the way privilege works.  Someone oppressed can still have specific sneaky openings into power, depending on the various intersections between social class, gender, language and geography in this case, and also naturally between ethnicity, religion and race more generally. 

The four stories I tell in the series are all different, yet they share certain same features.  And the paintings are fun, too.

Part 1:  Fanny Churberg

Part 2:  Ellen Thesleff

Part 3:  Maria Wiik

Part 4:  Helene Schjerfbeck (she was awesome!)

Echidne on Guns

I've written quite a bit about guns in the past.  These two posts are within the last twelve months and still worth reading, I believe.

First, guns don't kill people, people kill people.

Second, on guns and concepts of masculinity.

Both of those relate to the horrible massacre of children in 2012, but their message is more lasting.

David Brooks on Gender Through the Ages

(This is a re-posting from here.   It's still useful because I put together Brooks' views on women in one place.  When they slowly drip-drip on us it may be harder to notice how consistent they are.)



I do tend to dissect Brooks' writings often, don't I?  But the truth is that I stopped reading him so obsessively some years ago and mostly forgot what he actually says about women, girls and the wider question of gender. 

Working in my archives reminded me why I dislike him so.  Here's a smorgasbord of Brooks on the question of gender:

March 2006:

According to David Brooks, thymos is the secret ingredient in men, the thing that makes them tick. Not the puppydogs' tails, after all. Had there ever been a female Freud she might have had her question about what men want answered easily: men want to be recognized:*

Let me tell you what men want. Let me tell you why some middle-age men wear the sports jerseys of semiliterate behemoths half their age while others customize their cars with so many speakers they sound like the hip-hop version of the San Francisco earthquake as they roll down the street.

Recognition. Men want others to recognize their significance. They want to feel important and part of something important.

Some people believe men are motivated by greed for money or lust for power. But money and power are means to get recognition. They are markers of success, and success makes men feel important and causes others to pay attention when they walk in the room.

Plato famously divided the soul into three parts: reason, eros (desire) and thymos (the hunger for recognition). Thymos is what motivates the best and worst things men do. It drives them to seek glory and assert themselves aggressively for noble causes. It drives them to rage if others don't recognize their worth. Sometimes it even causes them to kill over a trifle if they feel disrespected.

Brooks is trying to hedge his bets about whether women might want similar things, too. On the one hand, he has just read a really fun and supportive book about Manliness. On the other hand, he wants recognition from women as the kind of guy who might not bash them on the head and drag them back to the cave for some... recognition.

April 2006:*

All great scandals occur twice, first as Tom Wolfe novels, then as real-life events that nightmarishly mimic them. And so after "I Am Charlotte Simmons," it was perhaps inevitable that Duke University would have to endure a mini-social explosion involving athletic thugs, resentful townies, nervous administrators, male predators, aggrieved professors, binge drinking and lust gone wild.
...

The educators who used this vocabulary several decades ago understood that when you concentrate young men, they have a tropism toward barbarism. That's why these educators cared less about academics than about instilling a formula for character building. The formula, then called chivalry, consisted first of manners, habits and self-imposed restraints to prevent the downward slide.

Furthermore, it was believed that each of us had a godlike and a demonic side, and that decent people perpetually strengthened the muscles of their virtuous side in order to restrain the deathless sinner within. If you read commencement addresses from, say, the 1920's, you can actually see college presidents exhorting their students to battle the beast within — a sentiment that if uttered by a contemporary administrator would cause the audience to gape and the earth to fall off its axis.

Today that old code of obsolete chivalry is gone, as is a whole vocabulary on how young people should think about character.

The concept of "chivalry" is offered to women in lieue of equality on several MRA sites, by the way.  So far we have learned that men want recognition and that they should be taught chivalry.

June 2006 (note that I wrote two posts on one column there), to analyze in greater detail this Brooks column:

Over the past two decades, there has been a steady accumulation of evidence that male and female brains work differently. Women use both sides of their brain more symmetrically than men. Men and women hear and smell differently (women are much more sensitive). Boys and girls process colors differently (young girls enjoy an array of red, green and orange crayons whereas young boys generally stick to black, gray and blue). Men and women experience risk differently (men enjoy it more).
It could be, in short, that biological factors influence reading tastes, even after accounting for culture. Women who have congenital adrenal hyperplasia, which leads to high male hormone secretions, are more likely to choose violent stories than other women.
This wouldn't be a problem if we all understood these biological factors and if teachers devised different curriculums to instill an equal love of reading in both boys and girls.
The problem is that even after the recent flurry of attention about why boys are falling behind, there is still intense social pressure not to talk about biological differences between boys and girls (ask Larry Summers). There is still resistance, especially in the educational world, to the findings of brain researchers. Despite some innovations here and there, in most classrooms boys and girls are taught the same books in the same ways.

That's a wonderful stew of all sorts of observations, some clearly proven false!   Brooks wants sex-segregated schools, of course, and believes that things like color preferences (pink!) are innate.   That Iran, with its sex-segregated schools, geared towards boys most likely, shows the same gender differences as the US doesn't matter to Brooks.  Neither does the fact that schools were created for boys, not for girls, initially, and that the sitting quietly in classrooms was a feature of all those boys' schools.

September 2006:

That would be a good name for a movie, starring David Brooks as the earnest and impartial neuroscientist who finds, after all, that girls are icky. Brooks has written yet another column about how the old sexual stereotypes are all validated by science:

Over the past several weeks, I've found I can change the conversation at any social gathering by mentioning Louann Brizendine's book, "The Female Brain." Brizendine is a neuropsychiatrist and the founder of the Women's and Teen Girls' Mood and Hormone Clinic in San Francisco. She's written a breezy — maybe too breezy — summary of hundreds of studies on the neurological differences between men and women.

All human beings, she writes, start out with a brain that looks female. But around the eighth week in the womb, testosterone surges through male brains, killing cells in some regions (communications) and growing cells in others (sex and aggression).

By the time they are three months old, girls are, on average, much better at making eye contact with other people and picking up information from faces. During play, girls look back at their mothers, on average, 10 to 20 times more than boys, to check for emotional signals. Girls can also, on average, hear a broader range of sounds in the human voice, and can better discern changes in tone.

...

This shift in how we see human behavior is bound to have huge effects. Freudianism encouraged people to think about destroying inhibitions. This new understanding both validates ancient stereotypes about the sexes, and fuzzes up moral judgments about human responsibility (biology inclines individuals toward certain virtues and vices).

Once radicals dreamed of new ways of living, but now happiness seems to consist of living in harmony with the patterns that nature and evolution laid down long, long ago.

That's pretty hilarious, given the criticism Brizendine's books have received!  She is not a neuro-scientist, by the way.

October 2006:

This is a tale of two predators. The first is a congressman who befriended teenage pages. He sent them cajoling instant messages asking them to describe their sexual habits, so he could get his jollies.

The second is a secretary, who invited a 13-year-old girl from her neighborhood into her car and kissed her. Then she invited the girl up to her apartment, gave her some vodka, took off her underwear and gave her a satin teddy to wear.

Then she had sex with the girl, which was interrupted when the girl's mother called. Then she made the girl masturbate in front of her and taught her some new techniques.

The first predator, of course, is Mark Foley, the Florida congressman. The second predator is a character in Eve Ensler's play, "The Vagina Monologues."

Enough said.  A fictional story and actual events are treated as equal.

July 2007.

This was in response to a column where Brooks worried about the anger of women.

August 2007.

This, in turn, was a reaction to Brooks' attempt at creating a masculine mystique.

At this point I stopped following Brooks so obsessively and my mental health instantly improved.  I even spotted him changing some of his ingrained opinions on gender:

June 2009:

In 2000, Geoffrey Miller, a leading evolutionary psychologist, published a book called "The Mating Mind," in which he argued that the process of sexual selection among early human groups hardwired many of the behaviors we see in humans today. Some of the traits are physical. Men generally prefer women with a 0.7 waist-to-hip ratio (that's a 24-inch waist and 36-inch hips, for those of you reading this at the gym). Women generally prefer men who are taller and slightly older.

Some of these traits are more subtle. Men, Miller argues, tip better in restaurants, because they've been programmed to show how much surplus wealth they have. The average American adult knows 60,000 words, far more than we need. We have all those words because we like to mate with people who caress us with language.
....
 

But individuals aren't formed before they enter society. Individuals are created by social interaction. Our identities are formed by the particular rhythms of maternal attunement, by the shared webs of ideas, symbols and actions that vibrate through us second by second. Shopping isn't merely a way to broadcast permanent, inborn traits. For some people, it's also an activity of trying things on in the never-ending process of creating and discovering who they are.

The allure of evolutionary psychology is that it organizes all behavior into one eternal theory, impervious to the serendipity of time and place. But there's no escaping context. That's worth remembering next time somebody tells you we are hardwired to do this or that.

The allure of evolutionary psychology is actually in the fact that anyone can do it, over a cocktail wiener, and that it can be bent to support any bias one might have, given that evidence is impossible to obtain.  But I take whatever crumbs fell of Brooks' table here.

December 2010, however, shows Brooks back in his old form.

And in January, 2012, he seems to recommend wage subsidies for men so that they can get married to us the gold-digger females of Evolutionary Psychology.

Finally, in July 2012 Brooks was back to arguing that social engineering is an absolute necessity to save boys at school.

OK, that looks a bit like a laundry list.  It most likely omits many similar pieces, given that I stopped keeping a snake eye on our David, what with finding enough irritation elsewhere in my life.

But there are certain general patterns, more easily discerned in such a list.   Brooks believes in innate differences as the explanation for all gender-based stereotypes (which he regards as the truth), and he fishes in the rivers of academia for those studies (or pseudo-studies) that would support that belief.

Thus, what is is for reasons of biology and no government policies are necessary to correct it.  Women don't enter mathematics and the sciences because of innate gender differences, for instance.

The one exception to this can be found in Brooks' concern about boys at school.  There he urges social engineering of a type, albeit one based on his presumed gender stereotypes.

This contradiction is an interesting one and worth thinking about.  After all, evolutionary psychologists have argued that anything widespread across various cultures has a good chance of being innate.   Girls are doing better than boys in essentially all countries which allow girls entry to the school system.  Given this, one might propose that the observed gender differences in school success are innate, right?

That's rubbish, and I only present it here to point out that Brooks picks selectively from his menu of possibly biological sex differences.  The ones that hurt women are clearly biological, the ones that hurt men must be cultural or environmental and need correction.

So.  I was also struck by Brooks' pining for the golden era of chivalry.  Doesn't it sound wonderful?  Chivalrous men holding doors open for you and letting you get the best jobs going and so on?

That's not what chivalry is all about.  From the column Brooks wrote it sounds more like a promise not to assault or rape someone, to be honest.
-----

The links to dates are to my old posts.  The links attached to the direct quotes go to Brooks' columns.
*I couldn't find the links to two of Brooks' original columns except as dead ones.

A Sluttty Dresser. Re-Posted

Re-posted from here

Euro-English

This is an old joke about the English language:

EuroEnglish

The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the EC, rather than German, which was the other possibility. As part of the negotiations, Her Majesty's government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a five year phase in plan that would be known as "EuroEnglish".
In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump for joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of the "k". This should klear up konfusion and keyboards kan have 1 less letter.
There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year, when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like "fotograf" 20% shorter. In the third year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.
Governments will enkorage the removal of double letters, which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of the silent "e" in the language is disgraseful, and they should go away.
By the 4th year, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v". During ze fifz year, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters. After zis fifz year, ve vil hav a realy sensibl riten styl.
Zer vil be no mor trubls or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi to understand each ozer.
ZE DREAM VIL FINALI KUM TRU! 

English is a fun language to learn as a foreign language, because it's very easy to acquire some small skills in it.  It is, however, very hard to learn truly well after pupadom.  I should know as I have tried to do just that.

And yup, English is seldom written as it is spoken.

Happy Fourth of July

That's an old embroidery of mine,  an attempt to reverse the usual eye-of-the-beholder argument.  Flowers, in short, but curious ones.

Voting is Not Like Buying A Pair of Shoes Or A New Car. A Re-Posting

(Initially posted here)


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are asked to look elsewhere, pretty much.

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

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

So.

Vacation

I'm going to take the rest of July off.  I need the break.  I have prepared posts for the time in advance.  Some of them haven't been on the blog before and some old ones I have enlarged with more commentary.  If I get a chance I will do some vacation blogging, too.

I will keep an eye on the comments and check my e-mail, in case you need to get in touch with me.
Wish all you you a wonderful July!

From The Past

This is an interesting piece about women as bosses in 1956.  It's worth reading through it and thinking about what is the same and what has changed.  It would be more interesting to find an old story about women working in the labor force in general, but I doubt those were published in popular magazines even sixty years ago.

On Egypt

Contents:  Sexual violence


I have no special knowledge about what's going on, but it's beginning to look more and more like a military coup.  The argument that Morsi had no understanding of how a democratically elected president acts has some merits.  Democracy doesn't mean that the winner can then ignore the other side or try to destroy it completely.  Though the US politics has some of that same flavor.

I feel very bad for the Egyptians, even the ones who would like to see people like me without much rights.  The economic situation in the country is horrible, tourism is pretty close to dead and the current government doesn't seem to be equipped to run the country.

Or those are my fairly uninformed opinions.

On the other hand, the gang rape of a journalist at Tahrir Square demonstrates that Egyptian women face problems which will not disappear whoever ends up on top in these fights.

On Abortion, July 3, 2013

Florida is eagerly joining Texas, Ohio and other Republican-run states in  the abortion wars.  The idea is to ban abortions after twenty weeks of pregnancy, even though a small percentage of abortions  (1.5%) takes place after that point in time and even though that percentage includes essentially all the ones where either fetal abnormality or serious health concerns for the woman make continuing the pregnancy very difficult.

I've been watching this stuff unfolding with some horror.  What we learn about how those Republicans view women chills my heart.  In North Carolina strict abortion measures were tacked onto an anti-sharia bill at the very last minute, tho forced-birthers knew about them earlier!  The bitter humor of doing that in the context of sharia (which wouldn't exactly give women abortion rites) probably flew right over the heads of the politicians who were doing that.

In other views, a very large number of those regretting their abortions seem to be men.

10,000 Posts

I noticed that my previous post was the 10,000th on this blog.  Not all of those were written by me but most.  That's a lovely round number, 10,000. And I think the vast majority of those were served at least with some intellectual granola!  Mental pushups, perhaps, or deep knee bends with the little gray cells, eh?

My fiction-loving emotional side hasn't had such a great time all through this, but perhaps in the future I will post snippets from my Little Book Of Horrid Thoughts and similar stuff.  Or perhaps my emotional side better shut up in public, that goddess of doom.

Because there's a reason for my blog handle.  I was called Viper Tongue as a child, but I have worked very hard to turn that into a gentle and polite goddess chat with only hidden barbs.  Not completely successful but getting there, right? 

Some of you, my kind and sharp readers, have been along for the whole ride, and you have a special place in my heart.  I'm not sure how you did it, but my war helmet goes off for you.  And sincere thanks to all who read here and who teach me so much.

Cheers.

Speed-Blogging July 1, 2013: That War on Women And SImilar Stuff

Ohio Governor John Kasich proudly signs into a law new abortion restrictions:

The provisions in Ohio will make it more difficult for family planning groups to receive funding for preventive care; require ultrasounds for anyone seeking an abortion; and limit abortion providers’ ability to get transfer agreements with public hospitals.

Here's a picture of the general budget signing though it could be about the signing of that abortion law.  In any case, the global feminist conspiracy which runs the world, according to some MRA sites, is sorely missing in Ohio:

In Texas, however, some women and men are fighting back against Governor Rick Perry's desire to get similar abortion restrictions into place.

Picture credit.

I wonder how many fetal aquaria that picture contains?  Must get them under control.

In Egypt, one sheikh explains to us why female genital mutilation is necessary:

Female genital mutilation was made illegal in Egypt in 2008 but is still very widely practiced. Some estimates suggest over 75% of women, Muslim and Christian, still have had the procedure in some areas of the country.
Debate on the subject has re-opened after the recent death of a 13-year-old girl while having the operation. Studies have also documented cases of serious health and psychological complications.
Sheikh Yussef al-Badri is one of Egypt's biggest advocates for what he refers to as female circumcision, and has petitioned the country's courts to make it legal again.
He told Aleem Maqbool that it removed a woman's "need for man".

You can watch a video on the linked site.  The solution to control female lust is to cut that lust out, the solution to control male lust is early marriage.  That the men would be married to women who don't get any enjoyment from sex appears a trifle.

This speech about sexual abuse in the Australian army is a couple of weeks old but it's very much worth watching.   Thanks to WP for the link.

Finally, the reviews of these women's running shoes, worn by Senator Davis for her filibuster,  are  hilarious.

The Near-Invisible Economic News: Wages

If you think of the division of the economic gateau happening between labor and capital, the news we mostly get are whether the slices the capital gets are moist enough, have sufficient whipped cream and chocolate savings and so on.  We may be told something about the size of those slices but not much.

The slice labor gets is among those largely unreported things in mainstream news.  There are a few exceptions, such as this NYT story which shows how somebody may be legally paid less than the minimum wage, what with fees which are required to get hold of the wage package one has earned:

A growing number of American workers are confronting a frustrating predicament on payday: to get their wages, they must first pay a fee.

For these largely hourly workers, paper paychecks and even direct deposit have been replaced by prepaid cards issued by their employers. Employees can use these cards, which work like debit cards, at an A.T.M. to withdraw their pay.

But in the overwhelming majority of cases, using the card involves a fee. And those fees can quickly add up: one provider, for example, charges $1.75 to make a withdrawal from most A.T.M.’s, $2.95 for a paper statement and $6 to replace a card. Some users even have to pay $7 inactivity fees for not using their cards.

These fees can take such a big bite out of paychecks that some employees end up making less than the minimum wage once the charges are taken into account, according to interviews with consumer lawyers, employees, and state and federal regulators.

Another piece of economic news which hasn't got much coverage is this:  Wages Are Falling:

Breaking news alert! Wages fell at the fastest rate ever recorded during the first quarter of this year, the government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics reported.
Hourly wages fell 3.8 percent in the first quarter, the biggest drop since the BLS began tracking compensation in 1947. Productivity rose half a percentage point. The result was that what economists call “labor unit costs” fell 4.3 percent.
In plain English, that means paychecks overall shrank, but work output grew. If you are a business owner, that is news worthy of a toast with a bottle of the finest Cristal champagne, which at $595 is more than the $518 that a median-wage worker earns in a week.

Here's the truly troublesome thing about those numbers:  Productivity rose, which would make a sincere economist ask why wages didn't rise as well.  If worker productivity rose and wages fell, guess who it is who is making more than before?   The division of that economic cake is changing, again...

Today's Saying

It's not by me, and I don't know who invented it.  But it's a beautiful political parable:

Americans are like mushrooms:  Kept  in the dark and fed with shit.

The Wussification of American Men. Eric Bolling of Fox News May Just Be the Last Non-Wuss Standing, Possibly With His Foot On Someone's Neck.

The official mouthpiece of wingnuts, Fox News, had a chat about a girl who was banned from playing football with the boys at her private school, because, among other reasons, the boys might have impure thoughts.

The whole conversation from  here, is such fun*:



Four out of five people in that chat, including all three men, are adamantly opposed to the idea of mixed football teams (one is neutral) even in childhood.  The most commonly argued reason is that the girl could get hurt!  She looks to me like a pretty strong and big sixth grader, and at that age boys can, in fact, be smaller than girls.  But because she could get hurt at some future and unspecified date, she must stop playing immediately.

Eric Bolling somehow draws the conclusion from this case that it's all about the wussification of American men.  I don't get the connection, probably because I have a brain, but the only interpretation that makes any sense is that Bolling thinks men should put their foot down firmly, preferably on women's necks, on all this equality bullshit.

As an aside, I've been astonished by the number of times I read from anti-feminists about the enormous value of getting doors opened for nothing.  On some MRA sites it's a tremendous service which today's women, in their demands for equality, have relinquished.  Now they can only blame themselves when nobody opens that H-E-A-V-Y door for them or, as the case may be, punches them in the face.

These folks seem to think that we once had an implicit gender contract which gave women the advantages of receiving (wholly voluntary and optional) chivalry from men and which presumably kept women from ever being molested in any way whatsoever.  What women relinquished in return to these benefits is rarely spelled out  in that scenario but it looks like that would be all legal equality and the right not to have a custodian.

That bargain looks to me one that no woman would have voluntarily entered, but it must appeal to MRA types because their sites are full of stuff about the tremendous value of getting doors opened for you.  It's worth almost anything!

Bolling mentions those doors which he probably now slams in the face of all uppity bitches.  He also mentions how he can no longer complement a woman on her dress, in case people experience that as sexual harassment. 

But real men can't tell a dress from a tarpaulin, Eric!  If you can assess the artistry of a dress you are a wuss.  Unless the dress consists of a piece of string between her buttocks and two one-inch discs over her nipples.

Enough about Bolling.  Others at Fox News  chime in with agreement, stating that often-used but ultimately meaningless argument that men and women are equal but different.   This means that sixth grade girls are not allowed to play in a boys' team.

The equal-but-different, as it is used by anti-feminists,  is as meaningless as the old racial argument about separate-but-equal, because the assumed differences, whether real or not, are used to stop actual equality from taking place where it could. 

As a nasty example, Fox News' female and male  commentators are equal but different in the sense that all the women are beautiful in the Barbie-doll style, whereas the men often look like potatoes which have just been dug up from the field.  Because more of us people look like potatoes than Barbie dolls (or Ken dolls), the desired difference (women are eye-candy and should be content with getting their dress praised and doors opened for them) causes inequality in the selection of men and women into this job at Fox.  It's easier for men to get in (those doors are HEAVY)  and they probably get paid more, what with having to open doors to the chicks, too.

Then the argument from one of the other guys, about the logical extension to this equality rubbish:  Let the boys play on all girls' teams where they will then dominate everything!  How do you feminists like them apples, eh?

But that's an inane argument, because this girl was on the football team solely for the reason that there wasn't a football team for girls.  If a boy wanted to play a sport only available to girls at a school, he should be allowed to play with the girls.  So I think.

In general, the whole conversation degenerates into pure sexism of the type where all-men-are-that-way and all-women-are-this-way and the amount of thinking behind the various blurts is close to zero.  But that's not unexpected from the political party which wages a war on women on several different fronts.
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*Note, also, that the text at the bottom of the screen is incorrect.  The girl didn't say that boys might have impure thoughts, the school argued that.  If that's the reason the school used, by the way, the girl was excluded to protect the boys against their own thoughts.  Which demonstrates an interesting value judgement.

Speed-Blogging, June 27, 2013

First, American Apparel advertises its unisex shirts rather interestingly.   Several photo series show women with bare bottoms.  Those women must be too poor to afford panties after paying for that flannel shirt?

For the sake of fairness, I combed the site for revealing pictures of men in the unisex shirts.  There were a few series where the men could afford underpants but not jeans or slacks.  Still, none of them had bare bottoms.

American Apparel is a fascinating corporation.  It's opposed to sweatshops  but it is for extra objectification of women.

Second,  Tammy Duckworth addresses someone who seems to have abused the system for claiming Veterans' disability.  I hope she will never get angry with me.

Third, does Alito mock female Justices from the bench?

Fourth and finally, the NYT wrote about male victims of sexual abuse in the military.  The article appeared a few days ago.  Adele Stan wrote a commentary on it.

It's important to acknowledge both the fact that men are the majority of victims (because of much greater numbers of men than women in the military) and that women have a fivefold chance of becoming victims of sexual abuse.  The problem, therefore, is not specifically about women in the military but the problem is larger for the women in the military.

Rick Perry, For the Egg-Americans

The Governor of Texas preached to Senator Wendy Davis,  who filibustered the proposed Texas abortion law which will  make abortion available to only the wealthy and might also put birth control out of the reach of poor women.  Because Davis used her reproductive choice one way, Perry thinks she should make sure that no other woman can do otherwise.

Perry also states:

It is just unfortunate that she hasn’t learned from her own example that every life must be given a chance to realize its full potential and that every life matters.

It looks to me like lives only matter for the Texas Republicans until they leave the uterus.  After that it's tough luck.  And Texas just executed a woman whose life obviously no longer mattered.

Is Governor Perry a vegan, by the way?  If he is not, then he limits his concerns to human lives, at least as long as they can be viewed as not-yet-born.  Egg-Americans, in short.

The Texans will get their law making reproductive choices much harder for most Texas women.  That, in turn, will cause a greater number of unplanned pregnancies and possibly more abortions carried out elsewhere than within the health care system, with the associated extra health risks.  None of this makes any difference to the wealthier Texans who can travel for abortions, and all of this makes a much larger difference to the poorest Texans. 

I would dearly like to see one forced-birther write a long and careful treatise on the question how the rights of people-inside-people could be judged and compared in the world they wish to create. 

As every fertile woman is a potential home for an egg-American,  would the protection of the latter require that all fertile women  be given pregnancy tests before they can go downhill skiing or before they can have a glass of wine and so on, just in case they are endangering a minor?  All miscarriages should certainly result in police investigations.

The legal complications with the "human-life-begins-at-conception" are tremendous, and even if my examples sound extreme they would be relevant in the forced-birth world.  Indeed, given the extremist view which would ban abortion even in the case of rape, women could be theoretically stripped  of any choice over their own fertility.  All that would be needed is a rapist who decides to pass his genes on and succeeds in achieving conception.

That is the sense which I get from some pro-lifers:  That what they ultimately desire is to remove all control of fertility from women.  It's probably not an accident that it is the female-controlled contraceptives which the pro-lifers regard as abortifacients.

On Twitter

It's bad for me.  I don't get what I'm supposed to do with it, for marketing purposes, and my brain tries to fathom every single conversation that is in my Twitter feed. But the conversations are like all the books in the world cut into slivers, tossed around in a hat and then spread out in a random order.

On the other hand, the idea of really really short posts intrigues me.  But they would take a lot of time for the yield.  So I mostly post just information on my new blog posts and that's it.

Tell me how I could make it more fun.  I have a suspicion that this is one of those areas where I lack social skills altogether...

I get its news value and I enjoy about hearing stuff I might not have otherwise learned.

Working Women. Think Again!

Kay Hymowitz is the (right-wing) Manhattan Institute Go-To-Girl as the defender of traditional gender roles and biological gender differences.   She never disappoints.

Her new article in Foreign Policy discusses working women in the US and somewhat around the world and concludes that
a) women can't have it all*
b) women don't want to have it all because of that maternity instinct
and
c) any governmental attempts to change the sexual division of labor are bound to fail.

As a corollary to those three points she also concludes that the US system, with minimal maternity leave, no real annual vacations, very spotty child-care and so on, is the best of all possible worlds for any oddball ambitious women.  She gets to that conclusion by ignoring statistics from politics, say, and by focusing on statistics on women in management.  When those statistics seem to show that women don't do too well in particular leading positions, well, that's because they choose not to. 

OK.  Let me backtrack a bit.  Hymowitz doesn't discuss working women, in the sense of all women in the labor force.  She mostly talks about women on high career paths.  Because of that, she is able to end her article by asking:

It's possible, of course, that we simply haven't found the right tools to end gender inequality. But it's also possible that, whether for biological or cultural reasons or both, many women are less interested in absolute parity with men than they are in work that gives them plenty of time with their kids. Is that such a bad thing?

If you don't really need money from a job you can make that statement.  If you don't really care who it is whose retirement benefits and old-age security are most affected by their earlier role as the major caretakers of children you can make that statement.  And, of course, if you don't really care about the fact that having plenty of time with the kids might mean a part-time job with few if any benefits you can make that statement.

While reading that bit I thought about the way alimony in divorce is on its way out in the US.  That's not a bad thing if men and women have equal earnings power, if nobody took twenty years off to care for the children and so on.  But combined with the kind of thinking Hymowitz and friends entertain, it would mean additional punishments for that traditional sexual division of labor.

I was also thinking about the circularity of right-wing ideology about women:  That women earn less or end up in fewer places of power is because they choose children over careers.   But women should be at home with their children because the Western civilization depends on it! (And the Afghan civilization etc.,  I guess). 

Still, when women are absent from all sorts of important statistics having to do with talents, skills, fame and power, it's either because women are just less competent or because of that maternal instinct.

 Lamentable, perhaps, but the best of all worlds, really, when it comes down to practicalities.  There's no break in that circle, as far as I can tell, except for the few very unusual selfish go-getters (who write articles on women, say?).

On the deepest level Hymowitz argues that if fifty years of feminism (rather lukewarm in most countries) hasn't completely eradicated traditional gender roles lasting thousands of years, then clearly those traditional roles are permanent.

That's the platform she uses to argue that these data demonstrate failure in that respect:

In Sweden, fathers have long been encouraged to take some parental leave, but in 1995, noting how few of them were actually doing so, the government followed Norway's lead and reserved one month of total parental leave as a use-it-or-lose-it month just for fathers. The reform was at least nominally successful: The average father took off 35 days, a little more than the month offered. In 2002, the government went further, making two full "daddy months" of parental leave nontransferable to moms. Men took off an average of 47 days, still considerably less than the total available. Then in 2008, dissatisfied with the remaining large gender gap in the leave taken by dads versus moms, the government introduced yet another reform: the "gender equality bonus." Under this law, the more couples shared leave time, the more money they would get. Amazingly, the reform had no impact. According to official statistics, women still took 76 percent of leave days in 2011. The long-term effects of Sweden's parental-leave policy, in other words, have been negligible, all the more so when you consider how many women gravitate toward part-time jobs.

Her article doesn't give references so I cannot check the details of the data she gives in most cases, but in this particular case it seems natural that women would take 76% of the leave days Sweden offered in 2011.  It was the women, after all, who gave birth and needed the medical recovery from that.  That men took 24% of the leave days is a pretty fantastic thing against that background.  A fifty-fifty split seems unrealistic.

Hymowitz' basic assumption is that enough time has passed for us to be able to judge all these "social engineering experiments."  But that's  an odd reading. 

Social norms change very slowly.  That we can see clear change in gender norms since the 1960s suggests that at least some of the gendered division of labor is based on such norms.  And as many feminists have written, the second wave of feminism had some successes in the public sphere but never really got to the question of the private sphere.  

Fathers now do much more hands-on care of their children than was the case fifty years ago.  That this is still less than what mothers do is not necessarily evidence of us having reached some biologically determined maximal amount of gender equality.  The process may be continuing at its own slow pace.

Or as someone said:  Progress moves funeral by funeral.

I wish I could go through all the references Hymowitz uses in her article.**  The lack of citations makes it impossible.  But I note that she compares different countries without taking into account the historical dimensions (or some cultural differences, such as people living together without being formally married).  To evaluate where women are today in, say, Norway, we really need to know where they were fifty years ago, how the institutions and cultures of the various  countries differ and so on.  Even aspects such as working for the public vs. private sector mean different things in different countries in terms of prestige, maternity leave availability and earnings.

Her section on discrimination as unimportant is interesting.  For instance, she argues that we cannot deduce the level of sexism of a society from its gender gap because in some sexist countries only a few women are working and they are likely to get what comparable men do!  Thus, no gender gap could mean humongous sexism.

But that's of course the reason why economic studies of discrimination control for all sorts of relevant factors, such as the level of education of men and women and so on, and that's also why international comparisons usually try to compare countries which are economically and culturally as similar as possible in all other aspects.  And, finally, that's why such studies don't look at only earnings data but also at hiring, firing and promotions.

She concludes the discrimination section by stating this:

 Given a choice between a woman of childbearing age, who might well take a year off in the near future, and an equally talented young man who would take maybe a month off, many executives -- male or female -- would probably hire the latter.

I laughed a bit, because what she describes in that statement IS discrimination (which she argues doesn't explain anything).  It's called statistical discrimination:  Treating a member of a demographic group as if that member had the average (real or assumed) characteristics of the group.

But that statement also crystallizes the problem of assuming that the care of children naturally belongs to women.  That assumption has consequences, and the consequences ultimately make women poorer than men.  It is closely linked to the idea that children somehow are a private responsibility of women when it comes to discussions about gender roles but that having lots of them is a public responsibility of women when it comes to race wars and other stuff Lou Dobbs recently taught us.

Ultimately Hymowitz' article is all about choice vs. constraints.  Hymowitz argues that women choose their lives in a way which just happens to make them less likely to be in positions of power, that men choose their lives in a way which just happens to make them less likely to have much of a family life but lots of public sector power and so on.  It's like choosing chocolate ice-cream over vanilla, and the government should stay out of it.   And probably women just like chocolate better and men like vanilla better, and who are we to judge those choices?

That's the pure choice paradigm.  From that point of view children are not something that are needed for the perpetuation of the species, not the future workers, caretakers, scientists and artists of the society.  Because children are a private choice, like ice-cream, and because on some level we think of them as women's responsibilities, it's perfectly fine not to have maternity leaves or family benefits or whatever.

But the pure choice paradigm, paradoxically, is usually attached to the assumption that we really have no choice at all!  We are programmed, hard-wired, to choose one way, depending on our sex.  Now twist your brain around that and how it leads to free-markets being the king and no government intervention, not even maternity leaves.

What is missing from all that, of course, are the constraints within which we make our choices.  Those are not identical for men and women, as Hymowitz' own statement about statistical discrimination demonstrates.  Institutions that we still live under were created for a world in which workers were assumed to be male with a full support staff at home.  Labor markets assign the whole cost of child-bearing to women, except when laws stop them from doing so.

In a wider sense, the culture constrains all of us.  How boys and girls are brought up and trained for their gender roles constrains us.  The popular culture tells us stories relevant for our gender roles.  Our families build expectations about our gender roles (such as that women will change their names when marrying).  All those effects are like the drops of a continuous rain, and create a society where you may have to swim up-stream if you disagree with your assigned role in life.

To what extent any of this is biological depends on how we interpret biological effects.  On some level the cultures human beings create are naturally limited by human biology.  On another level we are clearly capable of immense flexibility, of tremendous cultural changes.  I think the jury cannot make a conclusion of the possible biological limits to gender equality in 2013.  People might one day laugh at anyone even assuming that might be the case, just as I have laughed at reading some very old treatises on the same topic.
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*The "have-it-all" argument has become inane, by the way.  I see people writing that neither men nor women can have it all but that men are realistic about that.  Yet the original meaning of the term was that people should have the right to have both children and challenging careers, and that women shouldn't have to choose between the two.  

**For just one example why looking at the references matter, Hymowitz states:

Indeed, the World Economic Forum (WEF) ranks the United States eighth globally on gender equality in economic participation and opportunity, ahead of Sweden, Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Iceland.

That's one of the four sub-indices in the overall index.  On the overall index US ranks 22nd, well behind those other countries the quote lists.  And the countries ahead of the US on the economic participation and opportunity sub-index?

They are Mongolia, Bahamas, Burundi, Norway, Malawi, Lesotho and Luxembourg!  Whatever that sub-index measures, it seems not to measure just gender equality.
















 

Good News Wednesday

The Defense of Marriage Act was declared unconstitutional.

Justice Kennedy was the deciding vote. 

And yesterday I watched the drama at the Texas Lege.  Better than television any day!  The victory pro-choicers received may be a short-lived one in practical terms but the popular rising and will to fight were awesome to watch! 

And The Supremes Sing, But Not of Gerrymandering or Voter IDs

The Supreme Court of the United States has struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act.  The 5-4 decision followed the usual lines, the conservative judges voting for the strike-down.  Justice Ginsburg was in deep disagreement:

In summarizing her dissent from the bench, an unusual move and a sign of deep disagreement, Justice Ginsburg called on the words of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to make a different point.

“The great man who led the march from Selma to Montgomery and there called for the passage of the Voting Rights Act foresaw progress, even in Alabama,” she said. “'The arc of the moral universe is long,’ he said, but ‘it bends toward justice,’ if there is a steadfast commitment to see the task through to completion.”

“That commitment,” she said, “has been disserved by today’s decision.”

She said the focus of the Voting Rights Act had properly changed from “first-generation barriers to ballot access” to “second-generation barriers” like racial gerrymandering and laws requiring at-large voting in places with a sizable black minority. She said Section 5 had been effective in thwarting such efforts.

The impetus for attempts to restrict voting by people of color may now be more political than purely racist.  The Republicans prefer minorities not to vote because that vote is so predominantly for the Democrats, and obligatory IDs etc. serve to limit the numbers of not only minority voters but of poor voters in general. 

The Great Texas Filibuster

Watch it!  More here. 

Give help here.

I Told You Being Ridiculous About Reproductive Rights is De Rigueur

French in the title!  I'm moving up in the world...

What I mean by "being ridiculous" is that it's perfectly acceptable in the politics of, say, Texas, to know nothing about women's sexuality, the way those weird breeding bits work or what the rape kit is for in hospitals.  This is de rigueur  for politicians who spend their working lives trying to ban all abortions.

I find that astonishingly arrogant.  Supremely so.  The facts are so unimportant that the politicians don't even have to pretend to study them at all.  You make your own facts to support your ideology.

The most recent example:

In the midst of all the chaos on Sunday night as the Texas legislature pushed through a series of stringent restrictions on abortion and women’s health, it was easy to miss what might have been the most inaccurate and dangerous claim of the evening: One state representative tried to argue on the State House floor that rape kits are a form of abortion.
Texas Rep. Jody Laubenberg (R) sponsored several anti-abortion measures currently making their way to the Governor’s desk. Taken together, they would shut down the vast majority of the state’s women’s health clinics and criminalize abortions after 20 weeks. But in reasoning out why she did not support an exemption for rape victims in the 20-week ban, Laubenberg betrayed a woeful lack of information on the procedures a victim of rape undergoes — namely, the “rape kit,” which is used to collect data on the assailant and in no way relates to pregnancy:
When Rep. Senfronia Thompson, D-Houston, called for an exemption for women who were victims of rape and incest, Rep. Jody Laubenberg, R-Parker, explained why she felt it was unnecessary.
“In the emergency room they have what’s called rape kits where a woman can get cleaned out,” she said, comparing the procedure to an abortion. “The woman had five months to make that decision, at this point we are looking at a baby that is very far along in its development.”
The remark about rape kits, which is not accurate, sparked widespread ridicule on social media sites. Laubenberg, who has difficulty debating bills, then simply rejected all proposed changes to her bill without speaking until the end of the debate.
Rape kits are used to collect DNA evidence from the bodies of rape victims; after a victim enters a hospital, staff collect bodily fluid, residue under the victim’s nails, and any blood or hair samples that could be relevant for an investigation. Rape kits are in no way equivalent to an abortion.

Texas is in the process of tightening its abortion laws even more.  It's like tightening a plastic screw.  One day the grooves are gone, and the whole thing will explode.  Perhaps that day has already arrived, given that a large number of pro-choice people are protesting in Texas.

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In other news about abortion, the merger of hospitals in California means that the Catholic Church now has more say on women's access to abortions:

In a most underhanded and insidious way, women's reproductive health rights in California were dealt a significant blow last month. That was when the availability of elective abortions at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian, one of Orange County's elite medical centers, was abruptly ended.
The ban on abortions was imposed by Hoag administrators effective May 1, shortly after the hospital entered a corporate partnership with St. Joseph Health System, a Roman Catholic chain with five hospitals in Orange County. The administrators acknowledge that the change was made at least in part as a response to St. Joseph's "sensitivity" about abortion.
What's worse, doctors at Newport Beach-based Hoag say the administration lied to them about the partnership deal. They were assured from the outset there would be no changes in the services they provide to their female patients. But public documents suggest that the abortion ban was planned by Hoag and St. Joseph as long ago as last fall.

Lou Dobbs With A Blackboard: On Oppressed Men

This is a fun lesson in putting together lots of data items which have very little to do with each other.  It's also a story about how American men are in trouble.  Or so Lou Dobbs tells us in this video:



I love the last bit about the high sales of erectile dysfunction drugs, given that they weren't around until quite recently.  That men didn't take them in the past does not mean that erectile dysfunction didn't exist.  Indeed, it seems to have been pretty common among men over forty.

Our Lou implies, however, that it is only now that the American men can no longer get it up, what with having become neutered and emasculated by women getting out of their proper places (kitchen, the bed, behind the vacuum cleaner).

Let's take that list more seriously.  The first item is about a serious dilemma, especially among men of color in the US:  Insufficient numbers attend college.  But Dobbs suggests that the problem isn't in that as much as in the gender percentages being the wrong way around.  I think he would be fairly comfortable with 43% of university students being women.

The second item in that list, the difference in male and female unemployment rates, shows a tiny difference

Had Dobbs been able to do his little class some time earlier, he would have found large differences in the direction he wishes them to be.  But the male unemployment rate has declined quite rapidly as the recession has eased itself, and the two rates are settling back to their usual statistical position which is rough equality (second column from the right)

The point here is that Dobbs uses data which does not reflect long-term patterns to bolster a long-term argument.

The third item, about the real earnings of men not having risen much over time, is also a serious problem.  It has much to do with the outsourcing and globalization that Dobbs' own political party supports, promotes and advocates. 

But notice that Dobbs decides to give us the percentages of women going to college but not the female median earnings.  The reason is that those are quite a bit lower than the male median earnings, even after the latter haven't grown much over time.  To show that would have interfered with Dobbs' thesis, because it would have shown men doing better in something than women, on average.  But omitting it biases his little lesson.

The fifth item looks at one consequence of the bad labor market of recent years:  more young men living with their parents than was the case in 2000, and attributes it to some other nefarious cause than the hand of the free markets that he otherwise worships.

The fourth, sixth and seventh items on Dobbs' list are pretty odd ones, because it's hard to interpret them as reflecting men being left behind, somehow, unless one agrees with Dobbs that men should all have access to obedient wives and lots and lots of children and no threat of a divorce (from the wife) and so on.  Well, in general they can only be explained if Dobbs believes in male supremacy as the only situation where men are not "left behind."

But these items:  men (and women) getting married later in life or not at all, more fathers living apart from their children and lower fertility rates than the US had in the 1960s, are not something that  can be argued to reflect a boycott of marriage by men or some horrible plot against men in general or other such simple conspiracy theories.

To unwind that bundle from the other end, let's start with the seventh argument:  The drop in US fertility rate.  HOW does that show that men are in trouble?  The 1960s fertility rate of 3.7 children per woman is probably measured before the pill.  Dobbs likes that fertility rate and he doesn't like the current rate of 2.07 children per woman.

I get that.  But I don't see what it could possibly have to do with his thesis here, unless Dobbs thinks that men's happiness is crucially dependent on siring very large families.

Dobbs argues that the fertility rate is low not for the reason that actually prevails (worldwide fertility rates are down and that has much to do with contraception) but because of single mothers!  There's no man around to make them breed more, I guess.

Duh.  I can't believe I'm writing about this seriously. The sixth and seventh items are both about the evils of single mothers, really.  Dobbs has very simple, though unstated, theories about why the percentage of fathers not living with their children has grown (though it's still a minority arrangement) and why men (and women) seem to be getting married later or not at all.

For instance, he assumes that the latter is because men are boycotting marriage.  For that to explain the later age at first marriage, we would have to assume that at various times in history men either boycotted marriage or really went for it.  We would also have to assume that women have no say in any of this.  It's just men boycotting marriage, and the reason why they would do so is left to hover in the air.  No economic causes at all!  No changes in the cultural ideas about marriage!

And divorce and single parenthood are also quite complicated matters which social scientists study from all sorts of angles.  I can't fathom how the sixth point, about a certain percentage of fathers (27%) not living with their children, fits into Dobbs' theory.  Is it that those fathers have decided to boycott fatherhood, too?  Or is it that they have been rejected by the mothers of their children?  In any case, why are phenomena that are usually discussed from the point of view of all the people that are affected by them suddenly seen as only problems about men?*

It's a mess, that list, because all the items in it share something only if one assumes that the traditional male breadwinner with a submissive and dependent family is the alternative to men being in trouble or being left behind**.   It's also a biased list, of course, because it omits anything (say, the percentage of women in the US Congress or in speaking roles in major movies) where men fare much better than women.

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*The point is this:  If we regard divorce or single parenthood a problem, why is it not discussed as a general problem, for both men, women and children?  Why is it a male problem? 

**The first item in Dobb's list is an important one.  More young men should take education seriously and consider college.

But as I have written before, the difference in college enrollment rates by gender is a global phenomenon, ranging from such countries as Saudi Arabia to the Scandinavian democracies.  Indeed, it is observed wherever women are allowed to go to college.  It is partially, at least, explained by the fact that the jobs women have access to without college are poorly paid, in comparison to the jobs that men have access to without college.  Still, the job markets are changing and education will matter more in the future and boys should be encouraged to think of higher education more.

The third item also matters, but it is largely the fault of outsourcing and globalized production strategies by Dobbs' beloved corporations.  Those have caused the death of well-paying blue-collar jobs in the US.