Media Quicksand. Fox News

I've been on the beach, building sand-mountains (breast or penis symbols, perhaps) and using my bare toes as sand-shifters.  Such fun.

Then I return to my kinda-job as media watcher and I'm sinking in quicksand.   Here's why.  On Sunday I spent about three hours in a living-room with people chatting while the Fox News told everyone what the state of the world is.

And what a state!  Did you know that nothing worth reporting happens in most countries of this world, in the class of international news?  International news is only about Benghazi and about terror threats and how poorly Obama is managing terror. 

US domestic news are about shark attacks and how those are becoming more common.   The pictures repeated often show the maws of sharks coming out of water, trying to eat you up!  The interviews (most of which I couldn't hear well, what with the chatter in the room) seemed to be about how much more common shark attacks are now.

So I tried to find data on shark attacks.  This site suggests that 2013 attacks in the US have caused one death among humans.  The world number of 2013 deaths is eleven.

It could be that the attacks are increasing.  But sharks-as-killers we should worry about instead of the human killers of various types or environmental catastrophe? 

The Fox News are very biased, of course, as are probably any news from political extremes.  But I never realized that the bias is more on WHAT is covered both in what is omitted completely from the coverage (anything having to do with the woes of capitalism, say) and what rubbish is covered 24/7) than in the inserted bias of the contents of specific coverage.

Though the latter abounds, too. 

So I sat there, getting more and more scared.  Not about sharks but about the idea that many people have a completely different idea about world events and what matters, about this quicksand of discussion on Fox News.

Non-news coverage was even more biased, naturally.  A program called The Five told me that criminals exist in direct proportion to broken homes.  This was somehow an obvious thing to blurt out in the coverage of three teenage boys severely battering a fourth teenage boy in a school bus, and the ethical question whether the 64-year-old bus driver should have intervened. 

Several of the Fox critters told that they would have stormed in to give the boys some real lessons and that the bus driver was a wuss for just calling the police and not physically intervening.  Based on the video showing the boys' muscular condition and size, my prediction is that the bus driver would have been killed had he tried to physically intervene.  But never mind.  At least two of the five members of the show stated that they would have stormed in.  That includes the female host of the show.

How cheap talk is.  But the most fascinating blurt-out was that thing about broken homes by Greg Gutfeld, given that I doubt he did research on the family backgrounds of any of the teens.

This teens-story also ran yesterday in the same program.  The final odd bias at Fox is the repetition of a few stories over and over again, as if nothing else happens in the world, as if those stories are the most important news items ever.

Scary stuff. 

I don't intend my criticisms to be only about Fox News, by the way.  It's always a good thing to follow several news organizations and at least one foreign source.  Otherwise we end up slowly sinking in the quicksand we make our sand castles of.  (Now that was a neat perfect-circle essay just slightly overdone!)

Katha Pollitt on Abortion in Europe

First read Katha Pollitt's discussion of the newest anti-choice idea:  That making abortion illegal after twenty weeks is AOK because those European countries do it.

When you have recovered from your surprise that anything those surrender monkeys in Europe do is worth quoting approvingly by the American forced-birthers (such as Ross Douthat), you might want to consider the fact that abortion is not the kind of "culture war" issue* in Europe as it is here.  As Katha writes:

And just because you’ve read this far: there are no screaming fanatics thrusting gory photos at you as you make your way to your abortion. No one takes down your license plate in the parking lot and calls you—or your parents—later with hateful messages. Doctors who perform abortions do not wear bulletproof vests, nor are they ostracized by their communities and shunned by other doctors. The whole climate of fear that makes many doctors reluctant to perform abortions and makes some women postpone going to the clinic does not exist.

And as Katha also writes, it's not that abortion is completely unavailable later in pregnancy, as is the desire of American forced-birthers:

Moreover, unlike the time limits passed in Texas and some other states, or floating around in Congress, the European limits have exceptions, variously for physical or mental health, fetal anomaly or rape. Contrast that with what anti-choicers want for the United States, where Paul Ryan memorably described a health exception to a proposed late-term abortion ban as “a loophole wide enough to drive a Mack truck through it.” If a French or German or Swedish 12-year-old, or a traumatized rape victim, or a woman carrying a fetus with Tay-Sachs disease shows up after the deadline, I bet a way can often be found to quietly take care of them. If not, Britain or the Netherlands, where second trimester abortion is legal, are possibilities. (In 2011, more than 4,000 Irish women traveled to Britain for abortions.)

At the same time, Europe is not one homogeneous place.  It's a conglomerate of countries with different histories, languages, cultures and even religions.  Different European countries have different abortion policies and different abortion rates:

 Abortion is complicated, like everything that has to do with sex. Germany’s abortion rate is much lower than ours, but Sweden’s is almost the same. The Netherlands is almost as low as Germany, despite permitting abortion much later. In much of Italy, it’s hard to find an abortion because so many doctors refuse to perform them—and yet Italy, like Germany, has one of the world’s lowest fertility rates. One thing seems pretty clear, though: all these countries have plenty of abortions. But in the Western European countries with time limits, there is less need for second trimester abortion because there is far better access to abortion earlier.

While the 2008 abortion rate for Sweden was 21.3 (measured as the number of abortions per 1000 women between the ages of 15 and 44), the rates for Norway, Denmark and Finland in that same year were 14.5, 15.0 and 8.9, respectively.  As both Norway and Denmark allow abortion on demand in the early weeks of the pregnancy (and the same is true in practice in Finland), the difference cannot be explained by more liberal Swedish laws. The Nordic countries are very similar in economic and demographic respects, so the higher Swedish rate cannot be attributed to economic or general cultural differences either. **

What's my point here?  Perhaps to remind us that international comparisons are complicated, that sex is complicated, as Katha notes, and that taking something like abortion out to be studied in complete isolation has its problems.   

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*I hatehatehate the term "culture wars". It sounds like arguments about tea vs. coffee or flower arranging or poetry or musical taste, like something less important than economics, even though it is about the lives of people just as seriously as are economic wars.

**I haven't been able to figure out the reason for the relatively high Swedish rate.  I read somewhere that the contraceptive pill has been less popular in Sweden.  If that's true it could explain the higher abortion rate as a consequence of less reliable contraception.  But I was unable to find statistics on this.  Other explanations are possible, of course.

Fewer and Fewer Women Are Entering the Labor Force?

That's part of the title of a Slate post by Matthew Yglesias (he probably didn't choose the title).  The rest of it is "America is Leaning Out."

It's fun to parse those kinds of titles.  This one uses both a link to Sheryl Sandberg's Lean-In movement and a type of exaggeration: "fewer and fewer women are entering the labor force."  The doubling of "fewer" implies continuous diminution.  The Sheryl Sandberg linkage implies that the women "choose" not to be in the labor force, in a manner opposite to "choosing" to do well in one's career or job.

But the research the post discusses has nothing to do with either of these suggestions.

It has to do with the rates of labor market entry and exit after an earlier recession and after the most recent one, and tells us nothing about continuous diminution of women's labor market participation rates or the reasons for the figures the researchers found. 

The authors of that study use two tables to argue that it's reduced labor market entry by women in the lowest age categories which is the major cause of the falling labor market participation rate in the US.  I reproduce the second table here.  It shows entry rates by age groups and separately for men and women:

The caption at the bottom of the table must be wrong.  It applies to the first table in the research paper, about labor market exit.   The proper caption should probably be "the percentage of people in labor force who were not in it four months earlier."

The crucial data, for the purposes of the post's title, has to do with what is going on in the younger age groups (up to age 54, even).  Women's entry into labor force after the most recent recession is lower than after the 2002-2003 recession, while men's entry in the younger age categories is slightly higher or the same as in 2002-2003.

This is all the data tells us, by the way.  It doesn't tell us what caused those differences.  To discuss them is speculation, ranging from the possibility that women are more likely to choose education at younger ages than men (thus leaving the labor force temporarily or delaying their first entry) to the possibility that women are "choosing" to stay at home with their children while men are "choosing" to enter the labor force.

The comments to the Yglesias post have the usual MRAs telling us that women naturally prefer to stay at home and that at least this gives the poor unemployed men a better chance to fulfill their god-given male role and so on.  But if the reason is that women choose more education, the MRAs could tell us that women are hogging all the good spots in colleges and so on.  They are a gift that keeps on giving.  And yes, I know I should not read comments.

It's worth pointing out that the study (which is not given in much detail in the pdf I linked to) is a comparison of the aftermath of two recessions.  It's not about the general labor market participation rates of women and men in general.  In that sense the information it conveys is much more limited and cannot be used for the kind of emotional arguments the title suggests.

Because the debate abstracts away from that contest it fails to ask what might be different between the 2002-2003 recession and the most recent one.  For example, could it be the case that female dominated occupations are simply not hiring as much after the most recent one, compared to the earlier one?  And if that is the case (say, because of the belt-tightening of health care and education industries), could it not be the case that women are more likely to find their job search fruitless and therefore more likely not to try entry or re-entry into the labor force?

I don't know the answer to that.  But focusing only on the supply side of labor is probably insufficient.  The demand side matters, too, and women and men are still largely working in different types of jobs and industries.

 

I Lack Gravitas. So Does Janet Yellen.

Writes she, while happily skipping about, cracking jokes and then bursting into feminine tears. 

Well not really.  But I was trying to reduce the gravitas of a post about Al Hunt writing on the relative merits of Janet Yellen and Larry Summers as the next chair of the Federal Reserve.  This is what Hunt wrote:

The public airing of the Summers-versus-Yellen debate has made the selection more controversial. Summers, who served as President Bill Clinton's Treasury secretary and was Obama's chief economic adviser, would face a difficult Senate confirmation.
The president, according to people familiar with his thinking, believes Summers has the experience and expertise to succeed Ben Bernanke. No one doubts Yellen's credentials as an economist, but questions have been raised, mainly by those in the Summers camp, about whether she has the gravitas to manage a financial crisis. 

Bolds are mine.

Here's one dictionary definition of gravitas:

gravitas

n.
1. Substance; weightiness: a frivolous biography that lacks the gravitas of its subject.
2. A serious or dignified demeanor: "Our national father figure needs gravitas, [but] he's pitched himself as the kid brother" (John Leo).

What's the problem with that criticism?  As Matthew Yglesias writes

This is also a great example of why lining up woman validators to vouch for Summers' feminist bona fides won't really answer the charge that sexism is driving the pro-Summers sentiment. The sexism at work here just isn't about whether or not some of Summers' best friends are women. It's about the fact that there's never been a woman leader of a major central bank. Consequently, the social image of a classic central banker is necessarily the image of a man.As a result, a 60-something woman who's served on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, chaired the Council of Economic Advisors, led the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and become Vice Chair of the Fed Board can be dismissed as lacking "gravitas" compared to an alternate candidate who on paper seems less qualified. If a woman can't acquire the necessary "gravitas" to do the job by having Yellen's career, then what exactly could she do?

Indeed. I guess Yellen could try to figure out how she could look more weighty, filled with more substance or how she could acquire a more dignified demeanor.  But if being qualified is insufficient I'm not sure what might work.  Wearing a Larry Summers mask?

The point of this post is not to debate the relative advantages of these two candidates as individual professionals.  It's to demonstrate how seemingly gender-neutral criticisms might not be so neutral, after all, if they are used differently about men and women, say.

A Trivial Feminist Post

I specialize in those.  This one is about two things.  First, what  USA Today wrote about Simon Cowell yesterday:

'X Factor' creator Simon Cowell will be the only man on the four-judge panel.

Now do a gender reversal on that and various television panels.  Nobody would write about a woman that she was the only woman on a four-judge panel, mostly because having one woman on such a panel looks like equality to most of us.  That's what we are used to.  Three guys and one gal is fair representation, three gals and one guy is a chick-fest.

Second,  here's a fun video about Bill O'Reilly and  James Garfield Carville, two older guys, arguing about what causes teenage pregnancy in the US.  What O'Reilly says is hilariously inane, naturally.  But note that having two older guys as the experts on this topic might not be noticeable because we are used to the idea of older white guys as the experts on everything.  And note how O'Reilly starts the segment by turning a question about heterosexual intercourse into something that is only about gate-keeping by teenage girls.  It takes two to tango but teenage heterosexual sex is only about the gurlz:

The Whip, Not The Carrot. The American Conservative Approach to Education.

That whip-and-carrot business applies to the old adage about how to make a donkey or a horse do your bidding.  American conservatives like the negative enforcement (whip) applied to schools, to get better workers for their global corporations.  The liberals they see as the carrot brigade, not demanding anything from  children at all but offering them succulent carrots for no work.

The equivalent of the whip are standardized tests when it comes to students.  When it comes to teachers, everything is the whip.  I've found this fascinating.  Teachers should be willing to take lower and lower pay, longer and longer working days and a much reduced retirement package, while being judged (often quite mercilessly) by how well students do in standardized tests.*

Atrios linked to a fun piece about the importance of standardized tests by Norman R. Augustine,  a former chairman and chief executive of Lockheed Martin Corp.. 

This is fun, because education is actually a skill which requires years of training and such, except in the US where business bosses know better how to make children learn than those who dedicate their lives to acquiring that skill!  It's hilarious.  Or would be, if education wasn't one of the most crucial things we humans do in this world for the sake of the posterity.

I'm not against standardized testing which compare how students are doing.  I'm very much against using MULTIPLE-CHOICE standardized tests to determine which students will thrive and which students will be condemned to a lesser life, or using such tests to determine which teachers should earn more and which teachers should be fired.

This is because multiple-choice tests are a rotten measuring device.  Real national tests should make students write essay answers, tested by someone outside the school system.  Real national tests should make students show all their work in mathematics and science tests.  Even if such tests were routinely performed, we should remember that they don't measure all aspects of learning and that they don't encourage creativity or necessarily measure the skills that students need for life.

In short, standardized tests have only limited benefits.  But they are a very good whip for those who think that the schools in the US can be beaten into shape. 

They are even better for those who don't really want to pay anything much for education and then must think of some other reason than lack of funds spent on the poorest (and most needy) school districts for the less-than-wonderful performance of US students in international comparisons.

To see what Mr. Augustine truly thinks about education is visible in his first sentences if you remember that he begins by presenting the views he opposes:

The chief problem with U.S. schools apparently isn’t high dropout rates or underqualified teachers but standardized testing. This is the only conclusion that can be drawn from the push by parents and teachers in Buffalo, Philadelphia, Seattle and elsewhere to help students opt out of taking standardized tests.
Members of this burgeoning anti-test movement fail to grasp testing’s valuable role in motivating and guiding students and teachers. Preparing young Americans for success in the global economy will require our schools to improve, not abolish, academic standards.

So it's dropout rates and underqualified teachers that Mr. Augustine sees as the real problem.  Ironically enough, both of these problems are amenable to the use of funds!  But nope, adding more money to encourage more motivated and better prepared students in teaching is out  of question, because it would be a carrot.  We need to whip, whip and whip.  Likewise, dropout rates correlate directly with poverty, and positive discrimination (more funds for poorer schools, more attention to students in trouble) would work there, too.  If it wasn't a carrot, that is.

All this is a bit muddled, and I apologize for this.  I just got back from my Finnish vacation. 

But while there, I talked to several teachers.  They are highly respected in their communities.  They come from the top ten percent of university students.  They get paid a salary commensurable with that.  They are given lots of freedom to experiment with individual students, they spend a lot of time in teacher education and they work in teams when necessary.  Class sizes are small.  National exams are obligatory for students only at the point of leaving the school system.  Other standardized exams are optional, though most teachers opt to have them.

And the Finnish schools right now do extremely well in international comparisons. 

It is true, as the critics say, that Finland is a more homogeneous country than the US and that it has much more equal incomes.  It is also true that teaching in the US with its greater heterogeneity and income inequality is a far bigger challenge, and that the "Finnish Miracle" may not work out as well with increased immigration and the cultural and language differences it entails.

But does this mean that the US has nothing to learn from Finland?  American conservatives seem to think so.  Better just apply a bigger and bigger whip, rather than those wussy carrots.

It's as if the American exceptionalism applies even here!  Americans work better than whipped, the lesser nations may thrive on carrots.  Something of that sort?

My point is, naturally, that even if the US couldn't achieve the Finnish results everywhere it might improve by adopting the Finnish principles.  The most important of them is that education is a skill, something to value, something that requires work to learn and to apply.  Far too many Americans appear to think that we can learn all we need about educating little children from the successes and failures of WalMart or General Motors.

I'm the first to admit that education is difficult, that families matter greatly, that values and culture, including the popular culture, matter greatly.  Much of education is an art, not a science.  But I'm quite certain that the principles of basic market models are not the proper way of looking at education.  Indeed, education has always been one of the industries where nonprofits and charitable organizations and other not-for-profit arrangements have been dominant, and there is a reason for it.

That reason is the difficulty of the job, the problems in defining and measuring the quality of education and the fact that the "production process" in education is a very collaborative one:  Everything that happens to a child affects it and the child herself affects it, too.  Finally, different children thrive on different incentives and need different amounts of attention.  Some need more whip than carrot, others the reverse.  But ideally education should be a preparation for life, not a preparation for becoming a better cog in the organizations of multinational corporations.

Juxtapose that with the usual American conservative approach to education where the main attack is against teachers' unions, teachers' benefits and so on, and where vouchers and magnet schools etc. are intended to somehow alter education into a more functioning system. 

It's an odd combination of pro-market ideas (school choice, focus on private schools) and anti-market ideas (forcing teacher salaries down outside the marketplace).  What it does share with the most clawed and fanged business is the rat-race focus:  If only we can make the rats run faster, nobody needs to pay much at all to fix the problems. 

As a corollary of that, schools must get rid of breaks, athletics, art and music, to become little factories where students on the assembly lines get those pass-the-test chips installed by minimum pay workers.

This is not going to work, by the way, but at least someone gets to wield the whip, and there's a certain satisfaction in that.

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*All this has a feminist connection:  In the past educated American women were steered into just a few possible careers and one of them was teaching.  The sex-segregation of occupations meant, among many things, that the Americans could get very good teachers for relatively low pay.  That changed when other career opportunities opened for women, but the conservative critics have never really understood this nor the fact that the shorter working days and longer vacations are the necessary trade-offs for the lower pay for many women.  They allow work and the care of minor children.  If the pay is kept the same or reduced while the annual working hours are increased, that benefit disappears, and fewer women will become teachers.  This market-aspect of education is oddly ignored in the conservative theories.

Vacation Post !!: Back From Vacation

I'm happy to see you all but not so happy right now otherwise.  A humongous plant has sprouted from seed to five feet in four weeks, in the middle of the lawn.  This means nobody is unreplacable.
Which is not a word but I'm still working two or three language centers.

Good things I think should be imported to the US:  Department store escalators which don't move until someone actually uses them.  Toilets which have a smaller flush for pee, a bigger flush for poo and little shower attachments in case you wish to tidy your bottom end even more. 

These are common in public places.  And of course young dads much more involved with their children, probably because of the daddy leave which the US doesn't have at all.  It encourages bonding and all that stuff.

I also learned that the US banking and credit card systems are in stone ages, compared to Finland.  Oddly enough, that never stopped the US markets from breaking the world markets.  So strong are the claws of the power of the few.

That last post below is really very useful, by the way.

My List on How To Analyze Research Popularizations

I think it's a good list, and offer it here for free!  Isn't that wonderful?

I have several posts on similar stuff and I'm planning to put them all together on my website one day so that the pearls I dropped into the compost of my archives don't get completely lost.

The original post is called A Nasty Post.  There are lots of those in my archives and most of them are pretty sharp, says she, modestly.

Feminism Is Dead. Take 4358. A Re-Posting.

(Originally posted here)


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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I should go through my archives and put together all the posts about the death of feminism!  It tends to die several times every year, poor thing.

Labiaplasty. Why on Earth? A Re-Posting

(Originally posted here.)

This story about labiaplasty may not describe a truly common new type of surgery, but that something called vaginal rejuvenation surgery exists is pretty astonishing stuff.  This is cosmetic surgery, for the most part, not surgery to correct something which causes physical pain or discomfort:

While labiaplasty is increasingly popular, it remains controversial, sparking debate within the medical profession broadly, among specialists, and in wider society. The surgery is relatively unregulated and frequently botched, as indicated by the staggering number of clinics that advertise discreet revisions of bungled previous surgeries. At the same time, detractors claim that women have been manipulated by the media to believe in a mythical “perfect vagina.” Some women undergo labiaplasty for medical or practical reasons—large labia can cause irritation and pain during sex and exercise—but the vast majority elect to undergo the surgery for cosmetic purposes, anxious to achieve a more attractive genital area. The desired “look” is consistently that of a smaller, less obtruding vulva, with “neat,” even labia, and this “streamlined” ideal is becoming increasingly minimalist.
“But I kept getting patients who wanted almost all of it off. They would come in and say, I want a ‘Barbie.’ So I developed a procedure that would give them this comfortable, athletic, petite look, safely.”
Dr. Red Alinsod, a urogynecologist in Laguna Beach, California, claims that his most requested surgical procedure is the Barbie: a procedure that excises the entire labia minora. This results in a “clamshell” aesthetic: a smooth genital area, the outer labia appearing “sealed” together with no labia minora protrusion. Alinsod tells me he invented the Barbie in 2005. “I had been doing more conservative labiaplasties before then,” he says. “But I kept getting patients who wanted almost all of it off. They would come in and say, I want a ‘Barbie.’ So I developed a procedure that would give them this comfortable, athletic, petite look, safely.”

Bolds are mine, to make you read the sentences I want you to read!

First, what is this media which manipulates women into believing in a mythical "perfect vagina?"  Could its name possible begin with the letter "p", continue with the letter "o" and end with the letters "r" and "n?"  Duh, that is really completely obvious.  For most women, relatively few people see their labia in the first place and doctors are unlikely to make comments about how they look.

When I wrote "why on earth?" in the title I meant that.  Why on earth do women think that they need to have their genital area trimmed to look like that of a prepubescent girl?  Because that's what the "Barbie look" implies, unless we wish to be literal and assume that women should look like a doll which doesn't have any genitals at all.

The answer cannot be in the advent of the Barbie doll herself.  Barbie is pretty old and labiaplasty as a cosmetic operation is fairly recent.  No, this has to do with the spread of pron views about how women ought to look.  Female pron actors may have had such surgery themselves to increase camera access.  Shaving the pubic area may have some of its (now shaved) roots in the same need for camera access.

It's my guess that "what is normal" in female genitals has become partly defined by pron.  That actors in pron may not be "normal" in the sense of not-surgically-treated-or-enhanced can be forgotten because we don't really talk about this stuff.  Pron is everywhere but consumed in privacy.  Impressions from pron are not tested in discussions and debates.

Another reason to ask "why on earth" has to do with the fact that surgeries are not without risks.  Thus, it's fair to ask why at least some women find those risks worth taking.  What has happened in their lives?  Are their vaginas and labias actually any different than the normal vaginas and labias, when defined not by beauty standards but by actual frequencies in the real world?  What or who has made them want such surgery?

These are not just righteous feminazi questions, my friends.  We can all be extremely vulnerable to any intimate criticisms and since women don't usually (or ever?) compare their labias with other women, no single woman can really know if criticisms of how her labia or vagina looks has any kind of validity (defined on whatever value system you wish or none).  So we should really talk about it, before someone dies in that surgery, for cosmetic reasons.

Third, why is the desired look that of a prepubescent girl?  I already stated that this most likely comes from pron.  But the question also links to how the question of "normality" oddly changes when women's bodies are the field.  We forget what "normal" breasts look like when so many celebrities have artificial breasts.  Artificial becomes the normal.  If you don't happen to match that artificial new-normal norm, then you need to have surgery.

“Women wanna reduce as much as possible while still looking normal,” he says. To this end, he developed the “Alter labia contouring” procedure. Rather than simply trimming or amputating the labia, this technique removes a wedge-shaped segment of tissue from the central section of each inner lip, then sutures the upper and lower edges of the excision together, creating smaller labia from the remaining tissue. The idea is to reduce the size of the labia while preserving the normal color and contour of the labia edge.

Fourth, and finally, isn't it possible that there is a reason for the labia?  Something to do with health and well-being, perhaps?  I have no idea if that's the case, but in general we humans are not terribly eager to cut out parts which our bodies might actually use for something.

None of this is exactly new when it comes to cutting and shaping the female body.  The cutting of  the clitoris and the labia, in Female Genital Mutilation  is an obvious example of such unnecessary surgery, and so are the anecdotes about Victorian women trimming their lower ribs to attain narrower waists or the Chinese foot-binding.  But I'm hoping that we can grow out of such practices.

Sia

Soon We'll Be Found

Old Elephant Matriarchs

Are better leaders than younger elephants.  That makes sense, because old age means more different types of experiences.  Also, if an elephant has survived to become very old, she must know a thing or two, right?

This is an older story as are all in my vacation Friday series.  You can learn more about the study here.

The Pregnancy Police. A Re-Posting

(Originally posted here).

Lynne Paltrow and Jeanne Flavin have just published a survey on the arrest rates of pregnant women since Wade v. Roe came into force:

Our study identified 413 criminal and civil cases involving the arrests, detentions, and equivalent deprivations of pregnant women’s physical liberty that occurred between 1973 (when Roe v. Wade was decided) and 2005. Because many cases are not reported publicly, we know that this is a substantial under count. Furthermore, new data collection indicates that at least 250 such interventions have taken place since 2005.

In almost all of the cases we identified, the arrests and other actions would not have happened but for the fact that the woman was pregnant at the time of the alleged violation of law. And, in almost every case we identified, the person who initiated the action had no direct legal authority for doing so. No state legislature has passed a law that holds women legally liable for the outcome of their pregnancies. No state legislature has passed a law making it a crime for a pregnant woman to continue her pregnancy to term in spite of a drug or alcohol problem. No state has passed a law exempting pregnant women from the protections of the state and federal constitution. And, under Roe v. Wade, abortion remains legal.

Yet, since 1973, many states have passed feticide measures and laws restricting access to safe abortion care that, like so-called “personhood” measures, encourage state actors to treat eggs, embryos, and fetuses as if they are legally separate from the pregnant woman. We found that these laws have been used as the basis for a disturbing range of punitive state actions in every region of the country and against women of every race, though disproportionately against women in the South, low-income women and African-American women.  

Emphases are mine.  This treatment of pregnancy as something that removes a woman's full legal rights does not fall upon every woman evenly but affects women of color, poor women and women in the South more than other women.

Many cases are about the use of illegal drugs where the pregnant woman is viewed not as a patient needing help to quit but as a criminal procuring drugs to "minors."  But not all.  In one case, a woman trying to commit suicide while pregnant ended in prison accused for murder.  And:

A Louisiana woman was charged with murder and spent approximately a year in jail before her counsel was able to show that what was deemed a murder of a fetus or newborn was actually a miscarriage that resulted from medication given to her by a health care provider.

Do read the other examples at the link.

If the "Egg-Americans Are Full People" movement starts winning, expect more of these types of cases.  They would be a logical consequence of fetal personhood measures.  If the embryo is a full person from the point of conception then the pregnant woman is no longer a full person.  She cannot have the same legal rights as other adults because she is now an aquarium or the outermost of those Russian dolls.  Everything she does can be judged from the point of view of fetal well-being.

The Paltrow-Flavin survey found a troubling trend in all this, having to do with what apparently is a practice consisting of Other People Just Deciding What Should Be Legal and then acting on it, even if laws supporting those acts did not exist.  And this trend is quite ubiquitous when it comes to pregnancy.

Thus, the current problem isn't usually a different legal treatment of pregnant women, as opposed to women who are not pregnant or men, but something nastier:  A personal decision by someone else to override the legal rights of the pregnant woman because that someone else has decided that he or she knows best what should be done to protect the embryo or fetus.  Swooping in like an avenging angel,  filled with righteousness and laws be damned.

An example of this:

For example, last week, a Tennessee woman who had been in a car accident was tested to see if she had been driving under the influence of alcohol. According to local press, her blood alcohol content was well below the legal limit. Nevertheless, because she told a police officer that she was four months pregnant, she was arrested and taken to jail. Tennessee apparently recognizes a special crime reserved just for pregnant women:  driving while not intoxicated.

 Of course she was arrested because the police officer decided she might be harming her fetus.  The Pregnancy Police is usually not an actual police officer but a private citizen or a group of private citizens.  The Pregnancy Police decides whether a pregnant woman should have a glass of wine or not.  It sometimes even decides where she is allowed to be:

Michelle Lee was catching up with friends at a nightspot near her parents' home when a bouncer pulled her aside.
"Can I ask you a personal question?" Lee recalled him asking. "Are you pregnant?"
She responded yes because, at eight months along, it would have been difficult to argue otherwise, she said later.
Lee, 29, said the bouncer who was staffing the Coach House bar near Roselle didn't care that she was only drinking water.

She said he asked her to leave shortly after midnight Thursday, telling her the bar would be liable if anything happened to her. She complied, but grew angrier over the weekend, questioning whether she had been discriminated against as a pregnant woman.
"He just said, if anything happens, if a fight breaks out and you get hurt, we are responsible," Lee said. "That can happen anywhere. If I am going somewhere, I am taking responsibility."

In that 2011 example the pregnant woman, drinking only water, wasn't allowed to stay at a place for adults because she was a container for a fetus.

But this is really about the fear that she might take a sip of alcohol from someone else's glass, I think.  Yet it's probably quite unlikely that the occasional glass of wine or beer would harm a fetus.  After all, the French, the Spanish and the Italians have drunk wine with meals for centuries, and pregnant women were not told to abstain from it.  If moderate use of alcohol was really bad for a developing embryo or fetus then all citizens of those countries should have suffered from clear signs of alcohol damage.

The health warnings about alcohol are based on studies of severe alcohol use during pregnancy, such as is the case with alcoholism.  That the health recommendations from such studies became recommendations to cut out all alcohol during pregnancy can perhaps be understood as a policy of choosing to minimize all risk to the fetus while noting that a short abstention from alcohol is unlikely to have any negative health consequences for the woman.

But one consequence of framing the health recommendation that way is that it has flashed a green light to all the eager Pregnancy Police Officers (whether official or amateur) out there to try to control the lives of pregnant women.  Not One Sip Of Wine Will Pass Those Lips As Long As I Am Here!

In short, we, as a culture, already regard pregnant people as having fewer rights than others, including their right to privacy, and we, as a culture, already assign pregnant women our own ethical rules about how they should act.  Just imagine what an increase in state level personhood measures would do to those tendencies!  Pregnant women might have to start hiding at home if they don't want to be subjected to the Pregnancy Police.

Note, also, that the more the legal authorities treat medical problems as crimes (but only in the case of pregnant women), the less likely it is that women with, say, drug addiction problems will turn to those legal authorities for help.  One unintended (and severe) health consequence of such policies could well be that pregnant women with problems will not contact the health care system at all.  That's something we really do not want.

Honeyed Speech, Moneyed Speech. A Re-Posting

Originally posted here, but still every bit as relevant.  Money is always relevant, sadly.

This post is about speech and money. The famous lefty philanthropist George Soros has donated Media Matters of America a million clams! As Atrios points out, why shouldn't Soros do that? After all, the wingnut blogs have accused him of funding everything on the "left" for years.

Sadly, Mr. Soros is not funding this blog. I even wrote him an e-mail when I first got started as a Divine Blogger and asked for a donation. Never got an answer.

That is not important (except for me), but it's indicative of what is going on in political blogging on the left/middle and on the right. The right pays people to speak and to write, and they pay very well indeed, and usually this payment comes from the pockets of a few billionaires who fund the various think-tanks (and most so-called conservative grass root movements, too). If you are an anti-feminist you will make big bucks writing your creed (Christine Hoff-Sommers, say) at one of those philanthropic think-tanks, but if you are a feminist you are left to the market forces, poor thing.

Now think about that! The conservatives always adore the market forces but they don't let those buffet their magazines, newspapers or blogs. The funding of those has nothing to do with market forces.

The liberals and progressives often talk about the problems with markets but they let their magazines and blogs struggle in those cold waters of capitalism without much help. This split is not complete. But it exists, and the irony is painfully clear to me, especially because there are pretty good economic reasons why advocacy sites will never be a good candidate for market funding.

What it ultimately means is that the people on the right are moneyed and the rest of us must write with a honeyed tongue to get any donations at all. (See how I got that title into the post?) More importantly, it means that the right easily out-writes everyone else in volume.

Life in the Neolithic Ages. A Feminazi Rant, Re-Posted

(Originally from here.   I repost it so that you can see my feminazi side, too)


That's the current era in terms of gender equality (Ogg has rock. Ogg bang head of Oggette! bangbangbang! Oggette stupid. Ogg smart, look at Ogg bang!).

We don't live in a feminist era, whatever the nuttiest types of Men's Rights Activists say, and we don't live in a post-feminist era, unless by "post-feminism" we mean that feminism came and went, like a dirty ring around the collar. All gone now! Besides, it was all about man-hating, unshaved armpits and ugly women not being able to get laid.

Women don't want equality, Counterpunch, an extreme left-wing site, tells us, borrowing heavily from non-existing research from a British wingnut. Women can't drive and shouldn't wear the pants, right-wingers tell us when it looks like female advisers persuaded the president to make a certain decision. And the president is now effete, weak and contemptible, because women should not have power.

Elsewhere, the American invasion troops in Afghanistan have decided to back-pedal on the topic of women's rights. Trying to change the oppression of women there is like rolling that stone up the hill, only having it roll back down again. (Poor Sisyphus. I know how he felt.) But we must all be pragmatic! What can be achieved in Afghanistan is something safer for the west and something better for the Afghan men and that must serve us.

In Egypt, the transitional government has no women and the Muslim Brotherhood (not sisterhood) is likely to win many seats in the next parliament. Tunisia's revolution has a similar male flavor and so it goes.

And in the ivory towers, new theories are created every day in those weird type of evolutionary psychology workshops about the innermost nature of women as coy, not very smart, keen on trading sex for money and best judged by how close to a human-sized Barbie doll* she might look, preferably with blond hair and blue eyes.

Most people are comfortably numb with this state of affairs. Even many feminists have switched their focus from women to oppressions of every kind.

But of course things have much improved in this country and in many other countries when it comes to the acceptable roles of women. Even international progress is visible if you squint hard enough.

The reason for my rant is not that. It's the obliviousness with which writers carefully pen the term "post-feminist," the pretend-seriousness with which they discuss the imaginary coming era of men's oppression by women, all combined with jokes about women as bad drivers or worries about whether women should be in power. It's the opining on feminist topics by many who appear to have done their research by having a ten-minute thought one night over a beer or two, and it's our willingness to take such thoughts every bit as seriously (if not more so) than the writings of people who actually have done the necessary research.

Take, for instance, the often expressed view that we now live in a post-feminist world? When honor killings exist? When the United States has never had a female president? When the Erick Ericksons of this world can proudly compare the US Secretary of State to bad women drivers? When work-life balance is just yet another women's issue? When I can watch a week of Japanese television about the earthquake-tsunami-nuclear-disaster combination and not see one female expert or politician interviewed, when all those rooms of power are full of only men? When the US Republican Party has declared an all-out war on women, and few notice this? Post-feminist, indeed, but only in the sense of feminism being irrelevant.

What about the ominous rise of the new matriarchy, some of you might ask**. Aren't women now dominant among university students? Isn't the world soon going to be run by those bad female drivers? Perhaps it is time for a counter-revolution! Perhaps we have gone too far in the direction of favoring women. And look what that got us? As commentators from both the left and the right told us, weren't women supposed to be the peaceful sex, the sex that will stop the wars? But look what three women did in the case of president Obama's Libya decision! They were the heedless warmongers. Which means...what?

Iran fixed the too-many-women problem in its universities by putting up quotas against female students in "manly" disciplines, such as engineering. The US tries to fix it by telling us stories about how bad it is ultimately for women (not for men, mind you, or for all of us) if they are the majority of college graduates:

They have nobody higher up or equal to marry! That something which we would applaud in a randomly picked student (hard work and drive) is so often presented as a problem: too-many-women, should make you think. It's a sign of the neolithic age of gender relationships: Zero-sum thinking, gender myths based on man-the-provider-and-leader and woman-the-subservient-housewife and generalized diffuse sexism which always leads us to the conclusion that women should do with something slightly less than full equality.

As I mention in the title of this post, this is a rant. But if it still comes across as too earnest and serious, think about why that might be the case.

Gender equality is not something that is taken seriously, in general. That's why Erickson can present his contempt of women as a joke and that's why we don't all riot when we are told that women should cut back on higher education so as to leave more space for men which they then could marry. We are uncomfortable with taking the topic seriously because we are still living the neolithic era of gender relationships. And that is what makes us uncomfortable with feminazi rants.
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*These link to the first posts of two series, not to the specific posts in which those arguments are presented. You can find loads more in my archives if you are bent that way.
**Just an aside: Note how outdated some of the arguments made about the "end of men" are less than one year later. The mancession, for instance, is rapidly disappearing and there are some signs that a womancession might come next.

She's A Slut. A Re-Posting.

(Originally posted here)

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.
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I have written before on the derogatory terms we have for women who do not obey traditional ideas about how women should behave.  It  could be useful to look at the whole collection of such terms, because almost all of them have the characteristics of stating "this is a nasty person AND a woman", whereas the corresponding male terms tend to say just "this is a nasty person."  There are exceptions to that rule but not many.

The Bald Vulva. A Re-Posting

(Re-posted from here.)


It sounds like the national bird (of the US, that is), doesn't it?

The Atlantic has an article about women shaving off all their pubic hair or getting Brazilian waxes down there or even having the pubic hair permanently zapped with laser treatment. I recommend reading the whole piece from the beginning to the end to note how the actual reasons for this trend are subsumed in all sorts of dead-end theories about why young women, quite suddenly as history goes, have decided that a bald vulva is a necessary fashion or health accessory. Nothing replaces that reading as an exercise in learning how smoke is blown into our eyes when it comes to political issues about women. And this IS a political issue.

I'm not really blaming the writer who does do the necessary work of discussing the real reasons. But all the fluff around that real reason, about low-slung pants requiring the shaving of pubic hair (what about men?) to the age-old argument that women are smelly by nature are trotted out, and so is the idea that femininity means hairlessness (even if biology disagrees).

And this bit is really hilarious:

So what does it all mean? Is pubic hair removal a symbol of feminine pride, something that Gloria Steinem might be proud of? Or does it signify submission to a domineering male agenda?
"It's all in how people deal with it," Herbenick says. As she's seen in her lecture-hall encounters, the hairless vulva isn't always analogous to the clenched fist of female solidarity; just as often, it's a telltale sign of oppression or forced conformity.
But, she says, uncovered, demystified genitalia can just as easily be a symbol of empowerment. "Many women have started to feel a sense of ownership over their bodies -- an autonomy," she says. "If they want to take it off, they take it off. If they want to grow it back, they grow it back. If they want to shave it into a heart, they shave it into a heart. But they're doing it because they want to."

They are doing it because they want to? No wider societal influences there? Why don't we have lots of women completely shaving off their eyebrows? They are hair, after all, and unfeminine, and they might smell when you are sweaty after a workout or sex.

The reason, of course is in p*rnography (which so far isn't that interested in eyebrows). It became widely available, in forms which did not require a man to walk into a crummy shop to buy a magazine, about twenty years ago. We now may have a generation of heterosexual men who formed their first ideas about how naked women look by watching p*rn. And women in those depictions do not have pubic hair. This is so that one can see all the dangly bits and the jingly bits better, of course.

Imagine such a man having first-time sex with a woman who actually has pubic hair! Might he not express shock or disgust at this horror? Might she not then feel that she, too, must shave her vulva bald?

That explanation suffices. All the other stories told in the article are either dead-ends or tales about the roads this influence took to get into the popular culture in general. But the direct route works really well, too:

Herbenick recalls one encounter in which a popular, well-liked college student in a class she taught openly professed that he had never hooked up with a girl who had pubic hair, and would frankly be disgusted to undress a woman and discover a veil of genital fur.
"Some girls talked to me and wrote in their papers that they had always had pubic hair, and in a couple cases never did anything to their pubic hair," she said. "They never thought it was a problem. But when he said that, they went home and changed it. They really started to feel ashamed about their bodies."
Fitzpatrick, similarly, finds himself in a collegiate scene full of young women far too obsessed with the hair down there. "It becomes a compulsion," he says.
Fitzpatrick's female friends, especially those who confess to not having waxed in a while, have added a distinct new routine to their social calendars: weekend-evening freak-outs. "When they go out on a Friday night to the bar, if they think they might be having sex with somebody later, they're like, 'Is he gonna judge me? What is he gonna think?'" Fitzpatrick says. Other non-waxed coeds simply skip the bar altogether.
Pinto, too, admits that she gets nervous about having sex toward the third or fourth week after getting a wax. "If I haven't waxed and I suddenly end up hooking up with someone, I'm like, Oh, God. No, no!" she says.
And it's true, says Fitzpatrick: Guys can be, and often are, "absolutely brutal." It's not uncommon for a college-aged man to "go out of his way" to make fun of a girl's pubic grooming habits with his buddies after he's hooked up with her -- even if he's never expressed a preference one way or the other, he says. "Then all of a sudden, instead of just being a girl who's had a fun night with her respective guy, she becomes that girl who has weird pubic hair. And nobody wants that label."

"Weird pubic hair." There you have it!

Two important points about this post: First, do a gender reversal on the arguments. All the arguments for a bald vulva seem to me to equally apply to men's pubic hair. The skin would be softer, the experience of intercourse would be more powerful, with less hairy padding, and so on. But do women shame men into shaving down there? And of course the real point about this first point is the absence of articles like this about men's pubic hair.

Second, and this is very important for any reader I have angered by downplaying "choice" here. We obviously have a choice about how much hair we want on our vulvas or around our penises. But those kinds of choices are never made in a vacuum. As I wrote in an earlier post, the women in this picture look very much alike, because their clothing was influenced by the culture they lived in:

Yet I'm pretty sure if we could have asked them about their choice of hairdo (the "Gibson Girl" of the early 20th century) or the dresses they would have given us individual choice explanations.

We are all affected by the culture we live in, and different choices carry different societal benefits and sanctions. This post is to point out why one particular "choice" has become more common and what drives its popularity.

Sunday Music

Philip Glass, Metamorphosis One

Old People With Plants On Their Heads

Very interesting artwork.  Someone in the comments notes that not all the models are Finns.  Some of them are Norwegians.

This reminded me of the necklaces I made out of rowan-berries as a child.  All you need is a needle and some thread and you can have rubies around your neck!

Why Is Feminism A Dirty Word? A Re-Posting

(Re-posted from here)

That's in the address of a Guardian piece with the final title:
Why is 'feminism' such a tough badge to  wear?'

Do read the piece.  What I want to write about are the comments because they are more illuminating about the possible answers.  Let's see if I can put them into some kind of classes:

First Class of Arguments

This is the argument that the piece itself mentions:

As Siobhan Garrigan, who studies English at the University of Lincoln, puts it: "Young people don't want to identify as feminists because there is this man-hating, frumpy, lesbian image forced on us."

You must have heard about those accusations many, many times before!  I certainly have.  I'm gorgeous, lurve men (especially with pesto and garlic) and, sadly, fail to be anything but quite heterosexual.  Well OK.  I'm not gorgeous.  But I certainly am not frumpy!  The gall, she mutters.

All joking aside, those three accusations don't have anything to do with each other.  The first one states that anyone wanting gender equality must hate men.  That's pretty weird.  The second one argues, that women who want gender equality cannot be attractive enough to get men in a system where women are second-class citizens.  Only unattractive women would want equality!

That's illogical, too.  Finally, one's sexuality has nothing to do with one's desire for a gender-equal society.  All illogical, says Echidne.

But squint your eyes a bit, and you see the underlying pattern,  what all three of these things share:  These women do not try to please men.  Or that's the suspicion of anyone using those accusations.  Wanting equality means not wanting to please men.  Therefore, women who want equality must hate men, be unattractive or prefer women in their sexuality.

Now, I don't accept those accusations.  I'm also willing to admit that there have been feminists who hate men (but nowhere near the numbers of MRA guys who hate women), that all social justice movements have more or less frumpy people of both sexes in them and so on.  But no other social justice movement is taken to task for anything similar.  No other social justice movement needs to say "but of course we love you, other guys!" or try to make sure that their members are nicely made-up and properly behaved.  It's only demanded of feminism, and that, I suspect, is because of women's traditional roles and traditional gender stereotypes.

Besides, the sexes are not independent of each other, and statements which ostracize feminism have a powerful impact because of that.  Nobody wants to be shunned by the groups of their peers, after all. 

Second Class of Arguments

This crops up quite a bit in the comments.  In the more sophisticated form it's a criticism of feminism as a political movement without intersectionality.  In the rougher forms the argument is about rich women perhaps being slightly worse off than rich men but who cares?  As one commentator states, how do poor women get helped if some women become judges or famous television personalities?  Her life remains the same.

From the latter angle feminism is unimportant because it is  seen as a movement which only focuses on wealthy, educated, white women who are better off than, say, poor, uneducated, black men.  Or poor women of any race.

Here I want to draw a distinction between feminism as-a-political-movement and feminism-as-a-theory.  The two are different, I've come to believe, and while intersectionality is important in both fields, the idea that focusing on gender in isolation isn't useful for anyone but the top women in the society is misplaced when it comes to theory.

It helps to understand how gender plays a role in the hierarchical ladders. One possible way that game might go is that women are slightly worse off than men who are otherwise the same in the kinds of things which determine the rung of the ladder we inhabit.  If that's the case, then poor women could be slightly worse off than poor men, for instance.

Or perhaps not.  The question is ultimately an empirical one and the studies must be done separately for each society.  But that has been the traditional setting when it comes to comparing men and women and it is probably still valid in most countries of this world.

Beliefs about the proper roles of men and women and beliefs about women's worth have an impact on all members of the society, including its women.  Seeing powerful women performing well in areas which have not traditionally allowed women that chance can change stereotypes and sexist beliefs.  In that sense what happens at the very top of the society does matter to all women and men.

Those who argue that the problems with sexism otherwise privileged women have don't matter fail to understand that similar and worse problems affect women further down the ladders.  Not studying those problems will hurt all women, ultimately.

I'm not sure how clear I have been.  There's a difference between intersectionality and between the argument that feminism should be a social justice movement which supports every cause and all people.

Intersectionality plays a useful and important role.  Turning feminism into some kind of a general social justice movement would leave the question of gender unexamined.  Other social justice movements are unlikely to take up the slack.

This class of arguments also fails to appreciate that much feminist writing IS about intersectionality.

And to argue that some different cause (such as income inequality)  is more important than feminism is to fail to take into account the intersectionality in that place.  It also assumes that we must pick one cause and focus on that alone.  I don't know about you but I can run and chew gum and plan my next blog post all at the same time.

Third Class of Arguments

These are the arguments that it is the men who are worse off in Western societies.  Feminists are accused of not working to reduce the rates of male-on-male violence, including the rates of male suicide, or of not trying for the most dangerous jobs in equal numbers or of not working to get more fathers child custody in the case of a divorce.

Yet a very consistent tone in the orchestra that is feminist music has always focused on the evils that traditional gender roles can cause.  A few examples:

Mothers are more likely to get custody in the case of a divorce when the society believes that mothers should do the hands-on care of the children. Stay-at-home parents are more likely to get custody than the family breadwinners, and the vast majority of stay-at-home parents are women.  (It's a completely different question whether fathers, indeed, are treated especially unfairly in custody courts.  Evidence suggests that in most cases the divorcing parents agree on who should have custody and when this is not the case, fathers win at least one half of all the cases in the US.)

Traditional definitions of masculinity have sometimes glorified violence.  To the extent that feminism has opposed such definitions, it has also opposed one of the many causes for male-on-male violence.

The most dangerous traditionally male jobs do not always welcome women with open arms.  Sexual harassment can be used as a way to defend one's turf.  It's important to note that women don't necessarily make a simple choice not to become, say, firefighters.  Also, as I've mentioned before, prostitution is probably the occupation with the highest risk of violent death, and it is a female-dominated occupation.  But because it is often an illegal one, its riskiness does not enter occupational safety statistics.

It's a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't argument.  Feminists should work hard on men's liberation because women have more "choices" than men do.  But when feminists do suggest that men should be able to become stay-at-home-parents or that men should be encouraged to react to anger in ways other than violence, they become interfering bitches who disobey biological imperatives and so on.   It's hard for me to know what some of these extremist MRA people want, because on the one hand they want feminists to work for the liberation of men and on the other hand they want the old-time gender roles to come back and feminists to shut up.

The best way to address these issues (in addition to getting the actual facts about them) is by pointing out that feminism wants equal opportunities by gender and equal valuation of traditionally male and female spheres of activity.  Feminists who encourage women to take up the bread-winning role or who encourage women to become firefighters or police officers should please these types of MRA people, right?  Because that way more women will die in the dangerous jobs and more men will be SAHDs and then get custody in the case of a divorce.   Well, that last sentence is only half-serious.  The point is that much of feminist agenda IS giving men more choices, should they want them.

Perhaps one could also mention that violence IS studied a lot in the society, and much of that study is about male-on-male violence.  It's hard to see what input the feminist movement with its meager funds could contribute to what is already being done.

I have trouble with this group of argument because it veers from one end to the other.  At one extreme, the argument is that the most traditional gender norms were the correct ones.  At the other extreme, feminists should work to liberate men whom those traditional gender norms have enslaved.

Fourth Class of Arguments

This is another familiar one:  The feminist movement was needed in the past (and perhaps still is,  in places like Saudi Arabia) but women in the Western countries are now completely equal with men.

What makes the argument familiar is that people wrote about it earnestly in the late nineteenth century and then again in the 1930s and so on and so on.  Makes you think, doesn't it?

Women in the West are certainly much better off now than, say, a hundred years ago.  We can vote, for one thing.  But the Church of England still won't have female bishops, the Catholic Church is an all-boys-club and so is Islam.  The number of women in the parliaments of most countries is nowhere near 50%,  sexual violence is still a problem and, most importantly, misogyny still manages to exist.

I'm grateful for the changes past generations of feminists spent their lives bringing about.  Very grateful.  But I don't think the job is over and done with.  Whenever I feel like that, I go cruising on the net and get my head put right again.  All it takes is participation in some poorly moderated forum while using a female-sounding pen-name.  Or reading YouTube comments...

And as long as we are not affecting the gender roles at home we will not see ultimate gender equality in the wider society.

Conclusion

To conclude, let me state that, yes,  some aspects of feminism have gone astray in the past, and, yes, there are always ways to make the social justice movement that is feminism more inclusive and more effective and fairer.  At the same time, the feminism of the past got women the vote, fairer laws and fairer retirement benefits.  It got women access to schools and colleges and jobs.  It got women mentioned in the history books.  It got women their own bank accounts and the right to enter contracts.   It cast light on the once-common belief that rape is a shame for the victim and better kept hidden.

And today?  We discuss how dirty a word "feminism" might be.

The paradox of my kind of feminism is this:  The problems of sexism have been fixed when each individual is judged as an individual, not as a representative of a whole gender.   Yet the only way to see the sexist treatment of any one individual is by looking at how it is affected by  the beliefs and prejudices and societal practices which apply to one's whole gender.

That's what I have tried to do on this blog, over the years (send money!).  It may not be the kind of feminism this Guardian article or the comments attached to it discuss.  It may not even be feminism, who knows, and it may have very limited value.  But from my snake's-eye-viewpoint most of the arguments classes I amassed miss the point of feminism, and it really is to remove that ankle-cuff with your sex etched on it.  So that we can all run free or something.

Was It Good For You, Too, Baby? Or What's The Point of The Female Orgasm? A Re-Posting

I wrote two posts on this question, with the basic premise that I know nothing (except in a laygoddess way if one can even regard us divines as lay-anything), and that I was going to ask questions in these posts.  But to be honest, I think female orgasm is there to make women more willing to have sex. 

The first post is here,  the second here.

After reading them again, I'm more struck by the lack of interest in the female multiple orgasms.  Research which looks pretty neutral often has an odd tilt, because the questions we feel are important are already embedded in our  societal ideas. 

Thus, it looks obvious (but is it?) that men need to orgasm to ejaculate, but that women don't have to orgasm to get pregnant, so we start from the assumption that the female orgasm is like a frilly collar.  Nice to have, but probably not essential at all.

But if the female orgasm is just a happy byproduct of the male orgasm, how come many women routinely have multiple orgasms and very few men seem to have that knack?   And how come that doesn't  result in a vast field of research?