Alice Munro, the 2013 Nobel Laureate in Literature

My congratulations to Munro.  As the linked piece notes, she is a master of the short-story form, and that is a difficult form.

I've read quite a bit of her work.  I'd say that it is about the decisions people make in their lives and the consequences of those decisions.  And it's indeed true that she can put as much into a short story as others cram into a novel, without making the story ungainly or bloated.

I find this news ironic, given my earlier post about the literature professor who refuses to teach either women or Canadians in his short-form writing course.

Limbaugh's Lies. Part 593854756

Rush Limbaugh tells us that the drop in poor white women's life expectancy figures in the United States is because they are now working outside the home:



This is the kind of thing which raises my wrath and then causes hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes in far-away places.  Because had Limbaugh not been so fucking lazy and gormless he would have read through a few of the studies.  Well, probably he is just lying because he knows he can get away with it.

The truth is the other way round:

In May, Jennifer Karas Montez, a social demographer who studies health inequalities, co-authored a study that was the first to investigate how quality of life might be playing a role in the early deaths of female high-school dropouts. Montez found that while smoking accounts for half of the decline in life expectancy among these women, whether or not a woman has a job is equally significant. “Women without a high-school degree have not made inroads in the labor force, especially in post-recession America,” Montez said in an interview. In fact, only one-third of women without a high-school diploma are employed, compared to half of their male counterparts, and nearly three-quarters of better-educated women. When they are employed, Montez said, it is usually in low-wage jobs that offer no benefits or flexibility. Smoking and other destructive behaviors, she added, may just be symptoms of the heightened stress and loneliness experienced by women who don’t graduate from high school.

Bolds are mine.  In short, the poor women who are in the labor force do better than the poor women who are not in the labor force.

On the topic itself, i.e., the question why certain groups of women (especially poor, white and uneducated women) seem to experience a drop in life expectancy, read this earlier post and especially the direct quote in this.

The Meritocracy of Twitter And The Top Layer of White Boyz

Via Amanda, I read this statement about the leadership of Twitter consisting mostly of white guys.  The lack of women has been a Twitter topic for some days, especially because women use Twitter a lot (not me).

As Amanda points out, the piece is a good example of How It Is Done in Anti-Feminism. 

My short summary of it: 

Life is fair but hard for all.  It's harder for women than men, of course,  and of course there are sexists and bigots everywhere, but life is still fair and competition in tech is totally fair and the women who are willing to pay the price men pay get there.  

Of course they have to ignore the sexism and the racism and so on and the fact that their pregnancies are a problem they have to take care of while working harder than everyone else.  But life is fair and the winners got there fairly, just like all other winners.  

That feminists dare to complain about the lack of women in Twitter's leadership just shows that they want something for nothing and really aren't good enough.  All one needs to do is work harder than anyone else, bulldoze through sexism and the assumption that every worker has a spouse at home taking care of children and giving birth to them.

The world of Twitter is a meritocracy and if the top is mostly white men, well, that shows that white men are more talented, work harder and deserve to be on top.

So stop your whining and actually do some work, feminazis.

Another way of looking at the very gist of the piece is that it is based on the assumption of general meritocracy and an accepted view of biological gender differences as something which can safely cost  in money, ambitions and emotional costs mostly to women. 

From these two assumptions it naturally follows that the status quo is the best possible of all status quos, that the women not on top are not as talented and hard-working as the men on top, and that the answer is to strap your baby on your back and your breast pump in your handbag, put on your stilettos and work harder and longer than all the white boyz while regarding any sexism or racism or both you meet en route as just so many gnats to ignore.

If I want a kinder reading of the piece it would be this one:  The author doesn't think she has faced any hindrances due to her gender and believes that she got where she is by her talents and hard work.  She was able to accept the rules of the game and won, and that's pretty rare for a woman!  So she is quite special, too.  And I have no doubts that she is good at her work and that she has the characteristics which let her succeed and that she has worked hard.

But none of that makes the wider questions about where all the women are irrelevant, and it's hard to see how one can make a polite nod to the sexism which enters the room but then pretend that it is powerless in affecting how high a woman climbs.  It also doesn't follow that those feminists who have questioned Twitter's lack of diversity (a word I dislike, as you know, preferring real fairness) are people who want something for nothing or that they wish to have empty tokens of womanhood on those boards. 

And yes, women are not fifty percent of all workers in high tech fields, so it would be unrealistic to expect them to be fifty percent of the top layers.  But surely some percentage higher than negligible would better reflect true talents?

On the Government Shutdown. Who Needs Governments, Anyway?

The government shutdown is a good time to think about the roles of governments.  We get far too many images of the government as a family, especially from the Republicans in the US but also sometimes from president Obama and other Democrats.  Thus, we are told that just like a family the government must live within its means, that there must be belt-tightening during bad times, that a balanced budget each and every year is the ideal for the government just as it is for families.

But of course families borrow money at certain times, for housing, for education and for larger purchases, and families accrue positive net savings at other times.

More importantly, a government is NOT like a family.  It's a government.  It controls military troops, it maintains law courts and police departments, it has an important role to play in coordinating the fight against epidemics and in guaranteeing clean water and safe infrastructure for all.  The environment and its protection need coordination and that coordination needs organizations which have the power to enforce the agreed-upon rules of cooperation.  Those are called governments.

And that paragraph is only about those parts of the government which even the conservatives support.  I'd argue that the role of the government in its insurance aspect (the safety net aspect) is much larger, because such safety nets are necessary under the trapeze artists we are forced to become in the free-market-experiment.  A great entrepreneur might not become an entrepreneur at all in a country where health insurance is tied to working for someone else, especially if she or he has a family and someone in the family is chronically ill.  Poorly fed and poorly educated people are not good workers, and neither are people who spend all their energy in struggling against abject poverty.  In the simplest of all senses, markets need buyers with money and the energy to use for buying.

Note how it's possible to defend the government from the side of the "free market" gods, too.  For markets themselves operate within structures and frameworks which are created by governments.  Even though firms complain about government oversight, in a more fundamental sense it is the government which provides the foundation for those markets to exist and also the rules which stop them from turning into pure anarchy. 

All these long and boring mutterings came about because I was thinking of the role of trust in social and economic interactions.  If you want to eat chicken tonight, you want to be reassured that the chicken won't give you salmonella.  And most of the time it is the role of the government to make sure of that.  Markets won't do it on their own, because fly-by-night firms have an incentive to unload their salmonella chickens on your plate, and because firms have the short-term incentive to cut costs wherever they can do so, and that includes quality control.

So one important government task is to uphold that trust we have, the belief that if I sign a contract to buy a house, on a mortgage, both the house will be turned over to me and the mortgage will be paid by me over time, according to the agreed-upon rules.   That's one narrow aspect of trust which the explosions in the housing and financial markets have reduced.  I now ogle all offers with great skepticism, and I no longer even know where my mortgage is held.  The people who hold it I might not have selected.  Thus, my trust is reduced, and that decreases my willingness to participate in the markets.

I'm sure you can think of other aspects of trust which have similar roots.  Those who believe that governments are so irrelevant that they can be drowned in bath-tubs should have a look at Somalia's recent trials and tribulations.  But there are examples closer to home, and I fear that we may learn more such examples if the government shutdown continues.

None of this means that governments can't be turned to evil or that any amount of government intervention is a good thing, of course.  But there are real and valid reasons for having a fairly large government section in modern societies.

And Another Religion On Women. This Gets Old.

This time it's the  Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints:

Also today, D. Todd Christofferson, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' Quorum of the Twelve, said in his speech that having women at home remains an essential part of society, and he cautioned against blurring feminine and masculine differences. His speech Saturday came during a two-day church conference in Salt Lake City.
Christofferson said women's "moral force" has kept societies on the righteous track for generations. He criticized feminist thinkers who view "homemaking with outright contempt."
He said overlooking the differences between men and women would lead to losing the complementary gifts of the two genders that work in harmony.
Also today, a group of about 200 feminist women were denied entrance to the all-male meeting of Mormon priesthood holders.
The Ordain Women group marched from a nearby park to a standby line at outside the meeting this evening to highlight what they perceive as gender inequality.

Where to begin?   The power is defined by the priesthood holders and they are all men.  The position of the church is defined by them, the terms used are defined by them, and the "proper role" of women is defined by them.  Thus, the idea that feminist thinkers (supposedly) view "homemaking with outright contempt" doesn't make Mr. Christofferson want to do any homemaking himself or to let any homemakers into the priesthood.

Neither does Mr. Christofferson want to let that presumed "moral force" of women have any real impact on his church or on the outside society.   Given that he argues it is women's "moral force" that has kept societies on the righteous track for generations, it is extremely weird that his church has an all-male leadership.

Then there's the fact that historically speaking the ideal that women are at home (not working at anything else but homemaking) and men in the public sector (doing all the work for income) is a fairly recent one.  The idea of one breadwinner per family has probably never been practical for the vast majority of people, and it's certainly not practical today.

But in a different sense Mr. Christofferson is naturally completely correct:  The all-male Mormon church leadership IS dependent on the willing (often unpaid) work of women, and the goodies the all-male church leadership receives in life is also dependent on a certain definition of what "complementary gifts" between the genders might mean.  Thus, women might be given the gift of "moral force" but they are not allowed to exert that, ultimately.

Reading for Oct 7, 2013. On the Affordable Care Act and Who Is Allowed To Judge The Game.

The government shutdown may have been months in planning.  The reason:  The desire to kill the Affordable Care Act (ACA).  The price of that killing is immaterial. 

I don't have any inside information on this, but it should be set against the very common "both sides do it" argument which I keep reading.

Speaking of the ACA, this story made me want to uninstall my brain.  An example:

Collett counts himself among the 29 percent of people who said in an NBCNews/Kaiser poll they are angry about the health reform law. “The issue for me is that it is not the proper role of government,” he said.
Collett, who is married and has 10 children, says the kids are covered by Medicaid, the joint state-federal health insurance plan for people with low income and children who are not covered.
But it’s “absolutely not okay,” that they are, Collett says quickly. “There are a lot of people out there that’ll cry foul."
Collett, whose children are home-schooled, likens taking Medicaid to sending children to public school. He also does not approve of government-funded public schools. “The government is taking your money. They are spending it on things they shouldn’t be,” he says. “Trying to get whatever you can back -- I have nothing against that. You have to at some point try and get your tax dollars back.”

Here's a fun piece of news for you:

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is expected to be one of nine people appointed to the College Football Playoff selection committee. Rice is pegged to join Archie Manning, former NCAA Executive Vice President Tom Jernstedt, former Big East Commissioner Mike Tranghese, and an athletic director from each of the five power conferences, a a person with knowledge of the selection process told USA TODAY Sports. The ESPN College GameDay crew discussed the selection committee this morning at Northwestern, where analyst David Pollack intimated that women are not qualified to be on the committee.


“Now I’m going to stick my foot in my mouth, probably,” Pollack said. “I want people on this committee that can watch tape, that have played football, that are around football, that can tell you different teams on tape, not on paper.” Host Chris Fowler asked Pollack if he was implying that no women should be allowed on the committee, and Pollack said “yeah,” as the rest of the crew disagreed.

Pollack would probably then agree that men shouldn't have anything to do with obstetrics or gynecology, right?

Cromulent Imprecations. On Reading.

Or a Friday-Fun post.  Because of the swine flu (in a snake!!), I've had that flu fatigue which made me re-read old books, the more difficult the better.  You may have had that experience with illness.  The emotional centers must be shut off or they are dead but you still need brain food.

So I read through the Canterbury Tales again (Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote) and then Virginia Woolf's The Waves. 

That latter is one of the hardest books I've read that is worthwhile, and it's also a book I need to read with a dictionary (imprecations! %&@!).  A book which requires several readings (I hated it the first time around.)

She tries to achieve an extremely difficult thing in that book:  to capture the rhythm of life/consciousness and the three-dimensionality of life/consciousness in writing which can only be organized as words after words.  I think she partially succeeds but only with tremendous work from the reader.  Whether a complete success in something like that is even feasible is an interesting question.  Or desirable? 

I also re-read some Jane Austen,  just to piss some people off.  She has been called the writers' writer, and I finally felt that, as opposed to just knowing about it.  Because her genius is in the writing (how every sentence is necessary, how every sentence carries several burdens), she reads terribly in  bad translations.  And because her genius is mostly in the writing, the plot and topics of her books are ultimately irrelevant (though not completely as she is a social critic).  But if you turn this upside down and see Austen as the creator of the chick-lit genre you miss the whole point of her.

Yes, I know that books might be dead or dying, which is too bad for future generations.  They are not just an imperfect way of picturing reality or dreams.  They are a different way of doing that from movies, a way which allows you to set the pace, you to decide on the colors and scents and sounds, and the speed with which events unfold, and you are the ultimate ruler of that imaginary world.  This gives more degrees of freedom to the possible interpretations.

I also read lots of Terry Pratchett's Diskworld while recuperating.  Recommended as escape literature. 

Something Rotten In Denmark. For Pickup Artists

Pickup artists (PUAs) are men who believe in a cartoonish version of evolutionary psychology, where women are coy and need to be persuaded to have sex but want to have it only with something called "alpha males."  Pickup artists view promiscuous sex as a game.  They are the offense, the women are the defense (and the ball or puck), and the goal is to get laid as often as possible.

A courting game for misogynists, really.  And it's a game because the rules require lying and pretending.  It's misogynist because it's a hunt for pu**y, and the stand for it is mostly immaterial.  And it's a game for men who feel cheated by mother nature in their looks, the society in their wealth, the women in their astonishing tendency not to always be available for sex as their underlying feelings of entitlement require them to be.  Hence the need to invent rules to get laid by the reluctant women.

Now one of the better-known PUAs, Roosh, has written about his experiences in Denmark in his series about how to bang one's way around the world.  He seems to have been "cockblocked" by the women in Hamlet's country!  And he believes that the reason is Denmark's excellent welfare state which makes it unnecessary for women to bed unpleasant assholes just so that they can get someone to support them in marriage.

That's not quite how Roosh puts it, of course:

Thirty-three-year-old Daryush Valizadeh, known to his predominantly heterosexual male fan base as Roosh, is a well-known pick-up artist within the worldwide “Seduction Community,” which relies on pop evolutionary psychology to teach the art of getting laid.

...

Pick-up artists believe that all women are the same: submissive, choosier than men when picking sexual partners, entranced by shiny objects. In the Community, players are self-made; most renowned pick-up artists claim they were socially awkward losers until they learned the tricks of the trade. If a pick-up artist hones his “inner game” (confidence) as well as his “outer game” (appearance), he can control his sexual future. When women come with cheat codes, rejection is not an option; if a play fails, the player tweaks his strategy instead of conceding defeat. 

Roosh enjoys middling success as the author of the “Bang” series of travel guides, which trains readers to seduce women based on derogatory ethnic stereotypes. In Bang Brazil, Roosh warns his followers that “poor favela chicks are very easy, but quality is a serious problem.” He vows never to return to the Polish city of Katowice unless forced to “maintain the pussy flow.” Roosh’s predations haven’t gone without recognition. The Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization, included Roosh’s personal blog in a March 2012 report on American hate groups; it quotes an Icelandic feminist group that described Bang Iceland as a “rape guide.” 

But Roosh’s Denmark directory diverges from his usual frat-boy Casanova fantasies liberally seasoned with rape jokes. Don’t Bang Denmark—note the dramatic title change—is a cranky volume that (spoiler alert!) probably won’t help any Roosh acolytes score. Roosh calls it the “most angry book” he’s ever written. “This book is a warning of how bad things can get for a single man looking for beautiful, feminine, sexy women.”
What’s blocking the pussy flow in Denmark? The country’s excellent social welfare services. Really.

And Roosh hates the Danish women he meets:

Danish women “won’t defer to your masculinity,” he writes. “They can fuck you, but no more. What they do have are pussies and opinions you don’t really care about hearing. That’s it.” Advocates of Nordic social democracy should be thrilled to discover a perk of gender-equalizing work-family reconciliation policies: they combat skeeviness.
Roosh comes to the conclusion that women who aren’t as dependent on men for financial support are not susceptible to the narcissistic salesmanship that constitutes phase one: “attraction.” That’s why Roosh fails to advance to the second level—”trust”—without being creepy. Thus “seduction” is almost always out of the question.

Here we come to the interesting stuff.  I repeat, from that quote:

Roosh comes to the conclusion that women who aren’t as dependent on men for financial support are not susceptible to the narcissistic salesmanship that constitutes phase one: “attraction.”

But that refutes his evo-psycho theories about what women want!  If women were hard-wired to go for the dominant growling alpha monkey, then women would do that even in Denmark.  That they do not suggests that dating rules and what appeals to people is also culture-dependent and affected by economic realities.

Roosh's theories are inane, of course, and so is his welfare state theory (which, to repeat, conflicts with his evo-psycho theory).  The reasons why Danish women won't go to bed with a particular PUA are probably far more nuanced.  The way Danes talk to each other, the way women and men talk to each other, the way they date or don't date; all those are affected by culture, history and women's and men's roles over long time periods.

Here's the wider problem with the PUA experiment, even if we somehow lost our brains and accepted the basic misogynistic premises:  There is no way of properly testing the PUA game against alternatives, other ways of seeking heterosexual experiences.  There is no way to prove that acting like a PUA gets a man more pu**y than approaching someone with confidence, humor and kindness, say.  I get that the Cinderella story among the PUAs is a rise from being a social outcast whom women ridiculed to being the one silver-back ape in the group and getting a carpal tunnel syndrome in the p**ck.  But those are anecdotes, Cinderella stories, and attempts to sell books when presented by the authors.

They don't hold looks and personality etc. constant while changing the "game" of the man.

Quiet NIght

Trying to relax myself after a day of fighting shitty computer crap and following shitty political crap and still recovering from a meatspace virus.

Speed Blogging, Oct 2, 2013: On Income Inequality, Tea Party Rage and the Defense of Roman Polanski

Contents:  Includes discussion of child rape.


This is a fascinating post to read and to ponder over:  Are we returning to the nineteenth century economic circumstances?

Samantha Geimer in the UK Guardian argues that we should be more nuanced about the rape of children if the culprit had a horrible life and creates beautiful and moving art and if the victim herself thinks that children should take some responsibility for their behavior.  I don't agree, at least not in the sense that Geimer adopts.   Or rather, the crime remains the crime.  If other factors are to be considered in the sentencing of the criminal, that is a different question altogether.

Kevin Drum  asks where the rage of the Tea Party comes from.  The answers (many in the comments to his post) are both obvious (loss of power and prestige for just being born into a certain group, real loss of income and relative standing, gerrymandering of districts which benefits the most extreme candidates, Fox News and other capitalist-funded populist movements) and elusive (why now?  why no real anger aimed at the out-sourcers, the inequality-creators, the free-marketers? why is the populism right-wing?).

I don't have the miracle answer to this one, but I'd argue that one important straw to carry to the pile is the fact that the Democrats, due to needing the money from the wealthy, stopped being blunt and open about being for the working classes.  They have dropped the unions and now employ euphemisms about that group (working families which sounds like child-labor to me).  So when the right-wing radio began, there were few opposing voices, if any, and all the foaming anger was channeled into the river which tries to sweep out immigrants, minorities and uppity women, to leave the majority of us fighting for the crumbs which fall from the dinner tables of the powerful few. 

Finally, and just for its interest, these historic photographs are fascinating.

Pictures of the GOP Powers-That-Be

One can be found here, about the House leaders.  And then there is this:

Photo by  Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

This is all in the context of the government shutdown, but the problem is much more general.  For instance, 75.6% of the women in the House of Representatives are Democrats and only 24.4% Republicans.  Put in a different way, 29% of the House Democrats are women, only 8.2% of the House Republicans are women.

Similar patterns apply to the Senate, where 32% of Democratic Senators are women, but only 9% of Republican Senators.

The conclusions one can draw from this are interesting. 

One, pointed out by a smart reader in my earlier comments, is that there's not much chance of a gender-equal Congress as long as the Republican Party is the party of (mostly white) men. 

Another one has to do with the question whether the Republican platform really is explicitly anti-women in the sense that this is what is appealing in the party to some voters.  Perhaps there are so few Republican women in politics, because that is what the Republican ideology demands (women at home etc.) so the women don't run or perhaps the women don't get voted in, even if they run, because that is part of the party ideology. 

The causal relationships can run in different directions at the same time, too.  For instance, the Republican War on Women isn't exactly the kind of message uppity women interested in politics like to hear.

What we read in places like the conservative Townhall is that women are not Republicans because women want a Big Government Daddy to provide for them and because women aren't that smart.  So take your pick, I guess.

On The Potential Government Shutdown

I have been mouse-silent on it.   There's not that much to say about a two-year-old's temper tantrums and that's the only good analog I can think of to this tea-party-driven show of power.

Except that the tea-partiers don't have the excuse of very young age and not much opportunity to learn.  So you might as well read this Slate piece about how the press would report the likely shutdown if it was happening in some other country.

Well, there is that continuing resolution the House passed:

Late Saturday night, the House of Representatives passed a continuing resolution (CR) that would keep the government open only if the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is delayed for a year and only if bosses are allowed to make their female employees’ health decisions. The House bill singles out women’s health care for this interference.

Specifically, the House-passed CR would exempt bosses from complying with the ACA’s Women’s Health Amendment if they oppose it for “religious or moral” reasons.   This means that bosses could impose their religious beliefs on their employees, or block their employees’ access to needed women’s health care for vague and undefined “moral” reasons. Female employees and dependents – just like men – are capable of making their own health decisions and must be allowed to do so without interference from their bosses.

It smells a bit like mafia politics to me.  "Nice country you have here.  It would be too bad if something happened to it."

The continuing resolution is naturally about contraceptives, the Catholic Church, and, on a very deep level, about the general conservative sentiment that both sex and its consequences should have large costs  to women.

This applies even to contraception which, by its very nature, will also benefit the woman's male partner. With the exception of the cases where the contraceptive pill is taken for other medical reasons, its subsidized price benefits approximately as many heterosexual men as women, I think*.  But if one wants the woman to pay for sex (by taking care of contraception or by giving birth and then taking care of the child), any kind of subsidy smells wrong.

------
*People in long-term heterosexual relationships have roughly the same number of men and women.  Those who have more than one sex partner can be of either sex, and if we consider the fact that protection ten times with ten different partners adds up to protection ten times with the same partner, it doesn't seem unlikely that the benefits of the contraceptive subsidies are ultimately pretty gender-neutral.  All this looks at only those people who wish to avoid pregnancy.  But that's the majority of people most of the time.
------
For recent events in all this, read here. 

The Consequences of Firing A Gun Near Someone

If your name is Aaron Alexis and you later become famous for killing twelve people, you can fire a gun in the ceiling and not get prosecuted:

On Sept. 5, 2010, he was arrested in Fort Worth on suspicion of discharging a weapon. Alexis reportedly told officials that the gun had discharged accidentally when he was cleaning it. The Tarrant County district attorney did not prosecute.

If your name is Allen West and you later become famous as a politician, you can fire a gun near a military prisoner and end up with a $5000.00 fine:

While serving as a battalion commander in Iraq in 2003, the Palm Beach Gardens Republican fired a gun near a prisoner's head to scare the prisoner into giving up information on ambush plans. He was fined $5,000 for misconduct and assault. The Army opted against a court martial, however, and he was honorably discharged with benefits.

If your name is Marissa Alexander, and you fire a gun in the air as a warning during a struggle with your abusive husband, you get sentenced for twenty years in prison:

Marissa Alexander, the African-American woman who was sentenced to 20 years for discharging a firearm in Florida despite pleading Stand Your Ground against her husband, will get a new trial. Alexander, 32, said she fired a bullet at the ceiling because she was afraid of her husband. No one was injured. It took 12 minutes for the jury to convict her.
“We reject her contention that the trial court erred in declining to grant her immunity from prosecution under Florida’s Stand Your Ground law,” wrote Judge James H. Daniel, “but we remand for a new trial because the jury instructions on self-defense were erroneous.”
Alexander, who had given birth the week before, testified that after an altercation regarding texts from her ex-husband, she locked herself in the bathroom. Her husband Rico Gray broke through the door, grabbed her by the neck, and shoved her into the door. She ran to the garage, found she couldn’t get the door open, and returned with a gun. When Gray saw the gun, he said, “Bitch, I’ll kill you.” Alexander testified that firing the gun into the air as a warning shot was “the lesser of two evils.”
The jury rejected her self-defense argument, and instead Alexander was sentenced under the “10-20-Life” law, which carries a series of mandatory minimum sentences related to gun crimes. The prosecutor in her case was Angela Corey, who also prosecuted George Zimmerman who was acquitted in the death of Trayvon Martin. After an outcry at the apparent racial double standard in the application of Stand Your Ground, Corey told the Washington Post, “I think social media is going to be the destruction of this country.”

 I am glad that she gets a new trial.

I understand that these three cases were not judged under the same legal rules.  But still.

Driving Damages Women's Ovaries. According to a Saudi Cleric.

This is in connection with a campaign challenging the ban on women drivers in Saudi Arabia:

Saudi traffic police have fined several car owners after six women were found defying the kingdom's male-only driving rules, a Saudi daily reported on Wednesday.
The fines in Eastern Province coincide with a campaign called by women's rights activists to challenge the ban on women driving in the conservative Islamic kingdom late next month.
Traffic police issued fines totalling 5,400 riyals ($1,400) for allowing "an unqualified person to drive", al-Sharq newspaper reported, quoting an acting police spokesman.
"The cases were stopped near the beach and in uninhabited areas that are still being developed," Major Mansour al-Shakra said. "They were driving for fun and not to learn how to drive."

Women are told to put reason ahead their hearts and passions by a Saudi cleric who tells us this:

"If a woman drives a car, not out of pure necessity, that could have negative physiological impacts as functional and physiological medical studies show that it automatically affects the ovaries and pushes the pelvis upwards," he told Sabq.
"That is why we find those who regularly drive have children with clinical problems of varying degrees," he said.

Let's use that reason, then.  If driving is bad because it tilts the pelvis upwards, so is all sitting.   And if driving is bad because of some movement related aspects, well, then sitting in the car as a passenger is equally bad, right?  Finally, there are no studies showing that driving causes the kinds of problems this cleric makes up.

All this reminds me of the Victorians' arguments against higher education for women in Europe and the US.  Your uterus will leak out of your head if you cram your brain with facts!  It will start roaming about and you end up hysterical!  And the puny energies of women are not sufficient for both studying and birth-giving.

That's because the two are motivated by the same imperative urges, of course:  to keep women out of some activity.

In somewhat related news:

Two prominent female rights activists who went to the aid of a woman they believed to be in distress are expected to go to jail in Saudi Arabia on Sunday after the failure of their appeal against a 10-month prison sentence and a two-year travel ban.
Wajeha al-Huwaider, a writer who has repeatedly defied Saudi laws by driving a car, and Fawzia al-Oyouni were arrested for taking a food parcel to the house of someone they thought was in an abusive relationship. In June they were found guilty on a sharia law charge of takhbib – incitement of a wife to defy the authority of her husband, thus undermining the marriage.
Campaigners say they are "heroes" who have been given heavy sentences to punish them for speaking out against Saudi restrictions on women's rights, which include limited access to education and child marriage as well as not being able to drive or even travel in a car without a male relative being present.

Comparing Elephants and Tony Makris

Contents:  Cruelty towards animals.



Both elephants and NRA Lobbyist and NBC Sports Network host Tony Makris  seem capable of anger.   Makris shot an elephant in the face and then accused those who criticized him of being like Hitler.  Elephants also feel anger and grief.  On the latter:

One of the most moving displays of elephant emotion is the grieving process. Elephants remember and mourn loved ones, even many years after their death. When an elephant walks past a place that a loved one died he or she will stop and take a silent pause that can last several minutes. While standing over the remains, the elephant may touch the bones of the dead elephant (not the bones of any other species), smelling them, turning them over and caressing the bones with their trunk. Researchers don't quite understand the reason for this behavior. They guess the elephants could be grieving. Or they could they be reliving memories. Or perhaps the elephant is trying to recognize the deceased. Whatever the reason, researchers suspect that the sheer interest in the dead elephant is evidence that elephants have a concept of death. In UNFORGETTABLE ELEPHANTS, when Erin is wounded, Echo and the family never wander far from her over the course of several days, leaving only to drink. After Erin's death, her family touched and smelled the bones, as filmmaker Martyn Colbeck says, "as if they were trying to understand what had happened."

On the former:

Terror, rage and stress, unfortunately, are also commonplace in the elephant repertoire of emotions. Terror afflicts baby African elephants who wake up screaming in the middle of the night after they have witnessed their families murdered and poached--a type of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Some researchers suggest a species-wide trauma is taking place in wild elephant populations. They say that elephants are suffering from a form of chronic stress after sustaining decades of killings and habitat loss. The recent surge in cases of wild elephant rage reported by the media is a sad indicator of the kind of stress that wild elephants are undergoing. Nearly 300 persons are killed every year by wild elephants in India. But the increasing numbers of deaths are closely correlated to the ever-increasing human presence in traditional wild elephant habitats, as well as the the effects of climate change, and loss of territory and resources. The ongoing competition between elephants and humans for available land and resources is leading to ever more unfortunate and often deadly consequences.

Human activity does more than put a stress on elephants to find resources. It can often disrupt the complex and delicate web of familial and societal relations that are so important in elephant society. Calves are carefully protected and guarded by members of the matriarchal elephant family. Any perception of danger triggers a violent reaction from the matriarch and, subsequently, the entire family. The extremes a family will go to protect a vulnerable new calf are reported in the news stories as fits of unprovoked "elephant rage." Charging a village, storming into huts where harvested crop is stored, plundering fields and, if disturbed, turning violent are some of the instances reported by the media.

The Price of an Engagement Ring: Three Hundred Sandwiches.

You can read all about this publicity stunt (for a book?) by a New York Post reporter here.  A snippet:

My boyfriend, Eric, is the gourmet cook in our relationship, but he’d always want me to make him a sandwich.
Each morning, he would ask, “Honey, how long you have been awake?”
“About 15 minutes,” I’d reply.
“You’ve been up for 15 minutes and you haven’t made me a sandwich?”
To him, sandwiches are like kisses or hugs. Or sex. “Sandwiches are love,” he says. “Especially when you make them. You can’t get a sandwich with love from the deli.”
One lazy summer afternoon just over a year ago, I finally gave in. I assembled turkey and Swiss on toasted wheat bread. I spread Dijon mustard generously on both bread slices, and I made sure the lettuce was perfectly in line with the neatly stacked turkey slices.
Eric devoured the sandwich as if it were a five-star meal, diving in with large, eager bites. “Babes, this is delicious!” he exclaimed.
As he finished that last bite, he made an unexpected declaration of how much he loved me and that sandwich: “Honey, you’re 300 sandwiches away from an engagement ring!”

So what can a girl do?  Make three hundred sandwiches, naturally.  The story is cute, all about love and feeding those you love and the sandwiches probably are delicious, too, right?

Then there's the side with the baby monsters.  She's making these sandwiches in exchange for a wedding ring because

Things were moving at a natural pace, but I wondered what it would take for him to propose. I’m in my mid-30s, and my parents have been happily married for more than 35 years. I have always valued the commitment and dedication it takes to get married and stay married. Call me old-fashioned, but I’d like to raise a family with someone who feels likewise.
Maybe I needed to show him I could cook to prove that I am wife material. If he wanted 300 sandwiches, I’d give him 300 sandwiches — and I’d blog about it.

One way to read that is that he's not keen to marry her unless she makes him sandwiches, that the marriage is something she has to buy from him, that she has to wait for him to propose.  And then there's the fact that this contract between her labor and his future payment for it (the ring) cannot be enforced in any court.  So she may end up having made all those sandwiches and then he just moves on.  Except that this is probably a publicity stunt.

Why it isn't a very good stunt is because of this: "Make me a sammitch, bitch!" is the most common   response of sexists to anything by an uppity woman (an article, a piece of music, a sports achievement).  Typing it out doesn't take much thought.  Even a brainless person can use it, and the intention is to remind that uppity bitch that she is supposed to be subservient.  I have read that thing gazillion times.

So the way I interpret this story is as a female subjugation story.  Come to think of it, that's how it might be intended to read?  Maybe the book or blog or whatever is going to be 2013's answer to that 1970s book about how to obey your husband best so that he will buy you a deep freeze.

On the other hand, that commercial flavor of the transaction smacks of something different.  We might be able to pick and choose which tired image of women we wish to use here (obedient mate, manhunter/golddigger).  But in any case, as the happy sammitch-man, Eric, states:

“You women read all these magazines to get advice on how to keep a man, and it’s so easy,” he says. “We’re not complex. Just do something nice for us. Like make a sandwich.”

I thought it was 300 sandwiches, in exchange for a ring?   And there's the third tired image of women and men, the dichotomy of men as very very simple creatures, as long as they get fed and of women as sandwich presses.

Speed Blogging 9/26/2013. On the Pope, Revenge Porn, Girls Having Cooties and Affirmative Action Bake Sales

Katha Pollitt asks whether the new Pope is actually any better for women than the previous ones were.  

Emily Bazelon talks about revenge porn and the fact that there is no current legal remedy to the harm it causes. 

Soraya Chemaly writes about the way we teach boys not to be girly in the US.  I think the boys' school crisis partly links to the idea that if girls can do education it's not worth doing, at least in some subcultures.  The other (and bigger) reason, as I've written before, is that what women can earn without college education is chicken feed and whatever we call women (chicks) they cannot bring up a family on those earnings.  The average male earnings based on just a high school certificate are considerably higher than the average female earnings based on the same certificate.

The Young Conservatives of Texas had another bake sale to protest affirmative action.  The idea is to sell cookies for less to members of minorities and women, to show how wrong this is.  What I've always found hilarious about the concept is that the average earnings of all minorities except for Asian-Americans are lower than those of non-Hispanic whites, and the average earnings of women are less than the average earnings of men.  So there's a sense in which we could have a bake sale about that or at least to realize that the relative sacrifices different kinds of people have to make for the same cookie actually ARE different.  But that's probably too difficult.

Finally, just for fun, pictures of medieval head-dresses created in an airplane toilet.

Men Eating Menstrual Pads. David Gilmour on Teaching Real Guy-Guy LIterature

Suppose you read this from a professor of literature:

I’m not interested in teaching books by women. Virginia Woolf is the only writer that interests me as a woman writer, so I do teach one of her short stories. But once again, when I was given this job I said I would only teach the people that I truly, truly love. Unfortunately, none of those happen to be Chinese, or women. Except for Virginia Woolf. And when I tried to teach Virginia Woolf, she’s too sophisticated, even for a third-year class. Usually at the beginning of the semester a hand shoots up and someone asks why there aren’t any women writers in the course. I say I don’t love women writers enough to teach them, if you want women writers go down the hall. What I teach is guys. Serious heterosexual guys. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Tolstoy. Real guy-guys. Henry Miller. Philip Roth.

Bolds are mine.

What would your reaction be?  If you were told that this was said in 2013 and is actually happening in Canada, where the person speaking there, David Gilmour, teaches short stories at the University of Toronto.

My reaction was an odd one.  The usual pain in always being regarded as the other, the usual notice of the idea that something like "real guy-guys" is a valid literary genre to teach, and the usual observation that this is a Catch-22 problem for women writers, because they cannot become "serious heterosexual guys" in David Gilmour's world and therefore can never become writers worth covering.  Except for Virginia Woolf, the usual honorary gentleman.

Gilmour's principles are at least partly gender-essentialist.  More precisely, he likes great literature which approaches pornography, and that's why he likes Henry Miller whose books are pretty much built on misogyny, I think:

I teach Tropic of Cancer to the first-year class. They’re shocked out of their pants. No one teaches it except for me. Sometimes their parents actually question me about it, they say, Listen, this is really outrageous. I say, well, it’s a piece of literature that’s been around for 60 years. It’s got something going for it.
There’s an even dirtier one that I teach, by Philip Roth, called The Dying Animal. I save it ’til the very end of the year because by that point they’ve got fairly strong stomachs, and they’re far more sophisticated than they are in the beginning. So they can understand the differences between pornography and great literature. There are men eating menstrual pads, and by the time my students get to that they’re ready.

Objectivity in Journalism. It Does Not Mean Reporting He Said, She Said.

What it does mean might be debated.  But it probably doesn't look the way NBC White House correspondent Chuck Todd assumes:

Appearing on MSNBC's Morning Joe today (9/18/13), Todd responded to Ed Rendell's claim that Obamacare opponents are full of misinformation about the program by explaining that this was because Republicans  "have successfully messaged against it." But wasn't journalism's job to expose misinformation? No, Todd insisted; if the public was misinformed about the Affordable Care Act, it was the president's fault for not pushing back:
What I always love is people say, "Well, it's you folks' fault in the media." No, it's the president of the United States' fault for not selling it.

Of course, if it's not the job of the media to provide facts, the job of the media just got a lot cushier.  No need to do research, no need to learn about a new field, no need to do much anything but be a recorder.

News About Sexism

On Hillary Clinton:

Discussing speculation that Clinton might run for president in 2016, Washington Times' editor emeritus Wesley Pruden, began his September 24 column by noting that Clinton's interview with New York magazine had revived speculation on her political plans, adding, "the lady knows how to keep everyone guessing. Only her roots are showing." Pruden concluded by saying that Clinton's age is "not particularly old for a man" but "a woman in public life is getting past her sell-by date":
Will she or won't she? Not even her hairdresser, who is only called in occasionally, knows for sure. But the lady knows how to keep everyone guessing. Only her roots are showing.
[...]
But what do they actually know? Hillary would be 69 on Inauguration Day 2017, not particularly old for a man not out of sight of his prime, but a woman in public life is getting past her sell-by date at 69. John F. Kennedy, who never had to grow old, got it right when he famously remarked that "life is unfair." A second failed race for president would not be much of a capstone for a distinguished career in politics, and life at the hearth with Bubba and the dogs would be more rewarding than indulging the parasites of another campaign.

Bolds are mine.  What is funny about that quote is the way it is sorta the reverse of reality.  As women live longer, on average, than men, a 69-year old man is, statistically speaking, closer to his sell-by date than a 69-year old woman.  But Pruden is not talking about that.  He's talking about whether a woman's looks appeal to him or not.

What John Lydon said:

John Lydon is no stranger to shocking television appearances, but the former Sex Pistol provoked fury today by ordering a female host to “shut up when a man is talking”.
The 57-year-old was branded a “sexist, misogynist pig” after his appearance on the Australian talk show The Project on Channel Ten.

With apologies to all pigs who are charming and smart creatures.

Finally, and slightly late, the discussion about racism in the Miss America contest gives an interesting example of one of those cases where different social justice concepts clash.  Is it an advance if something sexist becomes less racist?  Or something racist becomes less sexist?  You work that one out.

Head Cold Or Flu

Day four.  It seems to be going around.  Cougcoughcough.

Mother Blaming. The Gift Which Keeps On Giving

This time it's from the Finnish Helsingin Sanomat, in an article pleading for zero tolerance when it comes to alcohol and pregnancy.  This, my friends, means essentially that all fertile women should stop drinking, and that certainly no pregnant woman should ever have a glass of wine.

The latter is because "nobody has established a safe level of alcohol consumption during pregnancy."  But that's partly because the existing studies are about severe alcohol consumption by women who qualify for the label "alcoholics."  The recommendation of no alcohol is made on that basis, and because alcohol consumption is purely optional.  So there's no real loss, the thinking goes, when women are told that even a teaspoonful of alcohol could cause havoc with the developing fetus, whether that is the case or not.

And all that may be fine.  What's NOT fine is how the story in Helsingin Sanomat goes.  I have translated some bits from it, to explain what I dislike about it:

Vähäinenkin alkoholinkäyttö raskauden aikana huolestuttaa alan tutkijoita. He vetoavat nollatoleranssin puolesta.
Asiantuntijat ovat huolissaan raskaana olevien suomalaisten alkoholinkäytöstä.
Monet raskaana olevat juovat lasillisen silloin tällöin, mutta tämäkin huolestuttaa asiantuntijoita. Näyttöä riskirajasta tai turvallisesta rajasta ei ole.
"Mehän emme koskaan voi tehdä ihmiskokeita tällaisella asialla", raskaana olevien naisten päihteiden käytöstä väitellyt erikoislääkäri Hanna Kahila.
Suomessa syntyy vuosittain arviolta kuusisataa lasta, jotka ovat selvästi äidin raskaudenaikaisen juomisen vaurioittamia. Lisäksi vuosittain kaikkiaan 3 600 lapsen arvioidaan sikiöaikanaan altistuneen äidin runsaalle alkoholinkäytölle.

Translation:

Even very limited consumption of alcohol during pregnancy worries the experts in the field.  They appeal for zero tolerance.

The experts are worried about the alcohol use of pregnant Finns.  Many pregnant women have the occasional glass of alcohol, but even this troubles the experts.  There is no evidence about the risk limit or safety limit.

"We can't carry out human experiments in this area," states the specialist Hanna Kahila whose dissertation concerns women's use of alcohol.

Approximately six hundred Finnish children are born each year, clearly damaged by the mother's alcohol consumption during pregnancy.  In addition to that,  3600 children are estimated to have been exposed during pregnancy to the mother's plentiful use of alcohol.

Note two things in that excerpt.  First, the story speaks to all pregnant women.  Second, the data on children with alcohol-related problems probably is linked to cases of real alcoholism.  To put the latter into perspective, in 2012 the number of live births in Finland was 59,493.

A second quote:

Naisten alkoholinkäyttö ja nuorten naisten humalajuominen on lisääntynyt rajusti viime vuosikymmeninä.
Asiantuntijoiden pelkona on, että tämä näkyy myös sikiövaurioiden lisääntymisenä.

 ...

Tutkimusten mukaan joka toinen raskaus on suunnittelematon, Kahila ja Autti-Rämö sanovat. Moni nainen juokin itsensä humalaan, kun ei tiedä olevansa raskaana. Kuitenkin juuri raskauden alkuvaiheessa syntyy perusta keskushermostolle ja muille elimille, Autti-Rämö muistuttaa.

Translation:

Women's use of alcohol and the drinking by  young women to inebriation has radically increased in recent decades.  Experts fear that this will also show in increased fetal abnormalities.

...

According to studies, every other pregnancy is unplanned, Kahila and Autti-Ramo state.  Thus, many women may drink themselves into inebriation while not knowing about being pregnant.  Yet it is at the beginning of the pregnancy that the foundation for the central nervous system and other organs are created, Autti-Ramo reminds us.

And what does that suggest to you, hmh?  Perhaps we should insist that no fertile person with female sex organs ever has a drink anywhere?  Even if there are no studies about the effect of having the occasional glass of wine etc.  Because, after all, we are talking about the whole lives of potential future people here!  Only very selfish bitches would disagree with something like that (and, oh boy, do we get the selfishness of women discussed in the comments!).

Those of you who are familiar with this blog know already that I'm not advocating alcohol for anyone and certainly not for people (both male and female) who try to conceive.  But there's something truly odd about these sermon-type articles, aimed at women.

They try to push the guilt buttons of all women, they always imply that any sacrifice is acceptable and they misuse data to get to that conclusion.

On the latter,  take the reference to half of all pregnancies being unplanned.  As the study was not quoted in the article, I may be mistaken in assuming that it's the US study.  But let's assume that it is.  Then note this, about that study:

Two-thirds of U.S. women at risk for unintended pregnancy use contraception consistently and correctly throughout the course of any given year; these women account for only 5% of all unintended pregnancies. In contrast, the 19% of women at risk who use contraception inconsistently or incorrectly account for 43% of all unintended pregnancies. The 16% of women at risk who do not practice contraception at all for a month or more during the year account for 52% of all unintended pregnancies (see graph).[13]

Why does this matter?  Because the conclusions one draws are quite different.  If a woman wants to have the occasional glass of wine, she can do so pretty safely for any potential future fetuses by using contraception properly.  The conclusion of the "experts" in that article are rather different, implying that women, as a class, should not drink at all.

Then, of course, there's the fact that these kinds of stories are rarely aimed at men who consider becoming fathers, even though no study has shown the safe amount of alcohol they could imbibe, without damaging their sperm.  (Yes, this is a quip on the previous discussion of safe limits.)

Let me finish with the beautiful (beauuuutiful!) end to that Helsingin Sanomat article.  Here we really get into the mother blaming:

"Jokainen voi mennä peilin ääreen ja kysyä siltä peilikuvaltaan, että onko äidin oikeus juoda ja käyttää päihteitä suurempi kuin lapsen oikeus syntyä terveenä", toteaa sosiaali- ja terveysministeriön hyvinvoinnin ja terveyden edistämisen johtaja Kari Paaso.

 Translation:

"Each and every one of us can stand in front of a mirror and ask that mirror image if the right of a mother to drink and use drugs is greater than the right of a child to be born healthy."  notes Kari Paaso, the manager in the advancement of health and well-being at the ministry of social matters and health.

The comments to the story run wild with all these ideas, as you might imagine.  The selfishness of women is mentioned in several, and a few speculate that all children with difficulties at school have those because of what their mothers did during pregnancy!   Almost anything and everything can  now be assumed to be the fault of women during pregnancy.  And if they deny ever drinking or smoking, well, we all know they will lie.

I guess my annoyance with this piece is partly because they are so very very many, but only when directed at women, and because anything having to do with being a mother is discussed as a problem for ALL women and ALL mothers.  So if some women drink too much, then all women must be given a strict sermon.  And so on.  One becomes subject to this simply be being female, by the way, not by anything one does.  And then lots and lots of people join in policing those female bodies.  Because of the aquaria aspect. 

Yet we don't carry out these types of sermons when it comes to other large groups of people.
-----
Added later:  The way to make this something less than hectoring at all women (with implications of selfishness etc.) would have been to state the recommendation:  zero tolerance, and then to explain why that is the case (no safe amount known).  Then one might have added that taking care of contraception is recommended for women who like to drink alcohol and are fertile, and that both partners  should avoid alcohol while planning for conception and, once pregnancy follows, the woman should abstain from alcohol.  That would still not give all the evidence there is but at least it would be respectful of the intended audience (women).

Friday Night Music

On Gun Rights

The right to bear guns:

Two drivers are dead after a "road rage" incident in the Ionia, Mich., area escalated into a shootout, WZZM-TV in Grand Rapids is reporting.
Witnesses told the station that one driver was following the other too closely Wednesday evening shortly before 7 p.m. when the first driver pulled into a car wash and the second followed him.
The driver of the second car then fired shots, and the first driver returned fire, leaving both of them dead, witnesses told the TV station.

The right to bear guns:

Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy said a mass shooting at a South Side park shows why assault weapons should be banned, saying it was a "miracle" no one was killed when someone opened fire with a high-powered rifle at a pick-up basketball game.

"A military-grade weapon on the streets of Chicago is simply unacceptable,"  McCarthy told a news conference this morning, 12 hours after a 3-year-old boy and 12 other people were shot during at Cornell Square Park. All are expected to survive.

"It's a miracle there has been no fatality," he said. "Illegal guns, illegal guns, illegal guns drive violence."

And of course the Navy Yard massacre in Washington, D.C..

If the Newtown kindergarten children's deaths made no difference in gun control, then nothing will.  I have read that the fact that some people misuse guns should not infringe on other people's right to have guns.  That would cover not only the use of guns to kill others on purpose, but also the use of guns to kill others by accident, including by toddlers.

The concept of gun rights is interesting, because the debate usually overlooks any right of others not to be shot by people who have guns.   It also ignores the fact that guns are tools and can be difficult to use correctly, that they are dangerous tools which should be stored safely and which should be removed from those who cannot use them properly.

All that is because of the religious aspect of guns, the idea that owning a gun is necessary and sufficient as a form of protection.  Perhaps "religious" is not the right term here.  What I mean is the idea that the object, "a gun, " in itself is somehow protective.  But even the police, who train in shooting, still make big mistakes with that.  Under conditions of panic, can you guarantee that you would shoot more accurately, with the minimum damage to get the outcome you need?  And can you guarantee that the gun wouldn't be taken away from you and used against you?

Solutions to this dilemma in the US are not forthcoming.  Perhaps requiring people to have insurance for their guns, the way we do with cars, would help a little. 

The point of the two quoted theories above is that the damage in those cases would have been far less without the presence of guns.  That "people kill people, guns don't kill people" is only true in the same sense as "people mow lawns, not lawnmowers" in that we could also cut the lawn with nail scissors.

 

Feminine Machismo

The things one learns!  That is something Cardinal Timothy Dolan referred to when describing the new Pope's attitudes towards women and the church:

Turning to the issue of the role of women within the Catholic church, Dolan summarized the pope's sentiments. "He warned against the feminine machismo."

"The feminine genius is needed wherever we make important decisions," Pope Francis told the magazine, explaining that in his view, "the church cannot be herself without the woman and her role. ... We have to work harder to develop a profound theology of the woman."

Yes, I know that Pope Francis might be a refreshing change from the previous Old Boys' Club in the Catholic Church, and it's fun to hear about something like "the feminine genius!"

But what is "the woman and her role?"  Dolan says a bit more in the attached video, implying that "feminine machismo" happens when women try to be like men.  That's not a good thing!  Because then everyone has machismo, I guess.

Still, the way I read this is that "the woman and her role" matter, in a sense different from "the man and his role."  There's no "theology of the man" in the church, either, because "man" is the default setting, so all theology is about him.  You only realize this when you read enough to come across some shocking statement (also in the Bible or the Koran) where women are set apart and given stricter rules for existing.

And that's why "the woman and her role" is probably shorthand for essentialism, the idea that all women are the same with each other, and that there can be a general theology of the proper place of anyone with the xx-chromosome.  And that place might not be a powerful one, given that machismo warning.

Pope Francis could be a good guy, for a pope.  I'm reserving judgement until I see him walk his talk.  The fact remains, nevertheless, that the Catholic Church explicitly excludes women from priesthood and from almost all truly powerful positions.  The fact remains that it is celibate men (or apparently celibate men) who determine the church's views on the sexual lives of women, what is allowed and what is not.  The fact remains that those views are not good for poor women.

The Threat of "Obamacare:" Large Uncle Sam Puppet Will Look Up Your Ladybits

This is worth reading.

The conservatives are trying to make young women opt out of "Obamacare" because Uncle Sam will look up your vagina!   

I was giggling when I read that post.   Let me count the reasons why:

First, as Matt points out, it is preposterous to suggest that having no insurance is better than having insurance with a large puppet looking up your ladybits.

Second, there won't be a large puppet in the examination room.  I swear!

Third, this is absolutely hilarious, given that conservatives reallyreally want to insert probes (transvaginal ultrasound) in women's vaginas as a precondition for getting an abortion, and those probes are not medically required.   Women are not supposed to mind that but they *are* supposed to mind a large puppet ogling their birth canals.

Fourth, I think whoever designed this campaign has never been to a gynecologist!  The average woman (well, I, at least) has faced much more unpleasant crap in those examination rooms than large puppets getting an eyeful.

Which brings me to this:

Chris Moody at Yahoo reports on one of the groups leading the boycott charge, Generation Opportuniy, an organization funded by the legendarily youthful Charles and David Koch who have nothing but the best interests of younger Americans at heart.

The Koch brothers, again.

Royal Austerity in Holland

I read this with my morning cup of coffee:

King Willem-Alexander delivered a message to the Dutch people from the government in a nationally televised address: the welfare state of the 20th century is gone.
In its place a "participation society" is emerging, in which people must take responsibility for their own future and create their own social and financial safety nets, with less help from the national government. 

...

"The shift to a 'participation society' is especially visible in social security and long-term care," the king said, reading out to lawmakers a speech written for him by Prime Minister Mark Rutte's government. 

"The classic welfare state of the second half of the 20th century in these areas in particular brought forth arrangements that are unsustainable in their current form." 

Rutte may be hoping that the pomp and ceremony surrounding the king and his popular wife, Queen Maxima, will provide a diversion from the gloomy reality of a budget full of unpopular new spending cuts he revealed later in the day. 


...

The king said Tuesday some costs for the care of the elderly, for youth services, and for job retraining after layoffs will now be pushed back to the local level, in order to make them better tailored to local circumstances. 

The king earns an annual salary of around 825,000 euros ($1.1 million), though maintaining the Royal House — castles, parades and all — costs the government more than 100 million euros annually. 


Then I realized that nobody had participated in making me that coffee!  Nobody!  And neither had the welfare state.  Drat.

More seriously, perhaps the new king of the Netherlands is so beloved by the people that they see nothing funny about a guy costing the government more than 100 million euros per year talking about the need to cut back on the care of the elderly, youth service and job retraining.  For that's what it means when those services are sent down to a local level.

The wider angle to all this, the death of the welfare state, serves nicely those who are wealthy, of course.  And I get the arguments people like Mark Rutte make (though I disagree about the possible consequences of austerity politics). 

But what they seem to completely ignore is that almost all the good things in the recent century have come from countries which were welfare states.  Free education guaranteed  educated labor, good health care guaranteed relatively healthy and energetic workers and old-age pensions took care of the burden of how to care for the elderly. 

If we begin to scrap all those institutions we are going to go backwards, to a world in which I, at least, have no desire to live.  I thought the idea was to lift the rest of the world to the same relative standard of living as people in Europe and North America now enjoy, not to send even the Europeans and North Americans back to a life of always-looming poverty.

For that's how I  read the argument that the welfare state is over.  And what on earth is a participation society?  What are people doing today, if not participating?

The immediate concerns this provokes have to do with the distributive aspects.  The services will be curtailed and someone else will be expected to cover the gaps.  That "someone" else in most cases will be the immediate family of a sick or elderly person, assuming he or she didn't save for the needs before.  And in practice this will affect women even more than men, given the traditional patterns of care-giving.

I get that the welfare state is not actually in the process of being killed.  But the propaganda here is to start accepting that idea, slowly but surely, not just cuts in existing services or a determination not to expand them. That's something to be very concerned about.

Added to the List: Mass Shootings: Also Caused By Working Women

That list is long, about all the stuff women in the labor force cause and the stuff feminism has caused:  Unhappy women, latch-key children, the destruction  of the traditional concepts of masculinity, alcoholism among young women, the hook-up culture, the death of the patriarchal family and the outright destruction of the Western Civilization.  And now mass shootings!  Clearly, we need to revert to the gender norms of Iraq or Afghanistan to get rid of all that violence!

Joking there, though the people saying all those things were not joking.  They were Very Serious.  The most recent example, the one about mass shootings really being women's fault, even though almost all mass shooters are men, comes from a wannabe politician:

Former New Hampshire state Sen. Jim Rubens is jumping into the race to defeat Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen Wednesday. Before he even reaches the starting blocks, Democrats are questioning his ability to reach women voters.
The reason? A 2009 post on his website that connects the rise of working women with what he says is a rise in mass shootings and other violence perpetrated by men.
“The collaborative, flexible, amorphously-hierarchical American economy is shutting out ordinary men who were once the nation’s breadwinners in living-wage labor and manufacturing jobs,” Rubens wrote. “Because status success is more vital to the male psychology, males are falling over the edge in increasing numbers.”
A “collaborative” and “flexible” economy is one that has opened the door to more women working, Rubens wrote. And the nature of the changing economy has had a detrimental effect on men, including an increase in violence.
“The collapsing number of male jobs in the increasingly female-centric economy just adds to the already harsher impact of OverSuccess on males,” he wrote, referring to the title of his 2008 book.
It’s a view Rubens still holds today, and he seemed surprised in an interview Wednesday that anyone would care about it.
“The point of this, if you read the whole thing, is that manufacturing jobs, which have been the basis for higher-wage working men during the post-World War II era have been in decline,” he said. “Men are more sensitive than women to external indicators of status, which is one of the points in my book — which you might want to read so you can understand the whole point of this — and it’s very important to all people, women and men, to have jobs, functions, and roles in life that are fulfilling and productive and engaging.”
The loss of manufacturing jobs that men often held in favor of “collaborative” jobs that favor women, Rubens said, “has increased stress in males.”
“It’s a tiny fraction of males that become stressed for whatever reason and engage in acts of extreme violence,” he said. “If you look through individual psychology of mass shooters over the past 10-20 years, you can see that in the profile. Often its a person who has been subjected to extreme stress in the form of social rejection, job loss and associated mental health issues.”
Tweaking the tax code to add manufacturing jobs would be one way to reduce this “stress” on men, Rubens said.

A female-centric economy!  This guy is gonna win biiiiig!  At least in the alternate reality he inhabits.

Now, it could be argued that he isn't blaming working women as such.  He is just blaming the economic culture which makes it easier for women to hold jobs than was the case in the past.  And so I was exaggerating at the beginning of this post.  But, sweeties, that's the only thing that works in writing, these days!  Click magnets.

In any case, I think Rubens' deeper views are pretty obvious:  If we only returned to the old (mythical) male breadwinner  days, then male violence would really really drop.  Just ask people in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan!   The point, naturally, is to take a problem in which women are almost as common as teeth on hens (as perpetrators of mass killings)  and then turn that into a problem in which women have a large role to play.  Note, also, that if the latest mass killing had been by a woman, then an anti-feminist probably would have written that it was caused by feminism which turns women into killers etc..

It's one of those you-can't-win arguments.

Mr. Rubens has now cleaned off the offending blog post.

Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller Recommends The Monitoring of Wombs..

Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller is advocating the testing of all pregnant women in Indiana for drug use.  Well, at least he was advocating for that on the twelfth of September.  You can listen to him here, starting at slightly after 54 minutes.  There's also a transcript of that part of the discussion.

A snippet from it:

MR. ZOELLER: One of the things that’s the most shocking, and I, you know, the whole thing and the number of, you know, 718 deaths last year attributed to drug overdose, prescription drug overdoses, uh, but the rates of addiction, and the one that really bothers me the most is, uh, women who give birth to babies that are addicted –

MR. MCCONNAUGHAY: That’s – that’s gonna play right into a question we got, ‘cause I told you we got a few questions that actually followed you here from Indianapolis –

MR. ZOELLER: Yeah. I hope – I hope those questions are coming –

MR. MCCONNAUGHAY:  So let’s knock them down as quickly as we can but, uh, please ask Mr. Zoeller that, uh, mandatory drug screens for Indiana men seeking to donate sperm and buy Viagra. After all, that drug use can lead to mutations in their sperm which can cause birth defects, uh, costing the state money and harming babies. Basically they’re saying, those who wanna get these things, should they be required to go through drug testing?

MR. ZOELLER: You know, that’s not something that our prescription drug abuse task force is focused on. It’s mostly the, uh, I mean the rates of, uh, babies born addicted to opiates is the biggest, I mean the problem literally screams out at us the same way the, the babies scream for six weeks. It can be un- I mean, that you can’t comfort ‘em enough because they’re addicted to drugs.

Now the last exchange between the interviewer (Mr. McConnaughay) and Mr. Zoeller is fascinating!  Or rather, Mr. Zoeller's answer is nonsensical.  He's just focusing on pregnant women, not on the men who may have participated in the creation of that pregnancy, because he has decided that a particular focus is relevant.

Mr. Zoeller's idea in the above is clearly to require all pregnant women to be screened.  There doesn't have to be any grounds for suspecting that any particular woman has been misusing prescription or other drugs.

What would be so bad about that?  After all, it's for the good of the fetus and the blood is already being drawn for other purposes?

Let me propose a somewhat different but related example.  Suppose that we were able to screen for pedophilia.  Should all prospective parents be screened for it?  Or should all men be screened for possible tendencies to rape?

Many similar examples could be found in which some other person might benefit from forced screening for various problems.  The point is that it is pregnant women who are singled out for this type of treatment, not, say,  prospective parents of both sexes, even though sperm quality might be affected by drug use, too.

But is this what Mr. Zoeller is now proposing?  Al-Jazeera for America seems to think so,  whereas Fox seems to argue that Mr. Zoeller now only wants mandatory verbal screening:

Some women fear Zoeller’s push means mandatory drug testing and punishment for women who fail a drug screening. A national petition has already gotten nearly 4,000 signatures from people demanding Zoeller apologize to all women.
However, Zoeller’s spokesperson said he is not in favor of mandatory universal drug screenings for all pregnant women.

Well, he certainly was for it only a week ago.

What's wrong about the proposal more generally?  Mandatory drug screening would scare away those pregnant women who are most likely to have used illegal narcotics.  Because the use of prenatal care in pregnancy is a good thing, this outcome is not desirable.  Yes, Mr. Zoeller tells us that the results would not be available for law enforcement.  But I'm not terribly convinced of that, and doubt that Indiana women are, either.

I Cannot Stop Laughing. A Debate About the End of Men.

No, this is not the Onion (a satire site), but a real debate about whether men are now obsolete.  And have a look at the people in it!

Paglia is ba-a-a-a-ck!  Dowd is in it!  And of course Rosin herself.  I'm less familiar with Moran, but I have a guess that the debaters were not elected on the basis of how much they have written on the arguments Rosin posed in her book or of their ability to verify or falsify their facts.  In other words, this is going to be a stylistic debate, possibly accepting the idea that  facts exist to at least imply that men are now obsolete, that the so-called patriarchy is in its death throes and so on.  And notice that Paglia, who appears to be on the 'against' side of the argument that men are now obsolete, seems to make an essentialist point there!   It's Mother Nature which oppresses women. 

OK.  Now I stopped laughing.  And then I got very angry (thunder sounds in the distance), because having a debate of that kind is an obscenity in a world where we have Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia and survey results like this.

It is also an obscenity in a different sense:  It starts with a what-if-this-is-the-way-the-world-is,  and then never explains why it would have to be that time.

To clarify:  Women are closer to equality than women have ever been, in a small handful of countries in this world.  But nowhere do we see a matriarchy, nowhere is a matriarchy at all likely.  Yet this debate and Rosin's books assume that we are at the dawn of a (global?) matriarchy.  If that's the case, shouldn't we stop worrying about those matriarchs in India and China and Africa and so on?  Shouldn't we take the arguments of the misogynistic types of MRA folk seriously?  Pressing a little harder on those wimminfolk?

In short, what is obscene about that is the actual situation of this world's women, compared to make-believe world in the debates.

And yes, as many have pointed out on Twitter, all those four women* are white.  But I also question the selection on the grounds of expertise.  It's not enough to be a famous woman to debate a topic; one needs to know quite a bit about it, too.  My guess is that Dowd will apply schoolyard arguments, that Paglia will apply Paglia arguments and on and on.

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*And they are also all women.  This particular topic would seem to be one where the debater doesn't have to be a woman.

Music for September