A Man Without Woman And Sex Is An Irate Wasp

Is there something like Comment Readers Anonymous?  A place where I could go, stand up and introduce myself as "I am Echidne and I still read newspaper net comments."

I badly need that.  The comments threads of even the better types of newspapers are full of hatred, anger and stupidity.  The last mentioned is especially irritating because it is not a form of sincere not-knowing, but an utter unwillingness to actually look at data, to read history or to study statistics.  The stupid person's statistics are picked on the basis of their gut feelings.

Even that would be OK.  What's not OK when all that comes together with racism, sexism, hatred of foreigners or you-name-it.

It's like wading in rotting corpses, to read that comment shit.


The "Science Column"

Anyway, I somehow started reading a so-called science column from last October at the website of Helsingin Sanomat, Finland's largest newspaper.   The story has the following headline: "Man Without Woman And Sex Is An Irate Wasp."  To give you a flavor of the story, this is how it begins (my translation):

Satutteko muistamaan, kun Aamulehti kirjoitti Norjan joukkomurhan jälkeen, että jos Breivik – ja Jokelan ja Kauhajoen koulusurmaajat – olisivat saaneet seksiä, murhenäytelmältä olisi ehkä vältytty? Kirjoitus nostatti järjettömän haloon, joka huomioitiin ulkomaita myöten, ja vastalauseet olivat kipakoita.
Tyypillinen vastine oli "just joo, nyt sitten joka tyttö vain jakamaan luuseripojille piparia, ettei heistä tule joukkomurhaajia".

My translation:

"Do you happen to remember how Aamulehti (another Finnish newspaper) wrote after the Norwegian mass murder that if Breivik --- and the school killers at Jokela and Kauhajoki (places in Finland) --- had gotten sex, maybe the tragedy could have been avoided?  That piece raised an incredible hullabaloo which was noticed even abroad, and counterarguments were angry.

A typical resonse was "Just so, now every girl is then obligated to share the gingerbread with loser boys so that they don't become mass murderers."

The author of the column, Jani Kaaro, then says that such political correctness is very sad among the Finns because there's a lot of truth in that statement.  Men who don't get sex also don't get a family, children and all the restraints on bad behavior those contribute.  Single men are a danger to the health of the rest of the society.

So let's stop here, for a moment, and ask what evidence there is that the named mass murderers "got" no sex or what evidence there is that it was the possible lack of nookie which made them killers.

Let's also notice here that by looking at not "getting" sex or wives or girlfriend as the possible cause of heterosexual male violence (rather than, say, one of its consequences), the onus IS indeed put on women.   Or rather, women are seen as a commodity (sex slot machines), and the inadequate distribution of such slot machines among the would-be players is the real problem behind some types of male violence.

A kinder interpretation is that the women are supposed to perform that "taming" role, to "civilize" men.

Great stuff, eh?  Note that there's nothing even faintly resembling science in any of this, so far.  Also note how the article has labeled men as essentially incapable of self-restraint, as being lead around by their penises, as, indeed, also a kind of slot machines:  If you don't put in pu**y, out comes violence.

So both men and women have been turned into extreme types of caricatures.  Neither men nor women have real agency.  Men, because they cannot control themselves and women, because they are a resource or a commodity.

Now comes the evidence for all this!  Wait for it:  The Wild West and its biased ratios of men and women.  Because Wild West (at least the television version of it) was a realm of men and violent, it must be the case that lack of sex and women (the two being treated as equal here)  is what caused high levels of male violence.

OK.  That's not really evidence.  So Kaaro next mentions the worrisome sex ratios in China, stating that 160 million girls were never born because of son preference.  (Take note of that sentence.)  He then notes that there are millions of men in Asia who will not "get" sex or wives because of this sex-ratio imbalance.

Kaaro hints that  those countries will become more violent.  There already are young, unmarried men there who get together to play war games and blow up home-made bombs!

The implication is that soon those war games will no longer be games:

Jotkut poliittiset kommentaattorit ovatkin todenneet, että suurin globaali turvallisuusuhka ei ole Lähi-idässä tai islamistisessa terrorissa, vaan näissä Aasian toimettomissa, yksinäisissä vanhoissapojissa, joilla ei ole mahdollisuutta koskaan päästä naimisiin. Heitä on helppo houkutella poliittisiin ääriliikkeisiin, ja tilanne on ihanteellinen myös vihanlietsonnalle. Jos agitaattori osoittaa jotakin ryhmää ja sanoo "he vievät meidän naisemme", helähtää se syvällä nuorten vanhojenpoikien sielussa. Historia ja demografia osoittavat, ettei ole kaukaa haettua yhdistää miesten väkivaltaisuutta seksuaalisten suhteiden puuttumiseen.
Tilanne ei ole yhtään sen ruusuisempi niille naisille, jotka ovat livahtaneet abortointiseulan lävitse. Esimerkiksi Vietnamissa on lukuisia kyliä, joissa ei ole ainoatakaan lisääntymisikäistä naista, koska heidät on myyty kirjemorsiamiksi Kiinaan tai salakuljetettu prostituoiduksi ulkomaille. Naisen voi saada, jos on rikas, mikä katkeroittaa välejä rikkaan ja köyhän kansanosan välillä. Myös katkeruus naisia kohtaan on kovaa siellä, missä toive naisesta on vain etäinen kangastus – miksi tavallinen maamies ei kelpaa naisille?

My translation:

Some political commentators have stated that the largest global security risk is not in Near East or in Islamic terrorism but in these Asian old bachelors who will never be able to marry.  They are easy to lure into political extremist movements, and the situation is also ideal for fanning the flames of hatred.  If an agitator points at some groups and says "they take our women," it will cause a deep response in the souls of these bachelors.

The situation isn't any rosier for those women who managed to slip through the abortion filter.  In Vietnam, for instance, numerous villages have no women in fertile age groups because they have been sold as mail-order brides to China or smuggled abroad for prostitution.  One can get a woman if one is rich.  This makes the relationship between the poor and the rich a bitter one.  Likewise, bitterness towards women is strong there where a hope for a woman is but a distant mirage --- why isn't an ordinary farmer good enough for women?

It's true that the imbalance in the sex ratios of several Asian countries is deeply problematic, with potentially bad consequences.  It's also true that the real tragedy here is the fact that the preference for sons equals a dislike of daughters, and that dislike comes directly from the societal gender norms.  And perhaps the greatest tragedy (though sorta not stressed by Kaaro) here is the fact that women seem to go from the frying pan into the fire (from shabby social standing to an interpretation of them as just for sex)  in these Asian countries.  As I have written earlier, the Korean solution to the beginning of a similar gender balance seemed to work and it did so by supporting the value of daughters and by improving the status of women in the society as well as by making sex selective abortions harder to get.

But Kaaro is not interested in the solutions to this Asian dilemma.  He seems to apply it to all men, apparently even Finnish men!  But before I look at that, note the Othering language in the last quote:  "One can get a woman if one is rich" etc.  The "one" in that quote has to be male, and Kaaro has neatly slid into writing for only half of humanity as relevant in the groups of the rich and the poor.

That's why I sense the story to be really about women as slot-machines for sex, with the demand that such machines should be more evenly distributed.

Kaaro's conclusions:

Historia ja demografia osoittavat, ettei ole kaukaa haettua yhdistää miesten väkivaltaisuutta seksuaalisten suhteiden puuttumiseen. Miehet, jotka ovat tippuneet avioliittomarkkinoiden ulkopuolelle, vailla oleellisia mahdollisuuksia vaikuttaa omaan tilanteeseensa, ovat kuin loppusyksyn äkäiset ampiaiset: kun kuningatar hylkää yhdyskuntansa, työläiset jäävät toimettomiksi, ja elämänsä keskipisteen ja motivaation menettäneenä niistä tulee arvaamattomia ja aggressiivisia.

My translation:

History and demography show that it is not far-fetched to connect men's violence with the absence of sexual relationships.  Men who have fallen below the marriage market level, without real chances to affect their own situation are like the irate wasps of late season:  when the queen rejects her community, the workers become unemployed and because they have lost the focus of their lives and motivations they become unpredictable and aggressive.

There you have it!  Men are like the worker-wasps (which are not male, as far as I understand it) and women are like the queen wasp who has rejected them by refusing to keep on laying eggs nonstop over the winter.

The metaphor is terrible.  But it is also very revealing.

Note that we have moved from mass murderers via Wild West (as shown by television and movies, at least) to Asian son preference and the problems those cause to --- what?  The possibility that all men who cannot find wives or "get sex" become unpredictable and aggressive.

This piece is a mess.  It's not science, because it combines all sorts of evidence and then applies it far beyond the scope for it.  It also continuously uses correlation as causation.  For instance, my guess is that men don't become mass murderers because they can't find girlfriends or wives.  Those men can't find girlfriends or wives because they are future mass murderers.  That's a more credible theory, even though it, too, is pulled out of my --- helmet.



And On Its Comments

I do go on here!  My apologies for it.  Perhaps some of you enjoy the analysis enough to justify it.  But mostly I'm writing this post because I'm so very irate!  Like a late-autumn wasp.

Then to the comments.  I read them because I was already ready to sting. And many of the comments didn't disappoint me.  Out of the 200+ comments only a handful understood what was bad about the article, and only another handful presented a feminist take (i.e., that women matter as persons, too).  Most of the comments took for granted that the problem is how to make sure that single men can "get" as much sex as they need in order to not become killers and how women can be made more willing to marry them or to have sex with them.

Thus, the proposals included supporting prostitution, even starting government subsidized brothels.  A few MRAs were out there writing about women's tendency to only marry "alpha-males" (a numerical impossibility unless "alpha-males" are interpreted as all married men), several people wrote about the "in-built" biological drive in women to marry only wealthy men (given that no such drive has been shown to exist and that women's assumed hypergamy can better be explained by the fact that women have had historically no other way to make their own living, outside prostitution, than through marriage.).

There were those who wanted all minimum quotas for women in high positions of power to be questioned, given that those would "marginalize" men.  The idea, I guess, is that women will only marry financially upwards, that all "marginalized" men are at the bottom of the societal heap and that the solution to this is to make sure that there are women beneath them.  In all meanings of that term.

The strongest impression I got from the comments is that the click-magnet headline worked:  The focus was largely on physical sexual intercourse and how to get more of it to the "marginalized men."  Several comments did point out that the problem (if there is one, outside Asia and perhaps the Middle East) is probably more about rootlessness and loneliness than physical sex.  But even those stopped short of asking what it is about the men without partners which might contribute to their problems.  Instead, that part was replaced by the idea that women only marry "up" and that marrying "up" has nothing to do with a man who is willing to share parenting and everyday chores and not just incomes.  Traditional sex roles and evolutionary psychology, in short.

Oh, the Pickup Artists cropped up, too.  According to them ANY woman can just wait and then decide which of the many, many offers she wishes to accept.  There are no such terms as "wall flowers" or "spinsters" in their world.  All women are "alpha-women", I presume.

Then More Seriously

It is not my intention to imply that the men in China and India who will never find wives somehow deserve their fates or that there isn't a correlation between single status and violence in men (though some of it is probably caused by the correlation between violence and youth on the one hand and youth and singleness on the other hand).  But that correlation does not tell us anything about causation.  Men who are violent and dysfunctional in society may be unable to find a partner because they are violent and dysfunctional.  That's an equally likely theory, though the causality might go in both directions at the same time.

I also think that all this is a good example of the ills of patriarchy for men, too.  The gender imbalance in China, India and Azerbaijan is because families want sons rather than daughters, and that, in turn, is because families are patriarchal, marriages are patrilocal and the view of family is based on the male line.  All this is exacerbated by lack of pensions and other forms of social safety net and the tradition to find those in one's adult sons, not in one's adult daughters.  And it is her husband's elderly parents that a Chinese woman is expected to care for.  It's easy to see why daughters are not greatly wanted.  But those customs can be changed.  Some slight signs of a more natural sex ratio in China are already evident*.

Likewise, the disgruntled young single men in the Middle East are that way because of the bad economic situation but also because of the tradition that women shouldn't work outside the home.  Given that tradition, men must be able to earn enough on their own to support both a wife and any future children.  The disapproval of dating and pre-marital sex worsens this situation further.

But how any of this relates to single men in general or single men in the Western countries is something the article left very unclear.  It was, of course, intended as clickbait.  But I don't think a
"science" column should be so low-brow and so open to various kinds of sexisms.

Sigh.  I shouldn't pour buckets of text on something that appeared a month ago and in a different language.  But someone has to clean out the crap.
-----
*One interesting argument about why we see these changes (other than government attempts to raise the valuation of girls etc.) is that the correction is a consequence of the imbalance in the sex ratios itself.  Once prospective parents realize that a son might never be able to find a wife, but a daughter might fairly easily find a husband, the Confucian desire to continue the family raises the value of a daughter somewhat.  But the Confucian philosophy still places men above women.

Speed-Blogging Monday, November 11, 2013: On guns and mothers in Texas and on suffragettes

1.  In Texas:

On Saturday, nearly 40 armed men, women, and children waited outside a Dallas, Texas area restaurant to protest a membership meeting for the state chapter of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, a gun safety advocacy group formed in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.
According to a spokeswoman for Moms Demand Action (MDA), the moms were inside the Blue Mesa Grill when members of Open Carry Texas (OCT) — an open carry advocacy group — “pull[ed] up in the parking lot and start[ed] getting guns out of their trunks.” The group then waited in the parking lot for the four MDA members to come out. The spokeswoman said that the restaurant manager did not want to call 911, for fear of “inciting a riot” and waited for the gun advocates to leave. The group moved to a nearby Hooters after approximately two hours.

Check out the picture at the link.

2.  Also in Texas, Tammy Cooper was arrested for child endangerment and had to spend eighteen hours in jail because one of her neighbors had called the police stating that her children were playing outside the house without adult supervision.  The charges were later dropped as baseless.  Cooper says that she was outside, sitting in a chair on the sidewalk.

The odd point about this story is that looks like you might not get arrested for shooting people who arrive at your door asking for help after a car accident, and you certainly don't seem to get arrested for being a white-collar crook in the stock markets or in the housing markets.

I get that children need supervision.  But children have been playing outside unsupervised, probably for centuries.  Even if Cooper had let her children to play alone outside, what that would have meant is in no way comparable to the kinds of crime suspicions which get no real reaction from the police.

You can draw your own conclusions about the reason for the rapid police response.  It certainly has much to do with the idea that mothers are the only ones responsible for children and that the only standard of good mothering is perfection.  And note that Cooper's husband only appears in a photograph in this story.  It's about mothering.

3.  Finally, and just because it is interesting, check out this early 20th century photograph opposing women's suffrage.  It shows what the society feared might happen!  Which sorta did, of course, but the edifices of civilization are still standing.

You may have seen another picture showing a humiliated husband wearing an apron, sitting in the kitchen with a squalling baby in his lap, while his suited and cigarette-smoking wife is preparing to go out to vote.  I always loved that picture because of the inner fears  it reveals:  A role reversal!  Men would have to accept the kinds of lives many women then  had and women would get to have the good lives some men then had.

Voting couldn't do it and suffragettes didn't aim at anything of the sort.  But it's true that giving people the vote provides them with some power in a society, and that can be frightening to some.

A Texas mother was sent to jail and charged with child endangerment for letting her two children play outside.
Read more at http://www.realfarmacy.com/mom-arrested-for-letting-kids-play-outside/#zVePsS5Cfu3xMg4G.99

A Texas mother was sent to jail and charged with child endangerment for letting her two children play outside.
Read more at http://www.realfarmacy.com/mom-arrested-for-letting-kids-play-outside/#zVePsS5Cfu3xMg4G.99

A Texas mother was sent to jail and charged with child endangerment for letting her two children play outside.
Read more at http://www.realfarmacy.com/mom-arrested-for-letting-kids-play-outside/#zVePsS5Cfu3xMg4G.

A Texas mother was sent to jail and charged with child endangerment for letting her two children play outside.
Read more at http://www.realfarmacy.com/mom-arrested-for-letting-kids-play-outside/#zVePsS5Cfu3xMg4G.99

A Texas mother was sent to jail and charged with child endangerment for letting her two children play outside.
Read more at http://www.realfarmacy.com/mom-arrested-for-letting-kids-play-outside/#zVePsS5Cfu3xMg4G.99

Your Hair Should Be Looooong. On Judging Fu***bility

This Jezebel post  made me think about something a little bit wider and more serious.  First, here's the relevant quote from the post:

Regarding Jennifer Lawrence's new pixie cut, some pseudonymous goofball from MyBonerIsCrying.com writes:
If you have any female interaction on social media, whatsoever, you may also have seen Jennifer Lawrence's new 'do. Though every chick on the planet begs "Can we just be best friends? Why is she perfect?", you'd only bang her if she lost ten pounds. Now, shedding some lbs. might not even do it. Lawrence didn't go full-on pixie short, but the results are equally disastrous.
Should have cut her dessert instead.

Jezebel then talks about the short hair requirement (as in Must Be Sexy With Long Hair).  That links to something I noticed again recently:  Both men and women on the net seem to feel free to comment on women's bodies, pretty much nonstop.  Most of the comments are negative, except for the "I'd do it" or "I'd bang it" comments by mostly guys, I presume (which I have even spotted in various other languages in YouTube comments.).

When I first came across those "I'd do her" comments I thought the commenter was a teenager.  But time and experience taught me otherwise. 

Now I think that what's going on are two things.  First, women's bodies are seen as fair game for judging, by both men and women.  Men's bodies?  Some, but the level is much lower (and tends to center on shaming politicians and a few media stars.)

Second, the right to judge breasts, hips, legs, weight and general fuckability looks like a (Hetero?) Guy Entitlement, something at least some men don't mind expressing on the net.  What's weird about that is its obliviousness to others who read the comment.  The net is not a locker room.  Then there's the whole question why anyone should care about the information.  Whom someone would bang is irrelevant, the person to be banged wasn't asked, and  the whole scene happens only inside some skull.

Why that need to share?  Not sure, but it might be a way of showing power: " Here I am, and I am the judge.  The topic will be big boobs and what they do to me, and I don't care if half of the audience is boobed."  So I think it's probably a feeling of entitlement.  Could be completely subconscious, but still something I never do.

Why don't I do it?  Say, about hetero men?  The reasons are mostly obvious, what with objectification and the dangers of turning some things upside down.  But the main reason is that the culture has given me no such right.  I have to focus on what I would say. 

I know this because I have used reversals a few time, to make a point.  The usual outcome is that the body discussions stop.  Which suggests to me that what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, in both directions.

And no, it's not because I came across completely prudish and moralizing.  I flipped the thing around, with humor and such.

This topic isn't terribly important, but it's an interesting aspect of the way gender affects some aspects of the net.

On My Tenth Blogoversary: Thoughts Two

Today is the day, I think!  Ten whole years wasted.  Down the drain.  Never to come back.   Aggro, unpleasant learning.   But also fun, purest joy, happy learning, making new invisible friends.  So good.

Things I have learned about blogging:

1.  Facts, things, evidence, theories:  Those remain and continue to matter.  Specific people in the public eye:  Not so much.   But we can't toss the people out of the stories, because they are like the way a good meal scents the air or the nice secret spice in the cake:  They draw the readers in.

It's not enough to talk about the people alone, however.  That way we end up no better than those who say all feminists are like Valerie Solanas and  that because she existed there is no basis to the idea that gender equality is a good goal.  Reversed, this means that I shouldn't have written so much about Rush Limbaugh and his misogynies (though there is something useful to learn from him and his ditto-heads.)

2.  I was prepared for being hated by many across various political aisles.  What I didn't expect, ten years ago, were the circular firing squads inside movements I thought were on my side.  Older and wiser I am, now.  I even get the reasons for most of the fights.  And some chasms cannot be skipped over, though we can sometimes hold hands across the chasm.  That means pragmatic unions with people who partially believe in the same things may be the best we can achieve, at the present stage of political and societal evolution.  ---  And indeed, Virginia, there ARE topics you don't want to write about unless you want a flame war.  Doesn't even matter what you say about those topics (especially if you let readers comment.)

3.  Something you may not know about me (and wish you knew, heh!):  I write a lot.  I write a lot for myself, on topics quite different from feminism, and I care about many, many types of unfairness and other large problems in the current societies.  I just don't write about them here because this blog is for a very specific type of set of readers and mostly covers stuff I think is not covered enough elsewhere or stuff I believe I can elucidate, based on what I happen to know.

This means that if I don't write about something it doesn't mean anything.  It doesn't mean I regard the topic unimportant or important and it doesn't express my views on the omitted topic.  Although it could mean that the topic is something I don't know well.

Most environmental issues fall under that category, however much I care about them (and I do).   I'm also sometimes so late on some current event (waiting for the information to be gathered and for all the facts to be known) that by the time I'm ready to write about it the world has moved on.  Picking a topic early guarantees that one rides the wave but introduces the danger that one falls off the surf board with bad facts.  Giving bad "facts" is Not Good. 

4.  Speaking of timing, it is possible to "write too early" on other types of topics in the news than those where the facts are not yet in.   That has happened to me a lot.  It's of no importance to anyone but me, but it makes a goddess grumpy.

5.  Fun posts.  I should have had more of those.  More chocolaty posts, more leaping through the air for just the joy of moving posts.  More music posts, given that I know nothing about music.  More posts about the inner and outer beauty of humans, including the surface beauty of men. I was probably trained (by the background hum in the society) to regard commenting on the latter as inappropriate.  But that training seems to be gendered and it could be interesting to reverse the way these things usually go.  And yes, the border control to the land of sexist objectification is very close there.

6.  I haven't made money out of this blog, though my wonderful readers have just about covered its costs (excluding the opportunity costs of my labor).

7.  I go too deep into whatever problem I see As An Onion.  I should just strip the top layer and leave the next layer for another post.  But then perhaps I don't go deep enough, after all?  No way of knowing how those I converse with think about this.

8.  Love, love, love the learning my readers offer me, for nothing!  I've learned so much on this blog, and not only how to make a perfect omelet, though that, too.  So my humble thanks to you all.  And the green gored skirt a wonderful reader bought me many years ago!  Still my very favorite to look at.

9.  Blogging and struggling with a book project don't go together terribly well.  If writing is like opening a vein over the computer (from here), then writing on two or three different projects simultaneously causes permanent anemia, fatigue and a carpal tunnel syndrome.

10.  What next?  I haven't decided on anything because now it is party time (you can send presents).  I need to see if my voice still provides something of value that is not already otherwise available.  But I do love writing.  So thanks to you all who have had patience with me and this blog and of course, Echidne, who has chosen to use me as her flawed vessel.

The Thigh Gap

This is not a gender gap.  It's the gap which Lululemon company's founder Chip Wilson thinks should exist between women's thighs:

If you are one of the women who spent $98 on a pair of Lululemon pants and found them to be faulty, the company’s founder would like you to know: It’s not the pants’ fault. It’s your thighs.
“Frankly some women’s bodies just don’t actually work for it,” founder and former designer Chip Wilson said in an interview with Bloomberg TV. One design of Lululemon yoga pants was recalled for being too see-through last May. And while Wilson admitted that he knows there was a serious flaw with the sheerness of their pants, he said new complaints over pants pilling just shows that “they don’t work for some women’s bodies”:
Even our small sizes would fit an extra large. It’s really about the rubbing through the thighs, how much pressure is there over a period of time, how they much they use it.

So I immediately checked in the mirror!  Feet touching, check.

I only have a gap between the lower thighs, from knees half-way up.  The tops of my thighs sorta touch*.  Now I have to buy a pair of yoga pants to learn which part of my body is created all wrong for this clothing!  Or I guess I could try to walk straddle-legged while wearing them.

More seriously, as the linked article states, desiring to have a "thigh gap" or beginning to expect that women should have one can be dangerous:

Women’s legs naturally touch. In fact, there’s growing concern among eating disorder specialists over a fad trend of trying to achieve a “thigh gap” — having thighs that don’t meet even when one’s feet are touching. That’s physically impossible for most people, but has nonetheless become a goal for young women putting pressure on themselves to look a certain way.

This judgmental crap about women's bodies is very tiring.  It absorbs energy that could be used for doing good, for having fun, for just living.  When it all gets too much for you, think of the fact that nobody's tomb stone will say "She achieved an incredible thigh gap."

------
*All this applies to the human avatar.  The goddess part of me has a single scaly tail and would never consider wearing yoga pants!  Or anything but emeralds.

Added later:  Turns out that Chip Wilson is not keen on working women or women on the pill.  For instance, here are his conclusions about breast cancer:

"Breast cancer also came into prominence in the 1990's. I suggest this was due to the number of cigarette-smoking Power Women who were on the pill (initial concentrations of hormones in the pill were very high) and taking on the stress previously left to men in the working world."

For some actual stuff about cancer risk and contraceptive pill, check out this site.   And then look for alternative firms that sell yoga pants.

The Owl And The Kayaker

Photo:  Pentti Taskinen




This is a really fascinating story, from Finland.  Pentti Taskinen, a 61-year-old experienced kayaker, was out on Tuusula lake and saw something splashing in the water, through a thick mist.  When he got closer, he found that it was an owl, swimming, exhausted, near death.  Owls are not water fowl.  How that owl got into the water is a mystery.  Some bird watchers think it got lost in the fog, others suggest crows which sometimes chase owls away as a group.

What happened then?

Eläin oli aluksi kääntänyt rintamasuunnan poispäin, mutta ilmeisesti ymmärsi pian, että tyhjästä ilmestynyt kajakki saattoi olla viimeinen oljenkorsi. Vettä oli joka suuntaan vähintään puoli kilometriä ja sen lämpötila kuutisen astetta.
Pöllö lähti räpiköimään kohti Taskisen kulkupeliä ja yritti nousta kyytiin, mutta ei siihen omin avuin pystynyt.
- Hienoa oli, kun sain sen kajakin kannelle ja otin pari kuvaa, niin se ryömi lähelle ja pani päänsä pelastusliivien väliin.
Ja siihen se jäi. Pöllö oli Taskisen mukaan muuten rauhallinen, mutta tärisi hervottomasti. Hän epäilee, ettei lintu olisi enää kauaa veden varassa selvinnyt.

Translation (by me):

The animal had initially tried to swim away, but apparently soon realized that the kayak which appeared from nowhere might be its last chance.  Water reached in all directions half a kilometer and its temperature was six degrees Celsius.

The owl started struggling towards Taskinen's kayak and tried to get into it, but was unable to do so on its own.

"What was fine  was when I got it into the kayak and took a couple of pictures.  It then crawled near me and put its head inside my life vest."

And there it remained.  According to the Taskinen the owl was otherwise calm, but shook nervelessly.  He suspects that the bird would not have survived much longer in the water.

Taskinen sought the nearest inhabited shore, the owl was given heat, shelter and food, and it flew away the following morning.

From The Folder: What Right-Wingers Say

You may already have seen this today:

With Republicans openly cheering for a low voter turnout and passing laws restricting the right to vote, it is no surprise that they are extremely upset that the Affordable Care Act website asks if the person applying for an insurance plan would like to registered to vote.
The voter registration question is actually mandated by federal law. “The National Voter Registration Act of 1993, also known as ‘Motor Voter,’ requires public agencies that provide public assistance to offer voter registration opportunities,” Scott Keyes points out. “Nowhere are citizens told who to vote for, which party to register for, or even that they have to register at all.”
But Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy said that registering more people to vote is “promoting creeping socialism” and voter fraud. By registering more “low-income voters,” Gaffney warns, “expect a permanent majority demanding government hand-outs—and the end of America as we have known it.”

I'm not going to write about the fact that Gaffney has his gilded hoof deep inside his mouth there, because one is not supposed to say those things aloud, even when one believes in them.  Instead, I want to look at the possible Freudian (or whatever) slip in that statement, having to do with the "permanent majority demanding government hand-outs."

How many low-income potential voters does Gaffney think there are?  A permanent majority of voters?  But if that's the case, what kind of a country IS his America, the one he so fears will end "as we have known it?"

For note that a good economy, a safety net which encourages entrepreneurship (and stops the vortex that results in extreme poverty), fair wages and retirement systems would NOT create "a permanent majority demanding government hand-outs."  Because the majority of people would be paying federal income taxes and sharing in the expenses of our shared concerns.

I get that Gaffney here talks about one of the deepest of conservative beliefs:  That if you let people without, say, a landed estate, to vote, then the populace will just vote for goodies for themselves.  The only individuals who should vote in that scenario are the affluent (in the past only affluent white men), because they are viewed as the ones who would not want to dole out those goodies but instead to keep all the goodies themselves.

That deep belief appears to be based on permanent poverty of the masses.  It doesn't work that way if we have a low unemployment rate, good education, fair labor markets and so on. 

The Bechdel Test. Now In Swedish Movie Theaters

So the British Guardian tells us.  The Bechdel test:

You expect movie ratings to tell you whether a film contains nudity, sex, profanity or violence. Now cinemas in Sweden are introducing a new rating to highlight gender bias, or rather the absence of it.
To get an A rating, a movie must pass the so-called Bechdel test, which means it must have at least two named female characters who talk to each other about something other than a man.
"The entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, all Star Wars movies, The Social Network, Pulp Fiction and all but one of the Harry Potter movies fail this test," said Ellen Tejle, the director of Bio Rio, an art-house cinema in Stockholm's trendy Södermalm district.
...

The Bechdel test got its name from American cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who introduced the concept in her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For in 1985. It has been discussed among feminists and film critics since then, but Tejle hopes the A rating system will help spread awareness among moviegoers about how women are portrayed in films.

Bolds are mine.  It doesn't sound like a very demanding test to pass.  But, surprisesurprise!, it is a hard test to pass.

But who cares?  Not a Swedish anti-feminist:

For some, though, Sweden's focus on gender equality has gone too far.
"If they want different kind of movies they should produce some themselves and not just point fingers at other people," said Tanja Bergkvist, a physicist who writes a blog about Sweden's "gender madness".

That's an interesting criticism, because publishing the Bechdel test results don't require anything from anyone who makes movies.  You don't have to pass the test!  And what is finger-pointing about any of this?  Should we pretend not to notice that movies are made for the clientele of young men?  That it's somehow rude to mention that?

It's also weird in the sense that making movies is extremely expensive and before one gets the funding for a movie there are umpteen zillion hurdles in the way.  Most of them seem to be aimed at getting nothing but the next Rambo 3289 out to the marketplace.

I like the idea of giving consumers more relevant information.  That way I don't have to waste my time or buy products which I end up hating.

My Usual Election-Related Question

Why are the US elections held on a working day?  Why not have the polls open on Saturday and Sunday instead?  That would be much better for employed voters and for anyone who is minding small children or taking care of a sick or elderly person.  And having two days for voting would take care of the religious rest day objection and, probably, let even those who work one of the weekend days go out and vote.

Over 10,000 Posts

On this blog.  The majority are mine and quite a few of them still stand the test of time (says she, smugly). 

Which is a good lead-in to the fact that the emergence of blogs and other similar devices has opened the public conversations to many more people than was the case in the past.  Most of that is excellent, some of that is terrible.  The latter because now even the nastiest of humans can have an Internet presence and because their little hives of mutual reinforcement are psychologically dangerous.

But the positive outweighs the negative, I believe, and over time the (mythological) Wild West aspect of the cyberspace will be reined in and tamed.  The trick is to make certain that the democratic aspect of the net will not be endangered by that.

And More on Evolutionarily Mean Girls

I wrote about the summary of that study earlier.

Now Washington Post has a very critical piece on the same study. 

But it gets a few things wrong, I think.  The problem with these kinds of studies is not, in itself, the fact that they reinforce the worst types of gender stereotypes (at least on women), but that the science underlying them is inherently flawed, as in the sense that we cannot go back and prove an evolutionary sexual adaptation of cattiness in women.  Neither do most such theories consider the alternative explanations (for example, that all humans can be aggressive towards each other but that men and women may use different weapons, based on their comparative advantage, in that aggression, or that such aggression can affect all fields in life, not just the competition for mates).

Consider the kind of proof that would be needed to prove an evolutionary argument of the type this study suggests.  At a minimum, we should be able to show that catty women have had more reproductive success than non-catty women.  Note, also, that all through the written history women have been expected to act obedient, chaste and silent, at least in Europe, and that such expectations leave very few avenues for the innate aggression of all people to crop up.  Except, perhaps, in the form of indirect gossip and cattiness.

So that's the first point I want to make:  It's not the conclusions that worry me but how people get to those conclusions.  And that is far too often JustSo stories, or theoretical speculation within a very narrow basic framework, one which excludes alternative explanations and often ignores all societal reasons for certain types of behavior.  Then we get comments on how "science" has proven the cattiness of women as a form of reproductive competition.

My second point is linked to the first one:  That this study is a meta-analysis is not what makes it unimportant or non-scientific.  That it is a meta-analysis of studies based on the same basic explanatory theory, that's what the problem is.   If I went through a bunch of the worst Evolutionary Psychology pieces (the kind Kanazawa creates, for instance), I could obviously get a meta-analysis which demonstrates that those pieces agree on the perfidy of women or whatever.  A proper meta-analysis of this topic would need to enlarge its scope far beyond evolutionary psychology.

Though I think studying gossip is very difficult in the first place.  Certain stuff, such as having a jaw over a beer or two, about the baseball team and that guy in the corner office, is not labeled as gossip.  Talking about the new lover of the woman next door, that is.

For The Ten-Year-Blogoversary: Thoughts One

I'm going to do posts about blogging and what I have learned and forgotten and so on.  You can give me presents during the week or two weeks this continues!  Or not, as you please.

After reading through some of my early archives I realized that I don't do Echidne much, anymore, as in the avatar of the Goddess With Opinions.  How she came to be is a boring story but she wasn't plucked out of pure air.  Or she didn't pluck me that way, either.  The role is helpful for getting a particular voice out.  It is my voice, but it's not the only one I have.

I also realized that I'm much more aware, now, of which topics will cause blog wars and flaming, and because I dislike them, I tend to avoid such topics until my conscience puts me on the rack and demands a post or it will annihilate me. 

There's a loss in that innocence I then had.  On the other hand, I learned much in the process, including when something came out of my own arrogance or privilege, if you wish.

Finally, there are posts in my archives about people and events that we have utterly forgotten.  It would be wonderful if I could learn to predict which things have staying power and which things rapidly sink into that memory hole.  Still, one reason why I write less and less about the horse race and ballet critic aspects of American politics is because those are the bits at the bottom of the memory hole, even a year or two later.  They ultimately do not matter, even though their impact on the quality of our political debates is deleterious.  Since I can't figure how to alter that aspect I pretty much let it slide now.


 

Pictures Of The Day

An interesting picture of the workforce in one social media marketing company:

I didn't think such places still exist.  Bros around the table.

Another interesting picture showing us how American Apparel advertises underwear (or swimwear?) for women:

The idea is to do something like porn, except that porn is largely aimed at hetero men and not at women.  I would have thought that women's swimwear or underwear is bought by women.

American Apparel is a weird company.  They are for all sorts of good political stuff, based on their website (no sweatshops, in particular).   But their photo archives include pictures like these:

What does this remind me of, in politics?  hmmmm

Two Sunday Posts: On Female Marines in the US And The Preference For Sons in Azerbaijan

This might be a better format than speed-blogging?

1.  On pullups in the Marine Corps:

Four female Marines have passed what is considered the most strenuous aspect of enlisted infantry training, prompting officials here at the Marine Corps’ School of Infantry – East to surmise that at least some of the 15 women who began the course in September will graduate next month.
The women are assigned to Delta Company, part of the Infantry Training Battalion to which all prospective grunts are shipped after they complete boot camp. They are the first group of enlisted women to conduct such training as part of the service’s ongoing research to determine what additional ground combat jobs may lift gender restrictions.
New female Marine officers have been allowed to enroll in infantry training since last year, but as yet none has passed that course, which is considered among the U.S. military’s most arduous.
“Given the performance of female Marines with Delta Company, there is a high probability that some will be standing in formation at graduation,” said Col. Jeffrey Conner, SOI-East’s commanding officer.

This is out of a total of seven female Marines volunteering for the latest test.  Two of the three who failed plan to retake the assignment.   Here's the part I want to discuss:

And although there are more tests ahead, Monday’s hike represented the course’s last significant physical challenge. The only potential hurdle remaining, Conner said, is a final Physical Fitness Test. To pass it, the women will have to perform pullups as the men do.
Starting Jan. 1, pullups will be required for all female Marines conducting their annual PFT. That’s a new requirement. Heretofore, women executed a flexed-arm hang as a test of upper body strength. As part of this research, however, officials have stressed that women will be held to the same standard as men.

Given the average upper body differences in strength, this is a tougher test for women than men. It's not beyond a fit woman to manage, but it requires more training.

I'd like to know whether the tests are designed to test an individual's ability to get certain tasks done or whether the tests are designed to test an individual man's ability to get certain tasks done.  To give you an example, the best way to scale a high brick wall for a woman might be to use her hips much more than her arms.  That might not be true for a man (always speaking about averages).

I'm not opposed to requiring all members of some profession to have the same threshold skills.  But those skills should be based on getting the job done, not on getting the job done in only one possible way.

This also links to the idea that what we test is  based on traditions.  For example,  it could be that a test that requires very very long runs or long swims in the ocean shows some female superiority.  But those are not the kinds of tests which would traditionally occur to the test-designers in the military.  --  And then of course it's important to determine to what extent skills such as the ability to perform multiple pullups are really needed in the job.

On the whole, I'm pleased that the women who wish to participate in this training have a chance to do so.  It's too bad that they might not gain much from a successful completion, however.

2.  Meanwhile, in Azerbaijan,  sex-selective abortions are used to get the sons Azerbaijani culture prefers to daughters:

Baku, Azerbaijan - After giving birth to a baby girl, 24-year-old Shana knew what to expect the second time she became pregnant.
"When we found out that the second baby was going to be another girl, my husband said that he didn't want her and I was forced to have an abortion. It was already three months and 10 days. They anaesthetised me and cut the foetus out of me."
Shana's second daughter was one of thousands of girls aborted in Azerbaijan every year.
According to a 2012 report by the Guttmacher Institute, Azerbaijan has the highest total abortion rate in the world, with women having on average 2.3 abortions in their lifetimes. Between 2005 and 2009 almost 10 percent of potential female births in Armenia and Azerbaijan did not occur because of prenatal sex selection, another report found.
The oil-rich country has one of the world's worst records in sex-selective abortions, according to a report for the UN. In normal circumstances, 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. In Azerbaijan, the ratio in 2011-12 was 116 boys for every 100 girls. In some parts of the country, such as the Ganja region, the ratio is as high as 120 to 100.

Bolds are mine.  Using abortions to select the sex of children has been used in general arguments against abortion.  Indeed, there are conservative states in the US which work towards that aim.  This is somewhat surprising as the same states otherwise care nothing about women and as sex-selective abortions are a tiny problem in this country.

The real problem in cultures which prefer sons to daughters is, of course, not the availability of abortions, but the fact that daughters are not wanted.  And that is because women are not valued.

In short, what we observe is this:  A society contemptuous of women, a society not finding much of value in women, except their ability to breed sons, gains access to easily available abortions.  What do you expect they will be used for? 

There are economic and cultural reasons for the preference for sons, naturally.  The very definition of family based on the father's blood family, the expectation that sons will take care of their parents in old age, and most importantly, the fact that families trade women in (patrilocal*  marriages) rather than men (in matrilocal marriages), in that the women leave their families**.  Any investments in daughters are, therefore, seen as wasted.  Like watering your neighbor's garden, I once read.

The articles about son preference and its consequences always, always, always write about the future scarcity of wives, the possibility that more women will be kidnapped or trafficked as wives and so on.  In some ways our focus is still on something other than the real position of women in those cultures.  The worst of these articles (not this one) pretty much regard the problem only from the point of view of future wife-seekers.

But the only real solution is to affect the sexist underpinnings of the preference for sons.  It can be done, as the article mentions in the context of South Korea:

Meanwhile, the case of South Korea has been commonly used as a successful example of how imbalanced sex ratios can be reversed.

By the mid-1990s, South Korea's sex ratio at birth was similar to Azerbaijan's today. But by 2007 it had declined to 107 males born per 100 females. South Korea based its strategy on a multidisciplinary approach: Legislation against prenatal sex detection was passed and effectively put into force; a mass media campaign called "Love your daughter" was launched; and new measures were passed to encourage gender equality. These new policies were aided by South Korea's economic boom, which helped women join the workforce and thereby achieve more autonomy.

Do these two posts have anything in common***?  I'm not sure, but  I write so much about giving women equal opportunities because the traditional female cultural norms seem to breed sexism and gender-based inequality and, ultimately, a certain kind of careless loathing of all things female, in both men and women.
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*The custom of women taking the man's name at marriage is a reminder of that same practice in the West.  The woman "leaves" her natal family and "joins" her husband's family.
**And in many cultures require expensive dowries.  It's logical (in a callous and horrible way) to prefer sons to daughters when the latter cost money and yield very little, except for some useful new family connections.  But note that all those aspects which make the birth of a daughter a sad day can be changed.  They are not even especially hard to change, as cultural norms go.
***I know that they don't apply to the same countries and no way am I suggesting that things wouldn't be loads better in the US.  But the work required is similar in all countries.

Welcome To The Hunger Day. On Gormless Welfare Leeches (Food Stamp Recipients) and Aircraft Carriers.

Today is the day when food stamp cut-backs take effect.  Among the group affected by this are as many as 900,000 US veterans and their families.

That's an interesting data point, and a way for me to write about what the US can afford and what it cannot afford.  Let's limit the conversation to the armed forces.  That way we are on firm conservative ground and share the reality where car bumper stickers (made in China)  decorate so many American cars urging us to "Support the Troops."

Then juxtapose that form of patriotism with the large number of US veterans on food stamps and the cuts in those benefits.

Or walk across the room and look at what we can't afford in the food stamp field:

Starting Friday, millions of Americans receiving food stamps will be required to get by with less government assistance every month, a move that not only will cost them money they use to feed their families but is expected to slightly dampen economic growth as well.
Cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, popularly referred to as food stamps, reflect the lapse of a temporary increase created by the administration’s stimulus program in 2009. They are slated to go into effect separately from continuing negotiations over renewal of the federal farm support program, which looks likely to further cut funds for food stamps, which this fiscal year are expected to come to about $76.4 billion.
The Republican-controlled House version of the farm bill proposes cutting $39 billion from the program over the next decade; the Democratic-controlled Senate would cut $4 billion over the same period.
The food stamp cuts scheduled to go into effect on Nov. 1 will reduce spending by $5 billion in the 2014 fiscal year, and another $6 billion over the 2015 and 2016 fiscal years. They are expected to shave 0.2 percentage point from annualized consumption growth in the fourth quarter of 2013 and trim an estimated 0.1 percentage point off the annual growth rate of the nation’s gross domestic product, according to estimates by Michael Feroli, the chief United States economist at JPMorgan Chase. Those drags may seem small, but right now projections for gains in fourth-quarter gross domestic product hover around an annual rate of just 2 percent.

Bolds are mine.  Great savings there, what?  Now we can afford more aircraft carriers.  Note what the most recent carriers cost:

The final carrier of the class, USS George H.W. Bush, was designed as a "transition ship" from the Nimitz class to the replacement Gerald R. Ford class. Bush incorporates new technologies including improved propeller and bulbous bow designs, a reduced radar signature and electronic and environmental upgrades.[36][37] As a result, the ship's cost was $6.2 billion, higher than that of the earlier Nimitz-class ships which each cost around $4.5 billion.[38] To lower costs, some new technologies and design features were also incorporated into the USS Ronald Reagan, the previous carrier, including a redesigned island.[39]

Bolds are mine.  Or what about the latest, greatest carrier?  We are all very excited about it:

Navy's $7bn stealth ship hits the waves: America's largest ever destroyer leaves dry dock for the first time

Butbutbut, you might argue, we need those aircraft carriers to defend ourselves against evil Islamonazist terrorists who attack cities and such.  Heh.  Also,  look at the international comparisons on how many aircraft carriers the US has and how many the rest of the world has:

Seems a bit weird that seven billion for yet another carrier is money better paid than money on food stamps for veterans, say.

None of this should be intended to read as attacking aircraft carrier construction alone.  The point I wish to make is that we spend money like it grew in trees in some areas but in others we find our pockets so empty that nothing much can be done.  And neither should any of this be interpreted as meaning that the food stamp program couldn't be made better or that nobody ever misuses the system.  Rather, we are illogical in which government programs are deemed as important and which are deemed as breeding reliance on the government.
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Added later:  A smart reader points out that the actual costs of running the aircraft carriers are far greater than just the costs of building them.  This is, of course, correct, because they need staffing, maintenance, food supply ships, protection etc etc.

Meanwhile, in Texas*

The new anti-abortion laws can take effect right away:

A federal appeals court issued a ruling Thursday reinstating most of Texas' controversial new abortions restrictions, just three days after a federal judge ruled they were unconstitutional. 
A panel of judges at the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans said the law requiring doctors to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital can take effect while a lawsuit challenging the restrictions moves forward. The panel issued the ruling after District Judge Lee Yeakel said the provision serves no medical purpose.
The panel's decision means as least 12 clinics won't be able to perform the procedure starting as soon as Friday. In its 20-page ruling, it acknowledged that the provision "may increase the cost of accessing an abortion provider and decrease the number of physicians available to perform abortions."

How does a doctor get admitting privileges at a nearby hospital in Texas?  I couldn't find this by Googling, but my impression is that the doctor must do hospital medicine to get those privileges.  Is that a necessary medical prerequisite for working in abortion clinics?

I doubt that, and so I doubt this part of the ruling:

However, the panel said that the U.S. Supreme Court has held that having "the incidental effect of making it more difficult or more expensive to procure an abortion cannot be enough to invalidate" a law that serves a valid purpose, "one not designed to strike at the right itself."

Everything about the forced birth movement is aimed at striking at the right itself.  The right here would be the right to have an abortion.

Texas is a fun state to live in as a woman or as a member of ethnic or racial minorities, because of that voter ID thingy.  

I think the law was created (as in other Republican-dominated places) to reduce the number of voters who might vote for Democrats, especially the number of poorer voters and the number of people of color.  But the Texas version of the law also affects married women who don't have their names on the ID in exactly the correct form:

In 2012 a federal court struck down Texas' ID law, ruling it would potentially disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of minority voters.
But that federal decision was invalidated when the Supreme Court last year ruled part of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional. So now Texas is test-driving its voter ID law — one of the most restrictive voter ID laws in the nation.
Texas judges are accustomed to a certain level of respect, even deference as they go about their daily business in the Lone Star State. So imagine Judge Sandra Watts' surprise when she went to cast her vote last week and was told there was a problem.
"What I have used for voter registration and identification for the last 52 years was not sufficient yesterday when I went to vote," Watts says.
Why? Because Watts' name on her driver's license lists her maiden name as her middle name. But on the state voting rolls, her given middle name is there, and that's difference enough to cause a problem.
"This is the first time I have ever had a problem voting," she says. "And so why would I want to vote provisional ballot when I've been voting regular ballot for the last 49 years?"
Watts stomped out of her polling place and called the local Corpus Christi TV station KIII. Her voting problems became the lead story that night.
The original Justice Department concern with Texas' voter ID law involved its discriminatory effect on the state's poor and minority voters. In 2012 a federal court ruled it unconstitutional on that basis, but that ruling was itself invalidated last year when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act. And with that, Texas' voter ID law was back from the dead. So it's come as a surprise how, in practice, the law has also been a problem for Texas women.

Note, also that a concealed-carry permit is a valid ID but a student ID is not!  Given that the former group tends to vote Republican and the latter group Democratic, one is astonished by such a chance correlation between what is allowed and what is not allowed!

Nah.  Given that all this is intended, is the problem caused by the patrilocal marriage custom which ends up giving married women multiple names part and parcel of the same attempt to make voting harder for some groups?

I'm not sure, because married women are actually pretty likely to vote Republican.  On the other hand, many Texas politicians would love to get rid of all female voters.  So judge for yerselves.
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*The "meanwhile" series on my blog is about places where not-so-good anti-woman things are happening.  You can search for topics in it by using the "meanwhile" word.

Stuff To Read on Halloween

I write about the Zombie Trends For Women here.

An odd serendipity made me read a sad post about the troubles of the progressive movement* and a post about the Tea Party on the same day.  Try it out, reading those one after the other while keeping mind that these are the two acceptable limits in American political thought.  Nothing  left of the progressives officially exists, for example.

Here's the odd part.  Either I am Halloween-hallucinating or most of the comments at the Ian Welsh post can no longer be read.  Or there's something wrong with my computer.

Whatever it is, I remember distinctly reading opinions there (or elsewhere?)  that progressive blogs were once extremely popular and achieved important things, but that nobody reads blogs anymore, what with the Twitter etc..  In any case I commented about that at another blog, so it's unlikely I made it completely up.

The point I wanted to make in that context is that anyone who thinks blogs can change the American politics in a few years is in for a biiiig disappointment.  Writing blogs is like carrying water in a sieve to the ocean of public opinion.  If you are really fast and really clever you have some influence.  But most people never read blogs in the past or today.

To finish, have a look at this spookily funny Fox News video:



I lovelovelove the number of silly assertions it contains:

1.  Stossel argues that women should pay more for health insurance than men because women, on average, use more care**.  It's true that the average use rates are greater for women than for men. But the reason for that is not hypochondria.  The difference has several reasons***, but by far the most important has to do with reproduction.

The current system assigns all the care having to do with pregnancies and childbirths to women's accounts, even though humans still don't manage parthenogenesis.  Put more plainly, the costs of pregnancy and childbirth are not because of women's hypochondria and they are not caused by her alone.  Likewise, we have no male contraceptive pill, which means that the contraception often used by heterosexual couples together necessitates medical visits not by the man but by the woman if she's on the pill.

2.  Men and women who are past childbirth are told by Stossel that they should be angry about having to "subsidize" women (and men) in fertile age categories.  This is hilarious, because the subsidies inside the system flow into the reverse direction.  Older people use more health care than younger people.

3.  Stossel doesn't seem to understand what current insurance does when he complains about the "subsidies" of other people in one's insurance policy.  It already lumps together all sorts of different health care expenditures, which means that right now someone's Viagra consumption is "subsidized".  If insurance contained no such "subsidies" it wouldn't exist.  It's true that insurers prefer to divide the population they insure into groups of similar risk levels, but if we do this with all health care consumption (and match the risks precisely for each) we end up with no insurance at all.   To take a simple example from car insurance, Stossel's assertion is like saying that your insurance premia should not be used to pay for your neighbor's stolen car if you were luckier and kept yours and if both of you are customers of the same company.

4.  Stossel recommends more and more competition, instead of the ACA.  The idea that competition in health care is great is a very tricky one.  Lots of research suggests that there's very little price competition, without government incentives for it.  Whether quality competition is feasible depends on the particular product we are looking at.  It might work for some routine purchases of the well-care type, such as eye glasses and simple dental visits.  But in many cases consumers cannot judge health care quality well enough to become prudent shoppers (and in other cases consumers are too ill to do that).



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*For a different angle to the brogressive movement, check out what Scott Lemieux writes.
**This argument also reopens the door the idea that individuals with pre-existing conditions should pay more than those without them.  The same logic applies.
***Some of them hard to quantify.  For instance, many observers believe that men, on average, don't see their health care providers as often as they should.  On the other hand, the way the medical profession defines recommended visit rates and what should be checked may itself be affected by various non-medical considerations such as women's apparent greater medical "compliance."

Today's Quick Peep into the Evo-Psych World: On Mean Girls

It's always a fun place to visit!  This time we learn that there are "mean girls" (hard-wired mean!) because cattiness discourages other woman from putting out and so maximizes the "mean girls'" own reproductive success.  The linked summary says that the paper was not terribly well-received, and also offers a criticism. I'm glad of the criticism being added there.

 This example demonstrates something common in  much of evolutionary psychology:  Anything that exists will* have an evolutionary explanation if you think hard enough and weird enough (within the simple model). 

Or look at it the other way round:  If there were no "mean girls" or no time when any woman behaves like that, then the evolutionary explanation for women's kindness towards each other could be the need to get more alloparents for their children and perhaps to get help in gathering or trapping or fishing.

The behavioral reality is  somewhere in the middle.  We humans all have nasty sides and nice sides, in varying proportions by the individual.  Just as there are "mean boys" there are "mean girls".   ---  The particular way this meanness presents itself may have genetic differences by gender or perhaps not.  But it certainly links to the way girls and boys are brought up, too.  --- And what we are mean about is not limited to just jealousy or envy about sexual partners or romantic partners but to most everything humans do.  To pick girls' meanness in only that context probably biases the research from the beginning.
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*For instance, I've read about evolutionary psychology attempts to explain how suicide might contribute to the reproductive success of one's tribal unit.

Speed-Blogging, Oct 30, 2013. Contents: Rape, Sexual Violence And Societal Views on Those

 



This article, caused by the recent debate about whether women should stop drinking too much as a way to cut back on college rape at least opens the conversation on the difference between things one can do not to become a victim and things that can be done to cut back on perpetrators.

The studies it links to are a bit too often older,  from 1980s and 1990s,  and perhaps because the data is from sites where it is offered for a different purpose (rape crisis counseling for possible victims), it doesn't delve deep into questions of frequencies in the characters of the perpetrators, but just points out that rapists can come from all backgrounds.  Even when that is true it may still be the case that certain variables predict rape better and that we should work on whatever those variables might measure (such as belief that women are mostly wheelbarrows for c***t transportation etc.)

I had Cousin Insomnia visiting, so I read through all the comments at the linked article (those that were there last night).  They are revealing.  There are two schools of though, pretty much.

One argues that we shall always have rapists among us and that therefore the best potential victims (women and men and children etc.) can do is to do the equivalent of risk minimization.  Lock your doors, don't wear flashy jewelry, leave your vagina at home when you go out, and naturally don't get soused out of your head.

The other school argues that most rapes are not stranger rapes, that the rapist is more often someone known to the victim and that rapes can happen inside the victim's home or place of work, and that the idea of risk prevention can be a slippery slope, moving from not drinking to not going out to not wearing anything that shows your body and on and on.

I lean much more towards the latter school of thought, because rapes are common in India and in societies where people don't drink and because South Africa, for instance, has such humongous rape rates that there is no way countries simply have a fixed percentage of evil people who are born that way.  I also believe that our ideas about rape affect its likelihood.  If rape is something young men joke about, in public, that's bound to have an impact on how seriously the crime is taken.  So we must change the societal conversations on all this.

At the same time, I think that taking care of yourself is good for all of us human beings, that knowing where you are and what you are doing is very useful, if only to protect yourself against that rarer kind of stranger rape or other forms of violence, and this applies to both men and women.

 I also think that the reasons why rapists rape might vary.   We need more research on this (or someone needs to give lazy me links to the relevant research).  One commentator at the linked article argues that the motivations of male rapists who rape women include cases of extreme woman loathing but also cases where the rapist simply doesn't see the victim as a human but as that wheelbarrow which somehow contains the sex he is entitled to.

I think the person commenting on this stated that the views were based on clinical experience of some type, perhaps based on sentenced individuals' statements, so the wider motivations (given that only a tiny percentage of rapes end up in convictions) need more studying.

And when it comes to teenagers the confusion about what the concept of rape is in the teenagers' minds and what saying no means to them needs a lot more work.  The bro-culture, stereotypically, is seen as almost advocating rape as a form of scoring.  The wider society tells the teenagers that rape is wrong, but I'm not sure how the messages from the popular culture, the peer groups, the parents, the schools etc. interact.  We need to find what works, for a real prevention policy.

Speaking of rape sub-cultures of one type, Oxford University in England is giving us a peek of what's called "lad culture" in the UK:

Last Monday, the social secretary of the Pembroke College Rugby Football Club, Woo Kim, sent his members an email with the subject line "FREE PUSSY". In the email, Mr Kim proposed a "challenge" to the male members of the college; to "pick" a female fresher of their choice as a guest for the upcoming crew date. Mr Kim's email continued, "please bring TWO bottles of wine - one for yourself and one for your guest". This second bottle of wine is to be tampered with. He wrote, "You must open the bottle in advance, and include a substance of your choice. It may be spirits or food or anything you like."
"Please be as clandestine as possible in your deed."
As if this were not chilling enough, he elaborated that the theme of the Crew Date was 'VILLIANS' and that "Villains must be discrete [sic] in their work".

It's VILLAIN, by the way.

If I had to guess I'd think that this email is meant as a joke, not as an actual invitation for a mass rape event.  But we really should ask ourselves why this young man thought the joke would be appreciated by others, what the sub-culture was that he grew up in, why he thinks of "freshers" as prey and of the male football players as predators.  When would this joke be funny?

I'm not part of its intended audience but I think it's funny if you fundamentally believe that what those young men really want is free pussy and that the wheelbarrow wheel must be greased so that the pussy rolls out more handily.  If that's your basic belief, but you know all about the "politically correct" idea that no means no etc, you would find it hilarious.

Finally, and from my personal life:  This is the time of the year (near the day when the dead are on our minds) when I send love and good thoughts to the memory of a man I only met once, a long time ago, when I was in my teens and he was about eighty.

He was out walking his dachshund, clad in a dapper suit, about seven pm on an October night.  I happened to be walking on the same street, going to a study meeting at my friend's house (exams!).

Suddenly, a man in his forties, smelling of alcohol (SEE!),  grabbed me from behind, tore my long coat and pulled out large chunks of my hair by the roots.  I screamed for help.  A couple on the other side of the street made some comment about a marital quarrel (honestly).  I managed to pull myself free and ran up the street (a steep hill at that point), all the time calling for help and for someone to call the police (before cell phones, my sweetings), while my attacker was stumbling after me.

The only person who crossed the street was the old man with the dachshund.  He came to me, asking if I was all right, if I would like me to walk him to wherever I was going.  His hands were shaking, but he was there.

I have never forgotten that, and in recent years I light a candle to his memory.  A good person.

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This petition about the police response to a horrible rape in Kenya is worth signing.

Black Women May Be Less Likely To Be Protected by the HVP Vaccine

Think Progress writes about this:

The human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine that has cut teen girls’ risk of cancer in half is less likely to shield African American women, according to new research unveiled Monday. Black women, who have higher rates of cervical cancer than the general population, are susceptible to different strains of HPV than the most common types for white women. Unfortunately, the only approved HPV vaccines in the US target the strains that most affect white women, leaving black women more or less unprotected.

The likely reason?  The strains of HPV which are most common in white women are not necessarily the most common in black women, and the vaccine protects against the most common strains found in clinical trials before its creation.  Because there are more white women, the results are driven by the fact that they were the majority in the clinical trials for the vaccine, because they are still the majority racial group among US women.

But those clinical trials may have also included too few black women.*

In developing Gardasil and Cervarix, scientists relied on studies to pinpoint the strains of HPV most likely to lead to cancer. Studies were done on all ethnicities, Hoyo said, noting that there may have been insufficient numbers of black women in the research studies to pick up the differences in HPV subtypes.
"There has always been some skepticism about whether there are other strains that are important, other than 16 and 18," she said. This study is not the first to report the differences, she said.

And Think Progress:

The HPV vaccine is hardly the only medical breakthrough that failed to account for racial differences. Even though the Food and Drug Administration has mandated proportional representation of minorities in clinical research, minorities are still drastically undercounted. One recent report found that many clinical trials exclude non-white subjects; the Hepatitis C vaccine trial, for instance, was 83 percent white, 14 percent African American, 2 percent Asian, and 2 percent other. Latinos, who comprise 16 percent of the total U.S. population, account for just 1 percent of clinical trial participants.

The problem may be more complicated when there are major (and perhaps previously unknown) differences in the incidence or form of a disease in different racial groups (such as the case of different strains of HPV being most common here).   A group small in numbers (say, American Indians) might not be under-counted in a study, compared to their population size, but because of the nature of those differences it should really be analyzed separately.  This requires taking larger samples of small population groups, because small samples have more scope for the effects of sampling error.

Many epidemiological studies already do that, in any case.  But these news are a good reminder that there are real reasons for  including women and men of all racial groups in clinical trial studies when the diseases apply to all of them.

Should black women get the currently available vaccine?  The general answer seems to be that they should.  It still gives protection against two strains.  But its protective value may be lower for them than for white women, and the vaccine should either be adjusted or offered in different forms for different racial groups.
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* I can't figure out from just the summaries if this means that black women were not their population percentage in the trials but fewer, or if they were represented in their population percentage, but the numbers were too small to bring out the strain differences.

Folders We Need

I am now making folders of material which one needs to argue with weirdos on the net.  For instance, some time ago a story about a woman whose son got accused of sexual harassment in college led to the odd statement that colleges always find the man guilty in these cases, always.  I knew it wasn't necessarily so, because I had read many stories which argued that the alleged victim got no help from the college at all, but I hadn't saved those stories.  Well, now I do save them, and this one goes in that folder.

I am also collecting stuff on domestic violence, rape arrest and sentencing rates, the treatment of fathers in custody courts and so on.

The need to do this is lamentable, but necessitated by the fact that people on the net seem to have their own facts, in the way they used to have their own opinions.  If you don't have "your" facts stored, you are handicapped in any debates, and that handicap is unfair when the other people's "facts" are all one-sided.

We also need more general websites will all the information together and in easily found forms.  I'm going to try to do some of that on my own blog, but it's really a bigger endeavor than one puny goddess can undertake, all on her lonesomeness.

-- This is about my Ten Year Blog Anniversary coming, under the folder:  The Changes We Need.

Speed Blogging, Monday Oct 28, 2013: On Women Leaning In, Driving and Giving Talks in the Urinal Position

bell hooks writes about the LeanIn movement.  She makes good points about many of the limitations of the LeanIn ideas (their bad fit for women who are not white, upper class or blessed with a wonderful partner, the fact that they leave the corporate frameworks unchallenged, even though the success depends on the receptivity of those very frameworks etc.). 

On the other hand, tackling the problems she spells out is a much more difficult endeavor than the LeanIn emphasis on mostly self-help, especially if we are to address capitalism itself.   -- That comment does not mean that I didn't enjoy reading her analysis of this or that I wouldn't agree on much of it.

Saudi women protest the fact that they are not allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia.  That may be the most famous part of the rigid rules which govern women's lives in that country.  The rest of the oppressive iceberg is submerged, though the article I link to discusses it.  Yet there are a few very small signs of positive changes in the attitudes of government.

Finally, that urinal position.  It cropped up in an internal memo of a Manhattan law firm, intended to teach female employees how to give a good speech.  A lot of it is applicable to anyone giving a speech, which made me wonder why male employees aren't given all that good advice about how to dress and groom themselves or how to prepare their speech and delivery.   Or perhaps they already got their internal memo with lots of good advice?

In this one,  the section on the voice use is all about how the speaker should try to lower her speaking voice ("Your voice is higher than you hear.  Think Lauren Bacall, not Marilyn Monroe.)  And there is advice about cleavage and not letting people look up your skirt.

Which sounds pretty conservative and sorta common sense.  Well, except later on the speaker is told not to look like a mortician (If wearing a black suit, wear something bright.).  So all this stuff is extremely complicated and nuanced, whereas nobody would expect that a guy wears something bright with a black suit etc.

The funniest bit in the whole memo is the "urinal position."  It must have something to do with hands as it's in the section about choreographing your hands.  You should watch out for the urinal position!

The dreaded urinal position.  I have a guess on its meaning.  But I doubt it means that this law firm believes that women would otherwise, say, squat, while giving presentations.

Who Sucks Off The Government Teat?

When I first wrote about this bit from Media Matters for America, I didn't know that others had already pointed out the group which also gets subsidized when low-wage workers get food stamps or other help from federal and/or state governments.  That group is the firms themselves and ultimately their owners, because the low wages help to keep the profits higher .  From the article on Moyers&Company:

• More than half (52 percent) of the families of front-line fast-food workers are enrolled in one or more public programs, compared to 25 percent of the workforce as a whole.
• The cost of public assistance to families of workers in the fast-food industry is nearly $7 billion per year.
• At an average of $3.9 billion per year, spending on Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) accounts for more than half of these costs.
• Due to low earnings, fast-food workers’ families also receive an annual average of $1.04 billion in food stamp benefits and $1.91 billion in Earned Income Tax Credit payments.
• People working in fast-food jobs are more likely to live in or near poverty. One in five families with a member holding a fast-food job has an income below the poverty line, and 43 percent have an income two times the federal poverty level or less.
• Even full-time hours are not enough to compensate for low wages.

One person at Fox News made this comment about the idea that perhaps the low-wage workers should be paid more:

PAYNE: There is a lot of unfortunate parts of the story. If you want to create a society where these jobs -- $8 jobs go for $15. Then what you're saying to people is like, okay, "don't improve your life. Don't finish high school. Don't go to college. Don't, you know what, have three or four kids out of wedlock. Don't put yourself in a predicament where this is your only option. In fact, keep doing what you're doing, smoke weed all day if you want. Doesn't matter. You'll get rewarded because in this society Mickey D's has got the money. They owe it to you." And I think that's a work mentality.

This is the whip-not-the-carrot policy to everything, the one which appears to be the preferred approach in US politics.  Make certain jobs (working at McDonald's, say) so poorly paid that you cannot survive.  Now, that will give you a good incentive to better yourself!

But it does nothing about the need for someone to work those kinds of jobs, and it shows very little empathy towards those who are employed in them.  Neither does it make any kind of moral inferences about those whose profits are made larger due to the subsidies the government provides, only about the workers in the low-wage industries.