Today is the eleventh International Dayadvocating zero tolerance for female genital mutilation (FGM). This UN sponsored event focuses attention on the negative aspects of the practice and its prevalence. It is largely concentrated among 29 countries in Africa and the Middle East and the diaspora from those countries. It is estimated that 140 million women and girls alive today (125 million in the African countries where the practice is most common) have undergone some form of the operation, which can carry both instant and long-term health risks, including life-threatening ones.
The reasons for the practice are largely cultural and traditional. FGM can be viewed as a rite of passage, a custom passed on from older women to younger women, but its ultimate reason is in the belief that it is important to control women's sexuality, both for the family honor and in order to make women into wives who are less likely to stray. Whether practices such as infibulation (see below) might also have more direct sexual motives is unclear to me but seems possible.
Clitoridectomy: partial or total removal of the clitoris or, in very rare cases, only the prepuce.
Excision: partial or total removal of the clitoris and the labia minora, with or without excision of the labia majora.
Infibulation: narrowing of the vaginal opening through the creation of a covering ‘seal’. The seal is formed by cutting and repositioning the inner or outer labia, with or without removal of the clitoris.
Unclassified: all other harmful procedures to the female genitalia for non-medical purposes, e.g. pricking, piercing, incising, scraping and cauterising the genital area.
FGM has no health benefits, and it harms girls and women in
many ways. It involves removing and damaging healthy and normal female
genital tissue, and interferes with the natural functions of girls' and
women's bodies. Immediate complications can include severe pain, shock,
haemorrhage (bleeding), tetanus or sepsis (bacterial infection), urine
retention, open sores in the genital region and injury to nearby genital
tissue. Long-term consequences can include:
recurrent bladder and urinary tract infections;
cysts;
infertility;
an increased risk of childbirth complications and newborn deaths;
the need for later surgeries. For example, the FGM procedure that
seals or narrows a vaginal opening (type 3 above) needs to be cut open
later to allow for sexual intercourse and childbirth. Sometimes it is
stitched again several times, including after childbirth, hence the
woman goes through repeated opening and closing procedures, further
increasing and repeated [sic] both immediate and long-term risks.
The arguments against FGM are strong. It is an operation which can cause future health problems without any manifested health benefits, it can reduce tactile sensitivity in the genital area and thus one's ability to enjoy sex and it can be seen as a form of controlling the behavior of women in order to ensure their adherence to only the approved female roles.
But those who support the practice argue for its cultural significance. For example (quote taken from a manuscript still in the editing process; the final form of it appears to have been published here):
What the Health Ministries in Nigeria should be doing in respectful
consultation with traditional leaders - is restricting themselves to improving
the safe performance of circumcision, or conducting randomized controlled
studies to evaluate various traditional approaches to the matter, not
dabbling into making jaundiced value judgements (through an arbitrary
western prism) about an ancient blood ritual. That decision is for villages
and clans to make, not the country as a whole.
Opinions surveys about FGM are available for many of the 29 countries where the practice is concentrated. For example, in surveys about women and girls:
Girls’ and women’s attitudes about FGM/C vary widely across countries...The highest levels of support can be found in Mali, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Gambia and Egypt, where more than half the female population think the practice should continue. However, in most countries where FGM/C is concentrated (19 out of 29), the majority of girls and women think it should end.
Younger women and girls are more likely to want the practice to end than older women, and in some countries these age differences are wide.
Information on the attitudes of boys and men towards FGM/C is only available for 16 of the 29 countries where FGM/C is concentrated. Moreover, this information has not always been collected in the latest surveys for which data on women’s attitudes are available. This means that data on boys’ and men’s opinions of the practice are generally less up to date than data on girls and women, and may not reflect recent attitudinal changes.
The most recent data show that the level of support for the continuation of FGM/C among boys and men varies widely across countries..., as is the case for girls and women. In four countries with high FGM/C prevalence (Mauritania, Mali, Egypt and Guinea), the majority of boys and men report that they want FGM/C to continue. By contrast, in nine countries, the majority of them favour stopping the practice. While in most of these countries FGM/C prevalence is relatively low, the list also includes Burkina Faso and Sudan, where the practice is widespread.
A new Afghan law will allow men to attack their wives, children and sisters without fear of judicial punishment, undoing years of slow progress in tackling violence in a country blighted by so-called "honour" killings, forced marriage and vicious domestic abuse. The small but significant change to Afghanistan's criminal prosecution code bans relatives of an accused person from testifying against them. Most violence against women in Afghanistan is within the family, so the law – passed by parliament but awaiting the signature of the president, Hamid Karzai – will effectively silence victims as well as most potential witnesses to their suffering. "It is a travesty this is happening," said Manizha Naderi, director of the charity and campaign group Women for Afghan Women. "It will make it impossible to prosecute cases of violence against women … The most vulnerable people won't get justice now." Under the new law, prosecutors could never come to court with cases like that of Sahar Gul, a child bride whose in-laws chained her in a basement and starved, burned and whipped her when she refused to work as a prostitute for them. Women like 31-year-old Sitara, whose nose and lips were sliced off by her husband at the end of last year, could never take the stand against their attackers. "Honour" killings by fathers and brothers who disapprove of a woman's behaviour would be almost impossible to punish. Forced marriage and the sale or trading of daughters to end feuds or settle debt would also be largely beyond the control of the law in a country where the prosecution of abuse is already rare. It is common in western legal systems to excuse people from testimony that might incriminate their spouse. But it is a very narrow exception, with little resemblance to the blanket ban planned in Afghanistan.
It's difficult to get a good overview of the situation of women in Afghanistan now and ten years ago. There are positive changes and then there are these backlashes by the conservatives factions.
The real question now is whether Hamid Karzai will sign the law or not. That looks unlikely to me, given the rise of conservative forces and sentiments and the best private strategies of Karzai himself when the occupying forces leave. But I very much hope I am wrong and if writing about this here increases international attention by even a minute amount, then it's worth writing about it.
Meet Christina Hoff Sommers. It It's Bad For Women, Women Chose It. If It's Bad For Men, Women Chose It.
Are you familiar with the work of Christina Hoff Sommers? She is an anti-feminist* American writer, employed by the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where her field to plow is anything having to do with feminism. In 1995 she published a book fetchingly entitled Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women, but she is most famous for her book about the educational problems of boys and how those problems are the fault of feminists. That 2001 book is titled The War Against Boys. How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men.
In other contexts she has argued that masculinity is viewed as politically incorrect in the United States, that "fair" wages are not equal wages because women simply happen to prefer jobs which just happen to pay less or because women voluntarily choose to drop out of the labor force to have children and those gaps naturally mean that the free-market-gods will have to pay women less. She has recently stated that so few women are CEOs because women don't want to be CEOs. The LeanIn movement must fail because women don't want to Lean In; women want to lean against the strong shoulders of their male partners, or to Lean Out because pay isn't that important for those people-centered women interested in caring occupations.
None of that is surprising. Conservatives usually assume that any differences between men and women are a) biology-based and unchanging or b) based on utterly free and unconstrained choices by both men and women but especially women.
These rules are sometimes applied in the weirdest of manners. For example, you might think that reproductive differences, such as who it is who gives birth, would be viewed as biology-based. But the general conservative interpretation of what might be going on when women take time off from work to have children is that this is just a free choice by the ladiez! It's not something that the labor markets need to take into account, not at all the same as, say, the human need for sleep or rest.
But if reproductive gender differences were truly seen as innate and not just a choice by women, we'd have to address the kinds of questions we do about the need for sleep: Firms are not allowed to keep workers working 24 hours a day without rest. Human reproduction requires that those giving birth get to have some time off, but conservatives have fought tooth-and-nail against any kind of maternity leaves for those workers. What conservatives regard as innate is women's lesser skill or interest in STEM-careers, not the way humans are reproduced. The latter is one of those choice items.
There is one exception to these rules: When it comes to boys' problems at school or the lower male participation rate in college, conservatives do not look for a choice-based or innate explanation. Rather, Hoff Sommers' book blames feminism for the "war against boys" in the United States. That the same patterns are observed in essentially all countries which don't outright exclude women from higher education, including such countries as Saudi Arabia, cannot be explained by the blame-feminism theory. Indeed, in other contexts conservatives would probably argue that something so widespread as the greater percentage of women among college students must be based on innate differences, not on environmental or economic or cultural incentives.
I'm not buying that, of course. But it's important to note that the conservatives (and quite a few liberals) believe that "voluntary choice" because of [sic] those "biological differences" is the usual explanation for gender differences when they appear not to favor women.
Hoff Sommers: No, Women Don't Make Less Money Than Men
So why am I going on about this particular anti-feminist? Because she has written a commentary on president Obama's State of the Union speech with that inane headline (No, Women Don't Make Less Money Than Men) and because it's worth taking out that flea comb and combing through her arguments, partly to see How It Is Done and partly to see if there's anything in her opinions with which I can agree.
It’s the bogus statistic that won’t die—and president deployed it during the State of the Union—but women do not make 77 cents to every dollar a man earns. President Obama repeated the spurious gender wage gap statistic in his State of the Union address. “Today,” he said, “women make up about half our workforce. But they still make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. That is wrong, and in 2014, it’s an embarrassment.”
OK. Actually, women do make 77 cents to every dollar a man earns, on average. Despite the "bogus statistic" reference and the headline-in-search-for-clicks Hoff Sommers doesn't disagree with any of that. What she disagrees with is what she thinks the president thinks by that statement! Or
What is wrong and embarrassing is the President of the United States reciting a massively discredited factoid. The 23-cent gender pay gap is simply the difference between the average earnings of all men and women working full-time. It does not account for differences in occupations, positions, education, job tenure, or hours worked per week. When all these relevant factors are taken into consideration, the wage gap narrows to about five cents. And no one knows if the five cents is a result of discrimination or some other subtle, hard-to-measure difference between male and female workers. In its fact-checking column on the State of the Union, the Washington Post included the president’s mention of the wage gap in its list of dubious claims. “There is clearly a wage gap, but differences in the life choices of men and women… make it difficult to make simple comparisons.”
Emphasis is mine. More about that bolded assertion below and later in this post. For the time being, let's just assume that what Hoff Sommers means is this: The gross gender gap, measured as the 23 cent difference above, does not take into account such average differences between men and women which are not necessarily evidence for gender discrimination in the labor markets. If that's what she means here (and I'm being kind), she has a valid point. The rest of her piece presents a second partially valid point and then adds a lot of weird stuff and interpretation.
A survey of Catholics in Germany and Switzerland shows that most reject the church's teachings on contraception, divorce, sexual morality and gay unions. This will not change the moral teachings of the church.
Well, of course not, and not only because the results might be different elsewhere in the world.
And despite some statements by pope Francis, neither is much going to change in the official teachings of the church about the proper place of women*, though it could well be the case that your average Catholic in this country or in Germany or Switzerland might not agree with those teachings, either.
I have written before about the three pillars on which the general second-class status of women depend** (religion, laws and science/pseudoscience). Out of the three it is religion which is the hardest and the slowest to change, because the holy books, written when cultures were very patriarchal, can always be interpreted as the written law of god. Once someone does that, well, you are arguing with a divine power.
This doesn't mean that religions cannot change or that there aren't religions which have changed. Some do wonderful work on women and gender. But there's a lot of work still to be done within the three large Abrahamic religions***.
-------
*The teachings about contraception, sexual morality, divorce and gay unions are also linked to the proper place of women, of course.
**I use the pillars metaphor on purpose, because the old argument often consist of both restricting women's roles in the society and of putting them on a partial pedestal, especially as mothers. You can't leap off the pedestal without getting hurt but on the other hand your specific female talents (which the current pope attributes to women) can be more easily worshiped that way.
***And probably in other religions, too.
Are your tweets simple sentences in a chat you have with someone on Twitter? Are they mini- thoughts carefully framed and considered? Are they jokes you pass on? Are they information? Do you know if the information you offer is correct or not? Are Twitter discussions real discussions, given that the system doesn't quite allow us to know who the participants are? What is the sound of a tweet when it drops into the universe without any response? Did you reach someone or not? What if you tweet about what you had for breakfast and someone saves that tweet and uses it later in some completely different conversation?
Are there powerful goddesses and gods of Twittersphere? Does talking to invisible people you don't know make you feel freer to say what you mean? Or less free? Is it easier to be angry on Twitter than in real life? Is Twitter more democratic than the mainstream media (however defined) or no more democratic? Are tweets like scrawls on the seashore sand which the ocean smooths away in the next moment or are they like cuneiform tablets, to be one day (soon!) unearthed by future archeologists?
How are tweets to be interpreted?
That is a very serious question, my friends. I ask it, because Twitter, right now, is one of the best imitators of actual oral discussions or chats on the Internet, because it is a way of carrying out a conversation and because the way the tweets are restricted in length makes each tweet resemble one short snippet of an actual conversation.
People chat on Twitter, people post kitten pictures on Twitter, people transmit opinions, arguments, information and feelings on Twitter, and all of that is done in very short soundbites, in a way which makes one feel there's just this conversation going on, and if something is misunderstood then you clarify, the way you would while sitting around a kitchen table or on a bar stool in a pub.
I'd argue that most people think of Twitter use as close to oral communication. But once a tweet has been birthed and sent off into the Twittersphere it is also something quite different. The extreme analogy I use in the title of this post is that it's like a cuneiform tablet, to be regarded as an independent piece of written evidence, to be read in isolation of the conversation it belongs to and to be judged, pretty much, as if it is not that different from a book excerpt or an excerpt from a published speech.
Except that the context itself can be very difficult to properly establish in Twitter conversations. A published speech or a book allows those who wish a fairly quick way for checking what the context was. It is much more difficult to establish the overall contents of a Twitter debate. Some of them continue for days, for example.
I see individual tweets used in blog posts and in articles where the author posts screenshots of various tweets, tied to some wider topic, and usually that treatment doesn't cause problems, because the tweets are picked carefully, to present a range of opinions or feelings, say. But it's easy to see that taking one tweet out from a longer debate also offers a different way of analyzing it.
As I noted, we have always had the problem of taking statements out of context. But when those statements can be produced almost instantaneously, by large numbers of people, and not always with much thought given to those future archeologists, in a setting which resembles spoken communication, that problem is made much more common.
The cuneiform tablet approach to the analysis of tweets is to assume that some particular tweet stands alone (which it may or may not do), and to then continue to dissect it on the basis of its own contents. In an extreme form this can resemble the way archeologists use a cuneiform tablet, written by one scribe, to draw conclusions about, say, the ancient Sumerians.
It both explains why such proposals are not very important for at least some groups of Native Americans and why, at the same time, they can be very important, and it offers a lot of important nuance and additional information:
It explains about the racial profiling of those who live on the reservation, it mentions the very high unemployment rate and other large problems the locals face and, in my opinion, it asks why we are not having national movements to fix the enormous economic problems of many Native Americans.
This is something I see missing in the privilege-based debates about gender, race or ethnicity or both of those at the same time. Despite certain clear benefits that come from introspection in understanding one's own privileged position on various social thermometers, that understanding doesn't necessarily result in workable proposals for change about the underpinnings, so to speak. We need more resources for the reservations, more resources for Native Americans in general, not just the removal of team names which appropriate Native American history.
A bronze
statuette dubbed the "Dancing Girl", 10.8 centimetres (4.3 in) high and
some 4,500 years old, was found in Mohenjo-daro in 1926. In 1973,
British archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler described the item as his favorite statuette:
"She's about fifteen years old I should think, not more, but she
stands there with bangles all the way up her arm and nothing else on. A
girl perfectly, for the moment, perfectly confident of herself and the
world. There's nothing like her, I think, in the world."
John Marshall, another archeologist at Mohenjo-daro, described the
figure as "a young girl, her hand on her hip in a half-impudent posture,
and legs slightly forward as she beats time to the music with her legs
and feet."[14] The archaeologist Gregory Possehl said of the statuette, "We may not be certain that she was a dancer, but she was good at what she did and she knew it".
I love the moments when one reads about some ancient human culture and suddenly comes across that feeling: the person talked about or viewed could be someone here and right now, someone we can understand and appreciate as a human being, the reminder of the humanity of all people who once were.
I also love the girl in the statue and the work of whoever made it, because it is a statue of the person, not a mere visual symbol of characteristics which were deemed desirable for some wider purpose.
Fox News host Martha MacCallum asserted on Wednesday that women did not want special laws ensuring equal for equal work because they already were compensated “exactly what they’re worth.” After President Barack Obama used his State of the Union address on Tuesday to call on Congress to end workplace discrimination practices that “belong in a Mad Men episode,” Fox News asked two men, liberal radio host Alan Colmes and Fox News host Tucker Carlson, to debate equal pay for women. Carlson argued that women actually made more than men if the time they “voluntarily” took off work to raise children was factored in.
“The numbers don’t lie,” he insisted. “The losers in the Obama economy have been men.” MacCallum accused politicians of talking about female workers like they were victims “who we need to make sure she gets what she deserves.” “The numbers, when you look at them, do not bear out that there is a war on women in the workplace,” the Fox News host added. “And I think it’s a question of how liberals and conservative view what needs to be done for women.”
This is such a fun word soup. First, everyone and their great-uncle feels free to talk about the meaning of various earnings, despite the fact that there are mountains of actual economic research on the topic of the gender gap in wages and related questions. This feeling that one knows stuff without knowing it angers me, because of that Puritan streak I have: Do the research before you open your mouth and bare your fangs. And no, we cannot just say that women are earning exactly what they are worth, which means all women in this country and in all jobs.
Another example of this not-knowing-your-facts is the very common argument that men earn more only because they work more hours in the labor market. That's because most studies still show a difference in earnings when the hours spent working are held constant (taken into account). It is true that some of the difference in overall earnings between men and women has to do with different paid work hours (unpaid work at home is not taken into account in those comparisons), but it is not true that the whole difference can be attributed to worked hour differences.
Second, there's the idea, again, that the gendered roles of who take care of children doesn't matter at all, that "choice" is the explanation for why women choose certain jobs, that women freely "choose" to earn less, that women "choose" to take time off for childbearing and child-rearing and so on. This is an assertion, not something that we can deduce from research, this idea that all the reasons for gender differences in earnings are voluntary on women's part.
I have written about the way the term "choice" is used in political arguments before. But the main point worth repeating is that choice is carried out within a set of constraints. Those constraints are different, on average, for men and women, and the consequences of certain "choices" are also different. This doesn't mean that there is no choice, just that to understand why we end up with the roles we do end up with requires a study of the wider framework in which they take place. And here the role of the Republicans as the party which fights tooth-and-nail against maternity leaves, subsidized health care and in general the idea of women in the public sphere matters. It matters because they are pulling the framework within which women make these "free choices" in one direction.
A lot more could be written about that quote, such as a careful analysis of the losers and winners in the "Obama economy" which conflates the administration's action and inaction with the recent recession with what Republican governors have done in their states to increase unemployment and so on, and which carefully moves the magnifying lens from the group which is really doing well (those on the top of the earnings pyramid) to a kind of gendered re-reading of the data.
Why the latter is tricky is because of the recession effects: Men are more likely to lose jobs first in recessions because they are more likely to work in the bellwether industries (construction, manufacture and transportation), but men are also more likely to see recovery in those jobs faster. The recovery from the recession (such as it is) is still an ongoing process, and, as we should expect, the unemployment rates of men and women are coming back towards their usual rough equality.
But the new jobs people are getting, both men and women, do look like not-so-great-jobs. And the large unemployment differences are between whites on the one side and blacks and Latinos on the other side, another topic Fox News will not address.
First, the SOTU speech. I fell asleep before that started and so didn't watch it. And then I decided not to write about it because the SOTU speeches of the past didn't much matter, even though I spent effort and time to analyze them. Aren't you happy on my behalf?
Second, this article about how to bring up successful children: The gist is to make your children like this:
It turns out that for all their diversity, the strikingly successful groups in America today share three traits that, together, propel success. The first is a superiority complex — a deep-seated belief in their exceptionality. The second appears to be the opposite — insecurity, a feeling that you or what you’ve done is not good enough. The third is impulse control.
Now, those children might end up really unhappy, because of that inner insecurity and because at the same time they believe that they are better than people from other groups. But they have excellent impulse control so they will climb to the top of the social hierarchies!
Richard Kim talks back to the authors. I still can't get over the idea that creating unhappy children is a Good Thing because they will be rich one day. At least they can cry in a Rolls Royce, I guess.
Neither can I quite see how any of this would work if all racial and ethnic groups did the same thing, because the places at the top of the society are but few and getting fewer every year. You might derange your kids for no good reason!
Finally, I'm not at all sure that the authors, Chua and Rubinfeld, have really looked at the data. If certain groups of immigrants come into this country with high levels of education and other groups as refugees who have gone through hell and may not be able to read, well, their children might fare differently in the US, and you can't give that a nod and then just drive on holding your favorite parental-style theory. And whether we have good data to distinguish the economic performance of Mormons from that of Protestants and Catholics, say, is something I don't know, but I wonder how much Mormons might help each other to get ahead and I also wonder what the data actually shows, once we standardize for all the relevant economic variables (education, location etc.).
Third, an American agreementwith the fairly common idea that women are responsible for making heterosexual men think about sex:
A Southern Baptist pastor in Virginia has warned women in his congregation that they are sinning if their clothes allow others to see the “outline” of their bodies. The Christian Post pointed out on Tuesday that HeartCry Missionary Society founder Paul Washer had posted the sermon to YouTube last week, where he says that God wants women to “adorn themselves with proper clothing.” “That tells me that there is clothing that’s improper for a Christian woman,” the pastor explains. “That’s just logic.”
It's the same logic the Taliban used (and may still use) in Afghanistan: The shape of a woman must not be visible through her burqa.
What about cardboard boxes (piled up high enough to cover all of me) with a periscope? The advantage is that I could have all sorts of guns inside the box and nobody would know. The disadvantages are pretty obvious. But no outlines would be visible.
I have sometimes imagined what might happen if women had the ability to make themselves completely invisible. You'd think that would be great for all the religious men who don't want to see women's outlines. But then women could sneak into any place, without being spotted! The horror of it.
I'm fed up with these arguments, because they take all agency away from men (uncontrollable beasts, men seem to be, in some religious thinking) and because my research into the question of women's clothing is that any amount showing, even if it is two eyes, would make some religious preacher tell us that women must cover up more.
This is not to argue that there should be no rules about what people wear, of course, just that the rules should not be so much more burdensome for women than in general.
This article is a nice adjustment to all that Scandinavia-worship, by the UK Guardian. Read it and make sure that you don't want to move to the mosquito-filled ice-cold hell that is Northern Europe. It is a dreadful place*. Just don't go there! You will become suicidal if you do.
Kidding there, because it's in my interest to have a lot of nature left over in case I desire to move Snakepit Inc. back into Finland. But not completely kidding, because an important reason for those things which are going well in Scandinavian countries is social cohesion, and because there are a lot of mosquitoes and depressive people up there.
And as Michael Booth, the nasty-minded humorist at the Guardian, writes:
The myriad successes of the Nordic countries are no miracle, they were born of a combination of Lutheran modesty, peasant parsimony, geographical determinism and ruthless pragmatism ("The Russians are attacking? Join the Nazis! The Nazis are losing? Join the Allies!"). These societies function well for those who conform to the collective median, but they aren't much fun for tall poppies. Schools rein in higher achievers for the sake of the less gifted; "elite" is a dirty word; displays of success, ambition or wealth are frowned upon. If you can cope with this, and the cost, and the cold (both metaphorical and inter-personal), then by all means join me in my adopted hyggelige (home).
Well, not really "as the humorist writes," because he writes from the outside. That's why he is not sticking well enough for social cohesion. If you get my point. He thinks he is a tall poppy! How dare he! More seriously, the jury is still very much out on how the Scandinavian "miracle" would work in a more diversified society.
I think that the "ruthless pragmatism" argument is wrong, by the way. The reason for that pragmatism is something which I have thought about a lot, and that has to do with how much rational thought and evidence is allowed to influence the political systems of various countries. If I had to simplify a bit, I would say that the Scandinavian countries allow a lot more rational stuff to affect the political discourse than the politicians in most other countries, including the US.
I don't know the reason for that, but I believe the differences are real**, and one reason why corruption and bribery are so rare in Scandinavian politics.
I am very fond of the Finns, a most pragmatic, redoubtable people with a Sahara-dry sense of humour.
There you go. When I open my mouth sand falls out.
-----
*As the story is humor I can't be bothered to correct all the mistakes Booth makes. Just enjoy the parody.
**Based on both following the news and debates in Finland now and on what beliefs I had etched into my brain when I was growing up. I come across all innocent and naive about the power of facts and logical arguments because I was made to expect that this is how the world works. But do note that the difference is not huge or that Finns aren't watching soap operas from the US most of the time.
The House of Representatives passed a bundle of abortion restrictions
Tuesday that would dramatically reduce the number of health insurance
plans that cover the procedure. The vote was 227 to 188, with one
lawmaker voting present The No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act
(H.R. 7), sponsored by Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), would prohibit
insurance plans sold in the new health care exchanges from covering
abortion, and it would eliminate tax benefits for small businesses that
purchase insurance plans covering abortion. The bill would also prevent
the District of Columbia from using its own locally raised funds to
subsidize abortion care for low-income women. Currently, more than 80 percent of private health insurance plans
include abortion coverage, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a
reproductive health research group.
The bill would not actually prevent federal taxpayer dollars from
funding abortion because the Hyde Amendment has already done that for
more than three decades.
Why is it worth a closer look? Because the Republicans, when elected, seldom run on the promise to spend most of their time on abortion but that's what happens once they are in office. Because there is no real movement to have an act called No Taxpayer Funding For Killing Innocent People Abroad With Drones, say, and we don't even really question why that is the case.
That's fun. The current political discussion on marriage is not quite so fun. The two halves of it which came together inside my brain-box have a lot of trouble staying together and, indeed, desperately wish to get divorced.
The first half is a recent study about divorce. I haven't been able to read the original study yet, but most write-ups regard it as fairly well done.* What the study authors argue is this:
Demographers Jennifer Glass at the University of Texas and Philip Levchak at the University of Iowa looked county-by-county at divorces for a study to be published later this month in the American Journal of Sociology.
Their study controlled for the effect of poverty, which is greater in the southern Bible belt and is known to contribute to higher divorce rates. Even accounting for income and the higher rate of marriage overall in southern states — an alternative to unmarried cohabitation more common in less conservative households — divorce rates in counties with higher proportions of conservative protestants remained higher.
The religiously conservative states of Alabama and Arkansas have the second and third highest divorce rates in the U.S., the authors noted. at 13 per 1000 people per year while New Jersey and Massachusetts, more liberal states, are two of the lowest at 6 and 7 per 1000 people per year.
The strongest correlation showed that early marriage and low income among religious conservatives factor into the higher divorce rates. “Unpacking these variations, Glass and Levchak found that the high divorce rate among conservative religious groups is indeed explained in large part by the earlier ages at first marriage and first birth, and the lower educational attainment and lower incomes of conservative Protestant youth,” the authors wrote.
The study also argues that the divorce effect even works on people who live in areas with large numbers of conservative Protestants, even if they themselves don't belong to that group. The tentative explanation the researchers offer is this:
According to their paper, it’s not just believers who are affected—simply living in an area with lots of right-wing evangelicals makes divorce more likely, because the prevailing community norms and institutions affect everyone. The more powerful Christian conservatives get, the worse the problem becomes. “One plausible interpretation of the results is that as conservative Protestant presence increases, elite conservative Protestant influence grows stronger, which results in policies and programs that do little to reduce divorce, but only increase early marriage,” write Glass and Levchak. “One of the things that happens is that early marriage and parenthood in particular are bad times for very young women to be entering the labor force,” says Glass. “They withdraw from the labor force and withdraw from schooling to take care of their kids.” Meanwhile, she says, “it’s become very, very difficult for young men to support an entire family. Families that are formed early have a really difficult time making ends meet with the human resources they have at their disposal.”
So what do we have here? Something that has actually been known for a while, in a fuzzier form:
The rates of divorce are considerably higher in the Republican heartland than in the Sodom and Gomorrah of the more liberal states (such as Massachusetts, the Sodom of conservative imagination). Much of that is linked to greater poverty in the former, but some, at least, does seem to be linked to conservative Protestantism. That it is conservative Protestants who most worry and fret over marriage makes a kind of sense, except that they blame the problems on liberals.
The second half:Ross Douthat's recent column. Douthat is a good example of those conservative religious people who blame divorce on liberal values. He begins by suggesting that both sides in this political debate (the god-fearing conservatives and the Sodom folk) should make certain concessions:
Or both sides could be a bit more honest about the roots of marriage’s decline. Honesty from conservatives would begin by acknowledging that policies championed on the right — mass incarceration in response to the post-1960s crime wave, Bain Capital-style “creative destruction” in response to Carter-era stagnation — have often made it harder for low-income men to find steady work and stay out of prison, and made women understandably wary of marrying them.
Then this honesty would continue with a concession that certain kinds of redistribution — especially if tied to wage-earning — might help make men more marriageable, families more stable, and touch off a virtuous interaction between the financial and the personal. Right now, I think some conservatives — though not enough Republican politicians — are willing to concede these points. But I don’t see a readiness among liberals to make any concessions of their own, beyond the minimal acknowledgment that all things being equal, two parents are often better than one.
A more significant concession would be to acknowledge the ways in which liberalism itself has undercut the two-parent family — through the liberal-dominated culture industry’s permissive, reductive attitudes toward sex, and through the 1970s-era revolution in divorce and abortion law.
Bolds are mine.
The bolded first paragraph suggests to me that Douthat wants to see wage subsidies for low-earning men. He's not spelling it out, but that's what the redistribution tied to wage earning must mean in this context.
And note that last paragraph, for the liberal-blaming. This clashes with the findings of the Glass and Levchak study. But it's also a hint that Douthat likes the idea of forcing marriage on people and the idea of keeping them married. He talks about that later, when he offers various "compromises":
Many marriages, especially in the upper-middle class, were strengthened by caution and delay. But for couples with more limited resources, and more to lose from failure, no-fault divorce may have reduced the value of the institution and the sacrifices embraced on its behalf. When liberals claim social conservatives don’t have any policy ideas for marriage promotion, then, they’re somewhat self-deceived. A sustained conservative shift on abortion policy and marriage law probably would, over the long term, increase the rate at which couples take vows and stay together, and improve the life prospects of their children. So one hypothetical middle ground on marriage promotion might involve wage subsidies and modest limits on unilateral divorce, or a jobs program and a second-trimester abortion ban.
The idea of various abortion bans is to force women into marriages, the idea of making divorce more difficult is to keep people married, whether they wish to do that or not. All this smells of forcing to me, and Douthat argues that the outcome is good because it is good for children to have two parents.
But here's the problem with that: In the first half of this post about the marriage (or divorce) of the two thought types the problems of the conservative Protestant marriage culture boil down to the exact thing that Douthats dislikes: They make divorce more likely.
Yet he wants people to be forced into that very type of marriage, one which favors getting married so early that the women haven't acquired an education which guarantees decent earnings later, one which favors the norm of early childbirth and the mother staying at home with the child or children, one which therefore results in young families with many mouths to feed and only one wage-earner.
What Douthat adds to that is the argument that people should be forced to take the stresses of that type of marriage without being able to leave it very easily because it is better for the children. But here we enter the question whether any kind of marriage (even one that is all stress and fights, say) is better for the children than growing up in a divorced home. Research suggests that this is not the case.
The question Douthat is not asking, really, is what type of marriages we wish to create. That may be because he assumes that all people are pretty evil and must be made to live the way Douthat believes people should live, based on his conception of what divine rules on this are, or because he believes that in some weird sense all marriages are created equal, so the only question is how to push enough people into the marriage mold.
It's the marriage mold which matters here. When we debate something like "marriage" we bring to the conversation our own deeper ideas what marriage might mean. If I had to make a guess about Ross Douthat's deeper ideas in this context, I'd say that he believes in a certain kind of traditional marriage, based on heterosexuals marrying, the husband being the boss of the family, the husband earning all the money in the family and the wife doing all the child-rearing and all the household chores, and the number of children in the family being determined by either chance or by what the husband deems suitable.
That may be quite wrong. But whenever I make that assumption about the conservative deeper ideas of marriage what conservatives say or write starts making sense within that narrow context:
Same-sex marriage is then clearly deplorable because how can we decide which of two men or two women should be bringing the bacon home and which one should be cooking it? How can we keep child-rearing a purely female task if the parents are two men? And who on earth is going to be the god-determined boss in such a family?
Likewise, the recent conservative statements about the government being Uncle Sugar for unmarried women or Wendy Davis' husband seen as a Sugar Daddy can best be interpreted within that narrow framework: In the conservative worldview married women are like employees and married men are like the employers. The employer pays for the work of the employee, and that work consists of housework and child-rearing and sex. In return to that work, the employer funds and protects the employee and promises not to use other labor for those chores on the side, such as sex.**
If a woman is not carrying out the whole list of those tasks, then her husband (or the government) is seen as paying for nothing but sex. Ann Coulter called Wendy Davis a kept woman, because her husband helped her to get an education. Mike Huckabee sees the role of the government as a way to bypass the delivery of marital work to the proper employer of the married woman which is her husband.
What do you think of that interpretation? Do note that I'm NOT saying that marriages are like that or that husbands are like that or that wives are like that or that marriage cannot be absolutely wonderful and delightful, only that a certain strain of conservative thought is based on those implicit (and economic) assumptions.
This also explains why married women in the labor force are still seen as problematic among some social or cultural conservatives. The more time a woman spends outside the home, the less time she has for that proper labor that married women are assigned in the conservative thinking, especially child-rearing. And a woman bringing in money is also interfering with the assigned tasks of the conservative husband which is to be the wallet for the whole family unit. Because his role as the family CEO is based on that role, anything that threatens it is of grave concern.
OK. Now go and read Douthat's column again.
-----
*This is one critique which argues for problems in the study but even its writer agrees that the main conclusions apply. The church-attendance stuff the author uses to differentiate between those young Protestants who stay married and those who do not is, by the way, trickier to use than he or she implies. That's because the causality between divorce and church attendance is very likely to go the other way: Young people attending church regularly who then get divorced might stop attending church regularly. Thus, it's not at all clear that regular church attendance protects against early divorce. -- We need time series data to test for the most likely direction of causality there.
**Adopting this approach finally let me understand why one conservative writer, Danielle Crittenden, in her book (What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman) argued that men and women make similar size sacrifices for marriage when she tosses her career plans out of the window and when he agrees not to have a mistress.
I read that book years ago and could never understand how such a wild comparison could be made. Aren't the women, too, agreeing not to have lovers, and why is that not a sacrifice? But within the conservative framework of marriage as an employer/employee relationship this makes sense.
1. You know you need your eyes checked when every story about buffer zones around abortion clinics reads like it's about butter zones and when the "chivalry" that Kathryn Lopez (a conservative writer) praises Mike Huckabee for reads to me like "cavalry". On the other hand, that's exactly how my best creative thoughts have been born, from mistakes of various types. Mmm.
2. On procrastination: Here's one opinion piece about the best way to stop procrastinating in writing: Get your hip joints replaced.
That was a flat-falling joke, because the writer does have an interesting idea: That the creative part of your brain (most likely not the right brain hemisphere, however) might be awake when you are still all groggy with sleep. If that means having to get up at six am, I'm never going to get anything done. Some nights I'm hardly asleep by six am.
On the other hand, it's possible that my creativity is awake and doing stuff when I'm asleep. That would explain why I work so very hard and get so very little done: My creativity is spent on truly frightening technicolor nightmares and on those all-papers-coming-out-of-desk-drawers-while-poodles-climb-fire-ladders-and-charming-ladies-walk-by-leading-pigs-on-leashes. Just to summarize where today's creativity was spent.
Procrastination is both a real problem and a form of self-defense. The latter isn't appreciated enough. If you delay making a fool out of yourself you feel better for a while longer.
3. You cannot really have a list of shallow thoughts with just two thoughts. That's because humans see two things as a pair. To have a crowd of shallowness you need three things or more. Writing about that made my list a proper one and also helped in procrastinating.
A Texas judge ordered life support removed from a pregnant Haltom
City woman who has been kept alive at John Peter Smith Hospital against
the wishes of her family. State District Judge R. H. Wallace
ordered the county-owned hospital to discontinue providing
life-sustaining measures to Marlise Muñoz, 33, who has been hospitalized
since just before Thanksgiving after she was stricken by a pulmonary
embolism when she was 14 weeks pregnant. The family went to court
earlier today seeking to have that life support be removed after the
county hospital declined to do so. Wallace ordered that life support be
removed by 5 p.m. Monday. A court document filed shortly before
the hearing was set to begin states that Marlise Muñoz is 22 weeks
pregnant, that she met the clinical criteria for brain death on Nov. 28.
This week, attorneys for the Muñoz family released a statement
saying that medical records indicate that the fetus is “distinctly
abnormal,” with lower extremities deformed, and suffers from a number of
other serious health conditions including water on the brain and heart
problems.
I have not written much about this case for several reasons (including the inappropriateness of forcing a public debate over the private grief of one family, the awfulness of the idea that even dead women can be used for something, the clear prioritizing of the embryo or fetus over everything in this case, including the wishes of the widower and the wishes he reported his wife had, combined with the obvious question of whether a fetus can incubate inside a dead body for any amount of time, even after the woman was without oxygen for long enough to become brain-dead and so on). But clearly the Texas laws need rewriting.
The Supreme Court on Friday extended a temporary order from Justice Sonia Sotomayor barring the Obama administration from enforcing a part of the Affordable Care Act against an order of nuns. The health law requires most employers to provide insurance coverage for contraception. The nuns of the Little Sisters of the Poor said the requirement is offensive to their religious beliefs. An accommodation allowing them to opt out of the requirement — by issuing a certification to an insurance company to offer the coverage independently — also made them complicit in immoral conduct, the nuns said. In an order Friday, the Supreme Court said that the administration must not enforce the contraceptive coverage requirement against the nuns while the case is pending before a federal appeals court. In addition, the Supreme Court said that the Little Sisters “need not use the form prescribed by the government” to qualify for an exemption.
On Dec. 31, just hours before the requirement took effect, Justice Sotomayor had temporarily blocked enforcement of that part of the law against the nuns and some affiliated groups. According to the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which represents the nuns and other challengers to the requirement, preliminary injunctions had been granted in the lower courts in almost all of 20 similar cases. Justice Sotomayor acted after the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, in Denver, declined to issue an injunction. The nuns, who operate nursing homes for poor people in the United States and around the world, provide health benefits to employees through a “church plan” that is exempt from federal regulations that apply to most employer-sponsored insurance, the administration said. The nuns, their health plan and the company that administers the plan will not be required to cover birth control, the administration said in urging the Supreme Court to dissolve Justice Sotomayor’s stay. The Little Sisters “need only self-certify that they are nonprofit organizations that hold themselves out as religious and have religious objections to providing coverage for contraceptive services,” the administration said on Jan. 3 in a brief filed with the Supreme Court by Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. A lawyer for the nuns disagreed. “The government demands that the Little Sisters of the Poor sign a permission slip for abortion drugs and contraceptives, or pay millions in fines,” said the lawyer, Mark L. Rienzi, of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. “The sisters believe that doing that violates their faith, and that they shouldn’t be forced to divert funds from the poor, elderly and dying people they’ve devoted their lives to serve.”
As far as I can tell, extending the stay in this case is normal, until the case is presented to the Supreme Court. Also as far as I can tell, the case is about whether filling a form is offensive to the moral beliefs of the nuns.
The wider connections I'm thinking about are questions having to do with wars and other forms of legal governmental killing. Those are morally offensive to many religious and non-religious people, but there is no real way of avoiding paying for those from our taxes.
Then there's the general question if it ever should matter what the religions of the Justices at the bench of the Supreme Court might be. I don't have an answer to that question, by the way.
But right now six of the nine Justices are Catholic and three are Jewish which makes those religious groups pretty over-represented, when viewed in terms of the population percentages. I'm not arguing that the Justices would let their religions affect the decisions or that we should apply a religious test to the nominees to SCOTUS. Still, thinking about possible answers to this question is useful when many of the cases coming up concern one particular religion.
Read more here: http://www.star-telegram.com/2014/01/24/5511776/fetus-in-munoz-case-is-not-viable.html#storylink=cpy
Yup. Huckabee thinks my libido might be out of control, perhaps out gallivanting, spending money on rubber underwear and G-strings, ogling at the bottoms of all beautiful men strolling by and getting drunk in public bars on White Russians. Or any color Russians. Or any other nationality. Because of that lack of control.
That was fun. I never realized right-wing religious politicians such as Mike Huckabee have a sense of humor. Huckabee is a former Arkansas Governor and a former runner-up in Republican presidential candidate elections and I have followed what he says for a long time. He never came across as a funny guy before, though he did once advocate the Biblical submission of wives to their husbands.
"If the Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of government then so be it! Let us take that discussion all across America because women are far more than the Democrats have played them to be," Huckabee said.
This is still very funny. Note that the social conservatives don't believe that good women have a libido. Good women are only supposed to have sex when they want children. Probably while closing their eyes, staying veryvery still and thinking of the Tea Party or the Fibonacci series or what to cook for him tomorrow.
In the conservative worldview, only sluts have a libido, but in any case (and at the same time!) all men have a giant libido and women have little postage stamp libidos and that's why women must be the gate-keepers in the sexual marketplace. That's also why conservatives never try to control the male libido, or notice that the birth control women get actually does sorta benefit heterosexual men as it takes two to tango.
Well, that's not the real explanation, that "why" in my last sentence. It's the conservative way of looking at only women's behavior when it comes to sex.
I love that Uncle Sugar reference, too! It does so much for those who argue that there is no Republican war against women, especially when we put it into the context of the most recent assault against Wendy Davis who is running for the governor of Texas.
Ann Coulter stated that Davis married a Sugar Daddy to put her through law schools (an old solution traditionally used in reverse by men who went to medical or law or business school while their wives worked as secretaries or nurses or teachers, though those wives never got called Sugar Mommies). And Erick Erickson, an anti-feminist conservative, joined in:
"So Abortion Barbie had a Sugar Daddy Ken," tweeted Fox News pundit
Erick Erickson, referring to Davis' famous filibuster of an
anti-abortion bill in the Texas state Senate last year and to her second
husband. "[Not] exactly the bio she claimed."
Women can have Uncle Sugars (the government) or Sugar Daddies (husbands). But male politicians whose wives help them with their careers and then end up being divorced are never called Sugar Mommies. Neither do we have any similar name for men who make a lot of money out of the government subsidies for large firms, say*.
My point is not about what Wendy Davis has done in her past life. It's about the way conservatives view women's proper roles in life and how those views translate into criticism of uppity women in general. That's how you get a criticism of Wendy Davis as having abandoned her children because she was not the custodial parent for a few years after her divorce or because she showed ambition. Now gender-reverse that criticism. It doesn't bite at all, because the conservatives don't assume men to do the hands-on care of their children and because the conservatives don't see anything wrong with male ambition.
And it is in these generalizations that the conservative war on women is best shown.
-----
*These are not aimed at men only, of course, but the leadership of such firms is predominantly male, and as I point out in the post, heterosexual men also benefit from the birth control their partners use.
One problem with having such an old blog as I do is that I have covered most of what I wish to say on particular topics before. When some annual date of importance comes up I now sigh and fret, trying desperately to find something new to say on that particular topic.
This time I decided to go and see what I have in my archives. I still like this 2007 post about the reasons why I am pro-choice:
So many different levels on which this one could be answered. There is
the little girl who heard a story about her grandmother's best friend, a
long time ago, a friend who aborted her pre-wedding pregnancy with some
implement found on the farm, because getting pregnant before marriage
made a woman into a whore and a slut and she would be ostracized for the
rest of her life. Instead, she was buried in her wedding dress before
the scheduled wedding date. The story was told to the little girl for a
different reason, perhaps, but what she took away from it was the idea
that a world that puts such pressure on women is horribly wrong. And
she wondered why there was no pressure to ostracize the man. - There
might be a lesson here about how feminists are created, too.
Then
there is the teenager who read a book where doctors let a pregnant
woman with cancer die without painkillers, because those painkillers
might have hurt the fetus. And the same teenager went out to parties
and realized that in a slightly different world, with those stern
pro-fetus values, she herself might get raped and then made to be
pregnant for nine months and to give birth, too. And she might die
because of this and have no legal defense.
Fast forward to the
young feminist who read lots of legal books on abortion, lots of
arguments against and for, lots of impassioned pleas on both sides,
scientific evidence and quasi-scientific evidence. What she saw was
that some anti-choice people were sincere in their belief that a person
is created at the point of conception. But she also saw that many of
those who expressed this belief also liked the idea of killing people
just fine, provided that they were out of the womb and that the killing
was done by men in power. And there were many in that camp who really
liked the idea of taking the power over fertility away from women as a
group, and there were those who also liked the side-effect of removing
most freedoms from women's lives by banning contraception. Kinder,
Kirche und Küche people.
Closer to the present time. Add color
to the film at this point. The goddess in the chrysalis stage realized
the immense problems that would be created by the decision of the
anti-choice crowd that persons are created at conception. Think of
those Russian dolls where there is always another doll inside the one
you open. Well, this is what this decision would do to women who are
pregnant or able to become pregnant. We would all become containers or potential
containers for Real People, and our every step would have to be
monitored to defend the unborn and the yet-to-become-unborn. We would
have to eat raw oats and sit with our ankles crossed while Beethoven is
played in the calm room with integral signs painted on the walls.
Because if we don't do these things we are guilty of endangering the
Real Person. The decision how we are going to deliver a child could
become one over which we can go to prison. Someone else might have to
decide for us because of the Real Person inside us.
Note that
this is not just about abortion. It is about all fertility, about
pregnancy and about delivery. Once someone makes the decision that the
embryo is at least as important as the woman with the uterus, well, we
are going to build the adversarial approach between the two, and
doctors, lawyers and politicians will all walk into our uteri, with
little suitcases full of rulebooks.
This may sound exaggerated to
you, and it is, in the sense that I've taken the anti-choice position
to its logical endpoint, the point it would reach without any resistance
from the rest of us. We see the beginnings of this in those court
cases where women are imprisoned or restrained for using illegal drugs
or for refusing the recommendations of the medical profession as to the
preferred form of giving birth. These decisions are based on the
adversarial assumption and they exist to protect the fetus, not the
woman. She is seen as a criminal, not someone who needs help herself or
perhaps better information. That many of these cases fly below our
radar screen is because the women involved are poor and/or illegal
drug-users and often belong to a racial or ethnic minority. But the
same principles would one day be applied to a white woman who doesn't
want to undergo a Caesarian section. Our race or our class would not
save us from this destiny.
In short, I think that most of this
debate is about the control of fertility, about the control of the size
and the makeup of the next generation, and different women face
different types of pressure in this. Some women, white ones in this
country, are urged to have more children. Other women, minorities in
this country, are urged to have fewer or at different times in their
lives. But all women will see their own say over their lives reduced by
the anti-choice forces should they ever come to power.
Being
pro-choice is not just being pro-abortion if the woman wants it. It is
also treating a pregnant woman as a full human being and not letting her
body or her decision-making be possessed by those she doesn't want to
allow in. This does not mean that no other considerations ever prevail,
but the principle of the woman's full personhood must not be violated.
So I think.
I chose to treat this assigned essay question for
today's anniversary of Roe v. Wade from a personal angle. But on most
days I don't think about it this way. I see the larger and larger
contexts in which all this would play out in our lives. Practically all
levels of equality of the sexes require that women can control their
own fertility. If that is taken away from us we can never be truly
equal in anything else.
Rep. Steve Pearce (R-NM) (an American politician of one conservative flavor) tells in his memoir that wives should voluntarily submit to their husbands. Wives are not inferior, nosir! They are just supposed to behave as they are.
The reasons have to do with Mr. Pearce's religion, though he puts a fun tilt on that:
Rep. Steve Pearce (R-NM) believes that although a wife is supposed to "voluntarily submit" to her husband, she is not inferior to him, according to the Washington Post. "The wife is to voluntarily submit, just as the husband is to lovingly lead and sacrifice," Pearce wrote in a December memoir "Just Fly The Plane, Stupid!" that cites the Bible. "The husband's part is to show up during the times of deep stress, take the leadership role and be accountable for the outcome, blaming no one else." Pearce also writes that while the wife is not inferior, she must nevertheless be obedient to her husband.
The tilt is that "showing up during the times of deep stress." Where is he hiding at other times and how do we define times of deep stress?
This begins to sound a bit like the story I was once told by an anti-feminist guy on the net that the deal about wifely submission is this: It's not much to ask that wives submit when husbands are ready to give their lives for their wives!
Sounds like a very one-sided bargain for most people because such extreme events where a husband should be willing to give his life while protecting his wife are pretty uncommon (luckily) for most of us, and because if they happen and the husband fails to die for the wife, well, how do you then undo the contract that has been running for years?
Duh. I'm stupid to address any of that with sophism. It's about power, not about logic, in any case. But do note that if we followed Mr. Pearce's rule of wifely submission no married woman with a living husband could ever truly take a leadership role in the society. Because the real power would be in the hands of her husband. How could we vote for a female married politician if it's really her husband we are voting for? And going backwards in history, how could married women have credit cards and bank accounts in their own names if it's really their husbands who control everything they do?
To his credit, Mr. Pearce also argues that husbands shouldn't exploit all this power they are given over their wives. But it's hard to see what actual restraints his religious beliefs would put on husbands who do just that. After all, the wives are supposed to be obedient. If the husband becomes a bully or an abuser, what is the obedient wife to do? Relinquish her obedience? Who decides when she can do that, because clearly she cannot make the decision.
The model Mr. Pearce advocates is a popular religious model, both in right-wing Christianity and in much of Islam. It crops up in other religions, too. It's also a very dangerous model because power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Not to mention the fact that such hierarchical marriages sound extremely suffocating and confining, even for the supposed leaders if they take their responsibilities seriously.
But the real reason I write about these opinions (not terribly common among the general population in the US or in the legal systems of any country today) is that the requirement of absolute and permanent voluntary submission by the wives at home is incompatible with general gender equality.
As a complete aside, isn't Mr. Pearce's argument interesting when set in the wider conservative talk topic of the day which is the importance of marriage in combating poverty? We should ask more often what conservatives mean by traditional marriage, turn some stones over to see what might be crawling under them.
When salmonella next strikes, the politicians who fix the problem could get accolades and bouquets of roses for being decisive and caring.
I was unable to find more about this proposal, but it's a good teaching example of an odd political failing when it comes to prevention. Politicians tend not to get punished for removing proper prevention, but they can get rewarded for fixing the problems their own lack of prevention created. Say a politician spends money on making traffic intersections safer and prevents a lot of fatal accidents because of that. In the next election cycle she or he may not get re-elected because of all that money spent on preventing deaths. The prevented deaths are invisible, the money expenditure is not.
One person was shot to death on the campus of Indiana's Purdue University on Tuesday, and a male suspect was in custody, authorities said.
...
The frequency of shootings at schools and universities in the United States is fueling the national debate over gun control. On Monday night, a student was shot and critically wounded outside an athletic center at Widener University in Chester, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia. Last week alone, two students were shot at a high school in Philadelphia, another was shot at a high school in Albany, New York, and two students were shot at a middle school in New Mexico. Gun ownership laws in the United States have come under intense scrutiny since December 2012, when 20 young children and six educators were shot dead by a long gunman at Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut.
3. This is an interesting piece about the online use of the word "rape" and the difficulties in studying the meaning and prevalence of rape threats, say. A snippet worth thinking about:
This is changing how we talk to one another. To have the attention of
anyone at all, people are increasingly forced to push their
communications – whether text or images – out of any shadow of subtlety.
It needs to be the brightest star in a sky of very bright stars and
busy astronomers with short attention spans. For Oxford neurologist
Susan Greenfield, this is a world of 'yuck and wow'. She fears that it
could be literally re-wiring our brains. Her warning was itself of
course duly turned into a sort of meme, 'yakawow'. You can buy the t-shirt.
The use of rape on Twitter has to at least partly slot into this wider
process where taboos – including rape - are being ruthlessly
desensitised online. This is creating a more permissive cultural
backdrop against which rape threats are made. The threat itself however
remains undiminished in either its gravity or the harm it can do to the
recipient. The worst-case scenario is that, desensitised to the word, we
become desensitised to the act.
I guess the question I have about this is the alternative theory: That the use of desensitizing language may always have been common among certain sub-groups or within certain conversations, such as in locker-rooms or bars, and that what we see on Twitter, say, is simply seeing that happen.
That's not necessarily the theory I support. I suspect that the social media do have some impact on our ability to view the other participants as fully human, partly, because we are suddenly able to discuss things with strangers with whom we have no shared history, and partly, because talking to a screen makes it easier to forget that real people hide behind it.
Still, the possibility that our brains are being affected by all this is certainly worth some research.
The UK Telegraph posted an opinion column on misogyny in 2013. One could criticize it because of the great difficulties of measuring misogyny on a global level or changes in it or whether horrible gang rapes in India, the rising gender gap in wages in the UK or the hostility shown towards women on the Internet can even be made commensurate on some easily interpreted scale.
But it IS an opinion piece, and it DOES point out that anyone who is a woman can face that thing JUST because she is a woman and for no other reason. "That thing" could be misogyny, as in hatred of women, or perhaps just mild contempt towards women or perhaps the objectification of women as mere providers of sexual and reproductive services or as creatures who are supposed to be confined to the homes and not seen or heard outside it. But whatever it is, it is real, among some fraction of people, both men and women, though probably more commonly among men. And whatever it is, there is an element of ranking in it, and the ranking is based on one's gender, nothing else.
Here's where the fun enters the picture: Guess what the most common topic of conversation in the comments attached to the piece are? If you guessed misandry (the hatred of men) you get a very large box of chocolate truffles and a position as one of my priests or priestesses. That's because the comments seem to have been astroturfed by certain groups of MRAs.
And yes, I know I shouldn't read comments to any articles about feminism or misogyny etc. Is there a twelve-step support group for comment readers?
We also need a twelve-step group for those who don't understand that discussing one topic doesn't mean that the opposite topic should also be discussed (or that it is obviously, and without evidence, an equally large or larger concern) or that such an omission is tantamount to misandry. We need a twelve-step programs to teach people about why how often something happens does matter. We need to teach people that omitting all the data which doesn't support your position while presenting anecdotal evidence to support it is not the proper way to generalize about something. And we need to find a way for me to ultimately accept that none of this is likely to happen, because the debate is about power, not about facts. Sigh.
Australian author, Nick Adams was the guest for this segment and he
basically said that feminism (and for some reason, the government) is
purposely emasculating men. And apparently, this isn’t happening in just
the United States!
Even in Australia, we’ve gone from wrestling with crocodiles to wrestling with lattes.
Presumably the number one hobby of all Australian men once was wrestling crocodiles.
But more importantly, Nick Adams believes that what being a man means is stuff like wrestling crocodiles and although he also believes that men are like that in an innate sense, the society still manages to turn them into wussies! Feminists are all-powerful! Feminists can even overpower the "natural" definition of manliness. That is pretty illogical. Either the "natural" definition of manliness is not natural at all or what Adams talks about is rubbish. Well, both really.
But there's more! Is feminism a threat to national security? Adams:
Absolutely, without a doubt. I think it has wide-ranging implications.
Weeps and wussies deliver mediocrity. And men win. And what America’s
always been about is winning. So I think it’s pivotal to the health of
the country.
Now put that in your pipe and smoke it! It's men who win, not weeps and wussies, and weeps and wussies are men which make Nick Adams think about those other kinds of humans, women. Who naturally should be weeps and wussies.
And even more: The other guy in the video asks if all this is about "whitewashing" the differences between genders and about trying to make everyone be neutral! Let's return to those innate sex differences. Except then the same guy asks how do we teach boys to be boys and girls to be girls to fight this wussification tendency. So we are right back in that same confused thinking where manly men and wussy women are innate categories but we have to worry about how to create them in child-rearing.
I could do a proper analysis of all this but it's not worth it, because the story is not about facts. It's about who is allowed to be on top in the societal power ladders, applied to the question of gender. And that Fox News has this story is just another arrow in their quiver in the war against women. Because whatever evil things one might wish to assign to feminism, it's not feminists who attack men talking football or who attack hunters or who insist on banning crocodile wrestling.
----
*And the reference to doing the dishes at the beginning of this section is very illuminating, because it implies that manly men don't have to care about doing the dishes. This is intended as humor, but it's inserted for a reason. If we take it as part of the whole message, then we are told that men are innately unable to care about doing the dishes, whereas women somehow are assumed to be the reverse.
An aspect worth learning about is Martin Luther King's economic arguments. Here's one article which discusses them:
Today, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is most often remembered as a crusader for racial equality, not economic justice. But those struggles were inextricably intertwined for the civil rights leader, whose 85th birthday is being honored this weekend. Even during his upbringing, as he wrote in 1958 [PDF], he knew “that the inseparable twin of racial injustice was economic injustice.”
He also referred to global economic inequalities in at least this speech. When I follow various discussions about racism, white privilege and so on, I often crave more attention on the economic infrastructures and how to fix them.
Changing the way US schools are funded is not a glittery and exciting topic, but it would go a long way towards making sure that all children, whatever their race, ethnicity and family income, would get to start the marathons of life at the same starting line. I want to see school funding detached from local property taxes, because those create an instant feedback loop from poor areas to poor schools (and from wealthy areas to wealthy schools). Indeed, I'd like to see positive discrimination for poor schools: More teacher pay, more computers, more after-school activities, to compensate for the problems poor families face. And programs like Head Start should be supported, not attacked. If a particular program doesn't work, fix it, don't demolish it.
Changing the way the labor markets function, putting more effort into guaranteeing living wages, annual vacations, parental leaves, affordable daycare and so on, would do a lot to reduce the daily struggles of the poor, and because a larger percentage of blacks are poor, this would serve to reduce the racial differences, too*.
Accepting that anti-discrimination programs are needed, rather than fighting them, would make the systems of getting jobs and keeping them fairer. Unionization matters. That unions are dying in the US means that the relative power of the employers is increasing. The conservative argument that workers or job applicants can just negotiate their individual deals with the firms doesn't even work for the more educated and powerful workers, and it certainly doesn't work for a janitor or a supermarket cashier. We need organized activity on the worker side of the labor markets. We actually need that on the global level, given that large firms are now globalized.
Why does this matter for racial and ethnic differences and racism? Because it partially addresses the very infrastructure which also contributes to different outcomes by race. As long as the different income classes show different percentages of people from various races/ethnic groups, the economic problems remain intertwined with the racial problems. Addressing the economic problems directly is a very important part of the wider dream Martin Luther King had.
-----
*This is because to some extent the wealthier individuals and families can negotiate some of these benefits. Low-income workers cannot.
