Pickup Artists do not send Valentines for the same reason I don't send Valentines to a plate of food in front of me. Or perhaps for the reason that one side in a war doesn't send Valentines to the other side. This is very sad.
Are those who sell the weapons used in Syria and elsewhere sending Valentines to violence? The way arms are traded and the way they are later used should make lots of people stay awake at night, and not because of the great business deals.
Tom Perkins loves dollars. He wants every dollar to have one vote in politics! We are almost there, of course, given the way American politics are financed.
One answer seems to be this: Sell female athletes as sexy bodies. Whether the extra audience thus captured is the audience that female athletes would prefer to have for their events is a very different question.
I also do. The industry may have a shortage of pilots who are willing to work for chicken feed*, but that is not how economic theory defines a labor shortage. Ask yourself whether we might have a "shortage" of CEOs if the wages offered for that job equaled $35,100 p.a., then ask yourself what you'd expect to happen if there weren't "enough" CEOs at that annual salary:
Like auto manufacturers, U.S. airlines operate in a two-tier labor market where some people get paid quite well and many others are paid much less. The relatively lucrative long-haul flights are run by the major airlines. Local flights are outsourced to regional operators, which try to keep costs low by paying workers as little as possible. According to the Wall Street Journal, a co-pilot at a regional carrier with five years of experience gets paid about $35,100 in base salary, while a co-pilot at a major carrier with the same experience gets $101,900 in base salary. Although many commercial airline pilots get their experience and training in the military, those who don’t have to pay as much as $100,000 to get the required education and flying time -- an investment that can't be justified when the wages for new workers are so low. This helps explain why the average age of active airline transport pilots has increased to 49.9 in 2012 from 47 in 2003. Ticket prices have increased, but mostly in response to the rising cost of fuel. If airlines want to replace their aging corps of experienced pilots and continue serving second- and third-tier cities, they are going to need to boost pay and raise ticket prices. Alternatively, they should ditch unprofitable routes. At least that strategy doesn't require making up stories about pilot shortages.
The "skill gaps" argument about what's wrong with some US labor markets turns out to be something similar: Employers complain not about a shortage of skilled workers as such, but about the shortage of such workers at whatever wages the employers would prefer to pay.
A different question altogether is whether the simple market models are sufficient to explain what might be happening in various labor markets. Take the market for teachers. Because the public sector is a major employer of teachers and because the incentives of the government are not the same as those of profit-focused firms, the simple market models of labor markets (supply and demand as the two blades of scissors) may not be the best analytical tools for explaining what the average salaries of teachers are.
Yet I've read conservative commentary arguing that the salaries of teachers are fair because the free-market-god decreed them. Indeed, even pretty clearly noncompetitive labor markets are regarded as somehow automatically fair because they are called markets.
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*When compared to the training costs for the job and to the alternative jobs offering the same earnings levels without similar training costs.
1. I recommend the hashtag #BlackFemStory. It's full of information about the history of black women and about the past achievements of individual black women.
3. A new survey on ending "Mad Men"-era workplace policies has been conducted. I haven't checked the survey for leading or biased questions which means that I cannot judge its results. But within the framework of that survey, I found it fascinating to check which groups don't support more "family-friendly" policies and which do:
Fresh on the heels of President Obama’s State of the Union call for an end to outdated “Mad Men”-era workplace policies, a newly released poll shows that a majority of American voters support “family friendly” policies like an increased minimum wage, fair pay for men and women, affordable child care, paid sick days, and paid family and medical leave. The poll of 1,000 likely voters, commissioned by American Women, the National Partnership for Women & Families and the Rockefeller Family Fund, found that nearly two-thirds of those surveyed supported such family policies, including majorities of men and women, majorities of whites, African Americans and Hispanic voters, majorities of young and old voters and majorities of voters in different regions of the country. Nearly 90 percent of Democrats, who tend to believe that government should play a role in solving social issues, were in support of the family friendly policies, as were 54 percent of Independents. Nearly half, 46 percent, of Republican voters surveyed likewise signaled support. Among Republicans, who tend to favor voluntary policies or tax incentives for businesses rather than government mandates, 54 percent of GOP women were in favor of the call for more family supportive policies, as were 36 percent of men.
The write-up also has interesting data on what other countries are doing differently. The US is the odd one out when it comes to renovating the labor market. The US model is still largely based on the idea of a male breadwinner who has support staff at home to take care of everything else but paid work.
Last month, the Spanish government published a memo indicating that the renewed restriction on abortions, by allowing more births, could boost the country’s economy. Some academics believe the new abortion law stems from anxieties among conservatives about the falling birth rate in Spain, which is currently one of Europe’s lowest, and on the growing unpopularity of conservative ideals in Spanish society.
It's always the whip for women, never the carrot, when conservatives dictate policy. If women don't have "enough" children, just force them. No need to try to understand why the Spanish have fewer children than before, no need to try to support families, no need to look for those "carrots" which would make having children easier.
5. This video is about how it might feel to be a man in an upside world, the kind some misogynist sites believe already exists: an extreme matriarchy, run exactly on the same premises as an extreme patriarchy might be run. The video is not recommended to those who find depictions of sexual violence triggering.
The best way to watch the video, in general, is to remember that it is a condensed story of the kinds of events that can happen to women, not an argument that every single day of a woman's life would match the events in it.
The Monica Lewinsky/Bill Clinton scandal is back in the news, my sweetings. It happened almost two decades ago, and usually old scandals don't get a chance to become the Topic Of The Day that many years after the events, especially as Bill Clinton is not running for anything anymore. Granted, the archives of Diane Blair, a friend of Hillary Clinton, who died in 2000 have become publicly available only since 2010 and the Free Beacon, a conservative news website, has published their findings from those archives.
But the findings aren't that interesting.
So what's going on here? Why is Rand Paul (a conservative-cum-libertarian with presidential ambitions) bringing this up again? Let me just remind you of the facts here: Bill Clinton isn't running for anything, the scandal is fairly old and the Republican politicians have their own share of various sex scandals.
Michael Tomasky has one answer: Rand Paul tries to better his reputation among the fundamentalist wing of the Republican Party. No, he's not just "anything-goes-if-you-are-the-king-of-the-jungle" libertarian; he is also opposed to marital infidelity and wants to stop the persecution of Christians. At the same time, Paul can press that old Hatred Of The Clintons button which many conservatives still have installed.
If these moves are successful, his standing among the possible Republican presidential candidates will improve.
But from a wider angle all this looks nonsensical. Take Ann Coulter's comments on that, for instance (should anybody still care about what she says):
The right-wing radio host said that Bill Clinton's actions reflect poorly not only on his wife, but also on liberals in general. "I think it's more than limited to just undermining Hillary," she told CNN's Piers Morgan. "It's undermining this entire idea of the Republican War on Women."
Hmm. How do Bill Clinton's actions reflect poorly on his wife? It wasn't Hillary Clinton who pursued other men (as far as we know) or who got blow jobs in the Oval Office, right?
And the idea that today's liberals can be stained by a sex scandal from the 1990s is just weird. It's like saying that the David Vitter sex scandalreflects poorly on people whose political values agree with those Coulter has, and that's a more recent scandal. Or like saying that any actual sex scandals in this long list (some may be just unfounded rumors) could be used to pin collective guilt on all who have ever voted for a Republican.
Given all that, it's very hard to see how what Bill Clinton did in the 1990s could undermine the entire idea of the Republican War on Women.
Well, it's impossible that this would be the case. In the theoretical worst case scenario the Democrats, as a party, are as bad about sexual infidelity and about sexual harassment and so on, but at least they are not trying to strip women from all reproductive choice, they are not fighting tooth-and-nail against any attempt to make sure that women are not facing labor market discrimination, and while only 8.2% of the Republicans in the US Congress are women, 29% of the Democrats in the US Congress are women.
I have over 10,000 posts on this blog. It's hard to remember but a fraction of them. Today I read through a couple of months' worth of posts from early 2013 and could only remember having written one of them, and recently I thought a 2009 study about the gender gap in earnings had slipped by me, unnoticed, but a check in the archives tells me that I both read through the whole long file and wrote about it, too.
This "Unremembrance of Things Past" might be natural, given how much I have written. But in some ways it is frightening. I can no longer just state, off the bat, if I have covered something or not. I have to check.
On the other hand, many of my old posts are pretty interesting when you don't remember writing them and quite a few of them are not terribly written (and a handful are excellent). I get this odd feeling that I'm meeting my old self when reading those posts (and even the me of yesterday is not the same as the me of today, so there are lots of old selves).
All that is a very concrete example of the way we all change every day, however little, and of the fact that the passing of time makes our prior selves into different people from our current selves. Perhaps even almost-strangers. Maybe a better way of stating that is that the self we construct anew changes as the oldest fragments of memory tailing after us become mistier and mistier while new shiny or broken or nondescript bits are added.
That guy is a bushel of fun for us viper-tongued people. On the other hand, he is also the pilot of the right-wing Wall Street Journal's Girls Have Cooties airplane, the one which flies over our skies dangling those long banners with anti-woman messages.
And here he tells us why the weirder kind of evolutionary psychologists are correct about all women being gold-diggers and all men wanting the largest amount of promiscuous sex with the youngest and most nubile of women.
What is called the problem of "sexual assault" on campus is in large part a problem of reckless alcohol consumption, by men and women alike. (Based on our reporting, the same is true in the military, at least in the enlisted and company-grade officer ranks.) Which points to a limitation of the drunk-driving analogy. If two drunk drivers are in a collision, one doesn't determine fault on the basis of demographic details such as each driver's sex. But when two drunken college students "collide," the male one is almost always presumed to be at fault. His diminished capacity owing to alcohol is not a mitigating factor, but her diminished capacity is an aggravating factor for him. As the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education notes, at some campuses the accuser's having had one drink* is sufficient to establish the defendant's guilt: Stanford's definition of consent to sex imposes a concept that is foreign to most people's idea of adult consent and inconsistent with California state law. Stanford policy states that sexual assault occurs "when a person is incapable of giving consent. A person is legally incapable of giving consent . . . if intoxicated by drugs and/or alcohol." In other words, any sexual activity while intoxicated to any degree constitutes sexual assault. This is true even if the activity was explicitly agreed to by a person capable of making rational, reasoned decisions, and even if the partners are in an ongoing relationship or marriage.
In theory that means, as FIRE notes, that "if both parties are intoxicated during sex, they are both technically guilty of sexually assaulting each other." In practice it means that women, but not men, are absolved of responsibility by virtue of having consumed alcohol.
Bolds are mine.
Let's not stop with the thought experiment that if both parties are intoxicated during sex, then they are both technically guilty of sexually assaulting each other. Let's also notice that they might both be technically the victims of sexual assault because they cannot consent in the informed sense!
Why did I write that stupid paragraph? Probably because it reveals the implicit assumption in Taranto's thinking that the sex he is writing about really is voluntary sex by both parties who just happen to be drunk out of their minds. One person isn't pursuing the sex and the other person either resisting those attempts or too drunk to respond at all, but both people are eagerly driving their inebriated wagons towards sex, whether their sober selves desire that or not. And both people are equally drunk in these scenarios, but obviously not drunk enough to be simultaneously unconscious because then no sex, voluntary or not, could happen.
Or to return to Taranto's drunken driving analogy, what if the two drunken drivers are not steering their cars towards collision, but one drunken driver chases the other drunken driver all over the town? Are they both still equally guilty or equally innocent if the two cars ultimately do collide?
And what would Taranto propose as the solution to all these potentially mutual sexual assaults? Can you guess, based on his general thinking on the topic of girls and cooties? The answer: Women should return to sexual modesty:
One might argue, as City Journal's Heather Mac Donald does, that there are reasons to hold men in particular to high standards of behavior:
A return to an ethic where manhood consisted of treating women with special courtesy would be a victory for civilization, not just for college co-eds. The chivalric ideal recognizes two ineluctable truths: men and women are different, and the sexual battlefield is tilted in favor of males. On average, males are less emotionally affected by casual sex; if given the opportunity for a series of one-off sexual encounters with no further consequences, they will tend to seize it and never look back. . . . The less that a culture signals that men have a special duty toward the fairer sex, the more likely it is that the allegedly no-strings-attached couplings that have replaced courtship will produce doubts, anguish, and recriminations on the part of the female partner and unrestrained boorishness on the part of the male.
But as Mac Donald notes, contemporary feminists "embrace the Victorian conceit of delicate female vulnerability while leaving out the sexual modesty that once accompanied it." That they do all this in the name of equality is downright Orwellian.
What that boils down to is the recommendation that women shouldn't drink and that women shouldn't go out to any place where alcohol is provided to heterosexual men. Because "sexual modesty" alone wouldn't do anything much towards fixing this problem**, as long as it is required of women only, and Taranto appears to argue that any intoxicated man has a get-out-of-jail-card by the very fact of being intoxicated. Thus, the only solution that would work here is gender segregation in any activity where anyone might be drinking too much.
Finally, the obligatory statements: It is not a good idea for anyone, including young men and young women, to get so intoxicated that one is unable to make sensible decisions or to practice basic mental or physical self-defense. It is not a good idea for anyone, including young men and young women, to put their trust in the goodwill of strangers (which getting drunk in their presence means)
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*I haven't studied where that "one drink" argument comes from or if it actually is used somewhere. But I doubt it is a very common argument. Taranto appears to believe that all college sexual assault approaches are biased against the accused and that false rape accusations abound. But others disagree.
**That whole historical field of sex and the Victorians is used here in the fast-food sense, without any research into whether the oh-so-sexually-modest Victorian women in fact were so, and if they were, whether that saved them from being sexually molested or raped or harassed. Data on sexual assaults of some long gone era is hard to get hold of, and not the least because rape was a shame for the person who was raped and not a topic for general discussion.
This is the third and final post in the series which talks back to Christina Hoff Sommers (of the AEI which should stand for Anti-Feminists Essentially Incorporated but stands for the American Enterprise Institute). The first two posts can be read here and here.
This last post will be all about engineers. Honestly. Well, not just about engineers, but because Hoff Sommers focuses on engineers (as ultimately the reason why the gross gender gap between men and women is to the detriment of women), I will have to do the same. Isn't that fun? We can begin with the engineer vs. lady song (hat tip to Lee Rudolph):
And then you can watch the Volkswagen Superbowl ad about engineers getting their wings:
It's a funny ad, I think, and it seems to have two female engineers, too, except that they don't get their wings. Yet, anyway.
Funny songs and ads are not evidence of the difficulties women might face in engineering or of the question whether girls just don't like engineering and that's why we have so few women in the field ("choice," again). But they will make this post a little less dry-and-boring.
The College Majors Data
This is what Hoff Sommers says about the topic of engineers and different life choices by women and men and the gross gender gap in earnings:
Much of the wage gap can be explained away by simply taking account of college majors. Early childhood educators and social workers can expect to earn around $36,000 and $39,000, respectively. By contrast, petroleum engineering and metallurgy degrees promise median earnings of $120,000 and $80,000. Not many aspiring early childhood educators would change course once they learn they can earn more in metallurgy or mining. The sexes, taken as a group, are somewhat different. Women, far more than men, appear to be drawn to jobs in the caring professions; and men are more likely to turn up in people-free zones. In the pursuit of happiness, men and women appear to take different paths.
As I wrote in the second post of this series, "much of the wage gap CANNOT be explained away by simply taking account of college majors." This is because the majority of American adults do not have a college degree (only 33% have a four-year college degree or higher, and 61.3% have no college degree at all). But the argument has more problems than that.
I won't be able to check comments over this weekend, except sporadically, so all comments will go into a queue which I will clear whenever I get a chance. This doesn't mean that I don't adore you or that you are singled out for special harassment.
This is the second post about Christina Hoff Sommers' argument that, essentially, lower wages are fair wages for women. The first post can be found here, the third here. I realized, after working on this post, that there needs to be a third one. Otherwise this post ends up book length. So this post talks about occupational segregation between women and men, and the third (and final, promise!) post talks about engineers.
Introduction
Back to Hoff Sommers. After addressing the question of the gross gender gap in wages and the net gender gap in wages (in my terminology), she moves on to "choice" by focusing on gender segregation* in the labor markets. For example:
Much of the wage gap can be explained away by simply taking account of college majors. Early childhood educators and social workers can expect to earn around $36,000 and $39,000, respectively. By contrast, petroleum engineering and metallurgy degrees promise median earnings of $120,000 and $80,000. Not many aspiring early childhood educators would change course once they learn they can earn more in metallurgy or mining. The sexes, taken as a group, are somewhat different. Women, far more than men, appear to be drawn to jobs in the caring professions; and men are more likely to turn up in people-free zones. In the pursuit of happiness, men and women appear to take different paths.
Where to begin with that? Perhaps here: One cannot just state that "much of the wage gap can be explained away by simply taking account of college majors." This is because only 33% of American adults have a four-year college degree or higher, and even if we include two-year college degrees (which Hoff Sommers does not, in her argument), the majority of American adults (61.3% in 2011) do not have a college degree.
Hoff Sommers' other opinions about college majors are the stuff for my third post. In this one I wish to look at this quick reference** to gender segregation in occupations:
Women, far more than men, appear to be drawn to jobs in the caring
professions; and men are more likely to turn up in people-free zones.
Hoff Sommers doesn't really go on to talk about gender segregation, because she uses her data for that "choice" argument, but gender segregation in the labor market does matter a lot in explaining why full-time female workers earn less than full-time male workers, on average, and it's worth a short (for me) detour to that topic, to explain, specifically, why "people" are not just "drawn" to certain types of professions but might end up in them for all sorts of reasons.
Let's begin by noting that a) female-dominated occupations pay less, on average, than male-dominated occupations, and b) there are a lot of women in female-dominated occupations and a lot of men in male-dominated occupations, so that even small differences in the average earnings between occupations cause clear differences in the gross gender gap.
Put these together, and it turns out that occupational gender segregation accounts for a largish chunk of the gross gender gap in earnings. Or viewed slightly differently, if we could shift enough people about to make all occupations gender-integrated, the gross gender gap in earnings would be much reduced.
Could that be achieved? It's hard to say. The conservative argument, which Hoff Sommers presents in her opinion piece, is that occupational segregation is based on men and women wanting different things in life and on choosing different things when deciding on an occupation. Usually this "choice" argument is firmly based on the "no-choice" argument of innate differences. For example, Hoff Sommers argues that women prefer jobs having to do with people, men prefer jobs having to do with things, on average, and that it is these differences, seen as innate and not susceptible to choice, which drive those "choices."
I'm writing a second part of my posts about Christina Hoff Sommers' anti-feminist arguments in the most recently recycled form. It's taking longer than I expected, because I'm doing calculations and research (adjusts stern-librarian-glasses, stores pencil behind ear). But it will be a good post. In the meantime, you can read the first one. And no, it is not too long.
That was the reminder. Here is the stuff. I had a breakdown or breakthrough yesterday, and suddenly asked myself what would happen if I started writing popular stuff, if I didn't subconsciously pick post titles which guarantee that nobody wants to read the posts (Just A Post Reminder And Other Stuff), if I wrote about the rumor that certain kinds of financial executives might be either eliminated or committing suicide within a short period of time, or if I wrote about the possible affair between Wendi Deng (Rupert Murdoch's third wife) and the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. What would happen then?
A bowl of chocolate ice-cream cured me of that (though I think I could do the kind of writing that is required). And then I immediately asked myself why Rupert Murdoch's three wives vs. Wendi Deng's one husband plus perhaps a few lovers are treated differently in the Vanity Fair article, especially as we don't know how many mistresses Murdoch might have had. And then off I went in the usual boring direction.
Here's an example of a story which I do want to write more about, but can't, without the kind of research for which I have neither the time nor the expertise*. The story asks whether Dr. Marthe Gautier was given adequate credit for her role in the discovery of trisomy 21:
The woman is Dr. Marthe Gautier, now 88 years old. In 1956 she was a young physician, returning to Paris from a year's study of pediatric cardiology at Harvard. She was given a clinical/teaching position at a local hospital, with no funds for research. The Head of the Pediatric Unit, Raymond Turpin, was interested in mongolism (as Down syndrome was then called); years earlier he had proposed that it might be caused by a chromosome abnormality. Human cytogenetics was not well understood, but a big breakthrough came this same year, when the true chromosome number was finally established as 46 (not 48). When Turpin complained that nobody was investigating his hypothesis, Gautier proposed that she take this problem on, since her Harvard training had introduced her to both cell culture and histology. Turpin agreed to provide a tissue sample from a patient.
For this work she was given a disused laboratory with a fridge, a centrifuge, and a poor quality microscope, but no funding. And of course she still had her other responsibilities. But she was keen and resourcefull, so she took out a personal loan to buy glassware, kept a live cockerel as a source of serum, and used her own blood when she needed human serum.
By the end of 1957 she had everything working with normal human cells, and could clearly distinguish the 46 chromosomes. So she asked Prof. Turpin for the patient sample. After 6 months wait it arrived, and she quickly was able to prepare slides showing that it had not 46 but 47 chromosomes, with three copies of chromosome 21. But her microscope was very poor, and she could not take the photographs of her slides that a publication would need.
All this time Prof. Turpin had never visited her lab, but she'd had frequent visits from a protege of his, Jerome Lejeune. When she showed Lejeune her discovery, he offered to take the slides to another laboratory where they could be photographed. She never saw the slides again, but the photographs appeared in Montreal two months later (August 1958), where Lejeune announced to the International Conference of Human Genetics in Montreal that he had discovered the cause of Down syndrome! Lejeune and Turpin quickly wrote up 'their' discovery, with Gautier as middle author, but Gautier only learned about this publication the day before it appeared in print.
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*To judge all this properly requires reading the arguments from both sides but it also probably requires an ability to understand what Gautier was doing in her work and how that fits into the wider picture.
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***.
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*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.
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*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.
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*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.
