Three Posts On Women in the Media

1.  The VIDA counts for 2013 are out. Soraya Chemaly notes the good news and the not-so-good news:

Today, as they have every year since 2009, VIDA: Women in The Literary Arts, an organization dedicated to gender parity in the literary arts, released its annual count documenting the gaping divide between the number of men and women being published in literary magazines, journals and book reviews.

....

First, the good news: The Boston Review, Poetry Magazine, and Tin House continued to maintain their consistently balanced byline ratios. However, gross disparities continue to dominate the field (I encourage you to take a quick skim of the pie charts on VIDA's website that show The Count at different journals). 



VIDA announced a "Drumroll for the 75%ers" (where women made up a quarter or less of writers): The Atlantic, London Review of Books, New Republic, The Nation, New York Review of Books (which managed, for the fourth year in a row to have less than 20% of it's bylines by women writers) and New Yorker.



However, The Paris Review and The New York Times Book Review are worth noting for the substantive changes that occurred in their gender representation during the past year. They are both examples of how awareness and concerted effort can quickly effect change.

As Chemaly points out, the reasons for the disparities can be complicated, but the percentages of men and women among those who submitted stuff into the slush piles probably isn't a crucial factor, simply because the slush pile is not the usual source for things to be published.


2.  In other news about women and media, the Women's Media Center's annual report is out.  It covers women in all media types, all the way from social media to obituaries, and in that sense works as the frame for the VIDA counts, too.*


3.  Mary Beard has written an interesting essay about the authoritative voice and whether women's voices can be regarded as authoritative in the public sphere or just as cacophony.

She weaves together examples from ancient Greece and Rome, from literature, from British and American history and today's Internet misogyny to support her argument:

These attitudes, assumptions and prejudices are hard-wired into us: not into our brains (there is no neurological reason for us to hear low-pitched voices as more authoritative than high-pitched ones); but into our culture, our language and millennia of our history. And when we are thinking about the under-representation of women in national politics, their relative muteness in the public sphere, we have to think beyond what the prime minister and his chums got up to in the Bullingdon Club, beyond the bad behaviour and blokeish culture of Westminster, beyond even family-friendly hours and childcare provision (important as those are). We have to focus on the even more fundamental issues of how we have learned to hear the contributions of women or – going back to the cartoon for a moment – on what I’d like to call the ‘Miss Triggs question’. Not just, how does she get a word in edgeways? But how can we make ourselves more aware about the processes and prejudices that make us not listen to her.

The Miss Triggs question, by the way, is this:

It’s a well-known deafness that’s nicely parodied in the old Punch cartoon: ‘That’s an excellent suggestion, Miss Triggs. Perhaps one of the men here would like to make it'

And yes, I have been Miss Triggs, in that I have experienced and witnessed that odd sudden social deafness.  If I had to venture a guess about what motivates it I'd go for the "no real consequences" explanation.  We might all be more likely to hear our boss than our subordinate, because not hearing the boss makes worse things happen to us, and being female still codes for lower positions in the various hierarchies.

I think this is changing, because younger people have grown up in a different society, with more women in positions of power.  But I may be naively optimistic here.

Beard wrote her essay as a tentative history of what today has become the often-hostile social media treatment of women who speak publicly, and perhaps because she herself was the target of some vicious attacks.  

I'm not quite convinced that the anger aimed at women (as women)  in the public sphere is just a continuation of the way women's public speech may have historically been treated in most societies.

Perhaps it is, but it could also be the case that the odd quasi-public/quasi-private nature of social media supports the angry attacks because they are being shared, because relatively small numbers of angry individuals can get together and validate their anger by becoming a supportive group.  The anger grows by being validated, and the usual restraint of social disapproval and exclusion doesn't work the same way it does in real life.

I'm basing this on the observation that a large number of political Internet comments express anger and hatred of various types, not just misogyny or contempt towards women, and that doesn't quite reflect what I see happening in "meatspace" social contexts.  Part of the explanation is that we have found out what happens when people can communicate masked, sure.  But part of the explanation could also be found in how the Internet offers people a chance to share and support not only good things and information but also their hatred and anger.

----------------------- 

*Time magazine gives a short summary of the report with one mistake:

6.    Women had fewer speaking roles in movies in 2012 than in any year since 2007–only 28.4% of speaking roles in the top 100 films went to women. But on TV, 43% of speaking parts are played by women. Of the women who who did get speaking roles in movies,  34.6% were black, 33.9% were Hispanic, and 28.8% were white. And of all the speaking characters, Latina women were most likely to be depicted semi-nude.

The mistake is in the second sentence which I have bolded.  It's extremely unlikely that the majority of women with speaking roles in movies in 2012 would have been minorities. 

It took me some time to find the source for this (I couldn't find it in the report itself), but this looks like the source:

The percentages of female speaking characters who are Hispanic (33.9%), Black (34.6%), and Asian (34.8%) are greater than the percentages of White females (28.8%) and females from other ethnicities (16.1%).  Although we see more women from certain racial / ethnic categories, compared to their male counterparts, females in every group are still under-represented.

Granted, the original isn't terribly clear, either.  But what it means is not that Hispanic women, say,  got 33.9% of all speaking roles for women, but that 66.1% of all Hispanic actors (or Hispanic characters) with speaking roles were men and 33.9% women.  And so on.  The percentages don't add up to 100%, and they should if we are taking percentages out of the group "women."

When Sarcasm Fails. Pregnant Women As Hosts Without Rights.

I have called pregnant women aquariums/aquaria for the zygote or fetus when I have written sarcastically about the views of the so-called pro-lifers (or forced-birthers).

But all that talk about the care and maintenance of your inner aquarium wasn't intended to describe the actual views of forced-birthers, just to point out to them that what they so desired (laws stipulating that human life begins at conception) could logically result in half the humankind being viewed as containers for current, future or potential human beings.

Well, at least one "pro-lifer" already seems to have those views:

A pregnant woman is just a "host" that should not have the right to end her pregnancy, Virginia State Sen. Steve Martin (R) wrote in a Facebook rant defending his anti-abortion views.
Martin, the former chairman of the Senate Education and Health Committee, wrote a lengthy post about his opinions on women's bodies on his Facebook wall last week in response to a critical Valentine's Day card he received from reproductive rights advocates.
"I don't expect to be in the room or will I do anything to prevent you from obtaining a contraceptive," Martin wrote. "However, once a child does exist in your womb, I'm not going to assume a right to kill it just because the child's host (some refer to them as mothers) doesn't want it."

Martin has now changed his post so that the word "host" has been replaced by "the bearer of the child," and in the comments to the post he argues that the parenthetical "some refer to them as mothers" should have been enough to qualify the use of "host":

NARAL has attacked me for allegedly referring to mothers as "hosts" in this post, and the story has spread through HuffPo. To do so is to take my comments completely out of the context - which was me parroting their own arguments back to them. Please note that I accented that fact by parenthetically stating that some of us call them "mothers." The point of that parenthetical reference was to point out they are not "hosts." They are mothers. Mothers are a critically important lynchpin of society. Not just because of the nurturing of children they carry in their womb, and throughout their lives. But, also because of the compassion they carry, and their tireless commitment to all they do in homes, communities, and workplaces. With all that they also bring a perspective no one else can bring that serves us throughout their lifetime. The lesson to be learned here is that where an offense is sought it can be found.

Rrrright.  Pro-choicers always regard pregnant women as hosts for fetuses.

In any case, that comment brings Martin firmly back into the Russian dolls view of women's fertility.

As an aside, one comment (by someone else) to Martin's post is worth highlighting here, because it represents the second major thrust of the anti-abortion people.  The first one is the idea that conception means a person now exists, the second one is the idea that women are irresponsible if they have sex without being ready to become hosts for such a person:

Steve, I have long said that when a woman chooses to have unprotected sex for pleasure's sake knowing that a consequence could be pregnancy, she has ALREADY MADE her choice. These organizations aren't asking for the right to choose, they're asking for the right to change their mind at the expense of the unborn child who was the consequence of their choice.

Martin's response to that:

Norris, that is as well put as I've heard. That is exactly what they want. "They want others to pay for their life choices," financially, socially, and physically. The children have to physically die for their life choices, and society has to pay for it, both by financing it and by loss of valuable citizenry.

Now take that first comment and change "a woman" to "a man" and "she" to "he" and imagine the uproar that would follow!   Would most pro-lifers preach the same responsibility message to men about sex?  I very much doubt it.  The society, in general, certainly doesn't, and some MRA guys preach the reverse message.

But never mind that.  Note that Martin's response widens the reasons why he is opposed to abortions.  It's not just about conception meaning full human rights for the zygote, but also something about "the loss of valuable citizenry" and who is to pay for all that sex. 

Except that the public sector makes choices which cause us to lose "valuable citizenry" in Iraq and in Afghanistan and via lax gun laws etc., and the "life choices" people make will actually have higher societal costs (including more abortions) without such programs as publicly funded family planning services.

Sunday Fun

1.  A puppy likes snow

2.  Scotland Yard surveillance of suffragettes in 1913.

3.  Here's one of those studies you should be able to laugh at, especially if you've read some of my take-downs of smelly research.

4.  Hesiod, Theogony 295 (trans. Evelyn-White) (Greek Epic C8th or C7th B.C.) :

"She [Ekhidna] has her cave on the underside of a hollow rock, far from the immortal gods, and far from all mortals. There the gods ordained her a fabulous home to live in which she keeps underground among the Arimoi, grisly Ekhidna, a Nymphe who never dies, and all her days she is ageless."

Stuff To Read Over The Weekend, 2/21/14

This long article on the rise and fall of Chris Christie is of interest for political geeks and nerds.

Several states are trying to introduce far wider religious "conscience clause"  protections for firms and workers.  Arizona just passed such a law.

This time the focus is not on abortion or the "right" to refuse to prescribe the contraceptive pill, but on having the "right" to refuse to serve, say, gay or lesbian customers or clients. All this lawmaking probably has its roots in cases like this one, from New Mexico:

Vanessa Willock sent a brief email to Elane Photography wondering if they’d take pictures of her 2006 commitment ceremony to her longtime partner, Misti Collinsworth.
Elaine Huguenin, the photographer and co-owner of Elane photography with her husband Jonathan, said no. “As a company, we photograph traditional weddings,” read her response. “Are you saying that your company does not offer your photography services to same-sex couples?” Willock asked. “Yes, you are correct in saying we do not photograph same-sex weddings, but again, thanks for checking out our site!”

Willock told the state Human Rights Commission she was “shocked, angered and saddened” by Elane’s response, and suddenly worried she and Collinsworth would be unable to find a photographer. Though they eventually did, Willock also filed a complaint with the New Mexico Human Rights Commission, saying that Elane Photography had violated a New Mexico state law banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

In August, the New Mexico Supreme court agreed, ruling unanimously that Elane Photography had violated state law by refusing to photograph the ceremony. Now the Huguenins are seeking to have their case heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, saying that forcing them to take pictures of same-sex ceremonies violates their First Amendment rights by compelling them to engage in speech they don’t believe in. If the Supreme Court accepts the case, it will provide the first key test of a conservative political and legal strategy of reframing a losing battle against gay rights into a conflict over religious freedom, one that could rewrite the bounds of anti-discrimination laws in the United States. The case has “widespread ramifications for the conflict between religious rights and anti-discrimination rights,” said Caroline Mala Corbin, a professor at the University of Miami School of Law.

The bolds are mine.  It's important to note that these "religious rights" laws must be written in such general terms that they would open up the door for any type of discrimination that can be justified by some religion somewhere, even if that religion doesn't absolutely require that kind of shunning, unless the particular type of discrimination is already explicitly banned in other state laws.  The possible outcomes are mind-boggling.

In rodent research news, a new study argues that alcoholic daddy mice can sire baby mice with severe problems:

Published in Animal Cells and Systems, researchers studied male mice exposed to varying concentrations of alcohol and one control group exposed only to saline. After exposure the mice were mated and resulting fetuses examined. The findings revealed previously unknown and riveting evidence that paternal alcohol consumption can directly affect fetal development. 

A number of fetuses sired by males exposed to alcohol suffered abnormal organ development and or brain development. Those in the saline group were normal. So, can developmental abnormalities be predetermined at fertilization? This research proves so. The authors believe alcohol consumption affects genes in sperm which are responsible for normal fetal development. 

Until now fathers' lifestyle choices have not seen any repercussion on their unborn children. This ground-breaking research provides the first definitive evidence that fathers' drinking habits pre-conception can cause significant fetal abnormalities.

So prospective papa mice should probably stick to the saline drinks. 

I'm writing about this study because mice studies have in the past been interpreted as giving explicit health advice to human women about their fertility, so seeing that this has recently been expanded to giving health advice to human men about their fertility is kinda interesting.  Another recent study about papa mice taking vitamin B9  also gave human men health advice:

'Men really need to think carefully about the life they're living.'- Sarah Kimmins, McGill University 

Folate, found in leafy green vegetables, cereals, fruit, beans and liver, is known to prevent miscarriages and birth defects in humans if taken by the mother. Because of that, folate supplements are often recommended for women of childbearing age, especially if they are trying to become pregnant, and a lot of processed food is now enriched with folate. In men, folate deficiency is already known to reduce fertility.

 

Greg Mankiw's Ode To The Rich

Mankiw, a professor of economics at Harvard, has written an opinion piece for the New York Times, on the topic of whether the rich deserve their large earnings.  I had a tiny problem after reading through his piece, and that is the question of how he defines that pesky verb "to deserve."

This matters quite a bit.  Does Mankiw mean that if we taxed the rich more, for example, something really bad would happen in the various markets they rule over?  That the large earnings of the super-rich, say, are a necessary condition for the rest of us to have nice things at all?

Or does Mankiw mean that the high earnings of the top 0.01 percent, say, are deserved in some moral or ethical sense?  And if this is the interpretation, does it have the corollary that the poor deserve their poverty?

Or does Mankiw mean something else, altogether, given that at the beginning of the piece he appeals to how people in general might feel about the question whether the rich are deserving or not:

In 2012, the actor Robert Downey Jr., played the role of Tony Stark, a.k.a. Iron Man, in “The Avengers.” For his work in that single film, Mr. Downey was paid an astounding $50 million.
Does that fact make you mad? Does his compensation strike you as a great injustice? Does it make you want to take to the streets in protest? These questions go to the heart of the debate over economic inequality, to which President Obama has recently been drawing attention.
Certainly, $50 million is a lot of money. The typical American would have to work for about 1,000 years in order to earn that much.
That sum puts Mr. Downey in the top ranks of American earners. Anything more than about $400,000 a year puts you in the much-talked-about 1 percent. If you earn more than about $10 million, you are in the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent. Mr. Downey makes it easily.
Yet, somehow, when I talk to people about it, most are not appalled by his income. Why?
One reason seems to be that they understand how he earned it. “The Avengers” was a blockbuster with worldwide box-office receipts of more than $1.5 billion.

Let's see what Mankiw's detailed argument are.

More on Writer's Block. The Woody Allen Case.

This post is all about me.  It may not deserve publication at all, but I'm trying to dissolve my writer's block, by any means necessary.  And I think talking about some of the issues that cropped up in my head can be useful, because they relate to the way we have debates in the social media.

This current block began  when I  did a lot of research and thinking about the Dylan Farrow post and the various aftermaths (and before-maths).   At the time I had a post all structured in my head, then I read more and more and more and the structure melted back into thought clouds which didn't lend themselves to the kind of analysis I can do.

This giant, unwritten post is still clogging up my writing channel (cloaca?).  There are many unwritten posts in my head, and some of them are on very important topics.  That they remain  unwritten gives me guilt and shame and all the rest of the nice spices, but they don't cause writer's block.  This particular post did.

So I just tried to write it out by force (with all the evidence various camps quoted) but that didn't work.   Heh.  Then I tried to write to myself the reasons why I can't write the post, and that didn't work.  A perfect circle.

One more attempt, from a slightly different angle:

Women, Get Your Mrs. Degrees Before It Is Too Late!

Amanda writes about a Wall Street Journal piece which urges that young women in college should start investing more in husband-hunting and less in their careers.  This one is by Susan Patton but the template has been used by many others before.

The conservative, anti-feminist story goes something like this:

1.  All men want is casual sex:

When you find a good man, take it slow. Casual sex is irresistible to men, but the smart move is not to give it away. If you offer intimacy without commitment, the incentive to commit is eliminated. The grandmotherly message of yesterday is still true today: Men won't buy the cow if the milk is free.

  Men don't want intimacy, commitment, marriage or children.  All they want is sex (a common anti-feminist view of men, by the way).   Women want marriage but not sex, and heterosexual women must con heterosexual men into marrying them.

The exchange plan the conservatives tell women to have is to refuse to provide sex without marriage.

Think of sex as milk and a young woman as a cow, as Patton does in her article.  Men won't buy the cow, she writes,  if the cow gives away its milk for nothing.  So it's important for the cows not let any milk leak.  That way you, the cow,  get to be bought (and presumably fed and cared for)  and this is called marriage.

What this means is that a woman must cross her legs until that ring is around her finger.  The flaw in this plan is pretty obvious. There's a big market for just the milk out there.  If men truly did not want commitment or marriage or children, they could find enough milk to buy or even get it provided freely.

2.  Never mind that actual market.  Patton argues that cows get old real fast, and any woman who spends time on her career and next promotion and so on will suddenly find herself competing with much younger women in the marriage markets!

Think about it: If you spend the first 10 years out of college focused entirely on building your career, when you finally get around to looking for a husband you'll be in your 30s, competing with women in their 20s. That's not a competition in which you're likely to fare well. If you want to have children, your biological clock will be ticking loud enough to ward off any potential suitors. Don't let it get to that point.

Somehow those much younger women are not like the women this article speaks to, which is illogical and bothers me.  Because if young women in college indeed are not prioritizing marriage, then they are not yet competing in the marriage markets with their older sisters (those poor deluded careerists whose eggs are beginning to smell.)

But never mind.  The real point of this step in the theory is that youth is what makes women attractive to men, youth fades away, and anyone who focuses on work is going to miss the marriage train.

Because somehow "planning for a husband" is so time-intensive that it cannot be combined with planning for promotions and a career or studying hard?  Women can't walk and chew gum at the same time?

That's what Ms. Patton appears to be saying.

4.  The final step is to accept that men don't mind "marrying down" but women do, and that women like marrying up but men don't*:

Could you marry a man who isn't your intellectual or professional equal? Sure. But the likelihood is that it will be frustrating to be with someone who just can't keep up with you or your friends. When the conversation turns to Jean Cocteau or Henrik Ibsen, the Bayeux Tapestry or Noam Chomsky, you won't find that glazed look that comes over his face at all appealing. And if you start to earn more than he does? Forget about it. Very few men have egos that can endure what they will see as a form of emasculation.

This is a common Evolutionary Psychology** argument ("all women are gold-diggers", "all men look for brainless Barbie-dolls," and this is argued to be hard-wired in our genes).  I have written several stunning take-downs of those arguments. 

A better way to understand why women in the past have tried to marry up (in the sense of finding a richer husband) is because of the laws which took most of the alternatives away from women so that marriage indeed became the best career path for most.  If inheritance favored sons over daughters, if guilds excluded women from membership, if the incomes women earned didn't belong to them but to their families, if universities and professions explicitly excluded women, well, how is a woman to make a living?  Add to that the weakness of any birth control, and you can see why Marriage As An Economic Arrangement would have been much more central to women than to men.

But writers like Patton implicitly assume that this is how men and women are, in some fundamental sense***.  She also seems to think that men won't mind having a wife who can't follow erudite discussions, perhaps because he can always talk about the Bayeux Tapestry with his male friends?  The same alternative is available for those uppity college women, of course.

Duh.  I ask myself why I write about any of this because Patton just takes out the conservative recipe, found under the title:  How To Keep Women From The Top End Of The Labor Market:  The Fear Cake,  measures out the ingredients and bakes the cake.  The recipe fails, because it's not based on facts about marriage rates and women's education.  As Amanda points out, evidence suggests that more educated women are more likely to get married over their lives than less educated women, and the general evidence on marriage shows that it's not in trouble among the more educated or the higher earning parts of the US population.

So why aim this advice to a particular group of women?  Why not write about the decline of marriage among those with less education and fewer earnings options if your job is to uphold traditional marriage? 

The answer is in that name of the cake I created.   None of this is about caring about the fate of young women in college but about a certain kind of social structure, the kind the social conservatives (who read Wall Street Journal) prefer to see, the kind of social structure which is reflected in the gender percentages of Republicans in the US Congress and the kind of social structure which cannot be maintained if too many women catch the brass ring or insist that kitchen chores and childcare must be shared more equally.

What's ironic about the Patton article is that in the olden days what she recommends used to be called getting your Mrs. Degree, and getting your Mrs. Degree was one of the slurs college women got thrown in their faces, along the lines that they were taking away the college places which should really go to those who plan to have actual careers.  Which just goes to show that it doesn't really matter what young women in college are there for; the conservatives would rather not have them there at all.

But honestly, the funniest thing about the Mrs. Degree piece is that it assumes some weird sort of giant effort to be required to hook a husband and that the puny female brains cannot fit both falling in love and studying but must choose between the two.  The next funniest (though also insulting) thing in the piece is the treatment of men as rather simple one-cell creatures which run on the need for sex and can be manipulated on that basis.  Sadly, that manipulation would end up hurting the women more than men.  This is not something Ms. Patton worries about, of course.

-----
*This term is usually understood to be about education and income.  You "marry up" if your spouse earns more than you and/or is more educated than you.

**The capital letters serve to define this as the sub-field of the more extreme evolutionary psychologists, the ones who like JustSo stories about the prehistory where nomadic tribal living (with very little opportunity for amassing any kind of resources except those embodied in the person) in family-based units somehow provided the optimal environment for women to develop hard-wiring which today translates into preferring older men with large bank accounts.

***But more women do seem to be "marrying down".

Blogger's Block

This, too, shall pass.  In the meantime, the world can also be beautiful,  life is not only a struggle, but it  has those moments of awe and joy and beauty. 

The Most Hilarious Cadillac Ad

This one.

It tells us why Murkans don't want a month's vacation, like people in other similar countries have.  It tells us why it's OK to forgo seeing your family for 24/7work.

It's because only in Murka can you afford to buy the Cadillac that is advertized!  Well, you also get to have a fantastic house and pool and so on.  But what really drives you in this system is the Cadillac.  That's what life is for all Murkans...

I enjoyed watching the ad.  It's so very upside-down.  You lose two weeks of vacation in August and what do you get for that?  Lots of money and a Cadillac.  A good deal, eh?  A deal we have all made?

Duh.  The ad doesn't say anything at all about those other Murkans, the majority,  the ones who don't earn very much, the ones who struggle to keep their jobs in these shitty labor markets (imagine asking for more time off!).   Those Murkans, too, lose their vacations (compared to other countries) and get very little in return.  Just have a look at the income inequality data. 

And I get that Cadillac talks to the top earners.  But this is the first time I have seen a justification of the problems in the US labor market benefits from the angle that it can be defended by what the winners might feel. 

It's not clear if the man in the ad is a worker or a capitalist.  If he is the latter, of course he would be opposed to giving all workers federally decreed annual vacations.  In either case, the ad is an ode to income inequality and savage labor markets.

Some Valentine Day Poetry

Emily Dickinson:

This is my letter to the world,
That never wrote to me,--
The simple news that Nature told,
With tender majesty.
Her message is committed
To hands I cannot see;
For love of her, sweet countrymen,
Judge tenderly of me!


Dorothy Parker:

A single flow'r he sent me, since we met.
All tenderly his messenger he chose;
Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet -
One perfect rose.

I knew the language of the floweret;
'My fragile leaves,' it said, 'his heart enclose.'
Love long has taken for his amulet
One perfect rose.

Why is it no one ever sent me yet
One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
Ah no, it's always just my luck to get
One perfect rose.


Add your own favorites in the comments.

Twisted Valentines

Send this to all those who stay up late at night, staring into the ceiling because of the fear of false rape accusations.

The Valentines Janet Yellen (the first female head of the Federal Reserve) got.  These are wonky ones.

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.

Internet trolling might be just about loving the pain of others.  (Pedant rears her head:  The study suffers from selection bias, however).   But I do love those who do the nasty work of moderating comments.  That protects us from some of the most twisted hate messages.

Is that twisted enough for you?  Now I feel guilty for trying to mess up this wonderful day of sugary sweet love and friendship.

Roses are read
Violets are blue
After all I have said
I do love you.
Slurp.

How To Increase The Audience For Women's Sports? Show More Booty?

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 came across a website, before the Sochi Winter Olympic games began, where several of the Russian female athletes were portrayed in skimpy lingerie.  A few of the strongest examples:

Shortage of Pilots?

Bloomberg.com writes about the pilot shortage as an airline industry fairy tale, and Atrios concurs.

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.

What To Read Today On Women

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.

2.  Yet another study finds mammograms of more limited value than we all would wish.

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.

4.  The conservative government of Spain is trying to get a new and unpopular law on abortions passed.  If they succeed, most abortions in Spain will become illegal.  The Catholic church supports the proposed law, but, most interestingly, there's also an economic argument for it:

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.


 

Back To The Nineties: Monica Lewinsky vs. Hillary Clinton

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 scandal reflects 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.

And then there are those Republican politicians who blurt out stuff about how one cannot get pregnant from rape and other similarly informative snippets.

Today's Idle Thoughts Post: Remembrance of Things Past

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.

James Taranto: When Rapists Collide

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.

For more about his consistency on the question what women might be good for, if anything, check out my earlier posts on Mr. Taranto:  Why there is a war against men and how it is caused by women's sexual freedom.  Why women's careerism (women not staying properly in the kitchen and the bedroom only) and the contraceptive pill are the reason for the death of traditional marriage.

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 has Mr. Taranto done now that would be worth our attention?  He has written about sexual assault and inebriation (being drunk), and he has written about it like this:

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.



 

Christina Hoff Sommers: Nope, Women Don't Earn Less Than Men. Part 3 Of 3

Introduction


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.

A Housekeeping Post

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.

Mwah

Christina Hoff Sommers: Nope, Women Don't Earn Less Than Men. Part 2 Of 3.

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."

Just A Post Reminder And Other Interesting Stuff

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.

The International Day for Zero Tolerance of Female Genital Mutilation

Today is the eleventh International Day advocating 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.

There are four main types of FGM:

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.

The health problems FGM can cause are several:

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.

Preventing the practice is usually given priority, but Senegal is right now experimenting with corrective surgery for those who wish to have it.  It is not yet clear how effective the surgery is.

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. 

In surveys about men and boys:

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.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, A Small Law Change With Large Effects On The Treatment of Domestic Violence

Added later:  You can sign a petition addressed to president Hamid Karzai here.



The Guardian reports on this:

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.

Christina Hoff Sommers: Nope, Women Don't Earn Less Than Men. Part 1 Of 3

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.

Here's Hoff Sommers:

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. 

Thoughts on the Official Teachings of the Catholic Church. Where the Wimmenz Are.

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. 

Interpreting Tweets: Written on Seashore Sand, Until The Next Wave vs. Cuneiform Tablets

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.





 

The Washington Redskins. Or What's In A Name.

If you have followed the discussion about the name change proposal for  Washington Redskins, I strongly recommend reading this article (to the very end). 

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.