On Body Hair And Gender

I was going to write a funny post about the spring fashion trends in armpit hair:  do you bleach it, curl it, braid it or do you just use it as a noose to kill all those men you so obviously hate if you have armpit hair.  That's because of the new Veet ads which tried to argue that not having armpit or leg hair is an innate female characteristic.  But Veet, the honorable rat, pulled the ads, which left me nothing to write about.

Why waste a good post?  Topics having to do with leg hair or armpit hair or shaving off all your pubic hair don't rank terribly high in feminist importance, certainly not compared to stories like this one or this one or even this one.  Still, it is good to understand how we decide what being a woman should look like in various cultures, and body hair enters those definitions in pretty significant ways.  The most common rule is that women should have long hair on their heads and long eyelashes.  The rest of their bodies should preferably be completely hairless (with the exception of lines for eyebrows).

The same rules implicitly define what it means to look like a man in those same cultures, though you cannot get the male conventions as simply reversals of the female rules.

Several things about such rules are worth pointing out:  

First, the societal conventions turn incredibly rapidly into the kind of rear-brain loathing reactions towards anyone who has violated the rules.  This makes people interpret them as natural, as something that has always been true and always will be true.

As an example, I have read several recent Internet comments where the idea of pubic hair on women is used as an insult and as something revolting and disgusting, yet adult women usually do grow pubic hair, just as adult men do.  Likewise, in the US the assumptions that men should have very short hair and that women should shave their legs are both quite recent when put into a historical concept.  But the power those expectations have or have had is out of proportion to their purely cultural nature.

And I think the reason for the strength of such feelings is that they help in making men and women look more different from each other.  They can be added to the list of things one can use to tell someone's gender, and once they are in that list they become identified with biological differences.

Second, what is odd about the way body hair is conflated with secondary sex characteristics is the fact that women and men can both grow armpit hair, that women and men can both grow leg hair and pubic hair.  In some sense the way women ought to look, as biological creatures, is not the way biology has built women!  And that must be fixed.

The usual explanation for that tendency is to exaggerate biological average sex differences.  While I agree that there's something to that theory, it doesn't explain the whole process.  For example, men naturally have quite a lot more facial hair than women.  Why don't we have enormous pressure (outside the group of Islamic fundamentalists) for men to grow luxuriant beards? * Why don't we have beard care creams and beard perms and beard decorations (little swords or baseball team logos?) 

I think cultures assign women most of the work of exaggerating of sex differences, from Victorian wasp waists to 1950s pushup bras to silicone breast implants and the need for Brazilian waxes.  Not all the work, but most of it.

Third, the reason why violating the rules is met with such revulsion by many is not only because they have been merged together with secondary sex differences but also because those violations are then seen as attempts to deny the existence of secondary sex differences and ultimately to fight against the existing gender roles and norms. 

Thus, the so-called feminazis who refuse to shave their armpits or legs are not viewed as biologically natural women (which would be the actual definition) but as not-real-women, because what that rear-brain in some people tells them is that these women are rejecting the social norms for womanhood altogether, and by doing that they are threatening the social norms for manhood, too.  It's an attack, my friends, on everything some hold dear!

It's good to be aware of all this because it teaches us about the cultural coding of gender.  At the same time, we don't have to take it too seriously in our own lives.  Shave if you like the idea.  Leave stripes if you wish!  The body hair will not beg you to live or scream when the razor cuts, and you could always save the cut-off bits for years until you have enough for a pair of nice woolen socks.
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*Or bald heads.  That would work, too.  That men often fight against the arrival of baldness is probably not linked to the way we assign gender to people but to the desire to come across younger.  Both men and women spend effort and money on that.

Autism And Obese Fathers. Today's Research Popularization Critique.

A Norwegian study has found a statistically significant correlation between autism in children and their  fathers'  obesity:

A Pediatrics study finds the risk for autism spectrum disorder strongly associated with paternal obesity (that is, with a BMI of 30 or more).
Investigators examined the relationship in a Norwegian cohort of some 93,000 children, whose health was tracked in national databases. By the end of follow-up, at a mean age of 7 years, the odds ratio for autism spectrum disorder among children of obese fathers was 1.53, compared with those of normal-weight fathers. Maternal obesity was not significantly associated.
The authors express surprise at the findings, which suggest an unidentified genetic or epigenetic mechanism.

I would be a bit hesitant about interpreting the results at face value until they have been replicated in other studies.  The reason, oddly, is that very large sample of data (93,000) that they work with*.  Even though a larger sample is usually  better than a smaller sample, analyses which use very large samples can sometimes be too good a thing.  For instance, they can find differences which are tiny or unimportant in practical terms statistically significant, because (from the comments to the linked post by its author):

In short, it happens because a large sample size greatly increases the power of an analysis to detect a difference. And THAT occurs because the test statistic that determines statistical significance is based on a formula that, in effect, gets multiplied by a value based on the sample size (such as the square root of the sample size). So, assuming a given difference and a given standard deviation for the data, increasing the value of sample size (n) increases the test statistic and results in an increased likelihood of statistical significance. Therefore, a humongous sample size can "override" a difference of very small size, inflating the test statistic, and result in statistical significance, even though the difference is so small that it has no practical consequence.

Indeed, the head researcher warns us about taking the results as definitive, though he also seems to believe in a genetic or epigenetic explanation.

But what I really wanted to talk about is the tentative interpretation of what to do IF the results are meaningful in practical terms.  An example from Fox News site:

What To Read On Equal Pay Day: A Delicious Smorgasbord of My Writings!

Today is the National Equal Pay Day for 2013 earnings.  The day is defined like this:

Throughout our Nation's history, brave women have torn down barriers so their daughters might one day enjoy the same rights, same chances, and same freedoms as their sons. Despite tremendous progress, too many women are entering the workforce to find their mothers' and grandmothers' victories undermined by the unrealized promise of equal pay for equal work. On National Equal Pay Day, we mark how far into the new year women would have to work to earn the same as men did in the previous year, and we recommit to making equal pay a reality.

I have written vast mountains of text on the gender gap in earnings, on the question what "equal pay for equal work" means in contexts such as the one above and so on and so on.  Rather than rewriting all of that, I'd like to propose a short program of reading.  It's all on this blog, so you don't have to go anywhere!  And I've tried to make it clear and simple.

If you are very interested in the gender gap in earnings, you might wish to read my 2006 series.  The first part is about the theories trying to explain why women, on average, earn less than men, on average.  The second part shows one example of how economists analyze the evidence, and points out that the answer is never a simple one.  Though the data in that example is now outdated, the methods of analysis are not.  The third part addresses some of the common conservative counter-arguments, the kind you will see pasted all over the net today, too.

What's the role of labor market discrimination in explaining the gender gap in earnings?  The basic answer can be found in the above series.  Two additional posts, written expressly as responses to the conservative argument that such discrimination cannot exist or doesn't exist, come recommended by me:

The first one cracks the old chestnut which goes like this:  If men and women are equally productive workers but men cost more, why would any profit-focused firm hire men?

The second one answers a question I was posed, which was to "prove" that gendered labor market discrimination exists.  It covers several types of studies on that phenomenon.  Many more could be found in my archives.

Here are two posts I wrote in response to a  2011 anti-feminist piece that came out around the National Equal Pay Day then.  The first post is about gender differences in unemployment, the second post about misconceptions concerning how to interpret the gross gender gap in earnings.

Last, but certainly not least, I have written a lot about occupational segregation by gender recently, especially in response to Christina Hoff Sommers'  piece on the topic which was entitled "No, Women Don't Make Less Money Than Men."  I recommend the whole three-post series.  Different posts in it address slightly different questions. 

The first post is a get-to-know-the-different-types-of-gender-gaps and has lots of important stuff about what can legitimately explain such gaps and what cannot.  The second post  is a long (and interesting?) treatise on the meaning of occupational segregation by gender and how that segregation relates to the gendered earnings gap.  The third post is all about the choice of college majors, about STEM careers and so on, mostly because Hoff Sommers chose to go there as an explanation of the overall gross gender gap in earnings.

Virgin Toothbrush Looking for A Mate. Or Conservative Views on Premarital Sex.

Do you know what having too many sex partners does to you?  It makes you icky and yucky and disgusting.

Imagine you are a wet lollipop which has fallen on the floor and rolled around in all that dust and grit and pet hairs.  Would anyone like to lick that lollipop now, hmh?

This is a common conservative metaphor when it comes to premarital sex and young women, the idea that you are food and if other people have been salivating on you or nibbling at you then nobody in their right mind would wish to have a monogamous long-run relationship with you.  Some misogynist sites make the point much more nastily, by calling women who have had more than one heterosexual partner cumbuckets.  They have no comparable term for men who have had more than one heterosexual partner.

The most recent example of the use of food metaphors in abstinence education comes from various conservative sex education classes:

According to the Los Angeles Times, teachers in Oxford, Miss., are asking “students to unwrap a piece of chocolate, pass it around class and observe how dirty it became.” Says Marie Barnard, a public health worker and parent: “They're using the Peppermint Pattie to show that a girl is no longer clean or valuable after she's had sex—that she's been used. … That shouldn't be the lesson we send kids about sex.”

...

Last year, a school district in Texas instructed teachers to compare people who have had sex to dirty toothbrushes and sticks of gum. “People want to marry a virgin, just like they want a virgin toothbrush or stick of gum,” the guide read. 

Neither of the quoted cases seem to single out women, which is a reason to rejoice, because now we can all be disgusting hair-and-dirt-covered half-chewed lollipops.  Or lollipops still inside the cellophane wrappers.

Except that this doesn't quite work, because virginity has never been a requirement for men and everybody knows that the dirty lollipop really is the slutty girl.

The food metaphors in abstinence education (and elsewhere) are pretty lamentable, because it turns at least one potential partner in a relationship into a dinner dish and the other one, possibly, into the diner, and when it is applied to only women it reinforces the idea that a woman's value is pretty much in her unopened gift package of sexual and fertility services.

But consider hotel beds.  Consider the eating utensils and glasses and cups we are given at restaurants and coffee bars.  Consider touching door handles in public places.  The metaphors collapse really rapidly, unless one actually sees women's bodies as a type of sexual food, something that can be unwrapped, the lid removed and then heated quickly in the microwave.

Note, also, that none of the metaphors quite work unless one regards sex as inherently filthy and nasty and degrading, as something that leaves its marks on the participants, as something that turns them into used goods.  All this is a tango between the objectification of women's bodies and the simultaneous transfer of sexuality to market-type circumstances.  Love doesn't enter into it.

Speed-Blogging, April 7 2014. On Bodies, Sexual Harassment And How Politics Makes Us Stupid

These pictures about the bodies of elite athletes are fascinating.  They show the variety of what it might mean to be fit, or perhaps fit for something.

It's hard to study the prevalence of unpopular opinions, for obvious reasons (people cover them up because of social stigma).  One recent study on male college students argues that those students which blame women for becoming the objects of sexual harassment are more likely to identify with sexual harassers themselves.  I haven't looked at the study itself so I cannot comment on how well it was done.

The new Vox.com site, by Ezra Klein, Matthew Yglesias and Melissa Bell has an interesting piece by Ezra Klein:  How Politics Makes Us Stupid.  It's about the way humans might interpret information which conflicts with their prior world view. 

I say "might," rather than "do," because the real-world way of acquiring that information is somewhat different from the research Klein describes.  For one thing, people debate data with other people, and they might also read different interpretations of the same data, and these consecutive rounds might change any initial interpretations.

But the basic argument in Klein's piece does apply:  Politics is no more based on the kind of "believe-the-best-evidence" thinking than any other field of human endeavor where our fears, our relative societal rankings and our whole world view can be threatened.


On the other hand, the comparison the article makes, in the words of the researcher Dan Kahan makes ignores something important:

Kahan is quick to note that, most of the time, people are perfectly capable of being convinced by the best evidence. There’s a lot of disagreement about climate change and gun control, for instance, but almost none over whether antibiotics work, or whether the H1N1 flu is a problem, or whether heavy drinking impairs people’s ability to drive. Rather, our reasoning becomes rationalizing when we’re dealing with questions where the answers could threaten our tribe — or at least our social standing in our tribe. And in those cases, Kahan says, we’re being perfectly sensible when we fool ourselves.

What is that important point the comparison ignores?  The fact that politics is full of propaganda, studies twisted out of shape, studies carefully hand-picked to present one side of the aisle as correct and the other side of the aisle as deluded, sound bites which are intended to be taken as deep wisdom, surveys with loaded questions and so on.  Not all political information is propaganda and not all political studies are biased.  But a sufficient number are, and knowing this might play some minor role in explaining the findings of Kahan et al..

Good News Friday: Rennie Gibbs, The Bechdel Test And Movie Profitability and the Saimaa Ringed Seal As A Metaphor

My puny attempt to report more on positive things.  First, Rennie Gibbs doesn't have to go to court for her miscarriage many years ago.   I wrote about her case recently.

Second, having more women in movies doesn't seem to hurt financially, even if the women actually talk to each other about something else than the men in the movie:

We did a statistical analysis of films to test two claims: first, that films that pass the Bechdel test — featuring women in stronger roles — see a lower return on investment, and second, that they see lower gross profits. We found no evidence to support either claim.

This matters, because the most common argument to explain the scarcity of women in Hollywood movies is that the markets (often defined as teenage boys and young men) don't like watching women unless the women are in those traditional roles (eye-candy, partners of the male stars etc.).

Third, and this link is only in Finnish, sorry, volunteers helped the endangered Saimaa ringed seals to give birth to more pups by creating human-made snowdrifts (necessary for more pups to survive as the alternative is to be born on the open ice).  Those were needed because of the unusually warm and snowless winter.  The population of Saimaa ringed seals was estimated to be about 100 in the early 1970s.  Current numbers of adult seals are estimated to be above 300.

The early counts suggest that at least 27 pups were born in the human-made snowdrifts.

I like this news because it reminds us that humans can change things, that environmental degradation and the extinction of species is not something we must just accept.




 

Contrast And Compare: Street Harassment Videos

When I read the comments to this UK Guardian street harassment video, which turns the tables, I remembered the Snickers bar video from Australia (more on that in an earlier post).

The Guardian video shows a woman approaching men in inappropriate ways (such as asking for a woman to serve her in a store because a woman would know more, natch, and by sexually harassing them).  The point of the video is an obvious one, to turn the tables on street harassment, to show how it might feel if the shoe is on the other foot.

But that cannot be done, actually, because the effect of street harassment is largely because of its drip-drip nature, because it happens over years and even over decades, even when you are coming back from your grandmother's funeral.  As several people in the comments pointed out, the reversal might feel like a joke or a compliment or something odd and potentially a little embarrassing.  But it will not give the actual flavor of real street harassment.

The Same Political Speech Rights For Every Dollar! McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission.

That's how American democracy works, my sweet and smart readers, and had you any doubts about that the most recent Supreme Court case on political donations lays those to rest:

The specific issue in McCutcheon was whether Congress could enact “aggregate contribution limits” on political donors. Under the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (“McCain-Feingold”), individual donors are limited in how much they can give to individual candidates or party committees. These limits, called “base limits,” were not at issue in McCutcheon. But the BCRA also limits the “aggregate amount” any one donor can give to all federal candidates and committees in a given election cycle—a total of $48,600 to individual candidates and $74,600 to committees.
Plaintiff Shaun McCutcheon, an Alabama businessman, wants to give more than that—$1,776.00 to a total of a dozen more candidates than he has already supported during the 2014 cycle. He brought suit alleging that the aggregate limits burden his First Amendment rights. Four justices of the Court (Roberts plus Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and Samuel Alito) agreed that the aggregate limits violate McCutcheon’s rights; Clarence Thomas provided the fifth vote for McCutcheon, but wrote separately to suggest that both base and aggregate limits are unconstitutional.

The plaintiff's dollars weren't given the rights for political speech!  He had many which had to stay silent, hiding in his pocketses.  Sure, he could send small "I love you" checks to many politicians, but he wanted to send large "I love you" checks.  Well, now he can, to really express his gratitude.

On that gratitude, here's one of the five conservative Justices whose views of democracy are such that they worry a lot about the political rights of dollars and very little about the voting rights of flesh-and-blood human beings:

“[G]overnment regulation may not target the general gratitude a candidate may feel toward those who support him or his allies, or the political access such support may afford,” Roberts writes. “They embody a central feature of democracy—that constituents support candidates who share their beliefs and interests, and candidates who are elected can be expected to be responsive to those concerns.”

And that gratitude can now be multiplied by those who have more dollars to give.  Those dollars give them more access to politicians, more "thank you" letters from the same politicians and, naturally, enough, more attention to the causes the dollars support.  That the richer you are the more access you will get to this "central feature of democracy" doesn't matter in the alternative reality Justice Roberts inhabits, because there every dollar is created equal, and it's not the fault of those dollars if they are rather unequally divided across the populace.

Once we have all drunk that Kool-Aid and accepted the new definition of Dollar Democracy, why have any sort of regulation of political giving at all?  Why not let the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch and others of that ilk simply buy the best government money can get for them?   After all, the Republican Supremes are not worried about rent-seeking, not at all.

Well, they mutter reluctantly, there's still some limited scope for outright corruption but what with all those computers and IT, any actual crooks will be easily caught.  But as Justice Breyer notes in his dissent: 

...the First Amendment advances not only the individual's right to engage in political speech, but also the public's interest in preserving a democratic order in which collective speech matters.
What has this to do with corruption? It has everything to do with corruption. Corruption breaks the constitutionally necessary "chain of communication" between the people and their representatives. It derails the essential speech-to-government-action tie. Where enough money calls the tune, the general public will not be heard. Insofar as corruption cuts the link between political thought and political action, a free marketplace of political ideas loses its point. That is one reason why the Court has stressed the constitutional importance of Congress' concern that a few large donations not drown out the voices of the many. [...]

Bolds are mine.  If we allow only a few people access to the foghorn in the political debates, the voices of those without the horn will not be heard at all.  What's perhaps more important, they won't matter much in a system where only dollars are awarded equal political speech rights.

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The decision can be found here (pdf).  Some ideas for activism can be found here.

Meanwhile, in Kenya, Polygyny Politics

This story about the Kenyan government is a few weeks old.  When I read it I realized that I was grinding my fangs into bonemeal, which is a relatively rare thing for me, given the sort of topics I write about.  One gets a hard shell.

But there's something about this particular example which made me fume.  Was it the apparent plot to pass the polygyny laws when half of the female members of the parliament were absent?  Or was that absence just a fluke?  Or did the women absent themselves so that they didn't have to address this issue?

I have no idea.

Here's the gist of the story:

Female MPs in Kenya have stormed out of a late-night parliamentary session in a row over the legalisation of polygamy.
The law is intended to bring civil law, where a man is only allowed one wife, into line with customary law, where some cultures allow multiple partners.
But male MPs voted to amend the new marriage bill to allow men to take as many wives as they like without consulting existing spouses.
Traditionally, first wives are supposed to give prior approval.
...

MP Samuel Chepkong'a, who proposed the amendment, said that when a woman got married under customary law, she understood that the marriage was open to polygamy, so no consultation was necessary, Kenya's Daily Nation newspaper reports.
Mohammed Junet, an MP representing a constituency from the western Nyanza province, agreed.
"When you marry an African woman, she must know the second one is on the way and a third wife… this is Africa," Kenya's Capital News website quotes him as saying.

...

Proposals to ensure equal property and inheritance rights were also watered down - a woman will be entitled to 30% of matrimonial property after death or divorce.
Under current Kenyan law, a woman must prove her contribution to the couple's wealth.
There was also a proposal to recognise co-habiting couples, known in Kenya as "come-we-stay" relationships, after six months, but this too was dropped.
It would have allowed a woman to seek maintenance for herself and any children of the union had the man left.

The amendment to the law removing the need to ask for the first wife's permission in customary law marriages seems to have been a sudden one.  As far as I understand what this means (and I may not have this right), a man under the customary law is entitled to as many wives as he wishes, and any already existing wife has no say in whether yet another wife joins the family.  Under the same customary law, no woman can ever be guaranteed anything but a fractional husband, and how large a fraction she might get depends on what that husband decides to do.

And of course polyandry is not legally recognized in Kenya.

This is one of the many examples I have written about where religion and tradition directly clash with gender equality.

An April Fool Post

Even though this Fox News chart was from the month of March:

To the credit of Fox News, they have apologized for the mistake and shown the graph today with the necessary adjustment on the vertical axis (I couldn't get the video to work but you should be able to view it at this link.) 

For more examples of lying with graphs or making a mess out of statistical arguments, check out this, this,  this and this.

Shanesha Taylor and Robert H. Richards IV. Two Mug-Shots, Two Stories.

(Contents include sexual violence towards children and child endangerment.)



You should begin by reading why Shanesha Taylor is in the news.  Then read the newsworthy story about Robert H. Richards IV.  The two cases come from different states, one is about abuse charges and the other one is about sentencing for child rape, and those differences obviously matter.

Likewise, many more people (including the police officer in the Taylor story) are going to feel empathy, pity and anger at the unfairness of it all on Taylor's behalf than on Richards' behalf,  and the final outcomes of the cases are going to differ, too.

Now think about the role of income and the influence it has in these two stories:  Taylor left her small children alone in a parked car on a hot day (with windows slightly opened) because she had a job interview and because she was homeless.  Her lack of income severely limited her choices.  Homeless people don't have child care arranged for job interviews.

The culturally approved answer to homelessness and lack of money is to try hard to get a job.  That means needing to turn up for job interviews, preferably not with a toddler and a baby in tow.  Because doing the latter will be interpreted as not having the organizational skills a reliable worker needs, right?  

What are the options for someone like Shanesha Taylor, then?  If she cannot find anyone to mind her children, leaving them in her car (which might be her home, after all) looks like a solution.  It is a dangerous solution, sure, and visible as one.

Richards, on the other hand, is not going to prison, because

Jurden gave Richards, who had no previous criminal record, an eight-year prison term, but suspended all the prison time for probation.
“Defendant will not fare well in Level 5 [prison] setting,” she wrote in her order.
“It’s an extremely rare circumstance that prison serves the inmate well,” said Delaware Public Defender Brendan J. O’Neill, whose office represents defendants who normally cannot afford a lawyer. “Prison is to punish, to segregate the offender from society, and the notion that prison serves people well hasn’t proven to be true in most circumstances.”
O’Neill explained that he has previously argued that case if a defendant was too ill or frail for prison, but he had never seen a judge cite it as a “reason not to send someone to jail.”
He added that the public might come to see Richards sentence as the result of  “how a person with great wealth may be treated by the system.”
According to court records Richards is listed at 6 feet, 4 inches tall and weighing between 250 and 276 pounds.
Court records do not cite any physical illnesses or disabilities.
Richards, who is unemployed and supported by a trust fund, owns a 5,800-square-foot mansion in Greenville , Delaware, and also owns a home in the exclusive North Shores neighborhood near Rehoboth Beach.

The role income and the influence might have in this case looks pretty different from the previous case.

The cases also differ along the dimensions of race and gender, and the three dimensions:  socioeconomic class, gender and race, interact in complicated ways. Shanesha Taylor, a woman of color, is unlikely to benefit from the position inherited wealth provides, she is more likely to end up poor in this society and because she is a woman she is more likely to be the person responsible for her children's well-being and thus being blamed for possible child endangerment.

Weekend Reading, 14/3/28: On Wage Fixing, Parenting and Texas Abortion Law

1.  Wage fixing, anyone?  This story is worth wading through.  The US antitrust laws lost most of their teeth a long time ago.  I'm still hoping for a good set of dentures, because even the free-market acolites should acknowledge that market power isn't the same thing as the power to do good.

2.  Parenting can be very tough, especially because everyone and their uncle Harry are willing to critique those attempts as "experts."  Then there are the actual experts, with study after study on various parenting outcomes.  Parenting often looks like tightrope walking while carrying a week's worth of groceries and nappies/diapers.

Thus, if you are a parent you might be relieved or upset (depending which way you are tipping on that tightrope) by the renewed focus on "free range" childhoods and how important they are for creativity.  You might also be relieved or upset by the recent finding that parental help with homework is not at all helpful*.

If all that is too much for you, read this parenting article, put up your feet and have a large glass of nectar.  While someone else watches your children, naturally.

3.  The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals:

ruled Thursday that two provisions of a Texas abortion law are constitutional, including one that has closed a third of the state’s clinics. The unanimous panel, made up of three women appointed by Republicans, had already allowed the full brunt of the law – the same one now-gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis tried to block – to go into effect.

....

The Supreme Court has held that laws restricting access to abortion can’t put an “undue burden” or have the purpose of putting a “substantial obstacle” in the path of a woman seeking an abortion. But in a decision written by Judge Edith Jones and signed onto by Judges Jennifer Elrod and Catharina Haynes, the Fifth Circuit argued that Texas’s law wasn’t harsh enough to meet that standard.

...

In the oral argument in New Orleans in January, an attorney for the clinics had pointed out that the closures disproportionately burdened women living in the Rio Grande Valley, which had only two clinics. The judges were skeptical then, and they elaborated in their decision: “Even if we were to accept that both clinics in the Rio Grande Valley were about to close as a result of the admitting privileges provision, however, this finding does not show an undue burden,” they wrote. In fact, they don’t have to “accept” anything – both clinics closed three weeks ago.
The closures are not an undue burden, write the judges because “it takes less than three hours on Texas highways” to get to Corpus Christi. (The Corpus Christi clinic is expected to close in September.) “Although some clinics may be required to shut their doors, there is no showing whatsoever that any woman will lack reasonable access to a clinic within Texas,” they add, but only heed evidence from the trial in October, when the law had barely taken effect.

I'm not a goddess of law but I wonder how courts decide when something is an "undue burden."  Sometimes just having to fill in a form can be argued to be a burden, sometimes having to travel a long distance is not an undue burden, even if travel costs money and time.   So.
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*I can think of a reason why this might be the case.  The point of the homework is not to submit a perfect set of answers but to learn from going through the tasks, and that learning includes taking on the responsibility for the task as well as for the particular items the homework tries to teach. 

It's the process which matters, more than the outcome, and premature help with the process (or even knowing that a parent will go through the answers later and will fix any mistakes before the teacher sees the) could dilute the incentives to work hard on the assignment.

On Tech, Panties, Construction Sites and Street Harassment: Occupational Gender Segregation in the Popular Culture.

How about an interesting juxtaposition of stuff about gender and tech?  Here's a story about a different way of getting young women interested in computer science careers.  And here's a new (not safe for work) website for tech fanciers.  It's going to offer everything about mobile technology, with a sexy twist!

Sexy, in this context, means women with panties around their ankles, because sex is equated with the female body.  The website offers lots of goodies:

Readers can interact with the magazine by playing embedded mini-games and puzzles or joining in conversations via the magazine's in-app Twitter feed. Readers can also enjoy audio and video of hotties reading the articles, similar to a podcast. And readers can vote in the app for the Wannabe a Hottie contest, in which readers will choose a "girl next door" to be flown in for a photo shoot and feature at the end of the year. Hot Tech Today is everything a tech enthusiast needs in one app.

Mmm.  As far as I can tell, all the "hotties" will be female.  Imagine a "boy next door" competition!  Perhaps that would draw in more women interested in tech?

Just kidding, sadly, because that website doesn't try to draw women into tech, rather the exact opposite.

Occupational gender segregation does seem to take their cues from stuff like this.  It's not that different from gender-coded toy aisles (where it seems that physician kits are now in the boys' aisles!), except that young women in tech might have to view themselves both as the participants and as one of the sideline objects of participation, and that can be hard to take in the long run.

Speaking of occupational gender segregation and street harassment, have a look at this Australian Snickers chocolate bar ad.  The joke is at the very end.

Schools Policing Gender

Two recent US items of interest in this context.  First, a boy with a My Little Pony lunch sack was told by the school not to bring it in because the lunch sack (coded for girls in this culture) was a "trigger" for bullies. 

Second, a Christian school told the grandparents of an eight-year-old girl that she looked (and acted?) too much like a boy.

These gender-policing examples may no longer be extremely common in the wider American society (though I have witnessed parents doing this quite a bit, by replacing the toy a child holds with a different toy etc.)  But the camp believing in mostly innate sex differences should make a note that cultural forcing does take place and that gender roles are being policed, even by the children themselves.

Fun And Games in the Supreme Court. The Hobby Lobby Case And Women's Human Rights.

In the oral arguments about the Hobby Lobby case.  First Justice Kagan points out what will happen if we are going to regard for-profit corporations (which don't possess souls)  as religious believers with religious values worthy of honoring in the marketplace:

When Clement tried to deflect this list, Kagan came armed with an even bigger what. What of religious employers who object to gender equality, or the minimum wage, or family medical leave, or child labor laws? If the Supreme Court agrees with Hobby Lobby’s brief, which argues that laws burdening a corporation’s purported religious faith must survive the “most demanding test known to constitutional law,” then there would be few laws corporations could not exempt themselves from following.

Bolds are mine.   Just for your elucidation, Clement answered like this:

Paul Clement, the attorney for the companies, rejected that by calling it a “parade of horribles” that would not materialize.

Which is extremely reassuring...

And keep in mind that the religious values the market is expected to honor here are the social and cultural values of nomadic shepherding communities from two thousand years ago or so, at least in the context of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.  That's worth pointing out, because it is those social values that the rest of us, with different religious beliefs, are most likely forced to honor under the corporations-are-believers view. That is bad news for women, but not only for women.

Does that sound extreme?  Two reasons for the way I wrote that.  First, there is no obvious way to limit the possible religious rights of for-profit corporations to just birth control or abortions, and a decision that way in the Hobby Lobby case would automatically mean that 

“You would see religious objectors come out of the woodwork,” Kagan said.

As I mentioned in my earlier post on the Hobby Lobby case, a firm could then refuse to promote women in the organization, based on the fundamentalist belief of some sects that women must never be placed above men in any hierarchy and so on.

The second reason for my dismal mood is that the five conservative Justices appear to be ready to rule for Hobby Lobby, which opens the gates of hell, so to speak.  Indeed, Justice Scalia is eager to accept corporations in the pews of his Catholic church:

"There's not a single case that says a for-profit enterprise cannot make a religious claim," Justice Antonin Scalia said.

And finally, the case seems to be about abortion, once again, based on the scientifically very questionable idea that emergency contraceptives and IUDs constitute abortion, mostly just because someone believes that they do.   As Justice Kennedy hates abortion, that means a five-four decision for Hobby Lobby, because no firm should be made to pay for abortion or even for contraception which forced-birthers have decided is abortion in their minds. 

But of course the firms aren't really "paying" for abortions in the first place, unless we take such a tremendously wide view of "paying" that just giving a woman her properly-earned wages means that.  Because that's what the health insurance offered by firms ultimately is:  part of the total wage package.
 

The Hobby Lobby Case And The Supremes

Tomorrow the Supreme Court of the United States is going to hear oral arguments in two cases having to do with the ACA's coverage of contraception for women (and, incidentally, for men, given that it takes two to tango, and also because the same rules would most likely cover a male contraceptive pill if it ever became generally accepted).  The more famous of the cases is the Hobby Lobby case:

The owners of Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties don't have a problem with offering insurance that covers most forms of birth control, but they aren't willing to cover emergency contraceptives — like Plan B or ella -- or IUDs. Hobby Lobby contends its "religious beliefs prohibit them from providing health coverage for contraceptive drugs and devices that end human life after conception." The question these cases are seeking to solve is whether for-profit companies have a right to exercise religious freedom under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a federal law passed in 1993 that states the “Government shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability." If they do, does the government have a compelling interest to override it in this instance?

From my divine (not lawyerly) standpoint, these cases matter greatly because if for-profit corporations can be regarded as having religious beliefs of the type covered by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, then what's to stop a firm from discriminating against women, say? 

After all, some fundamentalist sects argue that all women should stay at home and more of them argue that no woman should ever be in a position to lead men.  I find it hard to see how for-profit firms could have a religious exemption applicable only to the coverage of contraception and not to all the ancient misogynistic and anti-gays&lesbians ideas so easily found in various holy texts.

Then there's the question of defining emergency contraceptives and IUDs as abortifacients.  That's the "scientific" basis of the suits, I guess, despite pretty obvious counterarguments.  Does it matter if a legal case is based on possible pseudoscience?

Peeling Onions. Or Writing This Blog.

That's how I see what I try to do here: peeling onions, but not just the skin of the onions.  I keep on peeling, layer by layer, trying to understand the issues I write about.  Mostly I fail, and then, of course, tears have to be shed when peeling onions.

It's the deepest levels of "why?" that I wish* to pursue.  Why do we humans do the things we do, both bad and good?  To what extent could we change our behavior? 

It may be that this pursuit is pointless, that it doesn't interest most people, that because we, so to speak, live on the outer skins of the onion who cares what happens in the deeper layers?

But it is the deeper layers which ultimately define that outer skin.

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Where did these thoughts come from?

Partly from the struggles I have with myself (boxing gloves worn by both halves of me) about how to pick among the many, many topics which interest me, because I cannot write on all of them, partly from some of my recent thoughts about the differences between activism and the kind of work (if you can call it work) that I try to do on this blog.
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*It's not even a question of pure wishing, because that makes the choice look too voluntary.  It's how I'm built. 

Americans Don't Like Female Bosses?

Bryce Covert talks about this:

In its annual report of the Highest Rated CEOs of 2014, based on employee feedback gathered during the last year, just two women appear on Glassdoor’s list, and they don’t break into the top 30. The top 10 are all white men. 

Sharen Turney, CEO of Victoria’s Secret, is ranked at number 35 with an 85 percent approval rating. The only other woman, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, ranks second to last (there are 51 on the list due to an error that originally left someone out) with a 79 percent rating, only beating GE’s Jeffrey R. Immelt.

...

Part of the problem is clearly that there are so few female CEOs to begin with. They make up less than 15 percent of executive officers at Fortune 500 companies and haven’t made any significant progress in four years.

Covert then talks about two studies which shows that people prefer male bosses, among those who express a preference, though the percentage expressing no gender preferences in their bosses is actually pretty big and growing.  From a 2013 piece by her:

Friday Cat Post

Norway has a different kind of a reality show:

Now the channel behind Norway's marathon "Slow TV" broadcasts – billed as an antidote to the frantic data overload of the internet and twitter – has excelled itself with Piip Show, a strangely addictive "reality-TV show with wild birds".

Guess who is watching this show?

Here's the answer:

Weekend Reading on Reproductive Justice, Stand-Your-Ground And Inheritance as Women's Issues

What you might want to read over the weekend:

A good summary of what can happen with the fetal human rights movement.  This is the story of Rennie Gibbs, but the article covers several aspects of the treatment of women as incubators:

Rennie Gibbs’s daughter, Samiya, was a month premature when she simultaneously entered the world and left it, never taking a breath. To experts who later examined the medical record, the stillborn infant’s most likely cause of death was also the most obvious: the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck.
But within days of Samiya’s delivery in November 2006, Steven Hayne, Mississippi’s de facto medical examiner at the time, came to a different conclusion. Autopsy tests had turned up traces of a cocaine byproduct in Samiya’s blood, and Hayne declared her death a homicide, caused by “cocaine toxicity.”


In early 2007, a Lowndes County grand jury indicted Gibbs, a 16-year-old black teen, for “depraved heart murder” — defined under Mississippi law as an act “eminently dangerous to others…regardless of human life.” By smoking crack during her pregnancy, the indictment said, Gibbs had “unlawfully, willfully, and feloniously” caused the death of her baby. The maximum sentence: life in prison.
Seven years and much legal wrangling later, Gibbs could finally go on trial this spring — part of a wave of “fetal harm” cases across the country in recent years that pit the rights of the mother against what lawmakers, health care workers, prosecutors, judges, jurors, and others view as the rights of the unborn child.
A judge is said to be likely to decide this week if the case should move forward or be dismissed. Assuming it continues, whether Gibbs becomes the first woman ever convicted by a Mississippi jury for the loss of her pregnancy could turn on a fundamental question that has received surprisingly little scrutiny so far by the courts: Is there scientific proof that cocaine can cause lasting damage to a child exposed in the womb, or are the conclusions reached by Hayne and prosecutors based on faulty analysis and junk science?

The "Stand Your Ground" laws and women's immunity from prosecution is covered in this article about the case of Marissa Alexander.  This piece covers the prosecutors' arguments concerning the applicability of the "Stand Your Ground" law to this case.  Whatever one's conclusions about that specific law might be,  the Alexander case looks like an outrage when compared to other recent Florida cases which have employed the "Stand Your Ground" defense.

Inheritance laws, both religious and traditional laws, still handicap women in several African countries and in Muslim countries which apply the shariah law to inheritance.  An example of the latter from Morocco is covered in this article, which also notes the usual problem with religion-based discriminatory rules:  The women themselves do not wish to go against their holy books.  A reinterpretation can be difficult, however much it is needed.

This article from last January talks about the impact of traditional inheritance rules on widows in Tanzania.

Both types of unequal inheritance laws, have included certain protections for women, such as the implicit understanding that men have been culturally regarded as responsible for the monetary support of their mothers, daughters, sister-in-laws etc., via various arrangements.  But those protections have never amounted to the same thing as legal ownership of the assets and the right to determine how they are being used.  They have many more loopholes than legal ownership rights offer.

Likewise, one can argue that such laws were more ethical and practical in the traditional patriarchal system (though they always had those loopholes).  But the case for those arguments is even weaker today, and change is urgently needed. 

Market Ideas in Education. When Things Go Wrong.

Can you have something for nothing?

In economic resource terms, pretty much never.  Yet people keep on trying.  For example, conservatives want teachers to teach just because of their devotion to children, conservatives want schools not to need budgets, and conservatives expect that cutting teachers' pension benefits will have no negative consequences to the ease with which we can find good teachers.

What's fascinating about that example is the contrast with, say, financial markets, where nobody expects people to work just because they like their jobs so much and where good pay is obviously utterly and completely deserved because the markets say so.  That  teaching is an occupation with quite a few women in it while finance is regarded as testosterone-fueled may matter for those conservative ideas.

When is a little knowledge very dangerous?

A good example is taking Economics101 (a basic micro course), learning about the model of competitive markets (which applies to very few real-world markets), and then deciding that all sorts of things (not covered in Econ101) which do not lend themselves to market provision should be turned over to the cruel and reckless claws of anarchy-markets.  Because of the appealingly simple models in that course!  I come across people on the net all the time who think they know economics because of one course they have taken.  That little knowledge is dangerous, especially when it is viewed as the entirety of all economic theory applying to markets.

Consider the popular conservative idea that schools should be turned over to the "free markets" everywhere.  Those who support that should ask themselves why basic education has so very seldom been offered by profit-making firms, why, instead, it has almost always been constructed on a not-for-profit basis.  There are economic reasons for these institutional characteristics, and though technological change may increase the ability of for-profit solutions to work in education, the essential characteristics of the product which education offers have not changed, and those characteristics make for-profit solutions rather bad ones.

What are those essential characteristics?

The Job Of A Wife, According to Dennis Prager

This is worth looking at, despite the original source being from 2008, because Prager, a conservative talk-show host,  is co-hosting a fund-raiser for Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

What Prager stated in 2008:

Prager has penned a number of op-eds for conservative publications like TownHall.com and National Review that outline his views on feminism, which he’s said has produced an “awful legacy” for women, and sexual relations in marriage, which he’s argued is one of a wife’s “mutual obligation[s]” to her husband.

Writing on TownHall.com in December of 2008, Prager compares a man’s obligation to go to work, regardless of his “mood,” to a woman’s obligation to have sex with her husband.

“Why would a loving, wise woman allow mood to determine whether or not she will give her husband one of the most important expressions of love she can show him? What else in life, of such significance, do we allow to be governed by mood?” he writes.

“What if your husband woke up one day and announced that he was not in the mood to go to work?”

So in Prager's view marriage is a heterosexual labor contract where the female spouse provides sex, childcare, meals, laundry services, house-cleaning etc. and the male spouse pays for those services.   Once you understand that definition of marriage, Prager's views become crystal-clear:  He believes that the workers are failing in their duties if they don't provide sex on demand, given that they are being paid for it. 

Those views also reflect, I believe, one of the major problems among many/some conservatives:  This is their definition of marriage, and it drives several of the socially conservative policies they support, their obliviousness for the need of labor rights for women, their opposition to daycare or pregnancy leaves and so on. 

That view has at least two major problems.  First, the majority of wives in the US work in the labor market, earning money, and Prager's patriarchal marriage doesn't acknowledge that aspect at all.  He just waves a magic wand, and suddenly paid work is all male.  If we decided to keep the interpretation of marriage as a labor contract, the fact that the wives also have earned incomes would mean that they, too, are then buying services from their husbands, right?  But in Prager's world the husbands owe their wives nothing but financial payments.

Second, Prager assumes that sexual services are included in the job description of wives.  That definition means that marital sex is paid sex work.  An interesting interpretation from a conservative anti-feminist.

Lawrence Summers On Envy. Or Why We Should Not Tax The Rich More.

Our Larry has cropped up again with interesting comments, this time about income and wealth inequality in the US:

“Reducing inequality is good, but it’s 50 times better to do it by lifting those up who are low than by tearing those down who are high,” said Larry Summers, the former treasury secretary whose bid to become Fed chair got derailed by the more liberal wing of the Democratic Party. “The politics of envy are the wrong politics in America. The better politics are the politics of inclusion where everyone shares in economic growth.”

OK.  Let's see what this would amount to:  Don't tear down those who are high would mean not taxing the wealthier more than they are being taxed now. Everyone shearing in economic growth would mean that the poor, the middle class and the rich would all get wealthier as the economy grows.

This is so beautiful.  It also dispenses with the accusation that concern with income and wealth inequality is based on nothing but that deadly sin of envy.

But imagine, for a moment, a society in which 99% of people are just barely surviving and where 1% of people own almost everything, living in guarded enclaves where the faucets and toilet seats are gold-plated.  There's nothing about such a society that would preclude the winning 1% from using the envy argument.  In that sense it is an empty argument, one which cannot be disproved and one which doesn't even have to be false, in the sense that of course the suffering poor would be envious of those who have their bellies full of food.

What Summers' statement hides is that there are other arguments we can make about income and wealth inequality being bad for all of us, even ultimately for the very rich.  How about the possible collapse of extreme unequal societies?  How about the unpleasantness of living in a society where the haves must hire private guards to protect themselves against the have-nots?  How about the damage inequality causes for the proper functioning of democracy?

To wipe all that under the "envy-mat" could come back to haunt us later, Larry.

Then there's the problem that economic growth benefiting everyone would still have to benefit the poor and the middle-income people more than it benefits the rich if growth is to be the major policy to be used in reducing income and wealth inequality.  But once we redefine the cake-division as applying not to the existing cake but to the growth in that cake, the envy argument can slip back in.  Who are the critics to argue that the wealthier don't deserve larger chunks of any cake growth?

I get that the linked article is about money in the US politics, that the Democratic Party doesn't want to frighten away its rich donors and so on. But think about the need for such articles in the first place.  They are necessary because the political system is already geared towards the desires of the wealthier among us.

Short Posts On Weird Stuff About Gender

1.  One conservative, Bryan Fischer,  thinks that the proper goal of women is to strive to be women:

"We don't need women trying to be like men," he added. "We need more women whose ambition in life is to be a woman"

That's based on the idea that men and women are non-intersecting sets in all their characteristics, but it's also an interesting plan for allowable female ambitions.

2.  The manufactured thigh gap that looks like a missing Lego piece.  This is funny on one level and nothing but horrible on a deeper level.  For an antidote, have a look at this story.

3.   Did you know that there will be a new reality show called "My Five Husbands?"  Well, I lied there.  The new reality show will be called "My Five Wives" and it joins other recent shows which portray polygyny (one man with several wives) in the US ("Big Love" and "Sister Wives").  The husband of those five wives states that he is a feminist and all the five wives also regard themselves as feminists.

To address those claims would take a proper post.  Though polyamory could be gender-egalitarian, the situation of that family doesn't quite look like equal sexual freedom for all participants.  Brad has five partners but his wives, Paulie, Robyn, Rosemary, Nonie, and Rhonda, each have only one partner, and the five share Brad between them.  There's a small adding-up problem* in that, for those who argue that the arrangements provides sexual equality. 

Now, a polygamic situation like that could have many theoretical interpretations.  For instance, the man could be viewed as having a harem or the women could be viewed as having a toyboy they share as they deem appropriate.  In other words, how egalitarian such an arrangement is depends on how power is divided inside it.  The traditional forms of polygamy give the man the lion's share of the power.  Whether egalitarian polygyny or polyandry is possible in real life and not just in theory seems an open question to me.  But the traditional type of polygyny certainly isn't gender-egalitarian.

I'm not as fascinated by this attempt at a feminist angle of the most recent polygyny series as I am by the question why there are enough American viewers for essentially gender-retrogressive stories about marriage and gender.  And when are we going to see that "My Five Husbands" series?
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*The fundamentalist Mormon polygamy has another adding-up problem which these kinds of series probably don't address, and that is what happens in a community where some men have many wives so that other men cannot have any wives.  The Lost Boys is what happens.  More generally,  polygyny cannot be a stable societal arrangement without some way to get rid of all the surplus men, even if the women in the society have no say about whom they will be married to.

Quvenzhané Wallis as Orphan Annie, Ben Kingsley as Gandhi. Looking at the differences.

The Oscar-nominated ten-year-old actor,  Quvenzhané Wallis, is playing Orphan Annie in a new adaptation of the original musical (Annie).  Several sites have gathered together tweet comments expressing racism or anger about the actor not being white and read-headed as in the original musical and book it was based on.

It's hard to know how common those kinds of comments are, without going back to gather all tweets about this news, but some people obviously feel that the character Annie should never be played by an actor who doesn't exactly match the original specifications and some of those people are racists*.

To compare this to related decisions, consider the classical film Gandhi.  Because it came out before we had the blessings of Twitter it's not easy to find out if people were at all outraged that a British-Indian white actor**, Ben Kingsley,  was to play Gandhi.  After all, Gandhi's essential characteristic for the purposes of that film was that he was an Indian leader of the people.

Then there is Waiting for Godot.  Evidence suggests that the playwright, Samuel Beckett, was opposed to having female actors play the roles in his play:

Beckett was not open to most interpretative approaches to his work. He famously objected when, in the 1980s, several women's acting companies began to stage the play. "Women don't have prostates", said Beckett,^[79] a reference to the fact that Vladimir frequently has to leave the stage to urinate.
In 1988, Beckett took a Dutch theatre company, De Haarlemse Toneelschuur to court over this issue. "Beckett [...] lost his case. But the issue of gender seemed to him to be so vital a distinction for a playwright to make that he reacted angrily, instituting a ban on all productions of his plays in The Netherlands."^[80] This ban was short-lived, however: in 1991 (two years after Beckett's death), "Judge Huguette Le Foyer de Costil ruled that the production would not cause excessive damage to Beckett's legacy", and the play was duly performed by the all-female cast of the Brut de Beton Theater Company at the prestigious Avignon Festival.^[81]
The Italian Pontedera Theatre Foundation won a similar claim in 2006 when it cast two actresses in the roles of Vladimir and Estragon, albeit in the characters' traditional roles as men.^[82] At the 1995 Acco Festival, director Nola Chilton staged a production with Daniella Michaeli in the role of Lucky,^[83] and a 2001 production at Indiana University staged the play with women playing Pozzo and the Boy.^{[citation needed]}

Setting aside the difference between the creator of a work of art opposing recasting and the possible audience for the work of art opposing it, these three cases do share a similar smell.  Or should share it, because I doubt that the casting of Kingsley as Gandhi caused much protest outside India (though I may be mistaken about that).

The essential question in such casting decisions is probably whether they change the central messages of the work of art.  I don't see how that would be the case for the musical Annie or even for Waiting for Godot (as some menopausal women have to pee pretty often, say) because neither piece explicitly demands a certain race or gender to keep its central message the same.  On the other hand, something like A Raisin in the Sun would be hard to recast with white actors at this time and in the United States, because it would stop making sense.

Not allowing more flexible casting of roles hurts actors belonging to racial minorities, because there are fewer works explicitly written for them.  If we are never allowed to rethink casting, minority actors will have more trouble staying employed. 
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*Hunger Games' casting decisions caused similar complaints about the race of some characters, even when the book had specified them.
**Sorry, got that wrong.  Kingsley was born Krishna Pandit Bhanji.  But he is British. Thanks to pixelfish for the correction.  For a better example of this phenomenon, the 2013 remake of the Lone Ranger might do:

Despite the producers citing the presence of an adviser from the Comanche Nation, some debated the advisability of casting of Depp as a Native American and whether the film would present a positive and accurate representation of the Comanche.^[97] Depp has stated he believes he has Native American ancestry, possibly from a great-grandmother. He has said that he considered the role a personal attempt "to try to right the wrongs of the past", in reference to portrayals of Native American culture in the media.^[98][99]

The Centennary of Tove Jansson's Birth

If you don't know any small children to whom you could read the Moomintroll books you should hire a few, just as cover so that you can read them yourself. Tove Jansson, the author responsible for those books, was born a hundred years ago this year:

This year Finland is celebrating the centenary of the birth of Tove Jansson, creator of the Moomins, and one of the most successful children's writers ever. Her life included war and lesbian relationships - both reflected by the Moomins in surprising ways.
There is Moomintroll, Moominmamma and Moominpappa - little white trolls who live in Moominvalley, with other fantastical creatures such as the Hattifatteners, Mymbles and Whompers.
Tove Jansson's Moomin books have sold in their millions, and been translated into 44 languages.
Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials, has described her as a genius. Other devotees include Michael Morpurgo, writer of War Horse and dozens of other children's books, and Frank Cottrell Boyce, who scripted the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony.
"I was completely blown away and enchanted," says Boyce, who read Finn Family Moomintroll as a 10-year-old, after discovering the book in a Liverpool library.
"I didn't realise it was set in a real place. I thought she'd made Finland up. Finland was like Narnia, with these incredible characters that were so strange but instantly recognisable because you had met lots of them - noisy Hemulens or neurotic, skinny Fillijonks."

The books are aimed at children.  Don't let that stop you from reading at least the Tales from Moominvalley, a 1962 short-story collection.  

It is one of the books I might take with me to a deserted island, because of the vast psychological riches the stories contain.  It's hard to pick a favorite among them, but if I had to do so I'd pick "The Fillyjonk Who Believed In Disasters,*"for reasons I discuss in this post.
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*The story is so good that a summary doesn't give it any kind of justice.  I know because I tried.

A Crime Post: On Gun Rights And Rape Kits

Which covers the love of guns, its consequences and the way rape kits are analyzed in the US.  Or, rather, not analyzed.

First, on guns.  The state of Georgia has a new proposed bill about "gun rights":

In addition to overturning current state laws and dramatically rolling back concealed-carry restrictions, HB 875 would loosen other gun regulations in the state. The law would:
    •    Remove the fingerprinting requirement for gun license renewals
    •    Prohibit the state from keeping a gun license database
    •    Tighten the state's preemption statute, which restricts local governments from passing gun laws that conflict with state laws
    •    Repeal the state licensing requirement for firearms dealers (requiring only a federal firearms license)
    •    Expand gun owner rights in a declared state of emergency by prohibiting government authorities from seizing, registering, or otherwise limiting the carrying of guns in any way permitted by law before the emergency was declared
    •    Limit the governor's emergency powers by repealing the ability to regulate the sale of firearms during a declared state of emergency
    •    Lower the age to obtain a concealed-carry license from 21 to 18 for active-duty military and honorably discharged veterans who've completed basic training
    •    Prohibit detaining someone for the sole purpose of checking whether they have a gun license
The sweeping bill would also expand the state's Stand your Ground law into an "absolute" defense for the use of deadly force in self-protection. "Defense of self or others," the bills reads "shall be an absolute defense to any violation under this part." In its current wording, the bill would even allow individuals who possess a gun illegally—convicted felons, for example—to still claim a Stand Your Ground defense.

Don't you think the list sounds like civil rights demands for weapons?  Not even for the people owning them, but for the guns themselves?  Less regulation of guns!  Guns should be allowed everywhere and there should be no trace of the guns in any statistical source!

To put all that in perspective, for about ten days I have made a note of any story which tells us how a child has killed or hurt someone with a gun or gotten killed or hurt by a gun.  This is not an actual search for those stories, by the way.  I just made a note when I saw one.  Here is the recent crop.  David Waldman at Daily Kos writes frequently about various types of "gun fails."

Studying Gender Stereotypes in Science. Or We All Know That Women Can't Do Math

Are there fewer women in STEM-fields just because women don't choose them as often as men?  Or could it be that there are demand-side reasons for the relative scarcity of women?  Those "demand side" reasons mean that the people responsible for hiring and promoting workers might have (perhaps subconscious) prejudices about women which affect the likelihood that a woman is picked for a job or an educational slot which requires mathematical skills.

A new study, How stereotypes impair women’s careers in science, by Ernesto Reuben, Paola Sapienza and Luigi Zingales tries to answer the latter question, about the possible impact of our prejudices concerning mathematics and gender.   Bryce Covert summarizes the study findings:

Researchers from Columbia Business School, the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago, and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University conducted an experiment that had both men and women complete an arithmetic task that both genders, on average, perform equally well as potential job candidates. Then test subjects had to decide who to hire. “Our results reveal a strong bias among subjects to hire male candidates,” the researchers note, which was true of both men and women. When the prospective employers were only shown a candidate’s physical appearance, making their gender clear, they were twice as likely to hire a man than a woman. This was because women were expected to perform worse on the math problems, even though it was a task they were equally like to do well.
Women were still less likely to be hired even after the candidates told prospective employers how they did on the task “because men tend to boast about their performance, whereas women generally underreport it,” the authors write. Employers don’t take this into account, particularly if they went into the experiment with a strong bias against women in math.
Things improved when those doing the hiring were given full information about how the candidates did on the task, but even then discrimination wasn’t totally eliminated.

Stuff To Read, 3/12/14

I always say that writing can be as fast as your ability to type.  It's the research that props up the writing which takes time.  That's another way to say that I've been doing a lot of research and very little writing today.

So what could you read, instead of me?  Let's see.

This piece talks about a new study which suggests that money buys access to politicians, but that even the smell of money isn't quite enough to guarantee face-to-face access.  More on the power of money in American politics can be found in this editorial.

What the Hobby Lobby case reveals about the US religious right's attitudes toward contraception.  A spoiler:  They think contraception destroys marriage and makes men disrespect women.

The US is ranked 98th in the global ranking of national legislatures when it comes to the number of women in them.  Sure, some other countries achieve a higher ranking through quotas, but many don't need quotas to get there.  This country is behind Kenya and Indonesia and just ahead of United Arab Emirates.  Part of the reason for America's less-than-stellar performance is the two-party system which makes atypical candidates less likely than multi-party systems.

On crowdworkers.  A new kind of labor market and mostly unregulated.

And one more example of the Republican wingtip-in-the-mouth syndrome when it comes to so-called women's issues:

New Hampshire state Rep. Kyle Tasker (R) posted a joke about domestic violence to Facebook on Monday while defending a fellow lawmaker's comments about abusive relationships, according to William Tucker's New Hampshire politics blog, Miscellany: Blue.
Tasker posted a graphic joke about domestic violence that read, "50,000 battered women and I still eat mine plain!"
Tasker has since deleted the joke from Facebook...

Put Me On A Pedestal

So that you can look up my skirt more easily?

Mike Huckabee, the former Republican Governor of Arkansas, tells how he has run against female candidates in political races:

“I’ve twice run against women opponents, and it’s a very different kind of approach,” he tells me. Different how? “For those of us who have some chivalry left, there’s a level of respect. ... You treat some things as a special treasure; you treat other things as common.” A male opponent is “common,” a woman requires “a sense of pedestal.”

“I’ll put it this way,” Huckabee says. “I treat my wife very differently than I treat my chums and my pals. I wouldn’t worry about calling them on Valentine’s Day, opening the door for them, or making sure they were OK.”

That's just wonderfully informative.  And funny, given that he seems to equate female political rivals with his wife and male political rivals with his pals (presumably all men).  Or at least he has trouble trying to explain how those female politicians might differ from male politicians, except in some extremely deep and gendered ways  which require chivalry from him, probably Valentine's Day cards, opening doors and making sure that they are OK.  I'd think it would be fairly easy to beat Huckabee if that's how he plans to run any future races against women.

Chivalry, by the way, is an interesting concept.  Many conservatives seem to assume that in the olden days the world was full of chivalrous men, opening doors, even when a woman didn't want to go anywhere, rising when women entered the room and so on, but now chivalry is almost dead and that's because of feminazis.  Indeed, some not-so-nice sites suggest that the price of chivalry is submission, and that the alternative to chivalry (of the imagined type that once ruled everywhere) is not being treated with respect and politeness as a human being but being treated with extra nastiness for overstepping the boundaries of traditional gender roles.

That's not what Huckabee is saying.  His ideas come from his own traditional gender norms, perhaps reflected in his earlier support for wifely submission in marriage.

I can't help feeling a bit sorry for our Mike.  He's trying too hard to make the Republican war on women come out right, but he just doesn't get it, because in his worldview women really cannot take the kinds of roles those uppity women are taking.  Sadly, there are no ready-made answers to the proper way of campaigning against someone who is both supposed to stand on a pedestal and then get that pedestal toppled. 

Today's Science Snack. On Hormones And Women's Voting

Remember that study in 2012:  "The Fluctuating Female Vote:  Politics, Religion and the Ovulatory Cycle" by Kristina  M. Durante,  Ashley R. Arsena and Vladas Griskevicius?   It argued that women's voting is affected by their menstrual cycles, and linked the argument to the usual evolutionary psychology stuff about reproductive drives and how they might influence women differently at different stages of the ovulatory cycle.

The next stage of the game:  A new study*, Harris, C., & Mickes, L. (2014). "Women Can Keep the Vote: No Evidence That Hormonal Changes During the Menstrual Cycle Impact Political and Religious Beliefs Psychological Science" argues that a replication of the Durante et al. study failed to find the same effects.

Neuroskeptic, at a Discovery magazine blog, writes about some of the methodological concerns with that particular field of psychological studies which might exist in both the original studies and in the replications, especially something called "researcher degrees of freedom," from here:

[I]t is unacceptably easy to publish “statistically significant” evidence consistent with any hypothesis.
The culprit is a construct we refer to as researcher degrees of freedom. In the course of collecting and analyzing data, researchers have many decisions to make: Should more data be collected? Should some observations be excluded? Which conditions should be combined and which ones compared? Which control variables should be considered? Should specific measures be combined or transformed or both?
It is rare, and sometimes impractical, for researchers to make all these decisions beforehand. Rather, it is common (and accepted practice) for researchers to explore various analytic alternatives, to search for a combination that yields “statistical significance,” and to then report only what “worked.” The problem, of course, is that the likelihood of at least one (of many) analyses producing a falsely positive finding at the 5% level is necessarily greater than 5%.

I'm not sure if that's a polite way to hint at the possibility that researchers can go on fishing trips with the data until they find significant results in at least one tiny part of the analyses, and that it is those significant results which then will be published.

Setting all that aside, replication still matters, even "replication"** suffering from possible "researcher degrees of freedom" problems.  That's because replications which fail to produce the original results tell us something about the fragility of the results,  so to speak, and about the ease with which opposite results can be manufactured.

Finally, it's worth noting that the women-and-their-hormones (and men-and-their-hormones) field also needs to be studied by people outside the evolutionary psychology camp, because any overt biases of the researchers will be different.  Evolutionary psychologists seek to verify their reproductive theories, those outside that field have different basic theories and thus different blinders.
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*I have not read this replication study or the response to it, though I did read the original Durante et al. study.
**In quotation marks, because replication should not deviate from the steps the original study took.  But if we don't know what those steps where...