Today's Recipe

Make a risotto.  Use real Arborio rice.  While you are busy using two hands adding the boiling water and stirring vigorously, use your third hand to clean some mushrooms with a darker-color hat, chop them up and fry them in some olive oil with chopped garlic (need a fourth hand here), rosemary, sage, thyme and ground black pepper. Deglaze the mushroom mess with a tiny amount of port.  This is very important.

You need a few more hands but figure that one out yourself.

Combine the two.  Add some grated Parmesan cheese and if you have it (I was given a bottle), drizzle a tiny amount of truffle oil on your plate.

To die for, it was.  And you can skip the part of the salad-making where I grated some finger in the carrots.  It's high in iron so that was okay and adds a nice color.

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I'm sure this recipe already existed but I didn't know about it.  Well, I knew about the finger-grating, because I have done that before.  Next time I make this one I will organize the mushroom stage to happen before the risotto dance stage.

Housekeeping...

Sometimes it's very hard to write anything at all.  Sometimes life intervenes, kicking the carefully-ordered piles of plans onto the floor. 

Sometimes Brother Death comes calling and gathers someone close into his dark arms,  sometimes Sister Sickness visits (and visits and visits) someone close, demanding more and more cups of tea and nursing help, and sometimes that crazy great-uncle in the attic, The-End-Of-The-World-As-We-Know-It starts hammering the ceiling with his cane.  And sometimes all those things happen at the same time.

Then it's hard to write.

Four Observations on the First Democratic Primary Debate

The first Democratic party presidential debate was last night.  I watched it and all. 

First observation:  The debaters all acted like adults!  That's refreshing, given that they are competing for the chance to steer the largest bus on earth either straight into the abyss or away from it.  Not all such debates have been between adults.

Second observation:  The way the "judges" rate these debates is very much like looking at a horse's teeth before buying it, to judge its real age. 

Only the way Anderson Cooper managed that was by thinking of the nastiest possible questions and then seeing how the candidate would cope with the situation. 

That those nastiest questions came straight from the Republican playbook may be just a coincidence (and I might be Marie of Rumania), but the fact is that I learned more about Benghazi and Hillary Clinton's e-mail scandal than I ever really wanted to know.  I also learned that Bernie Sanders is a socialist (gasp!), except that he's not the kind of socialist the insinuation meant.  He's more like Norway/Denmark/Sweden type of red-hot commie.

Third observation:  It's pointless to ask anyone the Syria question.  There is nothing that anyone can profitably say about the situation there.  Should we arm a dictator who slaughters his own people?  Or should we arm some "moderate" Islamist group which would act just like ISIS if they were in power?  Or perhaps the guns should be scattered around like candy for the kids? (Or how about the inane proposal of arming the Kurds but in an apolitical way???  Except that the Kurds only want to fight for the Kurds (against Turkey and currently against ISIS), not clean up Syria and Iraq.  That wasn't in the debate but demonstrates the impossibility of doing anything non-sectarian and non-religious and less violent about the situation).

Fourth observation:  If you watched the debate with left-leaning friends or even checked what the Internet is saying you quickly found out that the candidate provoking by far the strongest negative feelings among progressives is Hillary Clinton, despite the fact that she is also the Democratic forerunner.

The reasons for that are complicated and would take a book to analyze, ranging from her long presence in American politics, the fact that she used to be the First Lady, the nepotism question in US politics (the Bushes vs. the Clintons), her past mistakes, the fact that the press never liked the Clintons, and then also the fact that what's inside her underwear looks different from what we are used to assume politicians carry there. 

Rebecca Traister wrote about some of those issues in Elle magazine, and an earlier article by Molly Mirhashem discussed the complicated questions of identity among young feminists and how those made them less eager to support Clinton's campaign.

So it's not just the progressive bros who might have trouble with Hillary Clinton, given that she is white and wealthy and privileged.  But then, of course are all the four men who shared that stage with her last night.

I have much more to say on that fourth observation in the near future.

Today's Hilarious Political Utterances: Charles Koch, Ben Carson and Timothy Egan

A little bit of laughter, however sarcastic, keeps a goddess in top form.  And I'm sure it works for you, too.

1.  Let's begin with Charles Koch.  The defining characteristic of Mr. Koch is that he is Very Rich.  The other defining characteristic of Mr. Koch is that he uses his enormous wealth to influence the US politics, naturally in the direction which works best for Mr. Koch.

So what did Mr. Koch say in a recent interview?  This:

Mason asked, "Do you think it's good for the political system that so much what's called 'dark money' is flowing into the process now?"
"First of all, what I give isn't dark," said Koch. "What I give politically, that's all reported. It's either to PACs or to candidates. And what I give to my foundations is all public information. But a lot of our donors don't want to take the kind of abuse that I do. They don't want these attacks. They don't want the death threats. So they aren't going to participate if they have to have their names associated with it."
"But do you think it's healthy for the system that so much money is coming out of a relatively small group of people?"
"Listen, if I didn't think it was healthy or fair, I wouldn't do it. Because what we're after, is to fight against special interests."
"Some people would look at you and say you're a special interest."
"Yeah, but my interest is, just as it's been in business, is what will help people improve their lives, and to get rid of these special interests. That's the whole thing that drives me."
"There are people out there who think what you're trying to do is essentially buy power."
"But what I want is a system where there isn't as much centralized power, where it's dispersed to the people. And everything I advocate points in that direction."

Now unscrew your eyes, rinse them, and put them back in the normal way.  Then remember that Mr. Koch, together with his brother, has spent a lot of money opposing efforts to combat global climate change and efforts to get Americans health insurance.  Because people who will die when the earth finally boils over are special interest people!  Well, at least they won't get health care during that final struggle if our Charles has his way.

The Beta Boys

The Background:  

The USAToday quoted the term, "the beta boys," when writing about the grudge letter the Umpqua Community College (UCC) mass murderer (who killed nine people) left behind to "justify" his butcherings:

The rambling document left behind, and believed to be written by the gunman, lamented an isolated life with little promise, the official said.
The contents and tone of the document, the official said, tracked the often desperate and depressed writings from members of a loosely affiliated group known as the "beta boys." The official said members associated with the group share profound disappointment with their lots in life and the lack of meaningful relationships.

Emphasis is mine.

It is possible, though not likely (1), that the UCC killer posted about the massacre a day before it happened on an anonymous 4Chan thread, to some considerable support, applause, admiration and jokes (2).

Then last Friday an anonymous 4Chan poster threatened further college massacres for the following Monday in the Philadelphia region, calling them a "Beta rebellion:"

“I plead to thee, brothers! We only have but one chance, one spark, for our revolution. The United States will soon condemn us to the status quo forever, and soon after, the United Nations. Don’t let our one chance at writing history slip away. Martyr yourself for the cause or support those who have the courage to do so. We have the chance to make the world a better place for betas everywhere.”

That threat didn't materialize.  But the FBI is investigating the messages at that 4Chan site.  It is important to note that these Internet support groups for the "betas" may not be directly connected to the mass killings.  At the same time, the concept of "beta boys" deserves closer scrutiny, and so do all the sites which serve up this concept as an ideology and an excuse.


What are "the beta boys?"

To answer that question we need to put our wading boots on and enter the intellectual sludge in some of the shallower ponds of the Guy Lands on the net:  the homes of some extreme Men's Rights Activists and Pickup Artists.

We have to learn their "alphas and betas" theories:  That human men can be divided into alphas, successful, powerful and handsome men, who get all the women, every single one of them, and betas, the ordinary guys or the losers, who get no sex at all.  This idea is taken from wolf packs, except that the leaders of wolf packs are not the kind of alpha males the manosphere believes in, but the parents or grandparents of the pack, both the alpha female and the alpha male.

But never mind that.  This Manosphere theory now exists as its own justification.  It drives the instructions Pickup Artists give to their followers (act like an alpha and you get lots and lots of pussy, however unwilling that pussy really is), and it also drives the despair of many troubled young men, who have been taught that the blame for their social isolation, lack of a sexual partner and pretty much everything else is caused by Others, especially by women who are all going after the few alpha males, and by those (mostly imaginary) alpha males.

Why are "women" (some detested pile of all womanhood, but really meaning only sexually appealing young women) rejecting as much as eighty percent of all men (based on some of the sites I visit, numbers of that size, however impossible they actually are,  are routinely flouted)?  Because of hypergamy, the tendency for women to marry socially upwards, of course!

So the completed theory is stitched together from some flawed early research about wolf packs, a lot of rage and an iffy concept from evolutionary psychology. (3)

As American As Motherhood And Apple Pie?

How about criminal charges for pregnant women or for women who after delivery test positive for some banned substance?  Indeed, take the idea of fetal endangerment a step further, and tests for nicotine, alcohol and so on might also become a routine part of delivery, with all sorts of ominous consequences for the women with positive traces of those substances. And if we could devise a test which could tell if the fetus had had proper access to classical music and Einstein's relativity theorem, one day pregnant women could be tested for possibly endangering a fetus by starving its intellectual environment!

That's argumentum ad absurdum, sure, but before you judge me too harshly, read this story about the state of Alabama possibly secretly testing women in maternity wards for illegal drugs.  Then read this story about Amanda Kimbrough's actual prison sentence, caused by what seems to have been a stillbirth.

The Victims in the Umpqua Community College Shootings

The names which matter in this latest of so very many massacres, all enabled by the easy access to guns, are these:

Lucero Alcaraz, 19, of Roseburg, whose sister posted on Facebook that she won scholarships to cover her college costs
Quinn Glen Cooper, 18, of Roseburg, whose family said he loved dancing and voice acting
Kim Saltmarsh Dietz, 59, an outdoors lover who was taking classes at the same time as her daughter
Lucas Eibel, 18, of Roseburg, who was studying chemistry and loved volunteering with animals
Jason Johnson, 33, whose mother told NBC News that he successfuloly battled drug abuse and was in his first week of college
Lawrence Levine, 67, of Glide, an assistant professor of English at the college
Sarena Dawn Moore, 44, of Myrtle Creek
Treven Taylor Anspach, 20, of Sutherlin
Rebecka Ann Carnes, 18, of Myrtle Creek

It is these names which should become famous, it is these names which should be remembered when someone mentions this latest of frequent mass killings in the US.
 
This also matters:

Authorities confiscated 13 weapons associated with the shooter, six at the sight of the killings and seven at his apartment, Celinez Nunez, assistant agent in charge at Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, told reporters Friday. Nunez said all the weapons had been purchased legally by the shooter or members of is family.

And it matters that other countries, despite having their fair shares of angry, disturbed individuals, don't have the same massacre statistics by private individuals as the US. 

The difference comes from much easier access to guns here, from much greater support for the right to bear arms, from a far greater willingness to pay the price for that "liberty."*  When even the deaths of small children in Newtown, Ct., didn't look too high a price for that "freedom," more deaths of  adults will make nothing change.  This is reflected in the frustrated comments of the president.
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*I can't help thinking, after reading many of the comments threads attached to articles about the UCC massacre, that far too many Americans think this carnage is the watering of the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants and patriots which Thomas Jefferson mentioned.

Carly Fiorina And The Planned Parenthood Videos

Carly Fiorina and the Planned Parenthood (PP) videos.  The harvesting of baby parts.  The humongous profits PP makes from harvesting baby parts!  The need to close down all PP clinics because all they do is lure women in so that they can harvest baby parts to make money!  And watch the videos to find how horrible abortions really are!

That's one take on the Planned Parenthood videos.  It's also not the truth, but never mind that part, because none of this has anything to do with truth, not even truthiness, as the most recent round of debate shows you.

I haven't written about this topic.  The main reason is that truth in this context is utterly, entirely and wholly irrelevant.  The point of the videos, much doctored and edited, is to shut down all PP clinics, and the Republicans are doing pretty well pretending that they are going to get there.

Of course they might not quite want to get there, because the existence of PP is an important part of their vote-getting campaigns:  If they succeed in gutting almost all access to abortions, those forced-birthers might go on a political diet and no longer turn out at the election booths!  The bloody meat women's issues offer them needs to be kept available.

But in any case, pointing out all the errors in Fiorina's statements about the videos doesn't matter.  When something is not about the truth in the first place, truthiness works just fine.  It has the advantage of keeping the opposition busy trying to get those boots on.*

Have I ever mentioned that PP shouldn't fall for every trap the forced-birthers weave?  It's not required in any law I'm aware of, and it gets awfully awfully boring.
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*From here.

What To Read on Women, Monday, 9/28/15

1.  This long piece on what happened to someone who didn't want to report a rape to the police but was encouraged to do so anyway.

2.  This NYT health article on cancer during pregnancy, because of its last
paragraph:

It remains to be seen if doctors will be swayed by the study’s findings. Dr. Cardonick, who maintains a registry of cases of cancer in pregnancy, has heard of a couple of “sad cases” where “a patient was denied cancer treatment during pregnancy, and died soon after the baby was born, because there was no confidence that cancer treatment during pregnancy would be tolerated by the fetus.”

Bolds are mine.

If those sad cases are true, someone else denied a pregnant woman potentially life-saving treatment.  Because she was pregnant.

The rest of the article provides useful information, however.

3.   On the European refugee/migrant crisis and average gender role expectations among the refugees vs. the receiving population and how those different expectations might clash, given that most of the recent refugees/migrants come from countries with much more traditional gender roles  than those prevailing in their new host countries in Western Europe*:

Actually, I found nothing written about this by anyone who isn't a rabid right-winger.  Maybe I just didn't search hard enough?

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*  The largest source countries for asylum-seekers in Finland, for example, are Iraq, Somalia and Afghanistan.

Given that the refugees are fleeing war, not mistreatment because of their gender equality views, it's likely that their views match the average in their countries of origin (adjusted for social class, religion, rural vs. urban origin etc.).  To assume that all refugees are already fully aware of the average norms prevailing in their new host country seems unwarranted to me, even arrogant and Euro-centric.

Saudi Arabia to Head a UN Human Rights Council Panel

Remember my friendly alien from outer space?  The one who tries to make sense of earth-people values and norms and customs?

Suppose I told this alien (possibly of no biological sex or of what's called race in loose human parlance) that human rights are supposed to be something earth's countries, or at least some of them, really care about.  How, then, would I explain this piece of news?

Last week’s announcement that Saudi Arabia — easily one of the world’s most brutally repressive regimes — was chosen to head a U.N. Human Rights Council panel provoked indignation around the world. That reaction was triggered for obvious reasons. Not only has Saudi Arabia executed more than 100 people already this year, mostly by beheading (a rate of 1 execution every two days), and not only is it serially flogging dissidents, but it is reaching new levels of tyrannical depravity as it is about to behead and then crucify the 21-year-old son of a prominent regime critic, Ali Mohammed al-Nimr, who was convicted at the age of 17 of engaging in demonstrations against the government.

Then there's of course the obvious problem of women's rights, or rather, lack of such rights in Saudi Arabia.  Greenwald doesn't mention that part.  Maybe because it's too obvious. 

Greenwald's piece continues by linking to an interview with a US State Department spokesperson, Mark Toner.  You should read the interview.  I bet you don't know whether to cry or to laugh.  That is, if you actually care about human rights.

If you only care about oil, well, then the interview is pretty understandable.  You have to say something to defend this bizarre choice, to hide the fact that the powerful defend those who have something material they want.

I feel sorry for the job Mr. Toner had there.  But this particular farce puts into rather clear light the question how much human rights, including women's rights, actually matter in the top games those powerful boys (and a few gals) play with our lives.

The Pope Speaks. Echidne Whines.

If you didn't watch Pope Francis' speech to the US Congress you can read it here.  It looks like* the lefties and liberals liked it, the righties and conservatives, not so much.  There wasn't enough on the control of the vaginas or the defense of traditional marriage (with male dominance) for the latter, while the former liked the references to caring for the poor, accepting immigrants,  and the need to fight climate change.

I liked the caring tone of the speech (perhaps because that was missing in the speeches of the last few Popes and because religions in my view should be caring), and you must be a brand new reader here if you don't know that my views on income inequality, wars and climate change agree with what Francis said.

On the other hand, my eagle eye did not miss the quick references to what the conservatives wanted to hear, about the sanctity of human life (to be read as opposition to abortion though Francis segued from that to urging a global ban on capital punishment) and the  reference to the importance of "family" (a word which means very different things to different ears in the audience, one of those meanings being opposition to same-sex marriages**).

Still, the Pope honored three men and one woman as examples of great Americans!  Girls got included!

That reference was to Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement.

One aspect of the speech looks problematic to me.  That is Francis' plea for people to combat climate change, when it is combined with his church's anti-contraception stance.

That's because all people on earth ultimately want the western standards of living.  To achieve those without destroying the planet in the process requires global commitment to smaller family sizes.***

It's a bizarre feeling to write about the three big Guy Religions (Christianity, Islam and, to a lesser extent,  Judaism) for someone like me, because once you have seen the missing women in many religious hierarchies (which decide religious women's proper roles, their right to use contraception etc) you can't stop seeing them.

But if you point out that omission you sound whiny, right?  Why can't Echidne rejoice over this Pope?  Why can't she be content with all the good words that come out of his mouth? ****

My answer to that one I have learned from women's history:  If you don't demand your rights you won't get them, ever.  So someone needs to keep up the whining.



-----

*  Based on surfing in various places, not on proper research.

** And the link between women's roles and the family.  The Catholic Church is as big on motherhood as the American fundamentalists and much of Islam (check the Iranian constitution, for example).  Those references to "motherhood" mean more than urging women to give birth.  They also mean that women should focus on the family and that when women's rights and their family duties clash it is the latter which should win. ---  As an aside, it is almost always family vs. women's rights in these religious debates, not family vs. men's rights, because the traditional view of family places women firmly and almost entirely in only that context.

***  The alternative ways to save the environment are simply not practical:  Most people will not accept a minimal lifestyle just so that there could be both a healthy globe and more people.  The idea that rich countries should cut back their consumption to much lower levels will not fly politically, the idea that poor countries should just stay consuming little will not fly politically, either, not to even mention the ethical problems in that.

The only realistic approach to me seems to be to cut back on the overall global population.  If we don't do it through birth control, then it will happen through resource wars (Syria began that way).  And yes, I'm aware that the global population growth rate may have slowed down.  But the population numbers which can be sustained in a world where everyone has a good standard of living and where the environment is also taken care of is probably lower than whatever the current numbers might be.

The Catholic Church's anti-contraception stance makes keeping the planet healthy much harder.

**** Or I guess I could just pack up my bags and surrender to the view that the Guy Religions just don't believe that women and men should have equal rights.

Speed Posts 9/23/15: On Upward Income Redistribution, Women's Leisure Time and the Dalai Lama

1.  Economics geeks and nerds should read this article  about the possible role of government regulation in enabling rent capture and how that might fit into the income inequality puzzle in the United States.  I'm not agreeing with everything in the piece, but it has some food for further thought.

2.  A piece about leisure time and women with family obligations from Australia.  It makes the point that leisure for women in that position comes in tiny driplets, not really amenable to being used for rest, recreation or creativity, and suggests a few correctives.  It made me think about how much of this is about control, both at home and at work.  If your employer at work won't give you a firm schedule beforehand you will have very little control over some parts of your life.  How to organize for childcare when you don't know if you are working?

A similar problem at home has to do with the on-call nature of parenting.  If only one parent is responsible for it then she or he will find great difficulty with finding longer chunks of leisure time.

The wider links are naturally to things like annual vacations in the US (required ones being rarer than hen's teeth), the expectation of increasingly long working hours for everyone, and what happens when all these clash with the traditional gendered beliefs about who is to care for the children and the home.

3.  The Dalai Lama and a joke about any female ever planning to reincarnate in his role:  She needs to be attractive.

Which makes me think of the oddness of all those earlier reincarnations happening pretty close to the place where the previous Dalai Lama died, and always suitably in boys whose parents would be OK with the honor they were accorded as having produced someone so important.  And also of the oddness of the Catholic Church on earth deciding who has become a saint, and how they know.

We Need to Make A Profit. On Daraprim.

Pyrimethamine, better known under its trade name of Daraprim, is a drug developed in the 1940s by Gertrude Elion, a Nobel Prize winning scientist. It is used to treat protozoal infections and also as an anti-malaria drug.

Until quite recently, the US price of Daraprim was quite low.  But that has changed:

Specialists in infectious disease are protesting a gigantic overnight increase in the price of a 62-year-old drug that is the standard of care for treating a life-threatening parasitic infection.
The drug, called Daraprim, was acquired in August by Turing Pharmaceuticals, a start-up run by a former hedge fund manager. Turing immediately raised the price to $750 a tablet from $13.50, bringing the annual cost of treatment for some patients to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The former hedge fund manager referred to in that quote is Martin Shkreli.  He justifies the fifty-fold price increase by the need to turn a profit:

On Monday, Shkreli said: “We need to turn a profit on the drug.” He defended the decision by telling Bloomberg News that newer versions of the drug needed to be developed and his was the first company “to really focus on this product” for decades and that such research was extremely expensive.
He also promised: “If you cannot afford the drug we will give it away for free.” Shkreli also said the drug was currently underpriced.

This whole setup is confusing for several reasons.

Religions and Gender. More Critique.

1. Frances Kissling is an expert on the Catholic Church, and her thoughts on the Pope's statement about temporary clemency for women who have had abortions is well worth reading, because it has meat and gristle in it:

 The church, at its best, is not about punishment. But unfortunately, when it comes to women and sex, the church is rarely at its best. After all, there are only seven sins for which one might be automatically excommunicated—and ordinary murder of people, and even massacres, are not among them. Only abortion and an attempt to assassinate the pope might get you automatically excommunicated.

But the question of automatic excommunication is more complex than that.  Read Frances on the whole topic.

Elsewhere  I read that women in priesthood is permanently off the table, that god always intended priesthood to be reserved for men alone.  And the current Pope agrees:

 In reality, the letter offers false compassion. It’s one of many missteps this pope has made in what is, I’m sure, a sincere effort to understand and honor women. For instance, he has insisted that the subject of women priests is off the table. And while he speaks of putting more women in positions of power in the church, he rejected the idea of appointing women to head Vatican agencies as tokenism. He talks about the “feminine genius” of women who are kind, conciliatory and self-sacrificing, and he says we need a new theology of women (not persons)—but he does nothing about it.

2.  If the Catholic Church is problematic for women's equality, most mosques are worse.  Men and women are segregated inside the mosques, the spaces allocated for women look to be much smaller and placed so that it's hard to hear the imam (always a man), and conservative preachers tell women not to leave their homes even to go to mosque.  I first read stories about a proposed women's mosque in Bradford, UK last May.  The reason for the idea of a women's mosque:

Muslim Women’s Council boss Bana Gora says the mosque would be “run by women” and is in response to inadequate facilities in Islamic religious buildings dissuading females from attending.
The radical move, to be carried out in Bradford, promises to challenge traditions in the Muslim community and could provoke controversy.
Many traditional Muslim women living in Britain pray in their homes because they are dissuaded from attending mosques by conservative scholars.

The title of the linked article is worth thinking about a bit more: 

This mosque is for WOMEN: Brit Muslims challenge sexism with UK’s first female-only mosque

Here we enter a fascinating world where defining sexism is hard.  If this mosque is supposed to be for the most traditional women believers what they probably already believe would by my definition be extremely sexist. 

For example, a belief in divinely ordered extreme sex segregation everywhere* creates big problems for women's equality, and a sex-segregated system of mosques wouldn't challenge that, at least in the first round.**  And I'm not at all sure that a traditional female believer would accept the idea that other women could lead prayers.

In any case, the August article on the women's mosque proposal seems to show a fairly watered down version, with only the mosque management being female and the sex-segregated prayer spaces more equally placed.

I wish to finish with an explanation of the title of this post:

It's short-hand for looking at the nasty underbellies of major religions which also do a lot of good, but which truly make gender equality incredibly difficult to achieve, because gender inequality is seen as divinely ordained, and the acceptable versions are those which were most common in Middle Eastern societies about two thousand years ago.

 


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*Based initially on what the Koran told Prophet Mohammed's wives to do, and that in a war camp.
**In the longer run it could allow for a different interpretation of the various holy texts.

This mosque is for WOMEN: Brit Muslims challenge sexism with UK’s first female-only mosque - See more at: http://muslimglobalnews.com/breaking-news/this-mosque-is-for-women-brit-muslims-challenge-sexism-with-uks-first-female-only-mosque/#sthash.QQdckrD4.dpuf

Muslim Women’s Council boss Bana Gora says the mosque would be “run by women” and is in response to inadequate facilities in Islamic religious buildings dissuading females from attending.
The radical move, to be carried out in Bradford, promises to challenge traditions in the Muslim community and could provoke controversy.
Many traditional Muslim women living in Britain pray in their homes because they are dissuaded from attending mosques by conservative scholars.
- See more at: http://muslimglobalnews.com/breaking-news/this-mosque-is-for-women-brit-muslims-challenge-sexism-with-uks-first-female-only-mosque/#sthash.QQdckrD4.dpuf

Muslim Women’s Council boss Bana Gora says the mosque would be “run by women” and is in response to inadequate facilities in Islamic religious buildings dissuading females from attending.
The radical move, to be carried out in Bradford, promises to challenge traditions in the Muslim community and could provoke controversy.
Many traditional Muslim women living in Britain pray in their homes because they are dissuaded from attending mosques by conservative scholars.
- See more at: http://muslimglobalnews.com/breaking-news/this-mosque-is-for-women-brit-muslims-challenge-sexism-with-uks-first-female-only-mosque/#sthash.QQdckrD4.dpuf

Muslim Women’s Council boss Bana Gora says the mosque would be “run by women” and is in response to inadequate facilities in Islamic religious buildings dissuading females from attending.
The radical move, to be carried out in Bradford, promises to challenge traditions in the Muslim community and could provoke controversy.
Many traditional Muslim women living in Britain pray in their homes because they are dissuaded from attending mosques by conservative scholars.
- See more at: http://muslimglobalnews.com/breaking-news/this-mosque-is-for-women-brit-muslims-challenge-sexism-with-uks-first-female-only-mosque/#sthash.QQdckrD4.dpuf

Fractional Husbands. On How To Define Polygyny.

This post is from the imaginary series of what weird stuff Echidne's mind latched onto when it was supposed to do real work, and has to do with the way polygyny is traditionally defined:  One man with more than one wife, ranging from two to some very large number.

But suppose we flip that around, without changing the truth value of the definition at all:  One woman with a fraction of a husband, the size of the fraction depending on how many women have to share him.

Isn't that fun?  The first definition of polygyny sounds like a potentially good thing for the lucky husband*:  lots of sexual variation, lots of opportunity to make the wives compete with each other for attention, lots of power.

The second definition (mine) shows why polygyny may not be a good thing for any woman who would prefer at least one whole husband. 

All that is simplified.  But the basic nature of polygyny is that the women are expected to share, and not only the one husband, but also his resources, including any inheritance he might one day leave behind.  And all the children must compete for the one man's attention.

Then there is the traditional division of power in polygyny:  The lion's share of it goes to the husband.  But even if that aspect was fixed the general sharing problem would remain.

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*But not for all those heterosexual men who won't find even one wife because someone else is taking more than one.  That's a real problem, given the fairly equal sex ratios at birth, at least in the absence of enough warfare to kill lots of men.

The GOP Debate I Didn't Watch

I didn't watch last night's debate because
a) life is short,
b) I can watch pretend-wrestling done by more skilled people elsewhere and
c) it's too early to be drawn into giving fluffy style points for how the (suicidal?) dives of various wannabe candidates might look.

So my comments here are based on a few things others have written about the debate.

For the political geeks the debate was about the Republican power structure trying to get rid of Donald Trump's popularity surge.  But Manly Billionaires Who Know Nothing have always been dear to the heart of many American voters.  (If that guy made so much money (after having inherited a load of it), surely he must be capable of steering the still-most-powerful country in the world?  Just look at Atlantic City today!  And all his wives looked like fashion models!  He clearly lurves women and will be great for women's rights.  That autism comment?  Who cares!  The guy is a plain talker who calls it as he sees it.)

Speech Codes, Trigger Warnings And Universities. Or The Coddling of the American Mind.

Even the president chipped in on the question of trigger warnings in US college courses:

It’s not just sometimes folks who are mad that colleges are too liberal that have a problem. Sometimes there are folks on college campuses who are liberal, and maybe even agree with me on a bunch of issues, who sometimes aren’t listening to the other side, and that’s a problem too. I’ve heard some college campuses where they don’t want to have a guest speaker who is too conservative or they don’t want to read a book if it has language that is offensive to African-Americans or somehow sends a demeaning signal towards women. I gotta tell you, I don’t agree with that either. I don’t agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of view. I think you should be able to — anybody who comes to speak to you and you disagree with, you should have an argument with ‘em. But you shouldn’t silence them by saying, "You can’t come because I'm too sensitive to hear what you have to say." That’s not the way we learn either.

Bolds are mine.

This topic has gotten wider attention, with The Coddling of the American Mind article in the Atlantic Monthly by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt,  though feminists such as Jill Filipovic, Roxane Gay and Jessica Valenti have all written about the possible negative consequences of trigger warnings and such in college courses, as this recent article by Marcie Bianco points out.

So what do I think about this all?

Hilarious! In Louisiana You Should Go To A Dentist For Your Pap Smears

This is the hilarious side of the Republican war against women.  Just check for yourself, if you don't believe me:

When Louisiana state officials announced their plans to terminate Planned Parenthood’s state Medicaid contract in late August, they argued that there were plenty of doctors who could take on the more than 5200 patients the reproductive health organization sees each year in New Orleans and Baton Rouge.
They even provided a list of those doctors to the US District Court when Planned Parenthood filed suit against the state (Planned Parenthood argues that breaking the contract is a violation of federal law). It’s an impressive 37 pages long, including 1146 Medicaid providers near New Orleans and 864 near Baton Rouge.
But actually reading their list reveals that very few of those doctors are qualified to give pelvic exams, provide contraceptives, or administer screenings for STDs or breast and cervical cancer. The list is actually of every provider who takes Medicaid in the region—including dentists, along with anesthesiologists, eye doctors, radiologists, cardiologists, pharmacies, and nursing homes.
…

The Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals submitted a revised list of providers on September 8. This list is much shorter. It includes just 29 providers, 24 of which provide the same range of services as Planned Parenthood. Only five providers are in Baton Rouge; two have three-week waits for new patients, and one is not accepting new patients.

Bolds are mine.

Read the linked article.  It has a fun discussion of how a Federal judge reacted to the original list.

What's not so hilarious is the utter do-not-f***ing-care-about-women's-health that presenting the original list demonstrates.  Breast cancer and cervical cancer fears?  Go to a dentist, for godssake!  Or lie down in a nice nursing home bed.

More On Religions And Women's Rights

It's hard not to notice the impact of certain religious dictates as one of the major barriers to true gender equality in this world.*

Take the Catholic hospitals in the US:

By the close of 2011, one in nine hospital beds in this country existed in a Catholic or Catholic-sponsored health-care facility. If viewed together as one corporate entity, the ten largest Catholic-sponsored health systems of hospitals and clinics would constitute the largest in the country. And these hospitals are routinely denying medical care to women, citing Catholic doctrine as justification.

The crucial point is that it doesn't matter if this happens to patients with different faiths or none at all, because they have no other hospital to go to:  They, too, will be potentially subjected to the Catholic rules about contraception, abortion and sterilization, and they, too, might find themselves at risk of not getting the best possible medical care when pregnant.

Or consider the case of the Iranian cartoonist, Atena Farghadani:

An Iranian artist currently serving more than 12 years in prison for criticising the government now faces further charges of “indecency” for allegedly shaking her male lawyer’s hand.
Amnesty International reports that Atena Farghadani, 29, who was jailed after she depicted Iranian government officials as monkeys and goats in a satirical cartoon, may face a longer sentence amid claims over the handshake.
Charges of an “illegitimate sexual relationship short of adultery” have been brought against Farghadani and her lawyer Mohammad Moghimi amid allegations he visited her in jail and shook her hand - which is illegal in Iran.

And it is illegal in Iran because of the gender segregation rules which are based on that country's interpretation of Islam.  It is the gender segregation that is the problem here, because it's extremely unlikely that such a system could ever produce equal rights for women.  Separate cannot be truly equal.**

These two examples demonstrates the inherent clashes between many conservative interpretations of religion and women's rights to full human existence.  It also follows that when people demand certain religious rights which benefit or harm men and women differently, the shadow attaching to those rights is often a reduction in the rights of women, whether those women are believers or not. 

That's because the religious dogmas we still follow are ancient, and if taken ultra-literally would guarantee that women's rights remain at the level societies considered appropriate two thousand years ago.
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*  For more on this topic, read here and here.

**Except perhaps in a science-fictionish arrangement of two separate-but-equal countries, one for men and one for women, where the trade is one way in sperm and the other way in baby boys.

I haven't found out if Farghadani's lawyer will also be sued for shaking the hand of a woman.  But in general sex segregation laws have more severe consequences for women who in the extreme forms are excluded from positions of power because those places are full of men. 

Today's Idle And Not-So-Idle Echidne Thoughts

1.  Watch this video about women's fashions in the West changing from 1915 to 2015, because it's both fun and because you can then watch it again while thinking about the economic, technological, political and social influences behind the changes you see.

2.  I was struck by one interaction in this Salman Rushdie interview :

[Q.] Your novel is a homage of sorts to the myth of Scheherazade, who told stories every night to delay her execution, and the title is a riff on “One Thousand and One Nights.” It struck me that you have experienced the inverse of the Scheherazade story, after being a target for execution for your novel “The Satanic Verses.”
A. Yes, the anti-Scheherazade. My life is what it is, and clearly it affects what I think. Scheherazade is one of the great authorless figures. No one has any idea who made her up, so it’s easy to think she made herself up. But there she is, one of the immortal characters of literature, and how can you not fall in love with somebody who civilizes savage people by telling them stories?

I love the idea of stories having such powers!  If only that was the case.

Still,  in some deeper sense it is true that telling stories is an inherent aspect of being human, of trying to understand this bewildering mess that is reality, and, most importantly, of trying to reach others.

3.  This Huffington Post article argues that gender equality is the most critical of global goals. 

Whether it is the most critical depends on how we define such goals (as climate change, for example, might become so drastic as to wipe out the need to talk about a now-extinct species and the forms of inequality it accepted for millennia), but I have come to the conclusion that a shared global goal on gender equality is absolutely necessary. 

It's insufficient to let various countries or cultures pursue those goals for themselves only.  The world no longer consists of many isolated cultures, after all, but of something much more integrated, and what happens inside one culture affects other nearby cultures

Productivity Rises Much Faster Than US Average Wages

Here's an exciting article by Josh Bivens and Lawrence Mishel for all you economics nerds!  It talks about the possible reasons why the pay of a typical American worker has not risen as much as the overall productivity tells us it could have risen.   Look at the graph:

What's important in that graph are its two halves, divided by the vertical line.  Before the time marked by the vertical line productivity and the compensation of a typical worker went pretty much hand-in-hand:  When productivity* rose, workers' real earnings rose.  After that date, not so much.  The extra productivity which could have enabled higher average earnings instead enabled something else.

Bivens and Mishel argue that this "something else" is higher incomes for the owners of capital and for a small group of very highly paid workers, such as the CEOs in the financial sector.  In short, average real earnings could have risen considerably more, but they did not.  Instead, the income accruing to capital and the highest earners grew disproportionately.

What's behind that decoupling of average earnings growth from productivity growth?  The article notes that one factor consists of

 ...the passage of many policies that explicitly aimed to erode the bargaining power of low- and moderate-wage workers in the labor market.

I'm not certain if outsourcing and globalization is included in those policies, but its effect on reducing the bargaining power of workers in this country has certainly been much greater on low- and moderate-wage workers than those earning the high salaries.




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*Here productivity is defined as:

Productivity is simply the total amount of output (or income) generated in an average hour of work. As such, growth in an economy’s productivity provides the potential for rising living standards over time.

The Bivens-Mishel article goes into a lot of detail about various theories that might explain the divergence shown in the above graph.

Europe's Refugee and Migrant Crisis: What About The Women?

I have spent a lot of time trying to understand the wider ramifications of Europe's* current crisis with mostly Syrian refugees and Europe's general longer-standing crisis with migrants and refugees.  The numbers in the long-run are not manageable, the short-term situation is utterly devastating for the refugees and the real solutions are either politically unfeasible or pie-in-the-sky (stop the war in Syria, make Eritrea and Libya into  safe places, reduce income differences between Africa and Europe).

I'm not going to write more about the humanitarian catastrophes or who is most at fault for creating them, because I have nothing useful to say about that, or at least nothing that you couldn't read elsewhere.  Neither am I going to write about the horrible plight of the refugees and migrants because I have nothing extra to say about that, either, except to agree that the situation is horrible and that aid (both places of safety and much more money) is urgently needed, and that Greece, in particular, needs help in its attempt to cope with refugees.

Instead, I am going to write about why young men seem to be the largest group of refugees and migrants currently seeking asylum in Europe.

That's because this is a blog writing about gender issues, and because my Internet surfing showed me that many comments sections asked why the refugees and/or economic migrants** seem to consist of a majority of young men traveling on their own.  Some more right-wing commentators ask why those men are not fighting ISIS (or Assad?), why they look so healthy and well-fed, what they are escaping from if it was safe enough to leave the women, children and the elderly behind and so on.

The Official Back-From-The-Vacation Post

With a smidgen of jet lag and the usual post-flight migraine.  It's nice to be back at the Snakepit Inc. and it's also oddly nice to once again hear the louder American speech pattern.

My usual type of blogging will commence after the weekend.  Until then you will only get fuzzy thoughts.

The War Inside My Body: Or What Ben Carson Thinks.

The Republican Presidential hopeful Ben Carson promises to give a lot of grist for my sarcasm mill!  Just ponder this fairly recent comment of his:

“They tell you that there’s a war on women,” he said. “There is no war on women. There may be a war on what’s inside of women, but there is no war on women in this country.”

A very fine distinction our Ben tries to make there!  If only women had, say, prostates and penises, then we wouldn't have a war about their insides!

But more seriously, Carson hints at the dismal treatment of women in many other countries, and he is correct about that.  Women are not equally oppressed everywhere in the world. 

That's no excuse to let things get worse here or in any other country where older battles were won, because then we have to fight those battles again.

And even more seriously, much of the forced-birth movement is ultimately about who gets to control fertility and changes in population size.  Because such large parts of the "fertility factories" are inside women's bodies, of course the war on women is about those insides.

Research Monday 5: Wrapping It Up

This is the last day of this series.  You might want to end it by reading this audit study about white privilege on Australian buses.  Audit studies are very useful, because they manage to hold lots of stuff constant while analyzing the impact of something like race or gender or ethnic group on the way people are treated.

That "holding constant" means that the actors playing the roles in the study are trained to do everything the same.  For instance, if the actors are to look for jobs in the study they are provided with equally good resumes and trained to ask and answer all questions the same way.  If this is done well, any differences in the average treatment of, say, men and women or blacks and whites can be attributed fairly safely to discrimination.

And here are some of my thoughts about the kind of group blog we'd need for the critical evaluation of research and its popularizations.

No, there will be no quiz.  But I hope you found some of this series useful.

On The Duggar Ideology: Multiply At Any Cost. A Re-Posting

(From last May.  You might also wish to read this post about the coverage of the case.  It equates the Duggars' sect with Christianity in general.)

Many have written about the recently revealed child molestation accusations against Josh Duggar, the oldest son of Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar, the Quiverfull parents of nineteen children whose lives are depicted in a now (temporarily?) withdrawn reality show 19 Kids and Counting.

The basic ideology of the Quiverfull movement is well summarized by the description of Kathryn Joyce's book* about the Christian patriarchy cult:

Kathryn Joyce's fascinating introduction to the world of the patriarchy movement and Quiverfull families examines the twenty-first-century women and men who proclaim self-sacrifice and submission as model virtues of womanhood—and as modes of warfare on behalf of Christ. Here, women live within stringently enforced doctrines of wifely submission and male headship, and live by the Quiverfull philosophy of letting God give them as many children as possible so as to win the religion and culture wars through demographic means.

Hence the attempt to maximize family size, even if that might lead to the impossibility of adequately feeding, caring for, or supervising all those children.  They are arrows in the war against the infidels, and the manufacture of the maximum number of such arrows requires the women's submission and compliance.

This is the proper background for interpreting what happened after Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar found that their fourteen-year-old son had fondled the breasts and genitals of minor girls, many of them apparently his own sisters, while they were supposedly asleep.  The son was sent to therapy or perhaps just away for a while, a police officer (later sentenced for child pornography) gave him a stern speech and the girls who were fondled presumably forgave him.

The Duggars apologized for those events:

Back 12 years ago our family went through one of the most difficult times of our lives. When Josh was a young teenager, he made some very bad mistakes and we were shocked. We had tried to teach him right from wrong. That dark and difficult time caused us to seek God like never before. Even though we would never choose to go through something so terrible, each one of our family members drew closer to God.   We pray that as people watch our lives they see that we are not a perfect family. We have challenges and struggles everyday. It is one of the reasons we treasure our faith so much because God’s kindness and goodness and forgiveness are extended to us — even though we are so undeserving. We hope somehow the story of our journey — the good times and the difficult times — cause you to see the kindness of God and learn that He can bring you through anything.

Let me see what's included there:  God's forgiveness?  Check.  What the family gained from the events?  Check.  Josh's "bad mistakes?  Sort of check.

What the daughters went through?

Crickets...

And that's the fundamental problem with the Quiverfull ideology and those right-wing Christian beliefs which suggest that victims of abuse should bear responsibility for it happening, that God may have allowed it because of something the victim did or failed to do.

I stress this ideology, because it is what all the choices** of Duggars are based on and it is ultimately what their reality show is disseminating as a good conservative way of life.
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*I strongly recommend that book, by the way.  Kathryn's work is always painstaking and objective.
**Read that.  It's funny.  Then send me money.

Mail-Order Husbands?

You know about the women who are called mail-order brides, right?  From the point of view of, say, American men who seek such a wife  the market is for foreign women who seem to be viewed as more biddable, more willing to cook and clean, more willing to accept male leadership in the marriage and more exotic than homegrown women.   Some of the MRA sites, for instance,  advocate that men should order their wives from abroad so as to guarantee that feminism hasn't corrupted them yet.*

But the market for mail-order brides is only one way to look at what's happening.  That's because the market tries to match women to men, on the basis of various characteristics, and so the market could equally well be called one for mail-order husbands.  After all, the women who advertise their availability for marriage are looking for a mail-order husband.

Why, then, the focus on brides in this market?  Is it because the men participating are wealthier and more powerful?  Or is it because of our cultural conditioning?  Think of "wife-swapping," for instance.  When wives are swapped, so are the husbands, but somehow the cultural clutter makes that harder to notice.

Reversals of this kind can be incredibly useful.  When we think of "mail-order husbands" we then start asking what the women in that marketplace want to buy.  What kind of a husband?  For what reason?

And then, almost unavoidably, we start asking whether the desires of the women and men in this market actually match, whether participating in this market is equally unconstrained for both sides, or whether at least some women might be in the market because of the direst economic necessity.
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*I don't intend to paint all men as MRAs or all men who have married foreign women as thinking in the above terms  What that paragraph reflects is a common meme among the so-called manosphere, however, and it's useful to spell it out. 

Food Stamps As Democratic Bribes To Buy Votes. A Re-Posting.

(Originally from last February.  Not much has changed about the situation, though of course Scott Walker,  the governor of Wisconsin, wants to test food stamp recipients for illegal drug use.  This article explains why it's nuts.  But note that  if Democrats are supposed to use food stamps as bribes to buy votes, then at least some Republicans use food stamps to buy votes, too:  Those votes which want to punish the poor for getting government subsidies.  As the linked article notes, if getting government subsidies is the logical reason for drug tests, then we should test all mortgage applicants who plan to deduct their mortgage interest payments from their taxable income, because those deductions mean that other taxpayers are subsidizing the mortgage holders by having to pay more taxes.)

Fox News' Stuart Varney explains how the president buys votes with food stamps. 

You should watch the video at the link (I couldn't get it to embed).

In it Varney explains how the US cannot afford food stamps or any things from a long list of government "handouts" (which, by the way, includes health care for the poor and social security payments for the elderly). Then he explains that these "handouts" are paid by the tax payers, thus suggesting that those getting them never were or are taxpayers themselves.  Think about that division of people into two groups.  One gets all the undeserved benefits, one pays for all of them.  That the retired, for example, paid towards social security all their working lives is irrelevant.

And "we" cannot afford all these handouts!  "We" must take out loans to pay for them.  For Varney that "we" does not include the people on the "handouts."

I liked listening to Varney, because he is so good at triggering the anger and fear of the conservatives.  Someone is getting something for nothing and I am not! 

The logic is also fun to watch.  First Varney argues that the recession is over so why aren't people coming off food stamps (and "we" cannot afford those food stamps as "we" don't have the money but in fact we (as the government) should have the money if the recession is over).  But then he argues that two-thirds of Americans don't think the recession is over!

Gotcha, he mutters.  But of course there's the possibility that this recovery from the recession is another one of those weird ones where all the gains go for a small group of people on the top of the income distribution.  Varney tries to stuff to contradictory arguments down our throats:  Either there's no need for so many food stamp recipients anymore or there is, but Obama is to blame in both cases.

If you step a little back from these thoughts you could well ask why "we" cannot afford social security or Medicaid or food stamps but can afford a military system three or four times as expensive as the next largest military force on this earth.

Or you could ask why the government can afford to give "handouts" to corporations but not to individuals.

But then you would get depressed.

Instead, let's ask if giving a lot of food stamps indeed makes people vote for Democrats.  That's a silly sentence.  To answer that we would need to control for the incomes of the potential voters and what the two parties actually propose to do for the affluent and the less affluent and so on.

Still, it's unlikely that food stamps work as money to be paid for Democratic votes.  That's because a) the highest percentages of people on food stamps tend to be found in Republican-voting states and b) because the poor are much less likely to vote than the more affluent.

Motherhood Tuesday 4: Mother-Blaming Studies And Mothers in Politics

This popularization about a study concerning breast-feeding was hilariously bad.  I had fun writing about it, in a dark-humor sense.  This older post looks at how alcoholism is covered when it applies to women with children.  This post talks about obesity and children and whatever the mothers might be doing wrong, and this post takes apart one study on how bad mothers cause fat children.  And this tells us why mother's depression matters:  It might lead to shorter children.

I could have added many more such studies to this final Motherhood Tuesday report.

That's because researchers are really keen to study such questions as whether working/obese/etc mothers cause childhood obesity but don't seem at all interested in any potential relationship between working/obese/etc fathers and childhood obesity.  Indeed, if you study almost any field of research into children's development mothers are much, much more likely to be studied than fathers.

That is changing slowly.  I'm not sure if I should cheer for the arrival of new father-blaming studies.  It would be better if parenting research was popularized more carefully and if the biases didn't show as much as they do now.

To round off this series, I recommend this New Statesman article about being a mother or not being a mother in UK politics.  It tells us that childless female politicians are often asked about why they don't have children (or taken to task for it) and that female politicians with children are doubted as not being able to fully engage in politics.  The same is not true about childless male politicians and male politicians with children.

At the same time, the UK political institutions are still run on the assumption that there's a wife somewhere in the background, taking care of the politicians' children.

As the link article notes, children are an asset to male politicians but problematic (whether in their absence or in their presence) for female politicians.  This is a direct result of traditional gender roles expectations (mothers are to take care of children) and the (most likely subconscious) belief that women are really supposed to be mothers and only mothers.

Even this is changing, though perhaps slowly.  I write about it to make it change faster!

Research Monday 4: The Not-Yet-Published Research Problem

This is something I often fume about, the pre-publicity of papers not yet published or not yet available.

Why is this custom bad?  Because no potential critic can read the paper!  So those promoting it have all the aces up their sleeves.  How can you even ask another expert to comment when the paper is not yet available?

Suppose that the paper is then never published at all (yes, this has happened)!  Or suppose that it's published but has serious methodological problems.  Will there be a second wave of debates about it?

You can guess the answer to that question.  Once again, amateur readers will be left with the impression that the original advertising wanted to give.

The most recent example of this I came across can be found in this post.  And no, I never got an answer from the author.

The worst experience I've had about unavailable research papers is described in this 2006 post.  It's written a bit euphemistically but you can read between the lines.

Saturday Night Music: Gracias a La Vida

By Violeta Parra:



And by Mercedes Sosa:



It's fun to compare different artists' takes.

Monopoly. The Game. A Re-Posting

(From last March)

Yesterday (i.e. March 19th) was the eightieth anniversary of the game called Monopoly.  There's an interesting subtext to the history of the game.  Or a sub-game, if you wish:

Legend has it that Charles Darrow, an unemployed salesman, invented the game in his kitchen in 1930. But the roots of Monopoly actually date back a few more decades, to a game called the Landlord's Game created by Elizabeth Magie in 1903.

The Landlord's Game was meant to be educational, illustrating economist Henry George's belief -- inspired by the Gilded Age -- that property ownership by individuals is inherently unfair. Magie's game was an underground success, leading to a number of offshoots, including the one that Darrow tweaked. Parker Brothers bought her patent for $500 in 1935, closing the loop.

The New York Times recently published an article about Elizabeth Magie and her Landlord's Game as the possible basic source for Monopoly.  I recommend reading the whole piece, because it's a fairly representative case study of the "disappearing women"  phenomenon:

Magie’s game featured a path that allowed players to circle the board, in contrast to the linear-path design used by many games at the time. In one corner were the Poor House and the Public Park, and across the board was the Jail. Another corner contained an image of the globe and a homage to Henry George: “Labor Upon Mother Earth Produces Wages.” Also included on the board were three words that have endured for more than a century after Lizzie scrawled them there: “Go to Jail.”
...

It was a version of this game that Charles Darrow was taught by a friend, played and eventually sold to Parker Brothers. The version of that game had the core of Magie’s game, but also modifications added by the Quakers to make the game easier to play. In addition to properties named after Atlantic City streets, fixed prices were added to the board. In its efforts to seize total control of Monopoly and other related games, the company struck a deal with Magie to purchase her Landlord’s Game patent and two more of her game ideas not long after it made its deal with Darrow.

Magie never really benefited financially from her game, whereas Darrow became very rich indeed.  The reasons why history ended up that way can be many, but Magie's gender certainly would not have helped.

There's something about the way we (as humans) write history which downplays or erases the contributions of individuals which don't fit the subconscious patterns we have in our minds,* and women working in science or literature have frequently found their work  ignored or reinterpreted for that reason.  Sometimes the erasure is conscious, but often it is not.

What fascinates me is that often the unconscious or conscious rewriting seems to take place a short time after** the events, not immediately, as if it's the slightly more distant observers who have erased, say, any women from stories of inventions or scientific discoveries or assigned them to the more "natural" helper roles.   That could be because the effect of the unconscious patterns becomes more powerful when the actual individuals are no longer known.

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*The case of Rosalind Franklin is a well-known example of this.

For an example outside gender, consider the case of Sir Edmond Hillary and Tenzing Norgay as an example.  The early recognition went mostly to Hillary, perhaps because Norgay was seen as someone just doing his job whereas Hillary was the white adventurer.

**Time is a relative concept here, and I refer to such things as the evaluation of literary merit of various writers a generation after their work, rather than hundred years later.

From my Classics Archives: The Islamic State and Women.

(This mini-series of classics covers a few of my recent long posts, the ones that required a lot of hard work.  Each of them is of value about the individual phenomenon it covers, but I hope that each of them is also of value in a more general sense.

This series of posts (still missing the fourth post, sorry*) is about the views of ISIS/IS/Islamic State on women's proper position, about its views concerning sexual slavery as proper and legal and about the reasons why Western women have joined it.

The series is an example of how extreme subjugation of women might look like.  In that sense it's not easily generalizable to other movements wanting that extreme subjugation, mostly because they don't have the power.  But many of the principles of ISIS are basic social conservatism principles taken to the absurd end point (patriarchal marriage where the man is the leader, the control of women, the attribution of all sexual attraction or abuse to the sin of being female in the wrong place or at the wrong time or dressed wrong, the insistence of keeping women inside the house etc.)

The posts are here, in order:


Introduction

The Rules for Sunni Women

Sexual Slavery of the Yazidi Girls And Women

Western Women Joining ISIS 

Note that people are fighting back, in general against the Islamic State and in particular for the enslaved Yazidis.  Here is a heart-warming story about the latter.
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* I have no other excuse for that except I don't want yet another couple of weeks of nightmares right now. 

Three Short And Scrumptious Economic Posts: On Income Inequality and Lack of Information. A Re-Posting.

 (Originally posted here.  Everything in it still applies, income inequality is still growing and so on, and it's still worth your while to read the post if you haven't.)


1.  This is a neat bar graph about how the big economic cake is sliced and divided between various groups in the American economy.  It shows what has happened to the extra cake (income increases) in various economic expansions.  The latest expansion is passing most of that extra cake to the top ten percent of earners:

That's about how income inequality grows, right?   But what do people believe about income inequality in this country?

2.  A recent survey asking questions about what people believe CEOs here earn tells us this:

...Americans told researchers they thought CEO pay at major corporations was approximately 30 times more than their own. Actually, CEO pay averages 354 times what a worker earns at the same company.
Americans also said they thought the pay gap between CEOs and workers should be approximately 7 to 1. To achieve that ratio, workers would have to make $1.8 million each year, a separate study concluded.

Boggles your mind, doesn't it?  These results support earlier ones which suggest that Americans think general income inequality is a lot less than it actually is and would prefer even lower levels of inequality.  The Scandinavian ones.

To return to those CEOs, in other countries the multipliers are smaller.  From 2013 but still much bigger than the idea that CEOs would earn roughly thirty times as much as the average worker in the same company:

The ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay in neighboring Canada is 204, in Germany it's 147, in the U.K. it's 84, and in Japan it's just 67.

The Huffington Post piece notes that perhaps income inequality doesn't energize US voters because of this lack of information about its true size.  That may well be the case.  But it's also true that many not-rich in this country see themselves as just temporarily hampered potential billionaires whose interests lie with the top one percent and that class-based segregation in most everything further helps to disguise the magnitude of the differences.

3.  Speaking of lack of information:  The practice of maintaining secrecy about earnings in general is one reason why it's difficult for someone who suspects they are being paid less for discriminatory reasons to verify or falsify that.  If you don't know what others doing the same job are earning, how do you know if your pay is fair?

To take an example from gender differences in earnings, a Washington Post primer notes this:

 The one employer with relatively fair pay between men and women, Maatz said, is the federal government. Why? Because salary scales are published and widely known — so women, who historically have not negotiated for higher salaries, or are punished when they do — have more information about where to start.

That kind of transparency, among other provisions, is exactly what the Paycheck Fairness Act calls for.

Motherhood Tuesday 3: How To Discuss Gender Roles in Survey Results

That clumsy headline is an attempt to describe what I went through while studying a Pew survey on changes in the numbers of stay-at-home mothers.

But it can also be taken as the basis for a wider meditation about the way our ideas about motherhood and apple pie tend to crowd out the analysis of actual data in studies and surveys about how it is that women do parenting, and how easy it is to forget that mothers, too, are full human beings, who might stay at home to care for young children but who might also stay at home because they cannot get a good job or who might have gone back to school or who might be too sick to look for work and so on.

Although these old posts of mine about another Pew survey (in 2005!) are not about parenting, they describe somewhat similar problems of focus and magnification in survey results.

Research Monday 3. On Women And Men in the Labor Markets

These two studies about men and women in the labor markets are worth reading, despite their focus on the upper classes.

For a fairly good door into the magical world of economic research into work and gender, check out this post with its references.

The material it covers is still very important, especially given the crude treatment of the pertinent research by many MRAs who argue that men earn more because they work more and because they work harder, and more dangerously*.

That the discrepancies exist after controlling for working hours etc, albeit  reduced, is important to notice.

And that new right-wing chestnut, about young women presumably now out-earning young men, doesn't hold water (if chestnuts can be said to hold water).  That's because the study found it only to be "true" for unmarried and childless young women and men and only in large urban centers. 

Men earned more than women in the married category.  Even the results for urban singles were most likely caused by the fact that young women in urban areas are, on average, more educated than young men in urban areas.  To look for gender differences in earnings we must compare otherwise as identical people as possible (only differing in perceived gender).  That means comparing equally educated men and women, not comparing people with different average education levels.

Limiting the comparisons to people at the very beginning of their careers (a common trick in conservative writing about gender and earnings)  is also problematic if we are to analyze overall gender differences in earnings.

That's because most earnings differences, whether discriminatory or not, take time to appear.  Firms must have time to promote or fire people at different rates, workers must have time to get children and then perhaps drop out of the labor market for some years and so on.  The only possible discriminatory earnings differences that could exist at the initial point of hiring are those caused by discriminatory hiring practices (e.g. picking men for the better-paid jobs), not usually by direct gender  discrimination for people in the same occupational category.
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*See this post for an explanation of gross and net earnings differences between men and women.  The MRAs only talk about the gross differences.

The reference to dangerous jobs is something I have discussed earlier, but the gist of the counterargument is that the number of men in those dangerous jobs is too small and the jobs are not paid well enough to account for the overall average gender gap in earnings.  It's not the fishermen who make loads of money, it's the stock brokers.