What Sells In Political Commentary. A Sarcastic Take.

1.  Giving political commentary while being famous for some totally different reason.  People will want to hear what you have to say, even if it makes very little sense:

Tim Robbins and his ex, Susan Sarandon, have certainly made news in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, with Robbins going to bat for Bernie Sanders on Twitter and Sarandon speaking out against Hillary Clinton and even appearing to suggest she might vote for Donald Trump instead.

Sarandon wouldn't go quite that far in an interview with Stephen Colbert on Wednesday, but she did suggest why she might do such a thing.
"I'm more afraid actually of Hillary Clinton's war record and her hawkishness than I am of building a wall," Sarandon said. "But that doesn't mean that I would vote for Trump."

Sarandon can vote for whomever she wishes, of course.  But comparing Clinton's hawkishness in foreign policy to Trump's immigration policy is comparing apples to oranges.  In reality Trump is hawkier than Clinton and wants to build a giant wall.  Is "hawkier" a word?

This category is overflowing with celebrities who get the microphone even though they haven't done their homework (coughClintEastwoodcough).  Sarandon's comment is just the most recent one.

2.  Have your writing posted under a really shocking title!  Exaggerate!  Promise the moon!  Be very very partisan.

That always works, even when the article itself is milquetoast or interprets data wrong, and it works because many of us just look at the headline (tl;dr)*, but that counts as a click for the advertisers.  And it is clicks which matter.

3.   Keep it short and emotional.  Don't confuse people with too many facts (tl;dr)*  Note that the term "emotional" covers anger.  Anger is the default emotion in politics, but recently fear might sell better.  Be very very afraid!

Indeed, any hind-brain emotion (anger, fear, sexual arousal) will make an article popular.

4.  Avoid everything I do on this here blog.





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* too long, did not read

Donald Trump And The Gender Card

So it has begun, Donald Trump's election campaign against Hillary Clinton.   The first shot:

While celebrating sweeping victories in five primaries Tuesday night, Donald Trump mocked the qualifications of Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton and suggested she was playing "the women's card" to her advantage in the presidential race.
“Frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don't think she'd get 5 percent of the vote. The only thing she's got going is the women's card,” Trump said during a news conference at Trump Tower. “And the beautiful thing is, women don't like her."

Do women like the Donald, then?  Let's see.  A Gallup poll published on April 1, 2016 tells us this:

Donald Trump's image among U.S. women tilts strongly negative, with 70% of women holding an unfavorable opinion and 23% a favorable opinion of the Republican front-runner in March.

The percentage of men who held an unfavorable opinion on Trump in the same poll was 58%.  And what about the Hillary?  The same poll notes:

Hillary Clinton, like Trump and Cruz, is viewed more negatively than positively by both men and women, though of these two, women are far less negative. This likely reflects the basic female gender skew among Democrats and that Clinton is the only female candidate in the race. Clinton's stronger performance among women than among men has been a constant over the past nine months.

Bolds are mine.

Trump employs that old Republican tactic of attacking his opponent where her strength is. But he is abominably bad at that, and no wonder:  He seems to view women as walking racks for boobs, to be rated only for their looks.

To shift from that into seeing women as voters-with-some-power might be too big a leap for the Donald.  And the last thing he should do is what he did in that quote:  Played a gender card himself.

That's because he is a men's-locker-room type of guy when it comes to women.  He makes tits and butt jokes, he brags about being a playah, he even sexualizes his own daughters in his jokes as well as his wife:

A 1994 clip of Republican frontrunner Donald Trump describing his 1-year-old daughter left "Daily Show" host Trevor Noah speechless Tuesday night.

...

"Donald, what does Tiffany have of yours and what does she have of Marla's?" the show's host, Robin Leach, asked, referring to Trump's second wife Marla Maples.
Trump's answer to the "innocent question" left Noah speechless.
"I think she's got a lot of Marla, she's a beautiful baby. She's got beautiful legs. We don't know if she's got this part yet," Trump said, as he cupped his hands under his chest to signify breasts, "But time will tell."

And:
  

Stern once asked Trump what he would do if Melania were in a terrible car accident, God forbid, and lost the use of her left arm, developed an oozing red splotch near her eye, and mangled her left foot. Would Donald stay with her?
“How do the breasts look?” Trump asked.
“The breasts are okay,” Stern replied. Then, yeah, of course Trump stays. “Because that’s important.” 

I'm sure Trump was joking in those two (and other) examples, but the jokes were aimed at a particular locker-room audience (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) and that audience doesn't include women.  Women are the joke.

The link in that last quote is to a GQ interview with Melania Trump, Donald's current wife.  Check it out and see if you agree with the impression I got from it:  That marriage, to the Donald, is an employer-employee contract where the wife is the employee, the husband is the boss,  and all chores are strictly sex-segregated.

When we put all that together what do we get as one possible appeal of Trump among a certain group of Republican male voters? *

He objectifies women, and not in the men's locker-room but in a very public sphere.  That gives others the permission to do likewise (ah, the winds of freedom!).

He seems to wield the power in his own relationships with women, and that must appeal to those Republican men who pine for the power 1950s gender norms and roles gave middle-class men.

And it cannot hurt his attraction among that specific group of Republican male voters that his current wife is always beautiful and over time much younger than he is:  Like trading cars for a newer model!

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*  All Trump supporters, men and women, obviously have other reasons to vote for Trump than his open sexism.  Some of those supporters might not even like it, but still prefer a strong, bullying, protectionist,  pro-war and anti-immigration president who is clearly not part of the political establishment, even if he is equally clearly part of the ruling classes.



 

The Curious Case of The Dropping Life Expectancy At Birth For Non-Hispanic White Women. A Lesson in Interpretations.

I've been reading about the recent changes in life expectancy at birth* for various US demographic groups.  The main findings are summarized here:

Between 2013 and 2014, overall life expectancy at birth for the total US population held steady at 78.8 years, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC's) National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS).
For men, life expectancy was 76.4 years, and for women, it was 81.2 years, Elizabeth Arias, PhD, from the NCHS, Division of Vital Statistics, notes in a new NCHA data brief, published online April 20.
Life expectancy increased by 0.4 years for non-Hispanic black men (going from 71.8 to 72.2 years) and by 0.1 years for Hispanic men (going from 79.1 to 79.2 years). Life expectancy remained unchanged for non-Hispanic white men (76.5 years).
Among women, life expectancy increased by 0.2 years for Hispanic women (going from 83.8 to 84.0 years), remained unchanged for non-Hispanic black women (78.1 years), and declined by 0.1 years for non-Hispanic white women (going from 81.2 to 81.1 years).

I have bolded the sentences which describe changes in life expectancy at birth. Neither non-Hispanic black women nor non-Hispanic white men experienced a change in the life expectancy measures, but the other groups mentioned in that quote did. Life expectancy at birth rose for non-Hispanic black men and for both Hispanic men and women, but it fell for non-Hispanic white women.

When I started looking for the reasons behind that drop** (because this is the first recorded drop in a more general life expectancy measure in the US during a time period without major wars or epidemics)  I came across this, in the context of an interview with various experts:

WILLIAMS: It's important to realize that, although the life expectancy is declining for white women, that white women, nonetheless, are still living almost 10 years longer than African-American men. So there still is a large racial gap in health.
KODJAK: And that gap is even wider with Hispanic men and women. The CDC report shows they live longer than everyone else. Alison Kodjak, NPR News.

What these statements refer to is the following:  Arrange the life expectancy at birth figures for the six demographic groups mentioned in the above quote in an order from the longest life expectancy to the shortest and you get this list:

1.  Hispanic women (84)
2.  Non-Hispanic white women (81.1)
3.  Hispanic men (79.2)
4.  Non-Hispanic black women (78.1)
5.  Non-Hispanic white men (76.5)
6.  Non-Hispanic black men (72.2)

Williams' point is that non-Hispanic white women, as a group, still have a higher life expectancy at birth than non-Hispanic black men and most other groups mentioned in the quote.

Williams makes a mistake, however,  when he attributes the whole difference between the life expectancy figures of non-Hispanic white women and non-Hispanic black men to race, given that one group consists of women and the other group of men.  A more correct comparison would be to compare non-Hispanic white and black women to each other or non-Hispanic white and black men to each other.***

But never mind.  That's not the point I wish to make.

It's something more complicated, a reverse of the usual kind of statistical misunderstanding where people try to refute statistical information about the average, the most frequent or the modal value of some data by noting that it doesn't jive with their own personal experience or the personal experiences of those they know.  In short, personal anecdotes are used to argue against data about averages derived from large populations of people.

In this case even experts appear to interpret data about average life expectancy in some group as if it applied equally to all its sub-groups.  Thus, we get quotes like this:

Public health experts say the rising white death rate reflects a broader health crisis, one that has made the United States the least healthy affluent nation in the world over the past 20 years. The reason these early deaths are so conspicuous among white women, these experts say, is that in the past the members of this comparatively privileged group have been unlikely to die prematurely.

Well, if we go far back into the past we are going to find a lot of premature deaths among all women due to maternal deaths.  But it is indeed true that the life expectancy at birth in the US, on average, is high for  non-Hispanic white women, higher than for all other groups mentioned here except for Hispanic women.****

But not all non-Hispanic white women are equally "privileged" in having good physical and mental health.  Some are poor, lack education, are trapped (or see themselves trapped) in poor rural areas or small towns with few jobs.

It is that sub-group among the much larger category of non-Hispanic white women which is experiencing a rapidly shrinking life expectancy at birth.

The focus on the overall group of non-Hispanic white women in this example is like not seeing that some trees are stunted because much of the forest looks so healthy.

But it would be equally incorrect to use those stunted trees to demand more resources for the whole forest.  Some experts have expressed that fear:

Others have questioned the sudden focus on whites, pointing out that African Americans continue to have shorter life spans and face severe health challenges exacerbated by racial segregation and discrimination. Why, they ask, give so much attention to a group that remains statistically advantaged?

“The truth is that white death rates are still much, much lower than they are for African Americans,” said Bridget Catlin, senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin. “My concern is that people will think, ‘Oh, it’s whites that need to be helped.’ ”

It's the stunted trees which deserve attention.  Some forests have many more of them than others.  But they all deserve help.


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*  Life expectancy at birth in year x in a particular place refers to the number of years a child born in year x at that place can expect to live if current mortality patterns of year x prevail in the future.  When the measure is calculated for a demographic sub-group, the current mortality patterns that are assumed to prevail are those applying to that demographic sub-group in year x.

The bolded words are important.

Because of the way the measure is calculated it is more sensitive to deaths at younger ages than at older ages.


** Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain this change.  The more medical ones include increasing obesity and diabetes, increased misuse of opioids and heroin and the resulting overdoses, cigarette smoking among the poorer whites,  increased rates of suicide by middle-aged white women, increased rates of alcoholism by the same group and a rise in apparent accidents and accidental poisoning.

More sociological explanations suggest that economic expectations have changed for poorer whites, with more despair about the future.  Poor minorities are more accustomed not to expect a better economic future and so may not experience the same kind of loss of hope, having had little in the first place.

Some have proposed greater rates of divorce and single-parenthood among the poorer whites as one possible reason. Even the possibility that traditional gender roles, when combined with the new economic reality that most women need to work with money, might be at the root of the extra pressure poor white women experience in terms of the double shift.  On the other hand, one study found that employment seemed to have a protective effect on poorer white women's health.

Note that the crucial question all such explanations have to be able to answer is why they would explain a drop in white women's life expectancy but not in the life expectancy of otherwise identical (i.e., equally poor, equally likely not to have finished high school) white men or in the life expectancy of otherwise identical Hispanic women and men or of otherwise identical black men and women.  Some do better in that respect than others.

But what the data mostly agrees on is that this drop has its roots in the experience of one sub-group among white women:  Poor white women with little education who live in poor rural areas and small towns.  Poor white men in similar circumstances are also losing years of life expectancy, though not quite as many.  That the overall life expectancy for non-Hispanic white men has not declined could be because other improvements in men's longevity are large enough to have canceled out this particular effect.

All this is tentative.  I hope that future studies can tell us something more definitive not only about the life expectancy changes for poor white women but for all groups of the poor in the United States.


***  This article summarizes some of the issues which affect the life expectancy measures of black women and men in the US, compared to white women and men.  Some have a larger effect than others:  Neonatal deaths because of the years of life lost and the greater rates of violent deaths at early ages.  But note the general need for better access to medical care which the ACA might help to fix.

I couldn't find similar comparisons covering Hispanic men and women.

****  It is probably even higher for Asian-American women.  The available data doesn't address that question.







  







 

The Paperweight

Which Mother/Father Earth gave me one day after Earth Day looks like this:

Making Deals With God in Oklahoma: If Our Wimminz Behave, Will You Take Care Of Our Economy?

This would be hilarious if I read it in some movie about a goofy kind of theocracy on some other planet.  But sadly, Oklahoma is on this planet:

An Oklahoma bill that could revoke the license of any doctor who performs an abortion has headed to the governor, with opponents saying the measure in unconstitutional and promising a legal battle against the cash-strapped state if it is approved.
...

Under the bill, doctors who perform abortions would risk losing their medical licenses. Exemptions would be given for those who perform the procedure for reasons including protecting the mother or removing a miscarried fetus.

...

Supporters of the bill said it will help protect the sanctity of life.
"If we take care of morality,” bill supporter David Brumbaugh, a Republican, said during deliberations, "God will take care of the economy."

Emphasis is mine.

How did Mr. Brumbaugh make that deal with his version of the divine (cell phone conversation? voices inside his head?)?  What kind of morality is covered in the contract?  Is corruption in the government now on its way out?  Will all married male politicians now stop committing adultery? 

Such fun, to ponder that.  Here is a picture of of Mr. Brumbaugh:

Given the above story, it's surprising that many of the initiatives he has supported in the Oklahoma House are about right-wing economics, given that short-cut to fix all economics by making abortion unavailable for most women.

Hmm.  But of course we all know that Mr. Brumbaugh is just feeding the hungry fundamentalist lions in his zoo, the ones who vote on the basis of a Taliban-ish interpretation of the Christian Bible.

What might the real world consequences of revoking the licenses of all physicians who perform "unnecessary" abortions be?  Let me think. 

Could it be that physicians would become more reluctant to perform even those abortions which Oklahoma Republicans grudgingly accept as possibly necessary, because it might be difficult to prove that necessity afterwards?  So which way do you think borderline cases might go?

All this is political performance art, by the way.  What's sad is how very many people see nothing much wrong with it.  We don't have corporations canceling conferences and investments in Oklahoma because of what the theocrats there are planning for wimminz.

In Honor of Yesterday's Earth Day

Some of you may remember that I have always been at war with ivy at Snakepit Inc.  and until recently the ivy was winning.  This anecdote should be read in that context:

I spent two hours outside pulling ivy off plants and windows. As part of that, I had to go on all fours inside large shrubs. My neighbor heard the crackling sounds (me pulling ivy, making up new swear words) and feared that I was a coyote.

But luckily I wasn't.

Then I found a wonderful paperweight, all covered with dirt,  inside a shrub! After a bath it looks like a wintry night sky.

 It's not mine. I believe mother/father Earth brought it up from the soil to thank me for being such a wonderful warrior for her. Earth Day was yesterday, but I count this as a thank-you-present for having celebrated it.

Well, perhaps battling ivy is not quite the same thing as being a warrior for mother/father Earth.  On the other hand, a certain power balance is desirable both in international politics and inside our gardens.

This is funny

Donald Trump writes an academic paper:

How funny Trump is depends, naturally, on who you, the reader, might be.  He's not funny if you are an immigrant to the US or a Muslim, and he is certainly not funny if you happen to belong to that half of humanity which he judges by butt shape and tit size.  But for all of us laughing at his utterances is also tinged with that small frisson of fear, when one thinks of those famous fingers on the nuclear button.

Maybe this is just gallows humor.

News about Women, April 20, 2016: Harriet Tubman, Indian Housewives, Pulitzer Prizes and Female Refugees in Europe

1. Harriet Tubman will replace Andrew Jackson on the twenty-dollar bill.  As some on the wide and varied Internets have said about Hillary Clinton's presidential candidacy, this, too,  is only symbolic. But more representative symbols looks like a fantastic idea to me!

2.  A BBC story  about the suicides of housewives in India makes a  point about the invisibility of some issues:

More than 20,000 housewives took their lives in India in 2014.

This was the year when 5,650 farmers killed themselves in the country.
So the number of suicides by housewives was about four times those by farmers. They also comprised 47% of the total female victims.
Yet the high number of homemakers killing themselves doesn't make front page news in the way farmer suicides do, year after year.
In fact, more than 20,000 housewives have been killing themselves in India every year since 1997, the earliest year for which we have information compiled by the National Crime Records Bureau based on occupation of the victim. In 2009, the grim statistic peaked at 25,092 deaths.

That quote has a statistical problem, by the way, because it does not relate the suicide numbers of farmers and housewives to their population bases, i.e., the total numbers of farmers and of housewives in India.  It's theoretically possible that 5650 farmer suicides is a higher percentage of all Indian farmers than 20,000 suicides is of all Indian housewives, though I doubt it.

The point of that article still stands:  Certain social problems are more visible than others.  New problems get more attention than old but continuing problems, problems affecting women tend to be slotted into the sub-group of "women's issues" and thereby become less visible as general problems, and such problems are less often named.  Naming is a type of power, because we cannot attend to a problem we cannot identify.

3. Women did well in this year's Pulitzer Prizes.  Another interesting aspect of the 2016 prizes is the slight relaxing of the idea that certain topics belong to male journalists to cover and other topics to female journalists:

4.  A new study of the labor market integration of refugees in Europe makes for fairly dismal reading, with a few points of light.

The study also notes that from January to September 2015 young men dominated the group of asylum seekers.  Seventy-four percent of them were male and 82% below the age of 35:

 

Women and older people are vastly under-represented in the group which manages to reach Europe.  That's one problem with the current European refugee problem:  it tends to reward the young and the male and those who have money to pay the people smugglers.  It leaves behind the women, the sick, the elderly and the truly poor, though obviously many of the men who arrived in 2015 plan to bring their families in later.

The study has a short section about the labor market integration of female refugees.  It notes that women integrate less well than men:

Female refugees have significantly worse labour market outcomes, especially in the short to medium run. This might be partly due to cultural patterns as participation rates of women in their home countries are usually lower. Survey results in main source countries (e.g. Syria) suggest that participation rates of refugee women remain also low in host countries, at least in the short to medium term.

Thus, cultural patterns may hinder female refugees' labor market participation rates in Europe.  That is a posh way of saying that the norm is for women to stay at home, and such norms have staying power*.  One of the consequences of that is likely to be higher poverty rates among the refugees, because single-earner families in general tend to have higher poverty rates.

All is not gloom and doom in that respect.  An earlier Swedish study found that refugee women's labor market participation rates do rise with time, as this table shows:

5.  Finally, a question:  Are you interested in these kinds of complications?  One reason I write them is simply because I don't see many others doing it, but there are days when I wonder if it matters at all.

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*  Francine Blau has studied the effect of social norms and culture of source countries in this context using data from immigration to the United States:

Abstract: This paper examines evidence on the role of assimilation versus source country culture in influencing immigrant women’s behavior in the United States—looking both over time with immigrants’ residence in the United States and across immigrant generations. It focuses particularly on labor supply but, for the second generation, also examines fertility and education. We find considerable evidence that immigrant source country gender roles influence immigrant and second generation women’s behavior in the United States. This conclusion is robust to various efforts to rule out the effect of other unobservables and to distinguish the effect of culture from that of social capital. These results support a growing literature that suggests that culture matters for economic behavior. At the same time, the results suggest considerable evidence of assimilation of immigrants. Immigrant women narrow the labor supply gap with native-born women with time in the United States, and, while our results suggest an important role for intergenerational transmission, they also indicate considerable convergence of immigrants to native levels of schooling, fertility, and labor supply across generations.

These results probably mean that when refugee source countries (say, Afghanistan, the source country for 10% of the asylum applicants in Europe in 2015) have considerably more patriarchal beliefs than the average beliefs in the new host countries in Europe those stronger patriarchal beliefs will take a long time to change.

Meanwhile in Poland, the Catholic Church Works To Take Control Or Reproduction

Poland already had the strictest abortion laws in Europe, but now those might become even stricter:

But now a new bill, pushed by a pro-life foundation and the Ordo Iuris legal institute, would make abortion illegal in all circumstances. Doctors who performed an abortion could be punished with jail terms of up to five years. The only exception would be the “unintended” death of a fetus while saving a woman’s life.

I assume we should thank God for that exception, though in practice it might not necessarily save pregnant women's lives.

The linked Washington Post article argues that the Poles don't really mind such a draconian law, what with being devout Catholics and all (and possibly because illegal abortions and abortion-travel to neighboring countries are already "flourishing" alternatives).  I don't know if that assessment is correct, but it seems that a strong protest movement has finally been created:

Here’s what’s new: civil society’s unprecedented and immediate backlash. Within five days of the announcement, 85,000 people had signed up for the Facebook page of a protest group, Dziewuchy dziewuchom, which roughly translates as “Women for Women.” In an organized protest on April 4, hundreds of men and women walked out of Mass when priests read the Church’s official letter supporting an abortion ban.

But, argues Anna Grzymala-Busse, the writer of the WaPo article, this is not really about women's reproductive choice which most Poles don't support, but about the Catholic Church taking on the role of a political advocate and getting involved in partisan politics.  The Church would control reproduction better if it worked behind the stage, pulling strings here and there.  That way its religious authority would still be respected.

Okay, that last paragraph was my own mean-spirited interpretation.  But that doesn't mean it is necessarily a wrong interpretation.

To put all this into a wider framework, note the similar work done by right-wing religious groups in the United States.  Also note how Poland's Catholic Church, too, falls under the reign of the current Pope, much admired for his concern towards certain other ill-treated groups. 

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Added later:  The most extreme form of the anti-contraceptive, anti-abortion policy of the global Catholic Church amounts to a demand that women either stay celibate (including somehow avoiding getting raped) or accept a kind of Russian roulette for the sake of the Church's interests in maximizing the number of people in its pews, where the odds of surviving that roulette are continuously reduced by the Church. 

Non-Men

Here is an interesting story about the power of definitions of terms such as "men" or "women", about who gets to define us and then put us into those categories and on what grounds, and about the possibility that greater inclusiveness might mean that more and more people must share a cake of a constant size.  It is also a story about good intentions which, in my view, have some exceedingly bad outcomes.

A group inside the Green Party in the UK, Young Greens Women, sent this tweet out in late March:

“Women/non-men who are Young Greens can find and join our Facebook group 'Young Greens Women'”

The tweet made some waves (1) given that it could be interpreted as meaning that women are defined by being non-men, with men as the default position, and that has been Business As Usual for much of human history.

But that is not what Young Greens Women intended by their tweet:

And Young Greens Women responded to criticism in a series of tweets.
“We currently use 'non-male' because this is inclusive of other non-binary genders which have a place in our group”, the group wrote.
"However we understand why people may have issues with language that defines us in relation to men.
“We are currently discussing within the group if we can/should change the language we are using.
"Rest assured that we are always striving to practice correct intersectional feminism and to be as inclusive as we can."

Bolds are mine. 

The Green Party Equalities (Women) spokesperson Sarah Cope later explained:

"Language is all-important."
"It was never the intention of the Young Green Women to use the term "non-male" to describe women, and this has now been clarified."
"What Young Green Women were doing was being inclusive not just to women, but also to individuals in the party who perhaps identify as non-binary or gender queer, as befits a party with a proud history of inclusivity."
"The Green Party is a truly feminist party."

Bolds are mine.  For both of these two quotes and the bolded parts, in particular, note the group that is made more inclusive.  It is not the general Green Party, and it is not the men in the Green Party.


Finally the Facebook page of Green Party Women added to the explanation:

A recent issue, taken out of context of its intent, has arisen and caused quite a stir. As a result, the committee of Green Party Women would like to reassure our sisters that we by no means intend to erase women’s identities by forcing members to define relation to men. "Non-male" and "women" are not synonymous.
However, Green Party Women are happy with uses of the term “non-male" as an umbrella term when gender balance practices are conducted. This umbrella term groups together all who face gendered oppression; women, transgender women and individuals of non-binary or no genders. We all deserve to be recognised and included.
For too long, marginalised women have been excluded from most women's movements and circles. As a group we affirm that trans women are women, and that non-binary genders and other gender identities experience oppression and deserve respect. After all, we are part of a political party, The Green Party, which has a proud history of inclusivity.

The bolds are mine, once again, and it is especially that bolded paragraph I wish to understand better.  It is not much of an improvement from the first interpretation of women=non-men, because the term "non-male" still defines several groups of people by lumping them together and then calling the resulting wider group "non-male,"  compared to the default option which is "male."

Positive News Items, 4/16/2016

Believe it or not, I am not always full of doom and gloom and bitter anger, even though it could look that way on this here blog.

To provide some balance, here are a few of my favorite recent news items:

1.  This woman is awesome.  And these women are awesome.  And this woman is awesome.

2.  And this man is awesome.

3.  US teen pregnancy, abortion and birth rates reach a forty-year low.

4.   Then cats.  Not news items, but always appropriate in cyberspace:

5. And this blueberry muffin recipe is awesome.  I'd use less sugar, however.

Sex And Sermons: Fundamentalists and Women's Sexuality

A delicious topic:  How fundamentalist religions cope with sexuality in general and with women's sexuality in particular?

The short answer is that all fundamentalist religions frown upon non-reproductive sex, including homosexuality.  They also wish to  take the ownership of a woman's sexuality away from her and assign it to her parents or her husband.  The deeper answer is that those religions want control of all fertility.  Those goals require that women should not be able to control their own reproduction. 

At this point in my writing I feel a strong pull towards discussing how getting more people-in-the-pews or on prayer mats keeps religions powerful and large, how that works against the whole idea of contraception or even non-reproductive sex,  and how it ultimately means that women must be assigned the role of producing babies for the common good but not the role of determining how many or at what intervals.

This time I won't go there.  Instead, I want to look at that fascinating storm of emotions which are revealed when, say, an Islamist preacher argues that the world will end if the sexes are allowed to intermingle at work or in the public sphere.  Why will the world end?  Because such intermingling will cause people to copulate like bunny rabbits, on the streets, in the stores and on the roofs!  Marriage will collapse!  Nobody knows what man sired what child!  Chaos ensues!

See what a frightening and powerful force sexuality is to such a preacher?  It's almost as if the only thing which stops him from participating in such orgies is that women are segregated from men and properly covered up.  One frail wall of fabric is all that keeps the flood of erotic tornadoes at bay.

And the maintenance of that wall of fabric is the duty of women.  Indeed, while all fundamentalist religions want to appropriate women's sexual agency, none of them wish to take any responsibility for the sexual attraction between heterosexual men and women.  That task they see as belonging to women alone.* 

Men are viewed as sexually liable to stray** and women are to stop that straying.  Hence the solution to the imaginary storm of random sex the fundamentalists so fear is to make women behave better, to make women the goalkeepers in the game of pre-marital sex (where heterosexual men are expected to try to get the puck in the net and heterosexual women are expected to try to avoid that outcome), to tell women to avoid places where rape and other sexual assault might happen (as John Kasich has just suggested), to tell women to cover up so that the weak men will not fall into sin (did she wear a mini-skirt?  was her hair showing?)

Thus, although the fundamentalists want to control all sexuality and rule out homosexuality altogether, much of their focus is on the control of female sexuality.   Customs such as female genital mutilation (FGM) are to make women less sexual, more faithful wives, less likely to take lovers***. Female masturbation is the most pleasant of roads to hell and dildoes the homes of Satan. 

And then there is the novel idea of sado-masochistic sex as a road to heaven for women, a form of religious female submission turned into the language of pronography [sic], this being one depiction of the kind of sexuality that is seen as acceptable among some believing women of fundamentalism.

When I put all this together (whether it belongs together or not), I get an explanation of women's sexuality inside various fundamentalist movements:

Women should not be active agents in sex, they should be active agents in stopping the kind of sex the fundamentalist fathers don't want them to experience, but otherwise their role should be passive and subject to the control of their kin. 

The incentives for women not to have "improper" sex consist of largely punishments.  The US anti-feminist right and the home-grown misogynists argue that sexually active unmarried women become soiled toilet paper, will never be able to have a happy marriage, will end up alone and weeping over their cats, whereas nothing much is written about the destiny of sexually active unmarried men, as long as their partners are female.  That's because men cannot become soiled toilet paper.

Other types of desired punishments abound.  Some pro-life activists seem to regard unplanned pregnancies as the proper punishment for "sluts" and the resulting children as an appropriate life sentence.  Those who don't want to subsidize "sluts" having sex in their health insurance policies when contraception is also covered never to howl out in despair about how other people's Viagra prescriptions amounts to exactly the same kind of subsidies.

The differences are driven by the deeply hidden assumption that it is women who are responsible for not having sex of the wrong type.  On the whole, very few restrictions in that field apply to heterosexual men's erotic life.

Finally,  consider this form of punishment for women who report a rape or a sexual assault at the Brigham Young University:

Students say Honor Code involvement means a victim who reports an assault faces possible punishment if she or he was breaking curfew, violating the dress code, using drugs or alcohol or engaging in consensual sexual contact — all banned by the code of conduct — before an attack.
In a statement, BYU said a student "will never be referred to the Honor Code Office for being a victim of sexual assault," and that its Honor Code proceedings are "independent and separate" from Title IX investigations.
But multiple BYU students investigated by the school's Honor Code Office disagree, saying they were scrutinized as a result of reporting a sex crime. In some cases described by past and current students, Honor Code investigations were launched even when the accused assailants were not BYU students — the alleged victim being the sole possible target.

This smells to me like a (much) milder version of the difficulties of proving rape under the sharia law****.  If a woman fails to make her case she can then be punished for adultery.  In both of these cases,  the specter of punishment for consensual sex serves to make women less likely to report rape or sexual assault.
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*   From 2006, this story gives us the most explicit version of the belief:

In the religious address on adultery to about 500 worshippers in Sydney last month, Sheik Hilali said: "If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it ... whose fault is it, the cats or the uncovered meat?
"The uncovered meat is the problem."
The sheik then said: "If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have occurred."
He said women were "weapons" used by "Satan" to control men.
"It is said in the state of zina (adultery), the responsibility falls 90 per cent of the time on the woman. Why? Because she possesses the weapon of enticement (igraa)."

** An extremely sexist assumption, by the way, amounting to assuming that men have no self-control at all or even need it.

***  FGM is a cultural practice but appropriated by religions:

No religion promotes or condones FGM. Still, more than half of girls and women in four out of 14 countries where data is available saw FGM as a religious requirement. And although FGM is often perceived as being connected to Islam, perhaps because it is practiced among many Muslim groups, not all Islamic groups practice FGM, and many non-Islamic groups do, including some Christians, Ethiopian Jews, and followers of certain traditional African religions.

It has been justified as follows:

Psychosexual reasons: FGM is carried out as a way to control women’s sexuality, which is sometimes said to be insatiable if parts of the genitalia, especially the clitoris, are not removed. It is thought to ensure virginity before marriage and fidelity afterward, and to increase male sexual pleasure.

**** For an extreme example, see Saudi Arabia's practice.


 



 

On The Recently Found "Judith Beheading Holofernes" by Caravaggio (Or Not) And How Gentileschi Saw It.

The story is told in several places, including here.  I have no idea if the painting is a forgery, a genuine Caravaggio, a contemporary copy of his work or a genuine painting by some other painter of the same era.  But it can be interesting to compare the painting to one on the same topic by Artemisia Gentileschi.  Here's the recent find:

And here is Caravaggio's earlier take on Judith beheading Holofernes (left), next to Gentileschi's painting (right) of the same topic:

This quote states what I find interesting about that comparison:

And, most importantly, whereas Caravaggio (above, left) pairs his delicate Judith with a haggard attendant who merely looks on, her eyes wide with disbelief, Artemisia depicts two strong, young women working in unison, their sleeves rolled up, their gazes focused, their grips firm. Caravaggio’s Judith gracefully recoils from her gruesome task; Artemisia’s Judith does not flinch. Instead, she braces herself on the bed, as she presses Holofernes’s head down with one hand and pulls a large sword through his neck with the other. The creases at her wrists clearly show the physical strength required. Holofernes struggles in vain, the thrust of his arms countered by the more forceful movement of Abra, Judith’s accomplice in this grisly act.

The Judith in the first two paintings appears someone who has to be talked into the violence, someone hesitant and maidenly.  Gentileschi's Judith is very different.  Some argue that it's because Gentileschi's own experience of rape and its consequences.  Perhaps.  But I also spot a difference which I find hard to name.  It's as if Gentileschi's Judith is an individual, someone who has agency, whereas I find the Judith in the other two paintings an almost mythological figure:  The passive, virginal maiden who abhors the task she must face. 

My Equal Pay Day Post

This is a re-run, because I spent the time writing about other stuff.  My 2014 Equal Pay Day post gives you lots of link to juicy and important theories and data, however, if you feel so inclined.

Or you could just take the various anti-feminists at their word which is that men earn more because they are out there hunting dinosaurs and jumping across the Niagara Falls 24/7  (24/7!), while women mostly want to be cozy and comfy in a little pink office, preferably working part-time.

But because you are my erudite and interesting readers you will prefer to read me first, including this more recent post which talks a lot about choice in this context and has even more links for your perusal.

The UK Guardian Guards Against Trolling

This is an interesting piece by the UK Guardian newspaper:

New research into our own comment threads provides the first quantitative evidence for what female journalists have long suspected: that articles written by women attract more abuse and dismissive trolling than those written by men, regardless of what the article is about.
Although the majority of our regular opinion writers are white men, we found that those who experienced the highest levels of abuse and dismissive trolling were not. The 10 regular writers who got the most abuse were eight women (four white and four non-white) and two black men. Two of the women and one of the men were gay. And of the eight women in the “top 10”, one was Muslim and one Jewish.
And the 10 regular writers who got the least abuse? All men.

The paper uses the proportion of comments that are blocked based on their commenting policy as their measure of trolling, and though that measure has some problems I think using it is a first good step.

What I'd love to see is an experiment where two columnists write two columns, essentially saying the same things in one of the hot-button areas, such as feminism*.  One columnist should be a man and the other a woman, and there should be some time between the columns, but not too much.  The time is needed so that the nature of the experiment is hidden.

Then see what happens in the comments!

Ideally, of course, exactly the same piece would be posted under a male and female bylines, to see what the effect might be.  I can't see how it could be done in practice, but we should be able to get fairly close to that by making sure that the two columns state the same arguments, albeit in different written forms.

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*  Now that I have thought about this a little more, the same should be done for a thoroughly boring and bland article, too, and ideally also by all sorts of race/religion pairings of the writers.

The Wounded Young Hero of Literature, Arts, Politics And Especially Journalism

Prologue

This post has no mothers, but it has multiple fathers, the wounded young men of arts and literature who rebelled against the society from their garrets, hungry and full of erotic lust and rage, the wounded young actors who portrayed "rebels without a cause,"  the wounded young political writers who were allowed to rage and rant against unfairness and inequality, but who were also allowed to wear proudly those mystical scars which womanhood had cut into their hearts and brains, thus turning them into misogynists.

I call these men wounded young heroes, though they were not always young when they gained the label or wounded in the way most of us would define the term.  Being "wounded," being "imperfect," is what makes them into truth-speaking heroes.

Philip Roth proffered us his misogyny like an orchid reeking of dying flesh and he was applauded for it.  Picasso painted women as the deepest nightmares of his soul and he was applauded for it.   Norman Mailer, John Updike, Milan Kundera, and many other famous mainstream male writers celebrate their fear, loathing and just plain misunderstanding of women in their literary works, and though they have been criticized for it, they still wear the laurel leaf wreaths of public approval and fame.

Now flip that over.  Assume that it is the hatred or fear of men or the analysis of those feelings which largely fuel the art or writing of some talented woman.  What will her reputation be?  Into what box will history place her art?

Women cannot be mainstream artists or writers if they knit their hatred of men into their art or writing.  But it takes much, much more for a man's work to be discounted in history than just loathing towards half the humanity.  He can still be mainstream, he can still be adulated, his work can still be widely taught.

He can Break The Rules.  He can be a rebel while supporting an ancient and traditional part of human history with his misogyny.  He can rebel against the capitalists and oppressors and be a protector of the weak, except when he rails at women, the weakest in many societies.

He can show us the scar some woman has inflicted on him (or so he believes), praise that scar, generalize that scar to all womanhood, use that scar to sell sexual humiliation of women as the rightful outcome in a rebel's world (Henry Miller), and we, the audience, take him seriously, accept his young-hero status, his truth-speaking status.  We, the audience,  honor the great Tolstoy's writings*, even though he assigned women to only their biological roles and frequently employed the Madonna/Whore dichotomy.  We, the audience, don't slam the door in his face. 

And we shouldn't slam that door.  But that door would be slammed against any woman who did the reversal.  Even the term "wounded young heroine" elicits utterly different images in our minds, and women cannot be wounded young heroes.  Not really.

This is the hi-falutin prologue to a post  which is about more mundane writing and about more mundane concerns.  Still, my central concern is to ask if we switched the gender of the main protagonist in these stories, would the stories still read the same, would the consequences of the stories be the same, would we even have reversal stories of this type published anywhere.

I have selected examples which are not all so clear-cut as those I mention above, but they flow from that same archetype:  The truth-telling young rebel whose misogyny scar doesn't invalidate the hero's ascent but validates it.

Today's Cartoon

This is so very very true:

I could give you an example for each of my ten fingers in ten minutes, all from recent political events.  Even the New York Times can succumb to this!  Many things have multiple explanations, all true (perhaps in varying degrees of influence), and there is no real point in deciding that only one explanation is the correct one.

Indeed, simple and correct answers are very rare.  What we believe is the truth can also be provisional:  true today but perhaps not in light of future evidence.

More on Sexism in the Presidential Primaries: Trump, Cruz And A Few Voices From The Sludge

There's something deeply wrong inside Donald Trump.  In an 1994 interview Trump was asked about his daughter, Tiffany, who was just a baby then:

"Donald, what does Tiffany have of yours and what does she have of Marla's?" the show's host, Robin Leach, asked, referring to Trump's second wife Marla Maples.
Trump's answer to the "innocent question" left Noah speechless.
"I think she's got a lot of Marla, she's a beautiful baby. She's got beautiful legs. We don't know if she's got this part yet," Trump said, as he cupped his hands under his chest to signify breasts, "But time will tell."

He sexualizes everything female, including his own baby daughter, and then either approves of her tits or tells her that she is ugly.  That, my friends, is sick.

I don't want a man (for lack of a more appropriate term; worm? dandruff?) like that to possibly become the president of the United States.  He would never represent more than half of the citizens of this country, because he sees them as tit-stands or something akin to toilet paper:  Useful but disposable after use (heh). 

On the other hand, Ted Cruz smells like Torquemada, so I don't want him, either. While Trump would run this country as his very own pleasure palace and then run it down to ground, Cruz would run it as a torture chamber of infidels.  He has a lot in common with the radical mullahs, though of course who gets the infidel label stitched to their jackets would differ.

Neither is anything but bad news for women.  Cruz is even for the rapists' fatherhood rights.

I came to write this post after reading a Buzzfeed piece about Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton.  The piece is pro-Clinton, the comments mostly are not.  The most recently posted ones at the time of my reading were these:

These are quite gentlemanly comments when it comes to subtle sexism, actually.  They would be funnier if they were:

Go to jail, female dog

and

More of the sound a hen makes after laying an egg than a laugh.

That hen-thing is one actual definition of "cackle," though what people disliking Hillary Clinton mean by it is something different:  Perhaps that she is an old witch who cackles or that women are supposed to laugh in a ladylike manner and not have cankles (fat ankles), either.  Can men cackle?  

Why The Gross Gender Gap in Earnings Is Mostly A Useless Figure

Or today's statistical raised eyebrow from yours truly (why yours truly?).

I came across an article on Fortune.com about the gender wage gap between white men on the one hand and women in various ethnic and racial categories on the other*.  Now those are very important things to study, as are the gender wage gaps within each racial and ethnic group.  Or the racial or ethnic gaps within a gender category. Or doing the same analysis for women in all those categories vis-a-vis, say, Asian-American or African-American men's earnings.

But the gross wage gap doesn't really tell us anything but one thing:  The total difference in the amounts workers from two different categories earn over their working lives, and even this only if the total is properly calculated (which isn't as easy as it might look).  And it really cannot be interpreted the way a net gender gap in wages can be:  As possible evidence of labor market discrimination against one or more groups.  I feel that the Fortune.com article is slipping and sliding in that direction.

Are you still reading?  Probably not, if the weather is as nice there as here (white snow!).  Now how to make this more exciting?  Let's do awful pedagogy.

Suppose Mary has spent 20 dollars on apples, Anthony 50 dollars and Evelyn 40 dollars.  Who has purchased the most apples?

You can't get the answer because you don't know how much each of them paid per apple.  They might even all have paid different prices if they didn't shop in the same store.

The gross gender gap is like that example.  The net gender gap would be an example where you are told the price of apples for Mary, Anthony and Evelyn.  That example would let you conclude which of the three has the most apples or the least apples etc.

Or using econo-babble, what we ideally wish to compare are the lifetime earnings of two imaginary (average) individuals who differ in nothing but the characteristics we deem relevant.  In the Fortune.com article those characteristics would be gender, race and ethnicity and any significant interaction terms between them**.  Everything else should be exactly the same: age, length of working life, average working hours per week,  education levels, experience, local labor market conditions,  the industry where the individuals work and so on, possibly also the number of minor children the employees have and so on.

But the study the Fortune.com article describes doesn't standardize for those other things, or at least that is my reading.  Consider age. The average age of white men in the labor force is higher than the average age of Latinas.  The linked study computes lifetime earnings by assuming that the length of one's working life is 40 years and then multiplies the current median earnings of Latinas and white men by forty.  Thus, some part of the calculated lifetime earnings difference is because Latinas, on average, are relatively young workers in the US labor markets and young workers earn less than older workers.

There are also educational differences between the groups the study compares, though not between men and women overall, and those differences should also be controlled for.  The same goes for all the so-called non-discriminatory variables which affect earnings if we wish to compare the remaining wage gaps from the is-this-discrimination-? angle.***

All this is about The Proper Way of addressing the gender gap in earnings.  I cannot tell what the correctly calculated monetary lifetime differences between white men and the studied racial and ethnic groups of women might be, though I believe that the direction of the difference and the overall ranking of the sizes of the lifetime differences would not be affected.****

So why am I boring you with this?  I don't want to feed the rabid anti-feminists and other eager critics who insist on telling  me that there is no gender gap in wages, silly women, and if there is, then it is because those brave men work 24 hours per day fighting dangerous crocodiles, work that women just don't want (being most eager to be cleaning ladies, of course).  And focusing on just the gross gaps in earnings does leave the door open for that.



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*  In theory,  the gap between white men and white women could be calculated from the data, too, but I don't have the labor market percentages of the various female groups listed and am too tired to look them up. 

**  Economists have been doing intersectionality of a sort for ever!  The interaction terms allow for the possibility that race or ethnicity might affect the earnings of women and men differently or that gender might affect ethnic and racial differences.

***  Note that many of these corrections would reduce the calculated lifetime earnings differences, but not all of them.  The assumption that all workers can spend forty years in the labor force is less likely to be true for women than for men (those damn kids) and may differ between women of different ethnicity, and it's always possible that controlling for a specific non-discriminatory variable could increase the net differences over the working years.

To make things even more twisted together, some variables which I list here as non-discriminatory may themselves be a consequence of discrimination of a different sort.  This may apply to education if the school system funding and teaching quality is discriminatory on the basis of race/ethnicity/gender.  The industry in which someone works might not be a wholly free choice if young women are steered into traditionally female but poorly paid industries by cultural norms or their parents.   This steering could differ by race and/or ethnicity if cultural norms differ between those demographic groups.

****  With one possible exception:  The lifetime net earnings difference between white men and Asian-American women could be smaller than the life time net earnings difference between white men and white women.  See the last graph in this article which gets further into the interesting stuff but still not far enough.  Then read this.

This Is Just Too Funny

Donald Trump as a desperate student trying to make something up for an exam question he blanked out on:

Now I desperately want to know if he could place Syria on a world map.  Like pin the tail on the donkey game.

Just The Woman, Her Doctor And Some Catholic Bishops

Those are the people who are supposed to be involved in pregnant women's medical treatment in Catholic hospitals in the US. 

About one out of six hospital stays in the US takes place in a Catholic hospital, and those hospitals tend to follow the US Catholic Bishops' Ethical and Religious Directives.

What's fun about those directives, created by a bunch of presumably celibate guys, is their disproportionate impact on pregnant women.*  Now muse on that for a moment!

Anyway, those directives tell us this:

Abortion (that is, the directly intended termination of pregnancy before viability or the directly intended destruction of a viable fetus) is never permitted. Every procedure whose sole immediate effect is the termination of pregnancy before viability is an abortion, which, in its moral context, includes the interval between
conception and implantation of the embryo.

And:

In case of extrauterine pregnancy, no intervention is morally licit which constitutes a direct abortion.

Can you wrap your head around that latter case?  Ectopic pregnancies,  which in other places are called medical emergencies require a different approach in the minds of those kind and gentle Catholic bishops.  These types of pregnancies can never result in a living child but may very well result in a dead woman.  Yet there are specific ethical (!) rules not to intervene by anything that could be viewed as an abortion.

This does not mean that Catholic hospitals wouldn't try to save the life of a woman with an ectopic pregnancy, just that the directives are so harebrained** and wild and fanatic that they stipulate extra suffering, uncertainty and possibly medically inferior treatments for the woman, simply because, in theory, the embryo is still alive even though it will never ever be born.

The first quote above is of equal concern, because it rules out abortion even in the case of an ongoing miscarriage unless the woman's life is at risk.  Thus, something similar to this case could happen in one of those American Catholic hospitals, too:

The report found that the application of the ERDs by Mercy Health Partners, a Catholic hospital in Muskegon, subjected five pregnant women to prolonged miscarriages that could have been life-threatening, Becker's Hospital Review reports. The incidents occurred between August 2009 and December 2010.
The five women each experienced a pregnancy complication involving the premature rupture of membranes surrounding the fetus, a condition that can cause miscarriage when it occurs prior to fetal viability. All of the women were less than 20 weeks pregnant at the time they presented symptoms at the hospital (Becker's Hospital Review, 2/19).
The report stated that all five women presented with symptoms indicating immediate delivery would be the safest option (The Guardian, 2/18). Specifically, the report found that all of the women presented with symptoms of infection, including elevated temperature or heart rate. Guidelines from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) state that in such cases, most physicians would induce labor (Becker's Hospital Review, 2/19).
According to the report, the hospital did not tell the women that they could opt for immediate delivery rather than wait for a natural miscarriage, nor did it tell them that immediate delivery was the most appropriate medical care in instances of infection. One of the women included in the report said she asked the hospital for immediate delivery, but they denied her request.

An internal audit by a Mercy Health physician argued that only one of the women showed signs of infection, but even she wasn't moved to another facility where an immediate abortion would have been available.

Similar cases have cropped up in the past.

What I find utterly cruel are these cases where miscarriage is unavoidable, but where the women are not helped or treated because the fetus still has a heartbeat.

This is another case of fanatic and uncaring religious dogma***:  the privileging of a few days of life by a fetus which cannot live over the suffering of the pregnant woman and her partner and the willing acceptance of the risk that such waiting just might kill her, too.  And all this in the name of a divine power, as interpreted by the Catholic Bishops.

Catholic hospitals have increased their market share over the last decades, often by merging with secular hospitals.  That the hospital system created by that merger is quite likely to follow those (hilariously named) Ethical and Religious Directives is not something all people may know. And if the only hospital you can quickly reach while miscarrying is a Catholic hospital, well, be aware that the a Catholic bishop will stand behind your doctor's shoulder and determine what kind of care you should get.**** 

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* The directives also affect all patients, because Catholic hospitals may overrule end-of-life directives and because they will not carry out vasectomies or tubal ligation.  But the so-called "beginning of life" rules deserve special attention as they can endanger the health of a pregnant woman and require her to have additional pointless suffering.

**  With due apologies to all hares who would never invent anything  contrived to hurt hare-women while calling it ethical.

***  So very often about women, have you noticed?  The rules of the Catholic church, the Islamic sharia law and other similar structures hurt women much more than they hurt men.

****  The issues I have discussed here are not solely Catholic issues.  Any life-begins-at-birth group may create similar medical dangers for pregnant women.  See this recent case from Texas as an example.

Weekend Reading Suggestions

1.  This is a good read on Wall Street and parasitic economics.  An example:

So the issue is whether Goldman Sachs, Wall Street and predatory pharmaceutical firms, actually add “product” or whether they’re just exploiting other people. That’s why I used the word parasitism in my book’s title. People think of a parasite as simply taking money, taking blood out of a host or taking money out of the economy. But in nature it’s much more complicated. The parasite can’t simply come in and take something. First of all, it needs to numb the host. It has an enzyme so that the host doesn’t realize the parasite’s there. And then the parasites have another enzyme that takes over the host’s brain. It makes the host imagine that the parasite is part of its own body, actually part of itself and hence to be protected. That’s basically what Wall Street has done. It depicts itself as part of the economy. Not as a wrapping around it, not as external to it, but actually the part that’s helping the body grow, and that actually is responsible for most of the growth. But in fact it’s the parasite that is taking over the growth.

2.  Five female soccer players have filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against the US Soccer Federation.  According to the complaint, women get paid a lot less than men.  A snippet:

As ESPN reports about the players' complaint, "The filing, citing figures from the USSF's 2015 financial report, says that despite the women's team generating nearly $20 million more revenue last year than the U.S. men's team, the women are paid almost four times less."
Citing U.S. Soccer's annual financial reports, the complaint says that the group's initial budget had projected a financial loss for both the men's and women's teams — but that the women's national team's success "almost exclusively" brought a projected $17.7 million profit. For the 2017 financial year, the players say, the federation now "projects a net profit from the WNT of approximately $5 million, while projecting a net loss of nearly $1 million for the MNT."

3.   An excellent and nuanced take on last New Year's Eve sexual violence in Cologne, Germany by Jina Moore.  Among other aspects of the case she discusses the fact that the kind of harassment so many women suffered that night might not even be criminal in Germany.  This struck a bell with me, because I've recently learned that far too many convicted rapists in Finland don't even go to prison, because the laws have no teeth and nobody is getting them dentures.

On Contraception, The New Culture Wars Frontier

Contraception:  The new frontier in the culture wars!

Imagine!  To be able to write that in 2016.  But so it goes, and of course the contents of the battles are different from the past:  Sluttery is now in the forefront of the war and the preposterous idea that health insurance should pay for contraception as it pays for Viagra, say.

But so it goes.  An example:

Colorado House Democrats passed a bill Tuesday they say will clarify the Affordable Care Act and expand the kinds of birth control available to women without a co-pay.
The bill drew just one Republican vote, Kit Roupe of Colorado Springs, which gives it dim prospects as it moves from the Democratic-led House to the Senate, where the GOP holds a one-seat majority and the edge in committees to bottle it up.
…

Republicans argued that the bill might permit people to get abortifacients — drugs that cause an abortion instead of prevent a pregnancy — through Medicaid or employer-supported health plans.
Rep. Gordon Klingenschmitt, a Republican from Colorado Springs who is outspoken against abortion rights, said taxpayers and employers shouldn't have to pay for what they might find offensive.

Bolds are mine.

Mmm.  I find many things my taxes pay offensive.  Wars, for instance, and I'm glad that Rep. Klingenschmitt tells that I shouldn't pay for wars.  And about those employers paying for all that sluttery?  It's called gross remuneration, my friends, and employees have earned the money.  If we took that argument to its extreme, then wage-payers could determine what you spend your wages on, in general.

But all is not doom and gloom in this battle.  Irin Carmon writes about the happenings in the Supreme Court in the Little Sisters case.*  The Court has asked the two sides for more information on their positions.  In my opinion it is asking if there is anything, anything at all, that the Little Sisters would accept:

Tuesday’s order seems to follow up on a question Justice Elena Kagan asked at oral argument: ”Is there any accommodation that the government would offer that would in fact result in women employees of your clients, or students of your clients, getting health care as part of an employer-based plan or a student-based plan, getting contraceptive coverage? Is there any accommodation that would be acceptable?” 

 Or:  If filling in a form is too painful for you so that your employees can get contraceptive coverage in their health insurance, what might not be? 

----------
* I believe that this is part of the Zubik v. Burwell case?

Ian Millhiser summarizes the core issue as follows:

Like Hobby Lobby, Zubik concerns federal rules intended to expand women’s access to birth control. Under these rules, most employers must include a wide range of treatments, from childhood immunizations to cancer screenings to contraception, in the health plan they offer employees. Hobby Lobby held that employers who object to birth control on religious grounds may refuse to offer health plans that cover such treatment.
Yet Hobby Lobby also strongly implied that the government could use an alternative method to foster access to birth control. Under this alternative, religious objectors may either comply with the birth control rules or fill out a two-page form that exempts them from having to provide contraceptive coverage to their employees. In most cases, the objector’s insurance company will then work directly with the objector’s employees to provide them a separate, contraception-only health plan. This fill-out-the-form option is now being challenged in Zubik by religious employers who object to doing the small amount of paperwork they must complete in order to receive an exemption.
Thus, if the Zubik plaintiffs do not prevail, the overwhelming majority of women will receive birth control coverage — albeit through a fairly roundabout method. If these plaintiffs do prevail, on the other hand, that decision could have sweeping implications that stretch far beyond birth control.

See here how Ian views the recent asking for information in this context.