Grumpy Thoughts About Weird Political Thinking. Or Down The Rabbit Hole.

Writing about general politics, women's issues and gender politics can be terribly grating*, as if one's skin slowly becomes perforated and all the viciousness and the acid and the hatred seeps in.  That's when I go all grumpy and mean-spirited.

Here are a few of my not-so-nice grumpy thoughts, in no particular order of importance.  They are about the various ways we can fall down the rabbit hole.

1.  Nobody becomes an expert in, say, the UK politics simply by assuming that it all works exactly the same as US politics.  I see far too much American Internet commentary where the assumption is that total understanding of the situation in some European country can be established through an American filter.  That is just not true.  There are similarities, sure, but the details matter, differences in political systems and demographics matter, different histories and cultures matter, and nothing makes local knowledge unimportant.

2.  Europe is not one country with one major language and one shared history.  Americans shouldn't treat Europe that way, or assume that all countries in Europe participated in the genocide of Jews or in colonizing other parts of the world.  Or that all European countries are, say, places where gender equality is far advanced and the social safety net strong and firm.

Both of the above points apply even more strongly to countries elsewhere on this planet.  I chose to focus on Europe because the superficial similarities between, say, the UK and the US can be deceptive, leading many not-so-informed Americans to believe that they know more about the events in Europe than they actually do.  The reverse also applies:  Many Europeans have views about the US which are largely based on television series and movies and various stereotypes.

3.  Nuance.  In general.  Oh how I wish it were back in fashion.  Not because I would be a cucumber-sandwiches-and-tea type of goddess, but because reality truly is nuanced.  For example, the motives of the Orlando butcher can be many.  We don't have to insist on finding one single motive for what he did.

And while I'm criticizing the quality of political Internet debates, I also want to notice that snark** isn't really the same as refuting someone's arguments.  It can be fun and it can be deserved, but it's not a refutation. Reasoned arguments take effort, and following (and checking) them can also be hard work.  But the results from them can be greater information and better solutions.

4.  There's a tremendous (and invisible) bias in much of political writing of treating one side in a conflict as being without any agency at all.  It's strongest in political propaganda which wishes to paint some group or country as the evil one and so focuses on the deeds of only those 'demonic' forces, but it's also common in more balanced articles.

For instance, victims are often treated as passive objects of the horrible things which happen to them.  Sometimes this is just the truth, as in drone strikes or terrorist attacks,  but more generally even victims may have some agency, some way of resisting, some way of expressing what they think or believe.  That this is frequently ignored is because it doesn't go with the unconscious plot the writer has in her or his mind or with the way which maximizes the impact of the piece.  I have done that myself, so I know.

But it's lamentable because it twists reality, even if the intention behind that is good.

5.  Linked to that grumbling is this one:  People to whom bad things happen are not necessarily all saints, people who are oppressed may themselves also be oppressors in different relationships or would love that opportunity, and yet we should criticize the bad things which have happened to them.  In short, the goals and desires of various oppressed groups are not necessarily in alignment.  Sometimes those groups fight for the same crumbs off the table of the powerful.  And no, not all powerful people are evil just because they are powerful.

6.  What I wrote in 5. can result in the most exquisite contortions for those social justice activists (say, feminists) who base their activism on supporting the simultaneous total rights of many groups and suddenly find that one of those groups might not support the rights of another one of those groups***.

What to do? I've seen some people just cover their eyes and ears and refuse to engage with the dilemma, though some take sides, ranking one group as the more deserving one, even if it's the  group deemed overall most deserving which happens to be violating some progressive values.  Hence the contortions.

These are avoidable.  The way one does that is by holding onto those progressive values in each case, never mind who violates them, while not dropping the support of equal rights of the violating group to all the other good things.  And to be fair, many writers and activists do exactly this.

For an example of what I'm writing about, consider this:

Some (or many) white working class people in the US**** might be racist, and when they are their behavior should be condemned.  But this doesn't mean that they wouldn't be suffering because of their lower social class and because of the increasing income inequality in the US.  When it comes to those aspects their case should be supported.

It's like blowing bubbles with the chewing gum while riding the tricycle.  Doable, right?  At least if we start from the principles-end and not the victim-end.

7.  Something doesn't have to be true just because it is re-tweeted a thousand times.  I've seen two recent Twitter examples of joyful mass dissemination of terrible data.  Lies, in fact, though not intentional lies in either case, just seriously bad interpretations of the sources the initial tweeters used.  A bit like thinking that the page number in a book has something quantitative to say about what's written on the page it refers to.

Always verify.  That is my motto and I follow it 98 times out of each hundred.  The other two times I get caught by you, my very erudite readers.

And that verification is even more urgent if what is asserted pleases your political side.  That's when you might re-tweet something inane and end up with egg on your face.

Most folks will not verify, sadly, and so the lie still careens around the world while the truth tries to figure out a way to refute it in 140 characters and without getting squished in a Twitter war.

That's an oversimplification, of course.  There are cases where the truth isn't that clear, but that's no excuse for not trying for maximal truthfulness in our political communications.
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*  As in "make America grate again," which misquotes Donald Trump.  But he certainly has raised the level of viciousness in Internet commentary.

**  And neither is hate speech.  That should go without saying.

***  Two fairly recent examples of the kinds of conflicts which might cause those contortions, but don't have to:

1.   African-Americans, especially African-American Protestants, are less likely to support gay and Lesbian rights than white Americans.  In 2016, 57% of whites and 42% of African-Americans support same sex marriage. This average (though shrinking) difference in opinions affected the passing of California's Proposition 8 in 2008, which banned same-sex marriage in California.  The proposition was later ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States, but the majority of both African-Americans and, to a lesser extent, Hispanics, voted for it:

African American voters, who were overwhelmingly in favor of banning same sex marriage (70 percent supported Proposition 8) even as they supported Obama even more heavily (94 percent).  And, to a lesser degree, Hispanic voters followed that same trend -- backing Prop. 8 by a 53 percent to 47 percent margin while giving President Obama 74 percent.

2.    Last New Year's eve's mass sexual assaults in Cologne, Germany,  by men of mostly North African origin, many of them asylum seekers, put quite a few feminists writers between the rock and the hard place:  How does one write about a form of sexual assault which truly is a new one in Europe and which is almost impossible for women to defend themselves against, without inciting more anti-Muslim, anti-refugee and racist bigotry?

It looked to me as if several writers felt that they had to choose which group to support, in some overall sense.  Thus I read, repeatedly, that there was nothing new  in these assaults (not true), and that there's something very fishy when suddenly the European right wing is concerned about sexual assaults and women's rights (exceedingly true). 

That the events in Cologne were used by the right-wing nationalists and racists (a group which is not exactly known for its feminism) for their own purposes counted more in the final feminist scale of things for some writers (not necessarily those I linked to above) than what happened to hundreds of women in Cologne.

Yet it should have been possible to note that the vast majority of refugees or migrants in Europe did not participate in these assaults or others of the same type,  that, indeed sexual harassment and assaults are not exactly unknown in European countries, but that it still is very important to nip mass sexual harassment in its bud.  And none of this matters at all when it comes to defending the general rights and welfare of refugees in Europe or when it comes to fighting against racism in general.

I'm sure there are many other similar examples, even recent ones, but those two are the ones I had jotted down in some detail.

More generally, being a feminist, say, doesn't preclude the possibility that one is also a racist or bigoted about trans-people.

People who do anti-racists work can be sexists (by, say, treating African-American women as invisible while focusing on the treatment of African-American men or just by being the ordinary type of sexists) and a few trans people believe in gender-essentialist arguments (about which types of behaviors should go with which gender identities) which in my opinion are sexist.

Progressives can be bigoted about poor whites in the US South.   In all these cases the trick is to disapprove of the bad behavior and to interrogate any iffy arguments, but not to drop some group from those who are deemed good enough to deserve fair treatment overall.  We all deserve fair treatment.

I'm not exploring these examples from some high-and-mighty pure goddess perch, by the way.  I identify lots of unpleasant bottom mud in my own thinking, including the fact that when I took the Implicit Associations Test my results suggested slight sexism in my own views!  How's that for something to think about? 

Though the associations actually measure stuff we are accustomed to quickly correlating with some other stuff, not necessarily our agreement with those associations.  But still.  All the various -isms are in the air we breathe, in our upbringing, in the religious values we are being taught.  So we should have some small amount of compassion mixed with the stern condemnation when we find others failing the value tests.

****  I picked this example and not one about the white middle class people who can also be racist, because I want the group in my example to be low on the totem pole in some other respect.

What To Read, 6/16/16: Hillary Clinton And Sexism, Donald Trump And The Authoritarian Personality, Whole Foods And Wholeness

Today's date is neat!  6/16/16

This post is in lieu of* a proper (exciting, creative and short!) piece because of my writer's block.  It's about two longer articles, both well worth reading, and about one shorter economics piece, just to make this post into a list.



1.  First, Michael Arnovitz at the Medium gives us his thoughts about the possible role of sexism in the low approval ratings of Hillary Clinton over the ages.

As you may remember, I've asked if an otherwise identical but male clone of Hillary Clinton, with the exact same history, the same policies and the same statements, would have met with exactly the same public treatment and the same approval rates.  For the want of that guy clone we cannot tell.







But Arnovitz tries, by posting the above graph of Hillary's approval and disapproval ratings over time and by arguing that the graph shows this:

So what do we see in this data? What I see is that the public view of Hillary Clinton does not seem to be correlated to “scandals” or issues of character or whether she murdered Vince Foster. No, the one thing that seems to most negatively and consistently affect public perception of Hillary is any attempt by her to seek power. Once she actually has that power her polls go up again. But whenever she asks for it her numbers drop like a manhole cover.

What do you think about that theory?  I find it interesting.  Some years in those trend lines seem to support it, such as her improving ratings when her role was pretty much the oddly traditional one of being the long-enduring woman with the philandering husband or when she quit her presidential race against Barack Obama, thus accepting defeat.

But the earlier reaction to her announcement to run for president in 2008 appears too anemic if the public is reacting to inappropriate power grab attempts by a woman.  That, after all, is the really big attempt to seek power.

In any case, the piece is well worth reading for the historical background it offers.

More on The Orlando Massacre. What Motivated the Killer?

So who was the butcher of Orlando, one Omar Mateen?  What motivated him?

His ex-wife tells us that he abused her, cut her off from her family and friends, didn't like gays.  We get a picture of a domestic abuser with sudden leaps into tremendous anger.

His ex-colleague tells us that he made openly racist comments and also openly misogynistic comments:

Daniel Gilroy, a co-worker at G4S Secure Solutions — formerly known as Wackenhut — told NBC News that Mateen was a "very conscientious" employee who was often early for work and was fascinated by law enforcement.

He was also loud, "very excitable" and racist, Gilroy said.

"He was scary in a concerning way," he said. "And it wasn't at times. It was all the time. He had anger management issues. Something would set him off, but the things that would set him off were always women, race or religion. [Those were] his button pushers." 

Working with Mateen was so difficult that Gilroy said he requested a transfer.

"I needed to be out of that situation," he said. "I described it as being toxic."

Mateen "always referred to every other race, religion, gender in a derogatory way," Gilroy added. "He did not like black people at all. That was mentioned once or twice, but more so was women. He did not like women at all. He did like women in a sexual way, but he did not respect them."

 His father believes that seeing two men kissing was what triggered his anger at homosexuality.

All through these stories are signs of mental instability, of anger management issues, of the characteristics of an abuser or a stalker, even if reported by only a few observers.  Yet Mateen was able to acquire the weapons he used for the massacre, and acquire them legally, and this despite having been investigated for terrorism by the FBI in 2013.  Because the investigations cleared him, he was as able as the next potential mass murderer in the US to buy an assault weapon!

Those are some the ingredients in the stew that made up the mind of Omar Mateen, with the necessary added sprinklings of extremist Islamic thought, the justification he himself appears to have applied to his butcheries by swearing support for ISIS, though whether he actually was a radicalized Muslim, in the sense of deep beliefs,  or whether he just used religious justification for acts he would have committed in any case is not clear.  To me it looks like he had his hatreds all neatly in a row and then looked for some type of blessing for them.*

The political reactions to this stew on the net are mostly predictable, and best understood by looking at what the two sides of the US political aisle are already for or against.  Thus, the right warns us about the dangers of radical Islam (it's everywhere!) but is also against any attempt to regulate access to assault weapons, and somewhat agrees with the extremist Islamic tenet that homosexuality is a deplorable sin, though not one that deserves the death penalty.**  On the whole the US right isn't terribly concerned with the potential for general anti-Muslim bigotry that the talk about religious wars and general Trumpery can support***. 

The left, according to the usual rules, picks the positions that are exactly opposite to those the right has picked.

I am with the left when it comes to concerns about using cases like the Orlando massacre as a justification for making the lives of hundreds of thousands ordinary Muslims more difficult.  That is wrong and must be condemned.

I am also with the left when it criticizes the wanton access to murderous weapons in this country or the money-starved mental health care sector.  And I'm with those who point out that the vast majority of mass killings in the United States are carried out by men and not by women, even though women are equally able to get hold of assault weapons, equally likely to suffer from mental instability, and equally likely to listen to extremist preachers.

Where I diverge from some on the left is in my determination to criticize all religious teachings I disagree with, whether they crop up in Catholicism, fundamental Evangelism or conservative Islam.  I believe the criticism of ideas is crucial, unless we wish our gardens of philosophical and religious ideas to be taken over by the most noxious of weeds.

I also believe that we must very clearly distinguish between criticizing extremist ideas and attacking people who belong to (or nominally belong to) various wider religious groups.  Doing the former and avoiding the latter are both equally important, and we should be able to do both simultaneously.

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*  I have written a rant on the Orlando massacres in another post.  That was my emotional reaction to the use of religion to justify deeds of utter horror, the way a stamp of approval can be applied to the most horrendous of human crimes by interpreting them as merely the ordinary day jobs of god's little executioners, just carrying out god's will.

We must erase that stamp of approval, and the job must be done by the preachers inside the religions and their sects.  Outsiders cannot achieve that erasure, but outsiders can demand it, must demand it.

Though of course it is the need for the label of an 'outsider' which is inherent in many of these religious dilemmas.  Your god or mine?  Let's see which wins.  And yet any real god(s) there might be is (are) silent as the stones are.

**  Seven countries have, at least in theory, a death punishment for homosexuality:

According to the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) seven countries still retain capital punishment for homosexual behavior: Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iran, Afghanistan, Mauritania, Sudan, and northern Nigeria.^[67][68] In United Arab Emirates it is a capital offense.^[69][11] 

*** This is necessary reading in that context.

Where Is Evil? First Thoughts on the Orlando Massacre.

A continuously updated list of those who died in Orlando, Florida can be found here.


Tell me, you with your holy books*, where is evil?

Is it in the needs of two men I know, men who love each other, who serve each other, who care for each other, but who have also adopted a child whom nobody wanted, who love that child, who tend that child, and that child, he flourishes?  Is it in their small family that I should look for evil?

Or is it in the life of a woman I knew who loved other women?  Is she the Evil One?  Does it weigh so heavily on your scales that her love was for women?  Heavier than her anonymous funding of two college degrees for needy students?  Heavier than all the coins she donated to AIDS research? Heavier than the coffin she paid for to bury a neighbor who had nobody left to pay for her funeral and nobody else left to attend it?

Tell me, you who are so heavy with your religious knowledge, how do you measure evil?  A stone of violence falls into the dark, murky waters, yet you seek ripples elsewhere, seek for borders violated, look for rules broken, even when those rules deserved to be broken, even when that breaking hurts no-one but helps someone to finally breathe fully, to finally be fully human, to even make a willing difference for good.

You measure your evil with a magnifying glass, carry your petty findings to a vindictive god you have imagined into being, while real evil rolls over the landscape of humanity, a dark, menacing cloud of wars and violence. 

And it is that dark, looming cloud you watch with approval and admiration, it is that dark cloud you want to rain down blood and pain, to wipe out those small imaginary crimes you so treasure, because they are not your crimes, because you are not one of the sinners you have defined!

No, your crimes are the declarations you make, the way you choose yourself as the judge, the jury and the executioner, the way you interpret your imaginary warlord god's desires to stomp, to destroy and to keep oppressing those always oppressed, the way you usurp the role of a divine power, interpreting the languages you hear in your head as the commands of your thunder god.

So tell me, you with your holy books, why is some love evil?  This world is dying, its flowers and trees, even the very grass is dying, because of our insufficient love for it, because of our inordinate love for power and for greed and for our tribes,  and, yes, because of our inflamed love for having the exactly correct ancient letters and words obeyed without a question, to silence those questions, to win, for our tribe, for our created gods, for ourselves.
 

It is that lack of love which is killing us all, not the love between two women or two men. 

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*  This 'you with your holy books' is not meant to be a religious person or a person who believes in some divine power.  Those are not the people I address my rant to.

They are the people who gather together all available data about the cultural rules and norms which prevailed two thousand or fifteen hundred years ago, who decide that those cultural norms are some god's everlasting law for all humans and who then decide that those who disagree with these beliefs should be put down because the odd god thus imagined would want it, because that odd god finds pain and blood and the eradication of humans less insulting than loving the wrong person, with kindness and with care.

The 'you with your holy books' is not the person responsible for the massacre in Orlando, Florida, and my rant doesn't argue it or explore the role of mental illness or the role of guns available as freely as candies. 

But anyone interpreting ancient writings literally falls guilty of the crime of abetting, of justifying and of glorifying violence against the innocent, just as anyone interpreting ancient writings literally also falls guilty of the crime of misogyny and the oppression of women.

Reminder To Self. And About Birds.

Self, stop trying to write long and tedious posts just because you feel you should.  They all end up half-finished, gathering dust inside unused parts of your brain, inside your computer and on those odd coffee-stained and torn-up bits of paper.

Oh, hello there!

That was for me.  The long posts were supposed to be for you, my imaginary readers, on topics such as the representation of various groups of Americans in the current US Congress, what's wrong with current feminism according to Echidne, and other equally not-so-interesting topics.   I doubt they will ever be done, because of my stupid tendency of trying to chew more than anyone can digest.

But in any case, tl;dr should be the new slogan of this blog.  Tl;dr means that something is too long and so was not read.

Let's talk about birds.

I have begun gardening again, after a long break.  Hence my permanently black finger-nail linings.  As part of that gardening, I planted a clematis which is an infant, right now, but is one day expected to be a wonderful tall fountain of burgundy silk, frothy lace and inebriating perfumes*.  Think of garden porn.

Anyway, I put up twine for the baby clematis, as a hint about the most likely direction it should climb (up the arch) when it has gotten its root system plump enough, after recovering from the transplantation operation.

But a robin in the nest-building business wanted that twine.  She/he wanted it so much!  I laughed watching the sudden bird helicoptering, the wings going extremely fast while the beak hung onto the twine (which, sadly for the robin, was tied to the archway for the clematis).  I laughed when it backed up, with the twine in its mouth, pulling, pulling, pulling, until it fell on its tiny bird ass.

Then I felt guilty, and went out with about ten pieces of nice soft wool thread for the birds.  I left them right next to the clematis twine.   The robin came back, walked over all that nice wool, and returned to the battle with the clematis twine.

I ended up cutting that twine so that the robin could get it.  She/he later came back for all that wool, too, but only after the clematis twine had been taken.

Somehow I expected that birds would grab string by the middle and fly away with the ends flapping about in air.  But the robin gathered all the twine and threads up very neatly, into little folds, and flew away as if carrying a tiny suitcase.

I want to come back as a nest-building robin.

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*  It's much more likely that the clematis will expire.  But the hope is as big a part of gardening for pleasure as what actually happens.  The strawberries I've eaten in my imagination were mostly eaten by the birds, too.

Quick Election Thoughts

Now this is fascinating:  According to Think Progress (and my own eyes) the official website of the Republican Party has nothing about Donald Trump.  The invisible candidate?

That must feel very awkward for the traditional Republicans. As if someone had stolen your chair, your name and your principles and there's very little you can do, because the thefts didn't break any law.  But attempts to regain all that property would interfere with the idea that votes matter, even in Republican primaries.

That's historic, in a sense, but not so historic as Hillary Clinton's position as the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party.  Because of that woman thing,*
which requires a much deeper post than I can write today.  But stay tuned, as they say.

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*  And that older women thing Joan Walsh writes about, the idea that women's votes somehow don't matter as much once they pass forty or their fuckability sell-by-date, whichever comes earlier. 

I spotted that subtext, too, and even a slight hint that older men's votes don't really count, either,  while following the Democratic primaries.  All votes should count equally.

Still, the  invisibility of older women as anything but grandmothers is in the air we all breathe and it even colors politics.  Though if we get an older woman president, who knows what might happen!

110 Years Ago Finnish Women Won The Vote

On June 1, 1906, 110 years ago,  this happened:

In tiny Finland, then part of the empire of Russia, women won the right to vote in the semi-independent Finnish elections.  The next Finnish parliament (voted in during 1907) had nineteen female members.  Here are thirteen of them:

The biographies (in Finnish, sorry) of those nineteen women make fascinating reading.  They were politically active, some to the extent of later spending time in prison for their political convictions. * They were teachers, journalists, seamstresses and servants.**  They were concerned with the position of women in the Finnish society and sought to improve that position through legislation, but they also had other political concerns.  They made a difference.

Those nineteen women were the world's first female members of parliament.


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* That would be the socialists or communists.  Several of them were imprisoned during the Finnish Civil War and one woman even later.

** The occupations I listed are the ones which had more than one representative.  The women also included a weaver, a farmer's wife, an entrepreneur (who was also one of the founding members of the Social-Democratic Workers' Party!), a life-long feminist activist (Alexandra Gripenberg) and even a woman who was a manager of a bank from 1917 to 1925.  Miina Sillanpää became the first Finnish female minister during the 1920s, was responsible for beginning the organizing of female labor and created a network of homes for unwed mothers.  She has earned a permanent place in Finnish history.

Both Sides Do It! Eric Alterman on the Pretend-Objectivity of Political Journalism

You can read Alterman's June 2nd article here.  It's about the urgent need of political journalists in the US to look for equivalence between, say,  the heinous deeds of Republican politicians on the one hand and the equally heinous deeds of Democratic politicians on the other hand (or vice versa), even when no real equivalence can be found.  In the latter case the demands of pretend-objectivity necessitate the creation of a false equivalence.

I wrote about that at least thrice on this blog:  ten years ago, nine years ago and six years ago.  From the 2007 post:*

A third pattern of interest is the "false equivalence". Suppose that I throttle my neighbor in a fit of temporary insanity, and you once forgot to send a Christmas card to your best friend from college. In the IOKIYAAR world these two deeds would be regarded as equally bad, but only if I am a Republican and you are a Democrat. (Well, your deed might actually be worse, especially if you happen to get Caitlin Flanagan to write it up.) The "false equivalence" treatment is probably the most serious one of the various patterns of IOKIYAAR, because it extends to all debate about issues so that a science debate must give equal time or space for those who don't believe in evolution or in any global warming whatsoever.

Alterman delves into the reasons for the enduring nature of false equivalencies in American political journalism.  My impression is that this is a bigger problem in the US than in, say, the UK, where journalists often assume the role of a slightly hostile interrogator when interviewing politicians.  That role makes providing factual corrections considerably easier for the journalist than the American "he said, she said" model which demands coverage of "both sides," even when one side clearly is preposterous.

Now how to fix that problem?  It can be tricky for the reasons Alterman mentions, but it shouldn't be impossible, given that some other countries don't require their journalists to act quite so servile. 

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* IOKIYAAR is an acronym for "It's ok if you are a Republican".  I hate hate acronyms.  The acronym for that is IHHA.

Yves Smith On the Perfidy of Hillary Clinton. Echidne Reacts.

Yves Smith, famous for running the Naked Capitalism site, does not care for Hillary Clinton, as she most forcefully writes on Politico.  Scott Lemieux, on Lawyers, Guns and Money, has a funny response to Yves.  That's where I found the link to Yves' Politico piece.

You should read both pieces, because my post won't address most of the meat (some rotting, some stinking, some still good to eat) (1) in Yves' column, and Scott does respond to some of them, though not all.

But before I write about what I really want to write about, let me make clear that I share with Yves her concern that the American working class, including the white working class, has been treated like the ugly step-sisters in the Cinderella (2) fairy tale:

The glass slipper of approval and of financial help never fits their large and horny feet, but slips beautifully on the tiny and well pedicured feet of the rich.   The fairy godmother of the Democratic Party waves her magical wand to pretend-help only the poor in other countries (through trade agreements and outsourcing) while blue-collar jobs in the United States slowly disappear down a sink hole, leaving behind dying factory towns where people have nothing to produce except drugs, divorces and despair.

On Female Modesty And Suspension Bridges

Here's an interesting story from the UK Bristol Post, about a woman who is now believed to have designed a suspension bridge in the nineteenth century.  But it starts with a very odd statement:

A BRISTOL mother-of-six has been added to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography with the revelation that she – and not Brunel – designed the Clifton Suspension Bridge.

Doesn't this remind you of the NYT 2013 obituary of Yvonne Brill, the female rocket scientist?   It began with a description of her cooking and mothering skills.  I'm trying to figure out how something of this kind could be used for a male scientist or inventor:

Albert Einstein, the father of three,...

Nah.  It wouldn't work, and not only because I used such a famous scientist as my example.  The reason why it's still done for female scientists and inventors is because most cultures keep defining women solely by their roles within the family (see my post on Erdogan).

So what did Sarah Guppy, the woman who is credited with the design of the Clifton Suspension Bridge, do?

Guppy was born Sarah Beach in Birmingham in 1770 but lived her adult life in Bristol after marrying Samuel Guppy, from a wealthy family which ran a Bristol sugar company.
She had six children, but was almost secretly one of the foremost engineering, inventing and designing minds of the Georgian era. Her inventions and patents, for everything from a new way of protecting ships from barnacles to a device to boil an egg from the steam of a kettle, had to be registered by her husband in the name of 'the Guppy family'.
In 1811 she patented a way of piling foundations to create a new type of suspension bridge, which provided the blueprint for both Brunel's Clifton Suspension Bridge and Thomas Telford's Menai Bridge.
She and her family were close to Brunel – her son Thomas was GWR's principal engineer – and she gave the design and plans for her bridge over the Avon to Brunel to enter into the competition.

Bolds are mine.  One reason for the disappearing women of history is evident in that bolded sentence:  the assumption that ambition and putting oneself forward were unbecoming in a woman.  The linked article notes that, too:

Sarah Guppy first patented the design for a suspension bridge across the Avon Gorge in 1811 and gave her plans to Brunel for free because she was a modest woman who wanted to see them used for the public good.

Mmm.  Female modesty, of course, is still an abiding value in many cultures.*

And so is the view that ambition is unbecoming in a woman.  Hillary Clinton's desire to be the president of the United States is suspect in a way the desires of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are not**.   There's something "unnatural" about it.

But the reverse is the truth, in my not-so-humble opinion.  Ambition is a human characteristic.  For women, however, cultural training has turned it into something they can only demonstrate indirectly, on behalf of their spouses or children or while helping powerless people or animals in dire need for help.

What has not been traditionally acceptable is for women to show ambition for themselves, perhaps because that conflicts with the traditional ideal of the all-sacrificing mother, the Virgin Mary of Christian thought.***

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* The hijab, for example, has been justified on that basis.  Though there are cultures where men's behavior is expected to be modest, too, at least when compared to the American society,  the requirements of modesty are and have always been much stronger for women.  As a rather facile example, just consider what "ladylike" behavior has meant in the past.

All this makes me wonder what the societal advantages of that female modesty ideal might be and who it is who benefits from them.  What would be so bad about values which allow all people some modicum of ambition and also require from all people some modicum of modesty and concern for others?

**  I fully acknowledge that the platforms of the candidates differ widely, that Trump appears to be running on nothing more than the fumes of his own personal ambition, and so on.  But the discomfort with Clinton's ambition does seem to have at least a few roots in those traditional views about how good women behave.

*** Have you noticed that we learn nothing about Mary The Person from the Bible?  She is simply the extreme form of the modest and yielding woman, having no opinions of her own.  A frightening thought, given her position as a role model, at least within certain religious and demographic groups.

More on The Demos Misogyny Study And The Gender Of The Sender

Remember how I ranted about the lack of a written report on the Twitter misogyny study by Demos?  Well, now there IS a written report, of a sort (thanks to AT in my comments for bringing it to my attention).  I quote from the beginning of the report:

The results were presented at House of Commons launch of Recl@im
on 26 May 2016.

Emphasis is mine.

My previous blog post on the study was posted on 26 May, too, so that the report wasn't available then.  What a relief, to be right (goddesses mostly are), for Demos to be right when they told me that there was no report on the 25 May,  and also to now have that report!

Then to the analysis.  I am particularly interested in how the study defined the gender of the person who sent misogynistic tweets, for the simple reason that when I look at the information various people on Twitter give about themselves I'm often unable to deduce their gender from it.


Here is how the report tells us it was done:

It seems that the algorithm uses someone's Twitter handle (or actual name, if used) and the user description people give about themselves on Twitter.  Demos tells us that the algorithm was tested in 2015 against traditional survey questions which allowed them to see that its accuracy was approximately 85%.  But there is no link to that study.

I don't want to sound like a grumpy goddess here, but academics are taught the way to write research reports for a very good reason:  Transparency of methods and the ability of others to go backwards to any sources they wish to study in greater detail.  I can't go and read that 2015 study, because it is not sourced*.

This criticism does not mean that I'm saying the 2015 study doesn't exist or doesn't show what the above quote says it does.  All it means is that I can't access that information on my own and must place complete trust on Demos' say-so.  And note that this 2015 survey or study is crucial.  It's the only information we are given about the accuracy of the method Demos used.

The results section of the current study tell us that when the algorithm was applied to all 213,000 tweets labeled as aggressive (by an algorithm), it gave 48% of the originators as male and 42% as female, and the remaining 10% as
"institution" which seems to also cover any tweeters whose gender cannot be ascertained by the algorithm.  If the latter category is omitted, the breakdown would be 52% female and 47% male.

A sample of 250 tweets was selected for closer scrutiny by a human analyst, with these results:

The report then concludes that the algorithm "slightly over-estimated" the proportion of male tweets.

Which means that the human analyst is assumed to have gotten the gender of the senders right, right?  What does the human analyst base his or her decisions on?  Was that person asked to use the same rules the algorithm uses or just his or her own feelings about what the gender of the sender might be?

The answers to those questions matter.  If the analyst was asked to use the same rules as the algorithm uses, the verification process itself would depend on the accuracy of the algorithm, and that takes us back to the 2015 results.  If the analyst was asked to use some other criteria or just personal feelings, it would still be important to understand what those criteria and feelings might be.**

Once again, I'm asking for a more thorough write-up of the study, because that is necessary for greater understanding of its results.

The report contains some information I didn't get from the various summaries of its findings:  It's possible that specific events in popular culture might have had an impact on the findings:

That seems to be a very good reason not to sample just one short time period in studies of this sort, but, say, to sample one day in each of the preceding twelve months.

Note that none of this is really a critical reading of the study itself, because for that I'd need the 2015 study about the accuracy of the algorithm and more data on how the human analyst classified gender.  Rather, this post is a critique of the way the study is reported.

It is possible that women tweet misogyny at roughly the same rates as men, because both women and men grow up in the same cultures and are taught the same tools of attack against women.  Evidence from various discrimination studies, both about gender and race, suggest that those who belong to the discriminated groups can also be found among those who discriminate against that group.***

At the same time, much more precise studies are required before we can state  something like that.  I'd like such studies to create a sample which amounts to some averaging over time, so that specific events don't influence the likely composition of the hate-tweeters, and to do (or at least show) a lot more work on the question of how to identify the gender of those who send misogynistic tweets.  Finally, a more thorough analysis of the contents of a sample of those tweets truly is needed.  There's a big difference between someone tweeting "You slut, how dare you not like x"  and "I'd like to hate fuck you, you slut."




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*  And no, it's not OK to expect me to spend hours looking for some such study on the net.  It's a courtesy researchers are expected to extend to their readers to give their sources.

**   For example, only pictures, Twitter handles and the description people give of themselves in the user description?  Or also the contents of tweets the person has sent recently?  Or something else?

***  For gender, see this, this and this post of mine.  For race, see this recent study about Airbnb discrimination against African-American renters or hotel guests which found that African-American hosts were not less likely to be found among the discriminating hosts than white hosts.

At the same time, other anecdotal evidence suggests something different about the quality of anonymous hatred.  For instance,  the sample of voicemails the Chairwoman of Nevada's Democratic Party received from various callers shows a gender difference in the type of hostility Lange received.  Likewise, the hate tweets I've seen women receive on Twitter often describe the desire of the sender to commit various sexual (often violent) acts on the recipient, and those acts require a male body.







 

Going Cold Turkey: Erdogan Wants Women To Use No Contraception

That's what the president of Turkey,  Recep Tayyip Erdogan, just said:

Speaking at an educational foundation in Istanbul on Monday, Mr Erdogan said: "I say this openly: We will increase our descendants, we will increase our population.
"Family planning, birth control, no Muslim family can practice such an understanding".

Erdogan really is an Islamist, though of course he is also an egoistic wannabe dictator.  He earlier noted that women are not the equals of men and should, instead,  focus on being mothers of the many.

Even his daughter in 2015  defended the Koran-based rule that sons inherit twice as much as daughters as a good form of gender justice (not gender equality, mind you).*

No, Mr. Erdogan is certainly not a feminist, rather the reverse.  That should have been evident to all from the minute he grabbed power.  As an example, under his reign the "Ministry for Women" was renamed the "Ministry for Family Affairs."

That tells you everything you need to know about how women are viewed by the current Turkish administration.  Indeed, it may be one of the countries in which women's rights are declining, though there are several others.**

But neither is Mr. Erdogan an environmentalist.  One of the best things humans could do to help Mother Earth is not to procreate so much, but in certain minds (such as those of Mr. Erdogan and Mr. Trump)  the short-sighted desire for power and greed outweighs considerations such as the future survival of the human race.***

--------------
*  She interprets the Koranic verse 2:228 which states that men are a degree above women to mean that men have that advantage because they are assumed to financially support women. 

Thus, she sees a divine command where I see  the economics and cultural rules of marriage which prevailed in the Middle East during prophet Mohammed's time, and which were later codified into the Shariah law by a bunch of medieval men.

**  Turkey is an example of a country which would dearly love to curtail women's legal rights, but hasn't  managed to do that, yet.  That may yet happen, given that Erdogan's voter base lives in the conservative rural areas of Turkey where women's rights appear to be a largely abstract and meaningless concept.

*** I have also read that Erdogan fears the higher birth rate of the Kurds inside Turkey and wants to start a population war as well as the usual kind of killing war. 

The New Demos Study On Twitter Misogyny. A Procedural Fail.

Demos in the UK tells us that it has carried out a new study on Twitter misogyny (the hatred of women and girls).  Newsweek headlines its summary of the study findings like this: 

Half of Misogyny on Twitter Comes From Women

Which is interesting.  Another summary tells us a little bit more of the study, such as the words it picked for measuring misogyny: "whores" and "sluts".   That "cunt" was left out is odd.  I would have thought that it would be the very choicest of words to measure woman-hatred.

The  study found 1.5 million tweets with either one or both of the search words "slut" and "whore" during a three-week period.  That sample was then winnowed down by using a Natural Language Processing Algorithm to remove from the original sample all pornographic marketing tweets (which were 54% of all tweets with those words!)*, and all other tweets which do not express anger in the use of those terms.  The remaining 10,000 aggressive tweets are the focus of future analysis, such as the sex of the tweeter.

Now, how did Demos decide if a tweet was sent by a man or a woman?  In my experience few people (at least in politics) tweet under their own name or any normal type of name.  Most people have Twitter handles, and many of those are very hard to attribute to either men or women.  Pictures?  I know several people on Twitter who have the picture of some famous man or woman whose apparent gender is not the same as the tweeter's gender.  And I, for instance, have a picture of embroidered snakes on my Twitter page.

After thinking all that, I was eager to learn how all that was done in the study.  But guess what?  There is no written study anywhere on the wide and varied Internets!

I then e-mailed Demos to ask for the url of the study.  The rapid response I received (thanks, Demos!) told me --  and here comes the fun part! -- that there IS NO WRITTEN REPORT THAT PEOPLE COULD ANALYZE.

That is bullshit.  Absolute bullshit.  Just think about what that approach means for scientific inquiry:  Nobody, but nobody, can tell if you have done the research correctly and nobody, but nobody can post a criticism if your study is a bouquet of nose hairs with dried snot on them.
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* How can we be sure that these tweets aren't based on misogyny?  Do corporations get an automatic pass?

Added later:  That there is no report does not imply that the results are incorrect, only that we cannot tell if they are correct or incorrect.  But a written report is very important.  The reason that researchers write their studies up is so that others can see what they did, how they did it, and also so that others can judge whether the study was done right or not.

Do Brutes Vote For Trump Or Sanders? I address Tyler Cowen's Theory.

At the Marginal Revolution Tyler Cowen takes a crack at explaining what's wrong with today's world (well, today's world from Cowen's angle):

Donald Trump may get the nuclear suitcase, a cranky “park bench” socialist took Hillary Clinton to the wire, many countries are becoming less free, and the neo-Nazi party came very close to assuming power in Austria.  I could list more such events.

Haven’t you, like I, wondered what is up?  What the hell is going on?
I don’t know, but let me tell you my (highly uncertain) default hypothesis.  I don’t see decisive evidence for it, but it is a kind of “first blast” attempt to fit the basic facts while remaining within the realm of reason.

The contemporary world is not very well built for a large chunk of males.  The nature of current service jobs, coddled class time and homework-intensive schooling, a feminized culture allergic to most forms of violence, post-feminist gender relations, and egalitarian semi-cosmopolitanism just don’t sit well with many…what shall I call them?  Brutes?

Quite simply, there are many people who don’t like it when the world becomes nicer.  They do less well with nice.  And they respond by in turn behaving less nicely, if only in their voting behavior and perhaps their internet harassment as well.

Wow.  What a thesis!  Lots of men are brutes, and that's why Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have their support in the US, while in Austria the brutes almost voted in a far-right president.*  How do you like them apples?

Reading that post (and the attached comments**) reminded me of the weird feeling I get when I venture into the evo-psycho blog-land.  Those blogs are among the places where I truly feel like an alien from outer space, because people like me (women) are the object of various dissections and the target of quasi-evolutionary explanations for our innate inferiority and the narrow and small lives nature forces us to lead, all couched in sciencey-sounding language.  We are viewed as an alien species, necessary to domesticate and to manage but not to befriend.

But Cowen's post is almost a reversal on that!  Now it is men who are more likely to be brutes, though the implied reason for that is still innate, and the subtle hints Cowen gives us suggest that the Uprising Of The Brutes is partly due to feminism:

Short Posts, 5/25/2016: Elizabeth Warren, the gender gap in STEM salaries, Iranian women And Birds

I.  Read Elizabeth Warren's speech, if you haven't done so already.  My first reaction was that this is how to attack Donald Trump.  But then the cynical me wondered if Trump has a dispensation from all ordinary political rules so that nothing, whatsoever, can harm him in the eyes of those who find him delicious.

2. A study looking at the gap in men's and women's early-career salaries in STEM field argues that only two variables explain why men earn more:

Women earn nearly one-third less than men within a year of completing a PhD in a science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM) field, suggests an analysis of roughly 1,200 US graduates.
Much of the pay gap, the study found, came down to a tendency for women to graduate in less-lucrative academic fields — such as biology and chemistry, which are known to lead to lower post-PhD earnings than comparatively industry-friendly fields, such as engineering and mathematics.
But after controlling for differences in academic field, the researchers found that women still lagged men by 11% in first-year earnings. That difference, they say, was explained entirely by the finding that married women with children earned less than men. Married men with children, on the other hand, saw no disadvantage in earnings.

I haven't read the study, but the results don't clash with my expectations.  The starting salaries for men and women in the same jobs tend to be roughly the same*.  Most differences accrue over time, and that's why studies looking at early career salaries or wages are not as informative as they might seem.

The study's leading author notes that the results don't explain why mothers would be paid less:

Weinberg says that the data cannot identify or tease apart factors that might explain why married women with children earn less — among the possibilities, whether employers assign different responsibilities and salaries to these women, or whether the women spend less time or energy on their careers. But, he says, “our data suggest that these positions, as they are currently structured and operate, are not fully family-friendly for women”.

This is where not reading the study might get me in trouble, but if the salary data really is from the first year on the job it sounds very unlikely that the pay difference would be caused by the women spending less time or energy on their careers.**  That's because all the academic salary contracts I know of have been annual, the year's salary being set in advance, and not something that can be easily changed after observing how the worker is doing, and I believe the same is true of corporate contracts in STEM-type jobs. 

But all that depends on the time period the salary data applies to. (Say, the first year after graduation vs. the fifth year after graduation)  --  In any case, I'd like to see a study of this type done with questions about the amount of parenting the worker's partner does.  That could cast further light on those questions, if we find that mothers get lower salaries even if their partners do most of the child-care.

3.  Some young Iranian women dress as boys, to avoid the police-enforced Islamic dress codes for women.  They are not trans men, just women who want to have the freedom of movement that comes with men's clothes. 

I hope they don't get caught, because the punishment for such a large breach of the female dress code is probably more than a verbal warning.  But because the male dress is both literally and symbolically freer and more comfortable the risk might be worth taking.

4.  I was going to give you a cat picture (an old Internet tradition), but Blogger refuses to cooperate.  Instead, I'm going to tell you about my so-called lawn. 

It was recently the Home Depot equivalent for several different types of nest-building birds, each with its beak full of dry grass.  That made me feel virtuous about that thing called "thatch."  I do wish the birds weren't so very noisy at four am, but I'm thankful for their presence.  




------------
 *  The reasons for this are several, but one of them is that the Equal Pay Act of 1963 makes it illegal to pay men and women different amounts for the same work and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act makes sex discrimination in employment also illegal.  An employer bent on discriminating against women can still do so, provided that individual salary offers remain secret.  That's one reason why the American secrecy about wages and salaries is problematic.  Note that it's also quite possible that employers don't discriminate in hiring.

**  It's not impossible.  But an employer assigning a woman with children different tasks from the beginning is more likely, as is the possibility that the woman herself asks for some kind of accommodation on the basis of her family responsibilities, and that accommodation decreases her earnings.















 

On The Political Treatment of Harry Clinton, Hillary's Identical Twin Brother

 Jia Tolentino at Jezebel has thoughts about David Brooks' recent column which wonders why Hillary Clinton is so disliked.  Brooks thinks she needs to become warmer, more appealing, to have hobbies.  Tolentino points at the invisible elephant in the room: Misogyny, or at least very gendered expectations,  might have something to do with the Public Drubbing of Hillary.

I've told you before how very hard it is to judge the role of sexism or misogyny in the treatment Hillary Clinton has received over the years.  That's because the number of powerful women in American politics (or, indeed, on this globe) is so small that we can't really generalize anything from those samples.

But one mental experiment is worthwhile:  Imagine that Hillary Clinton has an identical male twin (never mind the impossibility of that)  whose career matches hers exactly.  This Harry Clinton has committed all the same political "crimes" Hillary Clinton has.  Would he have gotten the same press, provoked the same primal rage from so many, been subjected to equally elaborate right-wing slaughter parties?

I doubt that, though your mileage can vary.  That's because people don't expect, say,  Ted Cruz to show a softer side, to tell us about his hobbies (ohmygoddess, torturing little animals?*).  And I, for one, do not want to learn anything about Donald Trump's hobbies.

It's quite feasible to see all the flaws in Clinton's political career, to frown on her hawkishness in foreign policy, to criticize her shifting statements about her basic values, to not want to vote for her, ever, and to still ask if that imaginary Harry would have been weighed on an equally sensitive scale of anger and disapproval and found equally wanting.

Harry wouldn't have to be likeable, and if he had to, he could just offer to have a beer with you.  Hillary sharing a beer with you?  That's inauthentic, and, besides, for some men sharing a beer with a woman has undertones of flirtation, for others it raises concerns about whether women should drink at all or what a beer-guzzling woman means.

My points are that  a)  the possible ways of signaling likeability are not the same for men and women in politics, b)  we don't necessarily demand likeability from male politicians and c) the traditional expectation that women should be likeable can clash with how we define competency**.  That last aspect can results in a Catch-22.

Harry wouldn't need a justification to run for the president of the United States.  Nobody would ask him if he's simply blinded by his own selfish ambition, because ambition is an admired characteristic in men, not, even now,  so much in women, unless it is siphoned into indirect ambition and avid support for the husband (think of Nancy Reagan looking at Ronald with admiring eyes) or for the children.

How does one begin to disentangle that knot of gendered expectations from Hillary's personal qualifications and character?  Even using our imaginary friend, Harry Clinton, doesn't get us very far, because his prior life wouldn't have included being the spouse of a former president of the United States.***  It's an impossible job, that disentangling.

Still, I smell something in the political winds buffeting Hillary Clinton that is not entirely attributable to her own flaws of behavior or personality, an exaggerated reaction, one which our Harry would not have been subjected to. 

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Public Health Announcement (for my emotional health!):

This post is not about Clinton vs. Sanders and it is not about Clinton vs. Trump or Sanders vs. Trump or about what each of them stands for.  It's about trying to measure sexism in American politics and the difficulties of using the Hillary Clinton case for that purpose.

* A joke.

** I would think these conflicting expectations are even trickier to satisfy if a politician is not only female but also black, because of the "angry black woman" stereotype.

*** Or if it had, we'd have to change the past to too large an extent to keep this mind experiment going.  A gay Harry, the spouse of former president Bill Clinton, for instance, would change the  imaginary past United States into a far more advanced country than it really was.

But would such a Harry be seen as abetting Bill's philandering in the 1990s?  I doubt that. 


   

The Year Of The Political Troll?

Evan Osnos writes about the year of the political troll in a recent issue of New Yorker.  He postulates that the trolls have finally come out of the keyboard closet:

The ur-troll himself, one Donald Trump,  now trolls openly on the Republican platform.  But the Democrats aren't blameless, either, given the recent events in Nevada where  Roberta Lange,  the Chairwoman of Nevada's Democratic Party,  received many trolling phone calls and texts (including indirect death threats) from some enraged supporters of Senator Sanders.

Anna Merlan, writing for Jezebel, contacted three of those enraged Sanders supporters who had texted Ms. Lange.  I find these quotes by the trolls in her piece fascinating:

Atlanta Man declined to give his name when I reached him. He sounded weary and embarrassed. He said he’d been getting phone calls all day.
“Most of them are just hangups,” he said. “I’ve gotten threats on Twitter, too. But I don’t make a big deal out of that stuff. All I can say is that I’ve apologized to her and I’m sorry. I said one thing I guess that somebody took as a threat.”

Atlanta Man called Ms. Lange a corrupt bitch and noted that someone will hurt her.  To clarify what somebody might have taken as a threat.  Mmm.

Then there is Ethan, who saw menacing threats as a good way to represent the anger of the people and who also seems to think that Internet threats are exactly like a computer game:

“We know where you live, where you work, where you eat,” another text to Lange read. “Where your kids go to school/grandkids. We have everything on you. We are your neighbors, friends, family, etc.”
The person who sent that one is a 26-year-old named Ethan with a Wisconsin area code, although he assured me the number was fake (and, I assume, the name was as well).
“Do you know what the concept of Anonymous is?” he asked me, immediately.
I said that I did. Ethan explained he’d been undertaking an Anonymous-esque action, but also, that he was trying to play a threatening character deliberately, to send a message.

Ethan then explains that Ms. Lange is "very much a top person" and stands for the "establishment." 

Ms. Lange works in a restaurant.  Here she asks Senator Sanders to be more forceful in condemning the verbal violence she has suffered from some Sanders' supporters:

“I think he should acknowledge that there were death threats to me, that there [were] death threats to my husband, that there [were] death threats to my 5-year-old grandson, that they called my work and tried to ruin … like I said, this is my volunteer job being chair,” she said.
“I have a full-time job where single mothers and people trying to pay off their school loans work, and it hurt our business,” she said. “People were calling our business so much that they had to unplug the phone.

Bolds are mine.

The take-home lesson from those quotes is this:  Some trolls don't see what they do as hurting real people, or argue that real people shouldn't have felt hurt.*

 Some trolls judge their own pain and suffering (which can be very, very real) as a sufficient reason to lash out at individuals whom they don't even know, to spread the misery around. 

Some trolls, perhaps pupa-stage ones, view the breathing, living people on the net as mere characters in computer games, and such characters can't feel pain or fear. 

And some trolls create an imaginary powerful monster in their minds, where an individual is the establishment, with enormous scope to do evil.  Then it is the troll's responsibility to attack that monster.**

Today's Feeble Thought On Communicating

Have you ever had the experience of trying to explain an abstract concept* which you, deep inside your head,  understand completely, but for which no particular set of words seems to be quite right?  I don't mean a scientific concept or a political definition or anything which you received as words in the first place.  I mean those nebulous concepts which are partly thoughts, partly emotions, yet taste utterly true to you.

I have that experience when I try to write about some new Echidne theory if the thoughts are still unripe.  What readers receive is not what I intended to send.  This can cause real misunderstanding and sometimes makes me discard the half-baked theory as half-baked when it perhaps should just go back in the oven.

It's a bit like trying to tell someone who has never eaten a strawberry how a strawberry tastes.  You can compare it to banana or to kiwi fruit (the flavor is somewhere in-between those) or to, say, raspberries by adding that strawberries are more acid. But none of that is as efficient, or as true, as just offering the person a strawberry to taste.

We can't do that with our intellectual-cum-emotional truths.**
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* That's not quite right.  See?  I don't even have words for what I'm trying to describe here!  It's not a concept as much as a mixture of concepts, the attached emotions and something else.  A bundle of possibilities?

** Including how it feels to be the target of repeated sexist and/or racist harassment or how it feels to be suddenly invisible and/or inaudible the way women often are at meetings or when dealing with, say, contractors.  Or how it feels to be very poor or how it feels to live with disability and so on.

Meanwhile, in Nevada. Or Anger At Female Politicians.

When the Democratic primary fights on the net began I decided not to follow them intimately (imagine candle light, red wine, soft music, and then people shaking their fists and yelling with saliva flying),  because I get annoyed with advocacy (push the evidence that supports your opinion, cover up the evidence that doesn't) presented as analysis (look at all evidence, weigh it and then conclude).  Even when it is "my people" who are doing the advocating.

I also felt that any Democrat, even, say, a suitcase with lots of little feet, would be better and safer for us than the kind of Republican whom the fundies and money-men would put up as the Republican candidate.  It seemed rational to save my gun powder for the general election, right?

But all that conflicts with my inner stern dominatrix.  She wants me to write down every sexist insult that is tossed around during these campaigns, because sexist insults don't insult just Hillary Clinton*, but all women.  She has some very odd ideas about the reason I'm still on this earth.**

The problem with policing the sexist campaign crap is that there's only one female candidate left in the race.  This means that anything I would write about sexism is automatically seen as advocacy for Hillary Clinton.  And that means that those primary fights become very intimate indeed.  As I'm a cowardly goddess, I have mostly avoided discussing those supporters of Bernie Sanders whom the Internet calls Bernie Bros.

This left me in a real bind when things got ugly in Nevada:

The public outpouring of anger began last weekend at the Nevada Democratic Party convention, where Sanders supporters who said Hillary Clinton's backers had subverted party rules shouted down pro-Clinton speakers and sent threatening messages to state party Chairwoman Roberta Lange after posting her phone number and address on social media.

The bind is that I haven't followed the fights over party rules or the growing frustration of some Sanders supporters or even the way Sanders has reacted to that frustration. 

But the point of this post isn't really about the disagreements or the frustration.  It's about the way some of those frustrated people*** harass women, as opposed to men.  The voicemail Roberta Lange received show some of those sex-linked messages:

You cowardless [sic] bitch, running off the stage! I hope people find you.
..
You fucking stupid bitch! What the hell are you doing? You’re a fucking corrupt bitch!
..
Fuck you, bitch!
..
You’re a cunt. Fuck you!

All those messages do is express anger.  But note that this expression of anger is linked to Lange's being female.  There are specific words some of us use to rage at women, words we don't use to rage at men, at least not without changing their meaning to something different, such as being compared to the more despicable sex.

But are those kinds of words even worth analyzing?  Why not just ignore them?  After all,   "sticks and stones may break my back but words will never hurt me," and Lange would probably have gotten nasty messages even if she had been a he.

I believe that the analysis is useful, for two reasons. 

First, we don't have a comparable set of slur words, of the same severity, which would only apply to men. So expressing anger at women becomes sex-linked, expressing anger at men does not.

Second, and this is only my suspicion:  It's possible that the anger behind the words "a bitch" or "a cunt" is very strong, stronger than it would be had Lange been a man committing the same perceived crimes.  I base this suspicion on my belief that we expect women to be nicer than men.  Thus, if a woman is seen as not acting nicely, a greater role violation has taken place, and that creates more rage.

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* In theory sexism could have also been directed against Sanders but I haven't seen any.

**  She is bloody annoying, I tell you.  I wish she packed her bags and went to pester someone else.

*** All the examples I give here come from men, but it's possible that similar examples also came from women and weren't reported in the sources I consulted.

 

Thanks For All The FIsh. The End Of The Funding Week.

My sincere thanks to all who have sent me money.  There's still time, and there's still need!  Though don't if your own finances are stretched.  The official fund-raising posts are now concluded.

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Added later:  The reference to fish in the title is about Douglas Adams' book:

Its title is the message left by the dolphins when they departed Planet Earth just before it was demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass.

I have no idea why that seemed relevant for my blog post title.  I'm not a dolphin.

Trump And The Ladies

1.  The Gray Lady, i.e., New York Times has published the results of its own extensive survey (fifty interviews with wimminz and such!) about the  private and public relationships between one Donald Trump, a not-self-made braggard and billionaire, and various female persons that have crossed his path through life.* 

Some of those female persons he grabbed for a girlfriend or a wife, some of them he rated in the meat markets which we call beauty pageants, and some of them he promoted at work and supported in all sorts of feminist-y endeavors.  But he always had a keen eye on the breasts and butts. 

In a bizarre way the NYT article might be the seeds of the process which I see beginning:  The Normalization Of Donald Trump.**  That's because it paints a picture of the kind of an asshat that many women have met at school, in college or in the labor markets, and if those asshats are so common, well, why not have one as our president?

I've seen similar normalization take place in real life.  Certain men (and more rarely, women) are allowed to act very badly, because "that's how they are and deep down they have a kind heart."   Though it might take open heart surgery to establish anything about the kindness of their hearts, while some other individuals (say, Greek goddesses) are NOT allowed to behave like asshats even though they clearly have enormously large and kind hearts, carried on their sleeves.

Reince Priebus, one of the Republican bosses,  is willing to hold the watering can over the tiny sprout of the plant that will be the normalization of Donald Trump.  When he was asked if that NYT story about Trump and the ladies bothered him he answered:

“Well, you know, a lot of things bother me, Chris,” he replied, “and obviously I’m the wrong person to be asking that particular question.” When Wallace pointed out that he was the chairman of the party and this was the nominee, Priebus continued, “What I would say is we’ve been working on this primary for over a year, Chris, and I’ve got to tell you. I think that all these stories that come out — and they come out every couple weeks — people just don’t care.
“I don’t think Donald Trump — and his personal life — is something that people are looking at and saying, ‘Well, I’m surprised that he’s had girlfriends in the past.’ It’s not what people look at Donald Trump for, so I think the traditional playbook and analysis really don’t apply.”

Mmm.  The sentence I bolded in the quote is exactly what I meant by that real-life normalization of asshats.  The traditional playbook just doesn't apply to them, even though it will continue to apply to the rest of us.

2.  I'm not going to help in this normalization process of Donald Trump.  Remember that the man wants to rule the most powerful country in the world.  Remember that roughly half of the people in that country, and in the rest of the world, are female persons.

Then ask yourself if those female persons (and, of course, the ones who love them!) will profit from having a leader who cannot tear his eyes or his mind off their breasts and butts.  It's that mind part which really matters here, because those who are carrying out the normalization work  are all about normalizing only his roving eyes.

Thus, we cannot take our eyes off the real question here:  Is Donald Trump qualified to be the president of the United States which has lots of female persons?

A part of the answer can be found in the long NYT article.  I give you two quotes which do matter for the Trump-and-the-ladies question:

First:

Mr. Trump still holds up his parents as models, praising his stay-at-home mother for understanding and accommodating a husband who worked almost nonstop.
“My mother was always fine with it,” he said, recalling her “brilliant” management of the situation. “If something got interrupted because he was going to inspect a housing site or something, she would handle that so beautifully.”
“She was an ideal woman,” he said.

And second:

When Mr. Trump hired Ms. Res to oversee the construction of Trump Tower, he invited her to his apartment on Fifth Avenue and explained that he wanted her to be his “Donna Trump” on the project, she said. Few women had reached such stature in the industry.

He said: “I know you’re a woman in a man’s world. And while men tend to be better than women, a good woman is better than 10 good men.” … He thought he was really complimenting me.

Those quotes are weak tea, you might protest.  But they tell us about two beliefs he has held in the past and may still hold today:  That the ideal woman is one who is utterly subservient to her husband's needs, and that, in general, men tend to be better than women.  

I get that Donald Trump is not unique in those beliefs.  He might even represent a majority belief on a global level.  I also get that this country has probably elected more sexist presidents in the past, only those men kept their mouths zipped about their beliefs. 

Still, it might matter to us that this particular candidate is open about all that.  How many women would the Trump administration appoint to positions of power?  Would those women have to be single so that no husband is inconvenienced by their long working days?  Would he openly discuss the breasts of foreign female leaders? 

Even more importantly,  the Trump those above beliefs describes would not try to promote legislation which would make it easier for women to both hold their jobs and care for their children.  And we have already been told that he would appoint forced-birthers to the Supreme Court.

3.  I'm trying to imagine how the more politically innocent "me" of twenty years ago would react to being told about the presidential race of 2016.  Would that "me" jump off the ledge in despair?  Or would she get a really good laugh over this surreal period of American politics?  Hard to say.

And that applies to most of us, I guess, that feeling of not knowing whether to laugh or to cry.

---------

*My analysis is about what we publicly know now and doesn't necessarily apply to any future revelations.

** There's an aspect to this normalization which is too big to be covered inside this post, and that is the attempt to re-normalize views of women as cupcakes, age-rated for spoilage, disposable and so on.  I'm fairly sure that some Trump voters love exactly this aspect of Trump's utterances, because it supports them in their own work to re-normalize the lighter kind of misogyny and male entitlement.




  

Funding Week: Sunday

It's still that time of the year when I ask you, my erudite and perceptive readers (hi mom!), for money to cover the expenses of my blogging.  I only pester you once a year, because I am kind and considerate.  So if you can possibly afford it, send me your spare pennies in exchange for the thoughts I may have seeded in your mind.  Not all of them are nasty.

And my heart-felt thanks to all who have contributed!