The Hottest President of the United States of America

This was created after Obama's comments about the looks of Kamala Harris. It's one of those "hottest this or that" lists but, for once, consists of men.

The comments Obama made, to create that response, were these:

At the fundraiser, Obama called out Harris along with several other Democratic leaders in California.
“You have to be careful to, first of all, say she is brilliant and she is dedicated and she is tough, and she is exactly what you’d want in anybody who is administering the law, and making sure that everybody is getting a fair shake,” the president said. “She also happens to be, by far, the best looking attorney general in the country.”
When the crowd started laughing, the president added, “It’s true! C’mon.”

He has now apologized for referring to her looks.

The reactions to all this have been predictable, taking the form of people either arguing that a man can't even compliment a woman anymore without all those feminazis rushing in or arguing that for the boss to talk about his subordinate's looks in public is inappropriate for all kinds of reasons, and mostly for the reason that traditionally women have been ranked first on their looks.  Thus, talking about those looks in some ways puts a woman back in her "proper place" in the grand scheme of things.

It is that gendered  history of certain types of compliments that might matter here.  In fact, I can't quite imagine anyone introducing Obama at an event by adding to a list of his achievements the fact that he probably IS the hottest president we have had for some time.  And if anyone actually did that it would look and sound very weird.

At the same time, I don't think Obama tried to do anything but compliment Harris.  And if these kinds of compliments were equally commonly received by both men and women I wouldn't see it a problem.  Indeed, it's not a problem in the grand scheme of things (fistulas, poverty, legal subordination of women in many countries and so on).  But analyzing it can be useful as one of those "my life experience is different" moments of shared understanding.

But this I have a little bit of trouble with:

During a discussion on the topic Friday on TODAY, celebrity guest Liza Minnelli said she didn’t see anything wrong with what Obama said.
“He can’t say she’s pretty?” she said. “When this lovely woman gets up in the morning and looks in the mirror and puts on her makeup and does her hair, don’t you think she wants to be attractive and wants to be thought of as attractive? She’s not doing that for no reason.”

If I have a shower in the morning do I want my boss to praise me on how clean I smell?  To want to be viewed as presentable or attractive or whatever is not the same thing as to want that vocally discussed in a professional context.  And compliments which are wonderful in certain private contexts are not so wonderful when they are publicly expressed.

Then there is the fact that many men would love to get compliments on their hotness because traditionally they do not get them.  It sounds like a really fun thing, and it may well be, the first one hundred times or so.

That's where the gendered history enters the picture.  The kinds of comments the manager of an exclusive men's financial club in Finland gave, about whether the club would ever admit women.  He pointed out that women would be lovely eye-candy.  I mention that example, because it sorta demonstrates why many women are uncomfortable with public comments about their looks, however complimentary they may be.
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Added later:  Garance makes the case much better.

Sunday Political Shows and Diversity

Media Matters has done another study about the numbers of Republican, Democratic and neutral people on those shows.  Republicans are, in general, overrepresented.  Last time I looked at one of these studies someone argued that it was because they were the administration.  But this time they are not the administration.

This graph shows the percentage of men and women in the studied seven shows during the first quarter of 2013:

 The reason I don't terribly care for the term "diversity" is that we could argue that this graph does show diversity!  Women are included, after all. 

The problem, for me, is that just talking about "diversity" ignores the population percentages of various groups.  A spoonful of that and a pinch of this in the soup provides a diversity of flavors.  But women, for example, are more than half of the American population.  All other things being equal, we would expect their percentage of those shows to be slightly more than half, too.

I get that those other things are not equal.  But a nonstop focus on diversity puts less focus on that concept of fairness.

Meet Professor Steven Landsburg. Rape and Intellectual Games.

Contents Warning:  Rape and Intellectual Games

Steven Landsburg is an economics professor at the University of Rochester and a former Slate columnist. He is  known for "controversial" arguments (meaning sexist ones), as an aid to sharper thinking, we are told.

And of course that can be the consequence if you can wade through the sexism first.  For instance, his textbook once argued that polygamy (one man with more than one wife)  is good for heterosexual women (and not for heterosexual men) because it expands the market of potential husbands, whereas it makes it harder for men to find any wives at all, at least for some men.

Thinking about that clarified to me that he deems a fraction of a husband every bit as good as a husband or a father than a whole husband.  Husbands as a kind of a public good, like lighthouses sending their messages to as many boats as fits in the ocean, equally.  But the time, resources and attention of a husband (or a wife) are not public goods of that sort, and a fragment of a husband is not the same as the whole man.

He also ignores the fact that real-world polygamy is not exactly an egalitarian system but one in which the husband has the lion's share and each wife much less power than she had were she the only wife.  Those criticisms mean that his argument (based on fairly competitive marriage markets)  is flawed.

So yes, such examples can sharpen one's thinking.  But how odd that professor Landsburg's examples almost always veer in that direction.  Now he has come up with an argument which suggests that raping an unconscious person might be hard to justify as a crime if a) the rape victim didn't get sick or hurt or pregnant from the rape and b) if she or he never learned about it all.  After all, what's the harm in something you never knew about?  And light particles and air enter our bodies all the time, which means that our bodies are continuously  penetrated  and nobody calls that anything criminal.

The practical example he ties his argument to is the Steubenville rape case:

Let's suppose that you, or I, or someone we love, or someone we care about from afar, is raped while unconscious in a way that causes no direct physical harm—no injury, no pregnancy, no disease transmission. (Note: The Steubenville rape victim, according to all the accounts I've read, was not even aware that she'd been sexually assaulted until she learned about it from the Internet some days later.) Despite the lack of physical damage, we are shocked, appalled and horrified at the thought of being treated in this way, and suffer deep trauma as a result. Ought the law discourage such acts of rape? Should they be illegal?

Later he writes (emphasis ours throughout):

As long as I'm safely unconsious and therefore shielded from the costs of an assault, why shouldn't the rest of the world (or more specifically my attackers) be allowed to reap the benefits? And if the thought of those benefits makes me shudder, why should my shuddering be accorded any more public policy weight than Bob's or Granola's? We're still talking about strictly psychic harm, right?

Benefits, eh?  What bizarre minds some people have.   Suppose I turn into a vampire and decide to visit professor Landsburg every night and drink some of his blood.  Suppose the bite mark would vanish right away and suppose I never take so much that he'd feel any negative health impact.   Suppose, also, that I'd not mess up his house or bedroom or wake up anybody in the process.

 Nothing wrong with any of that, I guess.  After all, Landsburg clarifies his argument this way (where the third case is the rape that nobody but the rapist knows about):

Edited to add: Some commenters have suggested that Question 3, unlike Questions 1 and 2, involves a violation of property rights. This seems entirely wrong to me; in each case, there is a disputed property right — a dispute over who controls my computer, a dispute over who controls the wilderness, a dispute about who controls my body. To appeal to a “respect for property rights” solves nothing, since in each case the entire dispute is about what the property rights should be in the first place.

In short, Landsburg argues that we haven't really decided yet who has the property rights to women's (and men's) bodies, for the purpose of sexual uses.  And obviously we haven't decided yet if I have the property rights to his blood or not, though he seems to lean towards the idea that I might have those rights!   Because clearly there are benefits for a vampire of having more unconscious food.

The term "property rights" is used in the economic sense in that blog post, not in the common parlance sense.  But its meaning isn't really that different.

I would argue that we have already decided that people have the general property rights to their own bodies.  Slavery is no longer legal, for example.  Landsburg seems to want to take the debate back a few centuries, at least within his imaginary case where nobody suffers at all and the rapist benefits.

But his example is far too unrealistic to matter in the first place.  Someone using an unconscious person sexually that way (to avoid calling it rape inside Landsburg's thinking game)  would have to be female or a vasectomized male, would have to carry a recent certificate of having no sexually transmitted diseases, would have to somehow get training in how to have intercourse with an unconscious person without leaving bruises, pain or bleeding and would also have to go through a process which kills all germs and bugs, including influenza viruses.  Because, remember, that the rules are the only suffering would be "psychic."  Add to that what being unconscious might mean:  A person could be seriously ill or extremely inebriated.  It is very difficult to see how someone could sexually use that unconscious body without leaving any traces at all or without causing some harm.


The point is that Landsburg's example  is invalid in any real world situation if his intention is to suggest that certain kinds of rapes shouldn't be regarded as crimes at all.  And though I like Amanda's take on this matter,  the picture attached to it suggests that Landsburg's imaginary case is like:

"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

But it isn't, because the "sexual user" was in the forest.  What this means is that at least one person knows what happened and at the very minimum that knowledge could alter his (or her) behavior in ways which have repercussions to the person whose body was used.  Smirking, for instance, or condescension.  And getting away with such a "crimeless" crime could increase the chances of that person trying the same again.  And again.

Enough of that game.  Let's look at the wider game professor Landsburg was playing here.

Suppose he has both female and male students who read his blog.  Does this particular example affect them exactly in the same manner?

Could it be the case that because of different life realities the female students might find their adrenaline levels rise, their hearts start pumping faster, their emotions turn to thoughts of self-protection and such?  If such sex differences exist, could it be that the example is easier to think about for some students than others?  Would this be good teaching?  Fair teaching?

The use of the Steubenville rape case where the victim was not only unconscious but also a minor might remind the students of the many defenses of the young rapists in the media, might even suggest that the whole post is somehow linked to such defenses.   Another way to explain why some rapes really are not rapes?

I believe the use of such an example elicits different average reactions from women and men, even though most men might find it distasteful, too.  And that's what makes it an example of sexism.





 

Stuff To Read on Women And Girls

This article on girls who wrestle is thought-provoking.

The use of a child bride as a form of debt payment in Afghanistan.  A harrowing story, on many levels, even if this particular one may have a happier ending.  This deserves a much longer post and shouldn't be included in a mere list but I have nothing useful to add, sadly.

What happens when a journalist takes the role of a judge in a rape case and decides that the accusation was false when proper analysis of evidence suggests the reverse?

How a blond Barbie might look without makeup.

On the Texas Prosecutor Murders

The awful murders of Texas prosecutors and the wife of one of them:

On Tuesday, the Kaufman County district attorney’s office reopened for business on the second floor of the local courthouse, three days after the county’s top prosecutor, Mike McLelland, 63, and his wife, Cynthia, 65, were found shot to death in their home in Forney. The shootings came after another prosecutor, Mark E. Hasse, 57, was shot and killed on Jan. 31 in an employee parking lot in a still-unsolved case that one law enforcement official described as “cold.”
Investigators have been interviewing members of the prison gang known as the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, but officials said that they have found no evidence linking the killings to the gang and that they were viewing its potential involvement as one of a number of possibilities. They have also talked to a former justice of the peace who was sentenced last April to two years’ probation and fined $2,500 for stealing computer monitors from a county office in 2011. Mr. McLelland and Mr. Hasse were both involved in that case.

...

Mr. Hasse and Mr. McLelland were killed after the state’s top law enforcement agency, the Department of Public Safety, issued a bulletin in December warning officials that the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas was planning to retaliate against law enforcement personnel involved in an investigation that struck a heavy blow to its leadership. Their deaths came less than a year after Mr. McLelland’s office prosecuted a case that led to a member of the gang, James Patrick Crawford, receiving two life sentences for his role in a 2011 shooting and kidnapping. Mr. Hasse was shot the day that two other members of the gang pleaded guilty to racketeering charges in Houston.
The investigation that led to the guilty pleas and prompted the law enforcement bulletin involved a multiagency task force that included Kaufman County prosecutors and three other district attorneys’ offices. The task force helped secure an indictment against nearly three dozen senior leaders and other members of the gang in federal court in Houston in October.
One of the federal prosecutors in Houston handling the case, Jay Hileman, the assistant United States attorney, is withdrawing because of security concerns, according to defense lawyers who were notified via e-mail of his decision.

I have no knowledge about the three killings or whether they have anything to do with the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas.

But when I was reading about them I wondered what the reaction of the pro-Second-Amendment people would be to this case if it, indeed, was an attempt to terrorize all prosecutors in Texas.

After all, the argument ist that the right to bear arms is a necessary tool against government tyranny.  But such tyranny might depend on the eye of the beholder.  One woman's freedom fighter is another woman's terrorist kinda thing.

Missives From The LIzard People. Or on the National Conspiracy Poll.

The National Conspiracy Poll is out.  You can read the whole thing here (pdf) and a shorter summary of some results here.

It may be fun to think of people believing that shape-shifting lizard people rule the world (ahem), but what really matters in those results are the answers which show large differences on the basis of party affiliation.  Because that suggests either that information matters less than basic wishes about what is desirable  or that the respondents believe in different sources of information.  Most likely the latter.

The findings which show differences by party affiliation are about whether global warming is a hoax,  whether there is a New World Order, whether Obama is the anti-Christ, whether Bush misled on Iraq WMDs, whether Saddam was involved in 9/11 atrocities and whether the CIA spread crack in inner cities.  (Note that I haven't done statistical tests on the significance of these differences, just picked the ones which show large percentage differences).

The questions with the largest party-based differences, large enough to create reversals of what the majority in each grouping believes, are whether Bush misled on Iraq WMDs (72% of Democrats believe he did,  73% of Republicans believe he did not, Independents were divided with 48% believing he did and 45% believing that he did not) and whether global warming is a hoax or not (58% of Republicans believe it is,  77% of Democrats believe it is not and 51% of Independents believe it is not).

The rest of the questions are kinda fun, too.  There are a few differences by gender in some of the questions though I spot no overall pattern.  But the youngest age group among the respondents seems more likely to believe in lizard people and bigfoots (bigfeet?) and so on.

Woman's nudity may have led to man's death

This post was going to be about an Australian article with that headline, about a gruesome killing.  But being the careful goddess I am, I just double-checked, and today the same link gives a completely different headline:  
  

 Vic man 'stomped on backpacker's head

But the link still talks about the woman's nudity.

The old version began like this:

An Irish backpacker may have been killed after he accidentally saw his housemate's girlfriend semi-naked, a Melbourne court has heard.

    David Greene saw the woman, Shayla Pullen, topless when he walked into the bedroom of housemate Luke James Wentholt to tell him a joke, Melbourne Magistrates Court has heard.
Wentholt, 31, of St Kilda East, is facing a charge of murder and three counts each of intentionally causing serious injury, intentionally causing injury and assault over the incident in August last year.
Ms Pullen told the court she believes the topless incident led to the confrontation that left Mr Greene dead and another man seriously injured.

And the revised version like this:

Melbourne man was acting like a "crazy monster" as he repeatedly stomped on an Irish backpacker's head during a housewarming party at their home, a murder hearing has been told.

Luke James Wentholt, 31, has pleaded not guilty to the murder of housemate David Greene in their St Kilda East house last August.
Two witnesses told Melbourne Magistrates Court that Wentholt stomped on Mr Greene's head as he lay unconscious after a confrontation between the pair at the party.
Wentholt's then-girlfriend, Shayla Pullen, said Mr Greene saw her topless when he walked into his housemate's bedroom to tell him a joke.
Ms Pullen told the court she believes the topless incident led to the confrontation that left Mr Greene dead and another man seriously injured.

What can I say?  Kudos for the site to have fixed this, because the initial framing implied that it was the woman's nudity which was the guilty party in the killing.

  

An April Fool's Post

I'm itching to give you all sorts of April Fool examples from research popularizations when it comes to studies on women or gender.  But I've learned my lesson:  The more I give out freely, the less money I will ultimately get from my perhaps-book! 

Now wasn't that about the nastiest paragraph you have read today?  Nyahnyah.

Even goddesses must sometimes eat, and monsters, though easy and cheap to catch, are not good in nutritional balance.  Hence the need for money.

But I CAN tell you that much writing about research should be re-shelved under "creative writing" or "looking for controversy, if not found, manufacture it".

The second aspect of this writing experience that retains a permanent April Fool aspect is the imbalance between feminist and anti-feminist voices in the mainstream media.  It's incredibly easy to get money and a comfy chair as an anti-feminist; it's about as easy to get a few cents and a rickety stool as a feminist as it is for a herring to start a world war.  Not impossible, just unlikely.

And why?  This is the other jokey bit:  Because feminism is assumed to be so dominant that its opponents need to be heard.   The real reason is that the anti-feminist side has most of the moolah.

The way all this comes about is that Hillary Clinton is labeled as a radical feminist.  Any woman or man who even makes a quiet note about a few feminist arguments while also discussing the anti-feminist arguments is labeled a rabid feminazi.  But someone advocating the removal of women's right to vote is just a valuable critic of the general debate.  That's how we get the same drag-the-center-to-the-right that we have observed in general political debates.

I've written before that the debate on women and gender is biased, to begin with, by the fact that the two sides are assumed to be men-are-better-than-women-except-in-childbirth and men-and-women-are-equal*.  The obvious third alternative is completely missing in those debates.  I am certainly not advocating it, but its absence puts the men-and-women-are-equal group not in the center where it belongs but at one extreme.  Then the center gets pulled somewhere between men-are-better-than-women and the-two-are-equal.
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*"Equal" here does not mean the same.  Neither does it mean not-same.  It has nothing to do with that aspect and all to do with equal opportunity and equal valuation.

I Make A Mean Pesto And Know How To Iron A Man's Shirt

Don't forget to put that in my obituary, should I ever evaporate.  Don't mention that I don't iron.

All this is because of a New York Times obituary for Yvonne Brill, a rocket scientist.  It initially began like this:

She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children. “The world’s best mom,” her son Matthew said.

After many complaints, the lede was changed into this:

She was a brilliant rocket scientist who followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children. “The world’s best mom,” her son Matthew said.

 The obituary then continues:

Yvonne Brill, who died on Wednesday at 88 in Princeton, N.J., in the early 1970s invented a propulsion system to help keep communications satellites from slipping out of their orbits.

The system became the industry standard, and it was the achievement President Obama mentioned in 2011 in presenting her with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.

Her personal and professional balancing act also won notice. In 1980, Harper’s Bazaar magazine and the DeBeers Corporation gave her their Diamond Superwoman award for returning to a successful career after starting a family.

Mrs. Brill — she preferred to be called Mrs., her son said — is believed to have been the only woman in the United States who was actually doing rocket science in the mid-1940s, when she worked on the first designs for an American satellite.

So weird.  The obvious interpretation of all that is to reassure people that Yvonne Brill may have been a rocket scientist, but don't worry.  She put her family first and cooked, too.  She was still a woman.

And that's how most of the criticism goes.  It is deserved, I believe, but I don't think the writer necessarily intended to write such an obituary.  This is because the little shock caused by the first and second paragraph has some literary merit:  You lead the reader in one direction and then flip her or him over and present something quite different.  That way the "different" will stick to your mind.

Where it failed is in the invisibility of how women are viewed in general, and that's how it became ripe material for those reversals the Salon article posts.  Something that would have worked for the obituary of a generic Great Man (pick a hobby, such as fly fishing, to begin with, say)  does NOT work for the obituary of a generic Great Woman, because of the gender role schema.   Women are expected to cook and expected to be great mothers if they have children.  Women are not expected to be rocket scientist.

I'm trying to think how Einstein's obituary would have read had we started with what kind of a father he was. Hmm.
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Added later:  This post supports my guess that the transition was intended as something different:

“I’m surprised,” he said. “It never occurred to us that this would be read as sexist.” He said it was important for obituaries to put people in the context of their time and that this well-written obituary did that effectively. He also observed that the references in the first paragraph to cooking and being a mother served as an effective set-up for the “aha” of the second paragraph, which revealed that Mrs. Brill was an important scientist.

But his surprise was because of that invisibility of the way female researchers are traditionally regarded.  

Wisconsin And Work

Interesting news about the Ringwraith realm (with governor Scott Walker) of Wisconsin.  He ran on the topic of job creation but achieved a large amount of other stuff* instead:

New quarterly figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Thursday showed Wisconsin has dropped to 44th in the nation for creating private sector jobs, a ranking Republicans lawmakers say is deceiving and Democrats contend is the result of Gov. Walker’s failed economic strategy.
The data covered the year that ended in September, and reflected a recent steady decline. Wisconsin ranked 42nd for the year that ended in June, and 37th for the year that ended in March 2012.

The report, based on a survey of 96 percent of all public and private American non-farm employers, said other Midwestern states are performing better than Wisconsin. Indiana ranked 11th, Michigan 13th and Ohio 24th.
Walker, a Republican, promised in the 2010 campaign, and has reiterated since, that he will create 250,000 private sector jobs by the end of 2014. He was about 212,500 jobs short of meeting that target at the end of 2012.

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*I wanted to link here to my myriad of earlier posts on Scott Walker, but found out, to my horror, that my blog is suffering from linkrot in the permalinks.  Only one of the many, many Walker posts seem to have a functioning permalink right now.  Which limits me to quoting from my May 2, 2012 post here:

And he has carried his assigned tasks out extremely well!  The great state of Wisconsin has almost been demolished!  In the good news, angry drivers can now have guns in their cars, there's no longer any of that gender-equality crap in state-based equal pay laws,  and the state ranked the first in increased unemployment and job loss misery last year!  

Tougher Skin, Please

I've been thinking of the message of that very old song recently.  The way people in various social justice movements or on blogs or elsewhere on the Internet  pick up their toys and go home after a big debate or a quarrel or a row.  And that's it.

If you hang around anywhere long enough you will witness such angry and hurt departures, and some of them seem very justified indeed.  Others, however, look to me to equal that proverbial tossing of the baby out with the bathwater.  But then all that is subjective.  Who am I to judge when such divorces are correct and when they are not?

Except that such reactions are pretty bad for any collective movement, especially when they are often based NOT on what the movement does or doesn't do, but on what one or a handful of people inside the movement might say.  In the comment-groups of blogs the quarrels are usually between very few people, but the ones who leave judge the whole blog as a hostile place and perhaps even what it represents as wrong.  Because of that quarrel, which in meat-space would have remained a private one and not linked to a whole place or all of its many participants.

I have often read comments on the net which tell me that some person (supposedly) is no longer a feminist because of what some other feminist said or did.  Those comments could be a form of trolling, but if they are not the person is throwing equal gender rights and lots of other stuff out of the window simply because of a personal disagreement.

Is it a search for perfection that motivates this?  Or a search for a comfortable ideological nest where one is completely accepted by all?  Or something else altogether?

The title I picked for this post isn't quite right.  I'm not asking people to have tougher skins, really (even scales don't cover all the sensitive bits), but to try to wait until the anger and hurt dissipates to see what it is that is really important.  To accept that most allies might be partial allies, that most people have some ideas which differ from yours.  Or at least to ask whether what gets thrown out isn't, after all, worth keeping, worth gritting one's teeth and hanging on there.

Games People Play. With Universities And Science.

This piece talks about influence and how it might be purchased with money.  In this case the influence is ideological and attempts to change what a university does:

At Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers, every student who majors in economics and finance gets a copy of Ayn Rand’s novel, Atlas Shrugged…FGCU now has a core group of a half dozen economists whose research supports the ideas of free-market capitalism, still an unpopular subject in most faculty lounges. They teach this material to more than 250 economics and finance students (one class is titled “The Moral Foundations of Capitalism”), organize lectures by leading thinkers, publish their research in well-respected journals and hold influential positions in groups that promote free markets.
The ideological transformation of FGCU economics began in 2009, when Allison, a famous devotee of Ayn Rand’s who was then the president of banking giant BB&T, donated $600,000 to FGCU to create the endowed “BB&T Distinguished Professor of Free Enterprise.” Allison now runs the libertarian Cato Institute, a position he gained with the support of Charles and David Koch after some controversy.
The Kochs also supported Allison’s efforts at FGCU, a largely local school with about 11,000 undergradutes. A ThinkProgress review of Charles G. Koch Foundation donations from 2008-2011 found $87,000 in donations to Florida Gulf Coast University. According to an internal BB&T professorship report, the Koch money “provide[s] operational seed funding for the yearly activities and the local BB&T Charitable Foundation sponsors our premier annual event — The BB&T Free Enterprise Lecture Series.” The internal report also included metrics on the program’s operations such as “Atlas Shrugged Distribution — Number of students reached: approximately 120.”
Strange as it may seem that private ideological organizations can support academic departments, it’s not uncommon. A massive Koch donation to Florida State University’s economics program generated significant controversy in 2011 when it came to light that the donation was accompanied by de facto Koch control over some hiring decisions and the ability to review the scholarship generated. As of February 2013, 129 colleges and universities around the country were receiving Koch Family Foundations support.

The influence of corporations on universities is growing in other countries, too.  The excuse is mostly about the need to manufacture better workers for the firms but an obvious side-effect of such influence (bought with money) is that it cannot but affect some of the things which are taught, such as the question whether the role of universities is to manufacture better workers for the firms.

I wasn't born yesterday (as goddesses measure time) so I'm well aware that universities were never the austere ivory towers of myth but places where bias and power struggles also grew, where, as some have said, the battles were so fierce because the rewards were so tiny.  And us wimminfolk were for a long time excluded from those ivory towers altogether.

At the same time, there's not much point in the concept of a university if we forget the importance of critical thought.  Pushing for only one side of the issue and using a money shovel to do that does not increase the students' ability to think critically.  Handing out the books of Ayn Rand would be OK if the books of Karl Marx, say, were also handed out.

Well, somewhat OK.  It would be better to match Marx with an economist who held extreme free-market values, such as Friedrich Hayek.

These ideological pressures remind me of religions more than of the way one is supposed to do science or social science, or the way one is supposed to teach it. 

And that's what connects some of this with my frequent critiques of evolutionary psychology of a certain kind.  It's not the existence of very one-sided articles that is the wider problem; it's the difficulty of finding enough good critical pieces, because the field of evolutionary psychology, perhaps due to its immaturity, seems not to include much work that would be critical of the basic theories themselves.  That means that the critics come from outside and can be discounted on that basis.

The incentives for others to critique a neighboring field in academia are fairly low.  Thus, the more isolated a field becomes and the taller its walls against the rest of the academia, the higher the danger that what determines whether an article gets published might depend more on it conforming to the basic dogma than on how well the research in it has been carried out. 

I think I see this problem most clearly in evolutionary psychology where cross-fertilization from other fields seems rare.  But it can be a problem more generally.  For instance, economists entering the field of genetics have recently been criticized for not having learned the basic problems with genetic data samples but attempt to reinvent the wheel (and ending up with a rather bumpy and misshapen one), and that comes from working within the particular ivory walls of your discipline.

What ties these two topics (other than that I was thinking of both, in my usual lazy way) is probably in the incentives participants in the academia are given.  If you wish to thrive in your chosen career certain moves are a no-no or very poorly rewarded.  Someone sitting in the Chair of Free Markets is not going to support research into the problems of markets, just as someone whose whole research depends on a certain view of  evolution is not going to suddenly start writing papers critical of that view. 

These are issues we need to be aware of, in other words.

Defending Marriage

This is the post I wasn't going to publish but...


The Supremes have been discussing the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).  Many observers believe that it might be struck down.  That would leave the definition of marriage to the states.

What's always fascinated me about that act is the "defense of marriage" part.  What is marriage defended against here?  Marauders who want to tear it apart?  People who want to participate in this wonderful institution?  That it is the latter makes the defense very odd.  Like saying that you can't come and play with our wonderful toys.

Except that the gays and lesbians have their own toys and have no intention of taking yours, assuming that I can use such metaphors in quite a serious context.

The arguments are somewhat more serious than that, of course.  The basic one is that marriage is meant for having children, and same-sex couples cannot have children together without external assistance.  This argument also tended to state that it is best for children to be brought up with two parents of opposite sexes, preferably the biological parents.  But research doesn't quite support that, at least when it comes to the children of gay and lesbian couples who tend to do quite well, thank you.

That leaves us with the argument that marriage is meant for bringing up one's own biological children.   This seems to require that marriages which have not produced children should be scrutinized most carefully and perhaps dissolved, that women after menopause or men with vasectomies should not be allowed to enter a heterosexual marriage and that we should pay far more (far more!)  attention to the threats that are created by unpaid child maintenance from non-custodial divorced parents, a very large problem in this country but one which gets minimal attention from the marriage-is-for-children people.

As many have pointed out, marriage as an institution is much more at risk from heterosexuals who have tried it than from gays and lesbians.

Then there is the "slippery slope" or "open the floodgates" argument from the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santorum.  Who are we going to let get married next if gays and lesbians are allowed to have same-sex marriage?  Can a man marry his dog?  How can we disapprove someone marrying a young child?  And what about polygamy?

The obvious answer to the first two questions is that the dog cannot be asked to consent to such marriage and neither can a small child, though the reasoning between the two cases is somewhat different, because the child will grow up to have that ability to consent or not whereas the dog will not.

The third question is more complicated. 

Notice that polygamy almost always means polygyny:  one man with more than one wife, and historically places which have allowed polygyny have also structured it so that the man has more power than all the wives put together.  What this means is that the partners in the polygynous marriage do not have equal powers.  The wives have very little power, the husband has the lion's share.

Would the American legal system give such arrangements the power of a binding marriage, especially if the wives are made to enter the arrangement inside closed subcultures where they really have few other alternatives or divorce rights?

I don't know.  On the other hand, if polygyny was legally allowed only under the equal-rights-for-all-spouses arrangement, most men might not find it that appealing.  For instance, a man's power in a heterosexual monogamous marriage would be roughly half (at least on paper), whereas his power in a group marriage with nine wives would be one tenth of the total.

All that would apply to polyandry, too.  Thus, the argument I would use to answer that third question is that it is the egalitarian laws about marriage which should be defended, not the specific form it takes between fully informed, adult and consenting parties.

This bring us neatly to religion.  Polygamy is linked to religious arguments in both Islam and Mormonism, after all.   But the supporters of DOMA are also often religious people and base their arguments on a literal reading of the Bible as being opposed to homosexuality, especially between men.  Yet a literal reading of the Bible also demands that adulterous women be stoned, that people not mix different fibers in their clothing and so on.

And of course other people's religions probably should not be used to determine what the rest of us do.  Hmm.  The Catholic Church certainly doesn't agree with that when it comes to contraceptive policies in the United States.  But still.  If the question is about marriage as a legal institution, nobody is forcing religious people to enter into same-sex marriages or the priests, ministers or mullahs to perform marriage ceremonies for gay and lesbian couples.

The proponents of DOMA probably have other arguments, too, but these three are the ones I hear about often.

I sometimes wonder about a hidden fourth argument, I do, and that is the defense of marriage as a male-dominated institution.  Having viable same-sex models for marriage could cause problems with that one, because gender could no longer be used to determine who it is who is supposed to be the head of the household or who it is who is supposed to do the vacuuming and the childcare.  Thus, believers in biological essentialist theories could support DOMA, too, though some of them might be OK with expanding legal marriage to one-man-many-women, what with that seen as "natural," too.

On some level it is the contents of marriage that are defended here, including its traditions and power relationships.  If we remove those signals of gender the hierarchies might tumble over.  Or not.  We shall see.

Then there are the legal aspects of marriage.  Extending marriage to same-sex couples wouldn't really matter very much in terms of those, because we already have the format for two adults.  But extending it to group marriages and such would cause bigger changes.  For instance, what would widows or widower's benefit look like if there are, say, five of them?

Finally, the history of marriage cannot be ignored here.  It was not initially a religious institution, at least in Europe, but was brought into the lap of the church with some reluctance from the priests.   Marriage for the wealthier was very much about property, very patrilocal,  centered on the idea of procuring sons for the next generation who would carry on the name and the lineage.  Marriage for women was the only widely available way to survive, the most common occupation, if you like.

The proponents of DOMA ignore those aspects of the traditional marriage and replace them with religious or ideological arguments.

Good Dancing

It veers on sexee acrobatics at points but these two are really very good.

Airbags For Bicyclists

This is a neat video about two female research students and their project:  To create an invisible bicycle helmet.   Via ReadMeGravatar at Eschaton.

Today's Blogging Thoughts

What do you do when everything you write ends up in the do-not-post pile?  Because you don't know enough about some topic, without painstaking extra research you don't have the time or inclination for, or because you realize that what you have to say is neither novel nor interesting?  That's what happened with my post about the Supremes debating the Defense of Marriage Act.  Other people have already said everything much better and my long post was just that.  Long.

I have other such posts.  One on the concept of rape culture deserves to be resuscitated but my ideas are still stewing (slowly) on that.  Still, sometimes I look at my old drafts which never got posted and I cannot tell why I did not post them.  They are as bad or as good as the things that passed the sieve.

None of this probably has much wider relevance.  But this is my blog and I can spread my frustrations over it like bitter icing on a cake.  Have some!

On the other hand, the topic ties with our feelings of self-confidence.  My self-confidence veers from one extreme to the other, though I'm slowly leash-training it and teaching it to sit and stay.  Setting the bar too high is pointless, given the vast amounts of mediocre words on the Internet.  But making more mediocre words is probably not the best use of time.  Not everything that I blurt out is divine.

So have a nice picture instead.

Stuff To Read on Women

Actually, this is the list of all the things I was going to write about but did not!

Remember that faux trend piece about feminism dying again?  There's more about the women interviewed in it.   And an evil but interesting parody reversal.  Content warning on the latter:  A lot of negative stereotyping of both sexes.

And Garance has written an interesting piece on the question why being more educated doesn't necessarily translate to more women on the top of corporations.   I had further ideas on it, such as the length of time required before changes in education percentages change things on top, the fact that women pick things to do in college which do not lead to the peaks of corporations or very high salaries and the pipeline leakage having to do with the agreed-upon assumptions who is going to do the childcare.

When the founder of the popular Facebook page I f***ing Love Science turned out to be a woman, many reactions were.... interesting.  There clearly is a tremendously strong basic expectation that science and women do not mix.

A letter to the editor demanding that women be silent in the churches.

A Twitter troll has been written up recently because of his racist and sexist and otherwise rather nasty comments.  There are many Twitter trolls, some of them pretty awful.  Why this one gets so much attention is because he used to be the former head of South Carolina GOP.  I wonder if the Party is proud of him or ashamed of him or doesn't care.

Money Makes The World Go Around? In American Politics, Perhaps.

One preliminary survey suggests that this might be the case:

Over the last two years, President Obama and Congress have put the country on track to reduce projected federal budget deficits by nearly $4 trillion. Yet when that process began, in early 2011, only about 12% of Americans in Gallup polls cited federal debt as the nation's most important problem. Two to three times as many cited unemployment and jobs as the biggest challenge facing the country.
So why did policymakers focus so intently on the deficit issue? One reason may be that the small minority that saw the deficit as the nation's priority had more clout than the majority that didn't.
We recently conducted a survey of top wealth-holders (with an average net worth of $14 million) in the Chicago area, one of the first studies to systematically examine the political attitudes of wealthy Americans. Our research found that the biggest concern of this top 1% of wealth-holders was curbing budget deficits and government spending. When surveyed, they ranked those things as priorities three times as often as they did unemployment — and far more often than any other issue.
If the concerns of the wealthy carry special weight in government — as an increasing body of social scientific evidence suggests — such extreme differences between their views and those of other Americans could significantly skew policy away from what a majority of the country would prefer. Our Survey of Economically Successful Americans was an attempt to begin to shed light on both the viewpoints and the political reach of the very wealthy.

The survey is a pilot study and cannot be used to draw conclusions about the whole country.  But it might suggest one reason why certain topics (the deficit!) are pushed into greater prominence  than the "will of the voters" suggests. 

After all, the money to run for office comes disproportionately from the very wealthy, and if we compare getting the same total amount from a very large number of small donors, the wealthy retain more individual power.  What they want to receive for their support (even if only hinted at) can be very clear-cut and obvious, while what, say, a million small donors wish to receive can get quite muddled on the aggregate level.

And the bargaining power of any small donor is nonexistent, while the bargaining power of a wealthy donor is very strong indeed.  He or she can withdraw sizable support if the results don't match the implicit expectations.

The problem is ultimately in the way the American political system is financed.  But it becomes more acute when income and wealth differences increase and when what the wealthy are concerned with deviates more and more from what the rest of us are concerned with.

What Price On A Woman's Life in North Dakota?

North Dakota is not a place that puts a high value on the lives of women:

Voters in North Dakota, where lawmakers last week approved the earliest abortion ban of any U.S. state, will decide whether to amend their constitution with a so-called personhood measure that could end the procedure entirely.
The language voters will consider in November 2014 would establish that “the inalienable right to life of every human being at any stage of development must be recognized and protected.” If approved, North Dakota would be the first state with a personhood amendment after Mississippi and Colorado voters spurned similar measures in recent years.
Members of the Republican-dominated legislature in Bismarck also passed a bill that may close the sole abortion clinic in the oil-rich state, the nation’s third-least populous.
“It’s a wonderful way for a state to display that it affirms human life,” said Senator Margaret Sitte, a Republican from Bismarck who sponsored the bill. “I’m hoping it will be a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade,” the U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion in 1973.
Backers say the personhood amendment will end the procedure in the state, with no exceptions for rape, incest or when a woman’s life or health is endangered. Opponents say it’s unconstitutional and could outlaw some forms of contraception and in-vitro fertilization.

I have bolded the part of the sentence which tells us that the North Dakotan Republicans believe it is better for both the fetus and the pregnant woman to die than for just the fetus to die.  Which tells us that the pregnant woman's life is given the value of zero.

This is all kabuki theater, naturally, as long as Roe v. Wade is the law of the land, or rather, a way to try to overturn Roe v. Wade.   The practical implication of the forced-birth-or-death Republicans being in power in North Dakota is that most likely the last abortion clinic in the state will close. 

But on a different level learning that explicit statement about the value of a woman's life is painful.  Very painful.

Today's Study Popularization for Mothers! Fun.

It is about a study which finds that infants are introduced to solid foods too early if the comparison is to expert advice on when that should happen.  But forget about the topic for a while and just focus on the interesting question who it is who is being talked to here and in what tone:

Moms Serve Up Solid Food Too Soon, Study Finds

Many mothers in the U.S. start infants on solid foods -- including peanut butter, meat, and french fries -- earlier than experts recommend, and half of them do so with their doctor's support, according to new research from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The study found that 40.4 percent of U.S. mothers interviewed from 2005 to 2007 said they introduced solid foods to infants before they were 4 months old -- that represents an increase of about 29 percent from earlier studies, the researchers reported today in the journal Pediatrics.

More than half of the mothers (55 percent) cited a doctor's advice as one of the reasons for introducing solids before 4 months.
"With multiple sources of information on infant feeding and care from healthcare providers, family, friends, and media, specific information on the timing of solid food introduction may be conflicting and not necessarily sensitive to the needs of mothers," the authors said.
Among mothers who introduced solid foods earlier than 4 months, the mean age of the children at introduction was 11.8 weeks, and 9.1 percent of early introducers gave solids to infants younger than 4 weeks, they added.
The authors noted that if they factored in the American Academy of Pediatrics' (AAP) 2012 feeding recommendation to avoid giving solid foods until 6 months, 92.9 percent of their analytic sample would have been "early introducers."

The bolds are mine.

Most of the stuff that irritates me in this write-up is subtle but it is still worth noticing because it is almost universal.  First, the title tells us that "moms" serve up solid food too soon.  The "moms" is not quite defined anywhere in the summary, though reading it makes me assume that these were mothers who had infants between 2005 and 2007.

But the headline says "moms."  Because the majority of women are mothers, the headline appears to speak to the majority of women and tells them that they are doing it wrong. 

Second, I really, really doubt that feeding four-month-old babies peanut butter, meat or french fries was something the doctors supported.  Indeed, I doubt that feeding those food items to small babies was anything but very rare in the study.   I may be wrong as I haven't dug up the study yet, but honest, most people, whether mothers or not, know that babies shouldn't be eating french fries.  They don't have teeth, for one thing.

Thus, that bit was added to hint that "these" mothers are just dreadful people, where you can insert whatever your definition of a mother might be into that little word in quotation marks.

Third, comparing what mothers of infants between 2005 and 2007 did to recommendations that came out in 2012 is kinda unfair.  The relevant comparison is to recommendations that existed between 2005 and 2007, if we wish to know whether mothers of infants and their doctors follow such recommendations.

The popularization then argues that pediatricians and other relevant doctors may not have sufficient information about recommended feeding of infants which is a valid point.  But this also irritated me, apparently from the study itself:

Healthcare providers might be as equally confused about infant feeding guidelines as mothers, the authors wrote, saying some clinicians "may rely on their own infant feeding experience rather than evidence-based guidelines when counseling women."

That looks like a speculation, not something the study unearthed, and because we are told that "moms" are the ones making the feeding mistakes, the odds are that those clinicians are "moms", too.

Then there is this bit, where the numbers just don't seem to add up to 100%  however hard I try:

Among early introducers, 52.7 percent exclusively formula-fed their infants; 50.2 percent mixed formula with breastfeeding, and 24.3 percent only breastfed.

 Whatever was supposed to be in that sentence, being sloppy about supposedly important research findings isn't helpful for the reader.