Maureen Dowd: Marriage and Career Counseling for Politicians

Maureen Dowd is a New York Times columnist who inherited the 'one-woman-only-in-a-prominent-position' job from Anna Quindlen. In fact, it's said that Anna herself fished Maureen's writings from the slush pile and brought them to the paper's attention. I so wish she had let them stay in the slush pile.

Based on her picture, Dowd is a woman, and I dare conjecture that she's supposed to cater for the female market in political readership. And what does she think might interest women readers of the Times?

The answer: argyle sweaters on men, inability of being a 'good wife' in women. Both of these topics are applied to Democratic candidates for the job of the president of the United States. Apparently our nation's future is hanging by a thread of argyle wool which a careless wife could easily snap. So.

Her latest assault on wives concerns the role and career of one Dr. Judith Steinberg, the wife of Howard Dean. Dowd begins her article suggesting that the Deans are in urgent need of George W. Bush's new initiative for propping up the conventional marriage. Why? Because Judith is not sitting in the front row when Howard gives speeches; widening her eyes into admiring opaque circles at the wonder and wit of this man that she suddenly finds herself married to. Instead, she's back home in Vermont taking care of her patients and the Deans' school-aged child still at home.

This MUST mean that the Deans marriage is in deep trouble. On the other hand, of course, if she indeed had chosen to sit in all the front rows on her husband's campaign tour, what would Maureen and others like her have thought about that? Shall I guess? Perhaps Judith would have come across as a political groupie, a woman who wants the limelight more than she wants to help her poor suffering patients. A woman who chooses to wine and dine with celebrities while her poor child is all abandoned in the middle of the frigid snow fields of Vermont.

Wives just can't win. Guilt is a fine tool in even clumsy hands as Maureen shows us:

"What will she tell their grandkids?" wondered one political reporter here. "Yeah, Grandpa was once a front-runner for president with crowds all over America cheering him but I was too busy to go see it?"

Too busy. Or too selfish. Or too cold. Or too clingy. Or too independent. Or too lumpish. Yes, I've heard them all about political wives. Poor things, they can't do a thing right, and as a corollary neither can any other wives. Is this what Maureen thinks that women like to read about in the mornings, just before donning their hairshirts and taking up the daily self-flagellation?

Why couldn't she stick to argyle shirts? Oh, but I nearly forgot! She does discuss the fashion sense of Judith:

In worn jeans and old sneakers, the shy and retiring Dr. Judith Steinberg Dean looked like a crunchy Vermont hippie, blithely uncoiffed, unadorned, unstyled and unconcerned about not being at her husband's side — the anti-Laura. You could easily imagine the din of Rush Limbaugh and Co. demonizing her as a counterculture fem-lib role model for the blue states.

No! How terrible! She's actually dressed like most women in real life! This won't do. Put her back in corsets and high heels, give her a dolly face with makeup and puff up her hair. Then wind up the key and off she totters, to walk properly just three steps behind her husband: the perfect political Barbie. The guilt and blame programs come with the basic version, and all socially conservative potential Dean voters can breathe a long sigh and relax: we can still win this thing, Dean now looks like he's supposed to: a package deal where we get a butch leader and his Suitable Spouse to fight another butch dealer with a suitable spouse.

According to the ever-unreliable source of the Drudge Report, Maureen isn't even done with Deans yet. Supposedly Howard forgot to give her a promised telephone interview, and she's promised to write about it tomorrow. Ah, the suspension! There is a hint, though, if Drudge is to be trusted (I wouldn't, personally). Dowd told him (he says):

"A race rooted mainly in attacking the president may not take Dean far enough. Voters want someone who's been through the fire. They care about character. They want to know the evolution of the man, even if it's a myth."

Myth? If Dowd wants to be the mythmaker, Echidne save us all. And she can't.
----------------
Postscript: And what did she write?

But a race rooted mainly in attacking the president may not take Dr. Dean far enough. Voters want someone who's been through the fire. They care about character. They want to know the evolution of the man, even if it's a myth.

And I want to know why she reads her columns to Matt Drudge before they are published.

Fighting Fat - The Bush Administration Approach

The World Health Organization just issued a report on the world-wide obesity problem. It estimates that 300 million people are obese and 750 million overweight. Even 22 million children under the age five are regarded as overweight. The WHO wants people to start eating differently and their governments to support this change:

The WHO report recommends eating more fruits and vegetables and limiting fats and salt. It also suggests governments limit food advertising aimed at children and encourage their citizens to eat healthier foods. Taxes and subsidies could be used to reduce the price of healthy food and make them more attractive to consumers, the report said.

The U.S. administration response was swift. HHS official William Steiger argued that the WHO findings were based on faulty science. I guess he also didn't like any of the onus put on governments or the business interests:

"The (U.S. government) favors dietary guidance that focuses on the total diet, promotes the view that all foods can be part of a healthy and balanced diet, and supports personal responsibility to choose a diet conducive to individual energy balance, weight control and health," wrote Steiger, special assistant for international affairs at Health and Human Services.

Now, personal responsibility is all fine and dandy, and exercize is also an important part of a healthy life. But personal responsibility is something that's a lot easier to practise when the grocery stores offer many affordable alternatives of healthy foods, when the cheapest filling thing to eat isn't a Big Mac with fries from McDonald's, and when the television isn't constantly blaring messages about the desirability of fast foods and soft drinks to its watching audience. If these messages didn't work, advertizers wouldn't be willing to pay for most of the tv industry.

Wiener's response isn't surprising, of course, given that the Bush administration wants pregnant women to assert individual responsibility in avoiding mercury that might possibly lurk in quite a few saltwater fish species, while the fishing and power plant industries (which put the mercury there) are not held to the same standards of individual responsibility.

Would you like to have lunch with me here at the headquarters of Snakepit Inc.? The menu: tuna salad with dill and mercury, freedom fries with saturated fat and a soft drink beverage with phosphoric acid. After lunch, we'll don our bulletproof vests and go for a brisk walk through the nearby delapidated area, admiring en route the individual initiative demonstrated by the drug dealers peddling at every street corner. Even the poorest American can do this much!

Frittering Away Your Life

Which is sometimes the only thing to do. Here are two interesting ways:

1. Play basketball. Warning: this ain't easy, so it's a great way to fritter away large chunks. Credit due to the Grand Reptilian.

2. Find out which world leader you most resemble. Idea stolen from Bronson's website. He won't mind as he's a lawyer! Note: you can do this test with four different numbers of questions, and the answers might change, so many minutes can be whiled away. (Though I always came out Gandhi-like, which casts grave doubt on the validity of the test.)

Enjoy!

The Short Version of News on Women in Afghanistan and Iraq

Afghanistan:

Women can now sing on the television:

Deputy Culture and Information Minister Abdul Hamid Mubaiz:"There should be no discrimination between man and woman. Therefore, we wanted to have them appear on television to give them the same rights as men."

Or maybe not:

Afghanistan's Supreme Court has protested the video, stating that they "are opposed to women singing and dancing as a whole...this is totally against the decision of the Supreme Court and it has to be stopped,"

Women are now citizens with equal rights and duties to those of men:

Afghanistan's new constitution is a success for the country's women. It deserves commendation for guaranteeing women what appears to be an equal rights clause, something that still eludes women in the United States.

Or maybe not:

The final constitution could be used to implement Taliban-like Sharia law. Before the equal rights clause appears, Article III of the constitution states that in Afghanistan, "no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam."

Iraq:

The Bush administration pledged its support for the inclusion of women in decision-making bodies. The result: three women on the Iraqi Governing Council, one woman on the Iraqi cabinet and no women appointed to the 24-member constitutional committee. The proportion of women in the Iraqi population is 65%.

The nice interpretation:

Hey, Rome wasn't built in a day. Iraq must start somewhere. Besides, we aren't going to interfere with another country's social traditions. We only interfere with political traditions!

The not-so-nice interpretation:

...the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) is treating a growing human rights crisis for women as an extracurricular issue at best, leaving women at the mercy of thugs on the streets and the religious parties that have rushed into the political vacuum.

and

Over dinner in the palace cafeteria one night, when I discussed the accelerating crisis for women with two high-ranking American officials in the Interior Ministry--which oversees police and security--I was told with shocking candor as my pen perched over my reporter's notebook: "We don't do women." It's hardly a dirty secret that our government abroad views women's rights as at most a secondary concern, yet it was thoroughly sobering to hear this lack of interest so casually discussed.

============
Postscript:
The Talibanization of Iraq: It's beginning:

The provisional government in Iraq has removed the Saddam-era family law from the legal books and replaced it with the use of sharia to be administered by local religious leaders.

The order, narrowly approved by the 25-member council in a closed-door session Dec. 29, was reportedly sponsored by conservative Shiite members.

Paul Bremer hasn't approved this change yet. Will he? And whether he will or not, what's going to happen after June? One guess:

"This new law will send Iraqi families back to the Middle Ages," Hakki said. "It will allow men to have four or five or six wives. It will take away children from their mothers. It will allow anyone who calls himself a cleric to open an Islamic court in his house and decide about who can marry and divorce and have rights."

Is this what we went to war for? Is this what freedom means for the female citizens of Iraq?
Gag me with a spoon.

And: No, Afghani women canNOT sing on television. Link courtesy of upyernoz.

The ACLU is Fascist. Now You Know...

From Bill O'Reilly's opening comments January 9:

Now the ACLU is free to come to your town and sue the heck out of it. And believe me, that organization will. The ACLU doesn't care about the law or the constitution or what the people want. It's a fascist organization that uses lawyers instead of Panzers. It'll find a way to inflict financial damage on any concern that opposes its secular agenda and its growing in power.

From Mediawhoresonline.

Travel Writing

Everybody does this: a tour of the blogs, with insightful comments thrown in between short takes on the main stories of various blogs. If everybody does it, how come I, a genuine trade-marked goddess, find it so hard?

It started very promisingly. On Alas, A Blog I liked almost everything, but especially the Masculine and Feminine in 1844. Interesting ideas about what's 'natural' to our genders. Sappho's Breathing has an excellent article on the reasons why it may not be a good idea for women to relinquish their own last name at marriage. Respectfulofotters has a good essay on needle exchange programs for drug addicts, and Trish Wilson discusses a new study which shows that the dearth of women in science is not due to a shortage of female doctorates. Barkbarkwoofwoof is lucid on the question what blogs are, while edwardpig is equally discerning on why it's not such a great thing to go to Mars, right now, and Rubber Hose has a great rip-apart analysis of William Saphire's political ineptitude. Elayne has an always relevant reminder that it's cheap and wrong to attribute the success of politicians we don't like to the voters' supposed stupidity.

Pretty professional, so far, isn't it? But note that I've already used up all sorts of civilizedly cheering adjectives: interesting, good, insightful, discerning, lucid, relevant. Besides, my travels had barely started at this point. Two blogs wouldn't let me in without blowing up my Explorer (The Fulcrum and And Then), so they'd have to be left for a later blog. This made me feel discouraged and all the funny writing I had read made me feel even more discouraged. (We goddesses are ambitious sorts and don't like competition, especially if it seems to beat us.)

And then I decided to include a picture that shows two dogs fighting from Clonecone's blog Craptastic, instead of all the relevant, insightful and discerning stuff that was also there, for no other reason except that I found it funny. Well, then it was just a short step to go through the rest of the blogs on my travel plan looking for equally funny stuff. Here is some of it:

Deep, Insightful, Political Comments by LC bloggers:

Farmer on Corrente in When Losers are Winners - and Vice Versa:

Except for all those Howard McGovern hippie type throwbacks from some decade or another. Boy are they losers. I'll bet they'll make the mistake in 2004 of voting for a loser again and the entire nation will once again be a winner when they select a silver spoon fed born winner and liar and crook and national disgrace to four more years. But who cares. That'll just make Dick Cheney a three-time winner and all real-Murican patriotic "pre-feminist" Christian sorts love a winner.

Gotham City 13 on election debates (Hypothetical Situations):

The way I see it, if anyone comes at Bush hard in the debates, he's just going to make a smug face and say some programmed response like: "Gee willikers, (Dem candidate).. I'm just a simple Southern boy, I don't like get angry.. I like to sit down and discussitude the issues."

Andante on Collective Sigh in More Ownership Society - Bush Style:

When I hit the meat counter at the local grocery, I've been known to drool and dream over T-bones or filet mignons before heading over to the ground beef. It's a matter of practical necessity.

The prospect of anyone drooling over job retraining, health care, and a secure retirement brings one phrase to mind - "third world country".

"Born on third base and thinks he hit a triple" comes to mind, also. Those who haven't even had a chance to get into the batter's box stand very little chance of socking away the savings, with or without tax credits.

Chris on Chrisbrown, while commenting on the administration's plans about the moon and Mars (Fly Me to the Moon):

We have a President saying "visionary" things like giving illegal aliens work visas, establishing moonbases, and flying to Mars. Any day now I expect him to say that he's a jelly donut, or Berliner. BushCo is now the evil doppleganger to JFK. He's the anti-JFK. What next? Bay of Pigs II: Electric Boogaloo?

The next two comments might not be quite purely political, but they are too funny to be omitted. Here's Invisiblelibrary (Supply Side Jesus and the Sermon on the Hill):

The reckless liberalism of Jesus Christ cannot be allowed to take hold of the Christian values this great country has fought so hard to preserve.

and BlogAmy (hope you're feeling better, Amy) in Guest Commentary Proves My Theory:

By the way, this person is not a normal journalist of the paper that printed his musings. Abusings. Accusings. Bruisings. Oozings. Mind losings...I could go on, but I won't. Boy, they'll put anybody into print these days. Maybe I'll be next?

And the last two comments are even less clearly about politics. The first one is by Stradiotto who is not in good health right now. While I really want him to feel better fast, there's nothing wrong with his blogging talents. This is how he gracefully says that he must blog a little bit less for a time:

My heart would be heavier about the latter were there not a sufficiency of drug addled commentary readily available for those whose surfing habits include rubbernecking intellectual meltdowns.

Dohiymir provides the perfect final quote:

Offline...
...for a few hours. Talk amongst yourselves.

Monday's Dog Blogging - The Highbrow Version

Greetings, my fellow canines and our humble human servants!

My maid, the snakewoman, didn't wish me to blog as she thinks nobody cares about what dogs think. Typical specieism! Down with humans! Well, not down with them; rather, let them stay in the roles they have been naturally allotted!

Everybody knows that dogs and humans are different. Even the most rabid humanist must admit that now. We all can see that dogs are faster and more beautiful. Dogs have more legs and much better leadership abilities. This can be easily explained by evolutionary science: as humans huddled around their puny campfires, we dogs were out there, exploring and hunting; and only the dogs with most legs survived! The survivors then passed on their precious genes to the next generations, who refined them even further! If you don't believe this, you are a creationist and a disgrace as a scientific thinker.

Humans are meant to open cans. Why else would they have thumbs? Other than that, humans are pretty useless creatures and the world would be a better place without most of them. The same is true of gods and goddesses. The snakewoman might be an exception as she buys me fresh Parmesan cheese to grate on my kibbles. But I'm not sure about this. Come the revolution, she, too, might have to go.

I have nothing but scorn towards last week's dog blog. That blockhead, Hank! She's not a bad dog, really, but so limited in her reading. She keeps wondering why I beat her in wrestling every time, and never connects this to the fact that I am a subscriber to all the martial arts sites on the internet. She can't even spell properly!

Henrietta the Hound
PhD, CE (Chien Extraordinaire), CEO of Snakepit, Inc.

Fashion Tips For The Uninformed

Argyle sweaters are a no-no. This according to Maureen Dowd in the New York Times. She doesn't like Wesley Clark's apparent attempt to appeal to women by trying to soften his image.
Dowd notes:

Is his staff watching "What Not to Wear" or "Style Court"? It's discouraging to see presidential campaigns succumb to the makeover culture. Obviously, appearances count, but clothes don't make the man. Sometimes, they unmake him.

But much more often they unmake a woman. Some news from the city of Kuala Terengganu in Malaysia. The city government:

...has banned non-Muslim women from wearing mini-skirts, tight fitting dresses, and even moderately revealing clothes such as short-sleeved shirts and tight jeans to work. Muslim women are being called to wear a headscarf known as the tudong, which has to be tightly drawn about the face.

This is supposed to drive out 'indecency'.

Two very different stories about clothes. One is about voluntary choices which may or may not be silly, the other about forcing people to dress a certain way. Yet I suspect that the first story provokes more outrage in its readers who expected serious political commentary from Dowd, yet received something which makes Clark look like a female politician: someone to be judged by the clothes she wears.

The second story actually is about women being judged by the clothes they wear, so perhaps its readers feel less dissonance. But it's the horrible one out of the two.

Today's Political Blog

This is really funny, if it works. Half the time it does, the other half it doesn't. Nevertheless,
it's worth a try!



A picture is worth a thousand words! If this didn't work, or even if it did, you can get more political pictures in here.
But the pictures are too tiny, and Athena is busy with orchestrating maximum strategic chaos in the Iraq occupation, so she won't help me yet. Credits due to www.elcadillo.com.mx.

No Doesn't Mean No?

Atrios links to two worried men's articles on the question of proving that rape has taken place.
The National Review's James Bowman pines for the old days when:

Pre-feminist common sense suggested that a woman who comes alone to a man's hotel room late at night has already consented to sex with him.

and Gregg Estabrook is similarly concerned about how to interpret women's fuzzy signals of sexual willingness or not:

Because men know this--because in the real world "no" does not always mean no--speaking the word "no" is not the ideal way to communicate to a man that what is happening has changed from persuasion, or pressure, to compulsion. Men not only want sex, the male mindset holds that overcoming the woman's "no" is part of manliness. Few men will rape if that's what they think they are doing. Many try to push past "no" and tell themselves that what they are doing is manly persuasion of the naturally hesitant female. "Had we but world enough, and time/this coyness, lady, were no crime:" Andrew Marvel, circa 1650.
There has to be a better way than the word "no" to communicate to the man that he has crossed the line, and that better way must be widely agreed upon. Here's my proposal: If the line is crossed, women should say, "This is rape!"

So in the real world "no" does not always mean no, according to these gentlemen. Where does it then? According to Bowman, this place is the courts:

No means no — even though no one else hears it, even though everyone knows that it may mean yes — because feminists want to reserve to women the right and freedom to be indiscrete (sic).

What's a guy to do (Bowman and Estabrook seem to say)? It's manly to push past the 'no', but then you get sued for rape. Those darned feminists have really spoiled the sexual games, haven't they?

My suggestion for these two: Accept the 'no' for a no. Then if she really didn't mean it, she'll be the one missing all the goodies and won't make the same mistake again. In fact, she might be the one cajoling you next time, trying to forcibly push past your nos. And you didn't rape anybody by accident.

Otherwise I quite like Bowman's idea about the prefeminist rules: Anyone entering my hotel room has consented to sex with me! Room service waiters, cleaning staff, people I've invited in for a business meeting. Yeah! Life is sweet for us goddesses....

Rara Avis, Part III (Laura Schlessinger)

I really have to make the effort to blog about somebody sane and fairly nice. But not yet! Today I want to talk about our Dr. Laura Schlessinger, the beloved radio prophet and advice giver to the right-wing female hordes as to how to keep their husbands happy, their closets clean and the gays and lesbians firmly locked away in the same closets. She's not really a curious bird, though it does boggle the mind how a doctorate in physiology makes her qualified to give psychological advice. Maybe 'physiology' sounds enough like 'psychiatry'?

She sees herself fully qualified by the fact that she has committed all the female sins she now preaches against: she divorced her first husband, engaged in premarital sex and actively sought a professional career. She still has a professional career, though, which she uses to rant against other women with professional careers.

Your average conservative talk-show star, perhaps, but there are deeper levels to Laura. For one, she's an interesting example of a female woman-hater. This is a fascinating thing to be, especially when there appears to be no lack of simultaneous self-adoration. How does she do it? And why? It probably has something to do with her unsatisfactory relationship with her mother. Still, it's bit of a stretch to seek vengeance on the whole female half of the species just because she didn't like her mother.

As evidence of her misogyny, I present Dr. Laura's new book, titled The Care and Feeding of Husbands. In it she gives women the keys to the secrets of a happy marriage. These have already been handed out in Marabel Morgan's Total Woman (1975), but just to summarize, this is what the Publishers Weekly review says about Laura's book:

...this controversial marriage and family therapist claims that every woman can achieve a deeply satisfying marriage if she adheres to certain fundamentals men require. Preparing dinner, caring for the children without complaint, greeting her husband with a kiss and engaging in sexual intimacy instead of "tearing down a husband's necessary sense of strength and importance" can result in the harmonious marriage women crave.

Dr. Laura also suggests that wives should not withhold sex. As one reader review so aptly noted:

I've read several criticisms of Dr Laura's position that it is a wife needs to meet her husband's sexual needs even when she's not in the mood. Dr Laura compares it to how irresponsible it would be for a husband to not go to work just because he's too tired or doesn't feel like it.

So now we know. Sex is wives' work!

And what do women get for following all this sage advice? Is there going to be a book titled The Care and Feeding of the Wife which men can leaf through to find the secret formula for women's happiness in marriage? No! See what happened when she was asked this very same question in an interview:

Are you going to write the book for men on the proper care and feeding of wives?

Nope. Men are born of women and between girlfriends and then a wife; men spend their entire lives in the tutelage of women. What women accept or reject is largely the guiding force for what men will and won't do. When they are treated with the Three A's, they naturally, and in gratitude and affection, give their women the attention, regard, respect, support and love they want.

The three A's referred to in this quote are affection, approval and appreciation. Nothing wrong in arguing that these are important characteristics of happy marriages. But what is odd is that women must learn to show their affection, approval and appreciation by such concrete acts as cooking, childcare and sex, while men just seem to 'know' how to show their affection, approval and appreciation. But only after women learn their lesson.

I don't buy this, and neither does Dr. Laura, really. She writes this book for women because men wouldn't buy such books. So it's all about money, as one might expect. The book won't work, and in a few years she can write another money-maker for the submarket of unhappy conservative wives. Nice work if you can get it.

Though The Care and Feeding of Husbands is a treatise based on woman-hating, there is something more to it; a tinge of contempt towards men, starting with the title which reminds me of a how-to-book in animal care. Dr. Laura may tell women how to be properly submissive, but she is telling this in the disguise of female power:

Women seem not to understand, or underestimate, the profound power they have over their husbands. Men are very emotionally dependent upon women from the day they are born to the day they expire. This book teaches women to use this power benevolently – which will definitely result in them being happier with life and love. (From the book.)

This whiff of misandry is strengthened when one learns that men are very simple creatures:

All through the book you say "men are simple" ... isn't that an insult?

Not at all! In fact, most all of the many hundreds of responses I received from men in preparing this book confirmed just that: "Men are only interested in two things: If I'm not horny, make me a sandwich," and "As a man, I can tell you our needs are simple. We want to be fed, we want our kids mothered, and we want lovin'."

Though not comparable in intensity to her misogynistic messages, I'd go as far as to say that Dr. Laura doesn't much care for men, either. In fact, it seems that Dr. Laura finds everybody quite lacking, with the possible exception of herself.

And what does she try to achieve with this book, other than the obvious increases in her stock market investments? I suspect that she seeks male approval, the comforting lap of daddy when mommy doesn't understand. Will she get it? I doubt it very much. Here's one man's comments on the book's author:

And for all her talk about the joys of domesticity and motherhood, she is principally identifiable as a psychologist, author, and talk-show hostess. How much time did she actually spent (sic) raising her family?

Besides, she's a black-belt in karate, and athletically-inclined females have terminal penis-envy. They are not bastions of pro-male sentiment.

Poor Laura, perhaps. Though not at all compared to the troubled callers in her shows and the worried readers of her books. It is they that deserve our real compassion and pity.

Getting into College: Echidne's Tips

Legacy admissions to college have been in the news again:

Blood ties to alumni, sometimes known as the other affirmative action, are the deciding factor in the admission of more than 300 white Texas A&M University freshmen annually, according to data provided by the school.
Such students -- known as "legacy admits" -- equal roughly the overall total of blacks admitted to A&M each year. Only a handful of black students a year are admitted because of legacy points.
....
A&M's program is drawing particular fire because university President Robert Gates recently announced the university, now free from a court ruling prohibiting racial preferences, won't consider race in admissions. Coleman and other black legislators cited a seeming contradiction between Gates' rhetoric that students be admitted strictly because of merit and a program they say perpetuates class distinction and white advantage.
Gates, president for 1 1/2 years, said he doesn't have a gut-level feeling about legacies, much less a thought-out one, because he inherited the program and knows little about it. He said a task force will study its future.

If Texas A&M President Robert Gates actually said that students should be admitted strictly because of merit, he is either going to revolutionize the admissions policies of American colleges or coin completely novel definitions of the term 'merit'. College admissions have never been based on strict merit. Factors such as family wealth, alumni status, geographic location and skills in playing some sport totally unrelated to the purpose of a university education have always had an effect on the applicants' chances of a place in the freshman year class. But none of these issues has provoked anywhere near the anger about lack of merit as racial preferential treatment in college admissions. It's not just fair, many seem to think. Students should be admitted on the basis of their merit, not because of their skin color. Even George W. Bush implied this in his
comments about last year's University of Michigan affirmative action case:

At the law school, some minority students are admitted to meet percentage targets while other applicants with higher grades and better scores are passed over. This means that students are being selected or rejected based primarily on the color of their skin. The motivation for such an admissions policy may be very good, but its result is discrimination and that discrimination is wrong.

Is it then fair to admit students largely based on where their parents went to school? Or based on how much their parents have stashed away? Or based on the location of their homes? If this is fair, why is using skin color less fair? In all these cases it could be that some student of greater academic merit, some student who has worked better and burned the midnight oil longer, some student with the potential of finding the cure for cancer, may have been denied admission because some other student was given preferential treatment.

In my experience, this is how most opponents of racial affirmative action view its effects. Yet they are strangely silent about the other affirmative action programs, or if they comment on them, they merely point out the rationale for doing these kinds of things : of course colleges want to favor alumni children, after all, their parents are a major source of funds, of course colleges wish to attract students from all sorts of geographical locations in order to create a diverse student body. Or they point out that discrimination on the basis of these other factors: wealth, blood ties and location is not illegal, but discrimination on the basis of race is. Or they argue that the numbers involved in the other affirmative action programs are too small to really make a difference.

But of course the racial preferences in admissions also have a rationale: to create a more equal society, and the numbers of the beneficiaries from these other policies are by no means inconsiderable. As an example, in last year's freshman class at Duke University, 18% of the students entered through the program for underrepresented minorities, 12% through the alumni program, 8% were recruited as athletes and 3-5% as potential donors (i.e. rich kids). Though some students may have entered through more than one program and many of these students might have qualified for unassisted admissions, the fact remains that at Duke the other affirmative action programs cover a larger percentage of freshmen than race-based affirmative action itself. So why the furor over one and not the others, at least among those currently in government? Might it have something to do with the race of the beneficiaries? After all, most alumni children are still white and so are overwhelmingly the students with very wealthy parents? And though many student athletes are black many are not. This couldn't be the answer, could it?

Think about the following exchange of opinions by the lawyers representing the two sides in the University of Michigan case:

"What does legacy preference do to advance fairness and merit?" asks Theodore M. Shaw, a lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., who represents 17 minority high-school students granted defendant status in the suit against the university. "Why is it more defensible than an attempt to include people from minority groups that have been excluded in the past and are still under-represented?"
The reply from the white students' lawyer, Michael Rosman: "Because some small percentage of white students are getting legacy preference, that doesn't mean we should disadvantage all whites" with racial preferences.

Michael Rosman appears to think that racial preferences disadvantage whites but that legacy preferences don't. But surely they do; they disadvantage all whites who are not lucky enough to have had parents, grandparents or siblings who went to the same college. Rosman appears to see the races as two competing armies, fighting a war for the same reward: a place at college, not as consisting of individuals which can indeed be harmed by preferencial treatment given to 'one of their own'.

The most fascinating and least talked about in the group of these other affirmative action programs are the potential donors. These are students with very wealthy parents. Duke University finds them as follows:

Duke's system works this way: Through its own network and names given by trustees, alumni and others, the development office identifies about 500 likely applicants with rich or powerful nonalumni parents. It offers them campus tours and admissions advice and relays the names to the admissions office.
The development office then trims the list to at least 160 high-priority applicants. Admissions readers evaluate them on merit, without regard to family wealth. About 30 to 40 are accepted, the others tentatively rejected or wait-listed. Mr. Guttentag and John Piva Jr., senior vice president for development, debate these 120 cases, weighing their family's likely contribution against their academic shortcomings. Most are admitted.
Once these children of privilege enroll, the development office enlists their parents as donors and fund raisers. A committee of more than 200 nonalumni parents provides a volunteer army for the four classes currently at Duke. Committee members usually give at least $1,000 to Duke, and the eight co-chairmen and the national chairman contribute more, sometimes six- or seven-figure sums.
Membership in the parents' committee is by invitation only and is overwhelmingly white.

Hmmm. My tips about how to get into the college of your choice if you're worried about your grades and test results not being quite up to the expected standards: 1. Get rich parents.
2. Make them attend the right universities. 3. Have them buy a house in some God-forsaken locality where nobody ever goes to college. Voila! You're in. This is a lot more likely to work than belonging to a racial minority. It's also totally unrelated to any merit attributable to the studen't own work.

Postscript 1/11/04: Texas A&M just announced that they are going to scrap legacy admissions.

Stupid Quote Of The Day

Or that's what I think:

Mike van Winkle, the spokesman for the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center told the Oakland Tribune, "You can make an easy kind of a link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that's being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that protest. You can almost argue that a protest against that is a terrorist act."

From here

Monday's Dog Blogging

Hi, everybody!

How am I supposed to blog with paws as fat as tennis rackets? Anyway, I'm a dog. I like to run, chase balls and roll in stuff that smells promising. I'm not very smart, but I'm a pedigreed Lab and a real jock. I live with all these snakes which is ok except that they don't like their tails being pulled at all.

This last year was really tough. First they raised the dog tax and then they started enforcing the leash laws. But I gave them the finger! Or the paw. So that wasn't too bad. Catch me if you can!

But then this snakewoman I live with took me to the DENTIST! Just because I played with some rocks and the long bits that stick out in my mouth fell off. Let me tell you that wasn't fun at all. No sir. I tried to bite the guy but they stuck a needle in my butt and that was curtains for me. Now I have fillings which is very embarassing in the dogpark. I had to whip couple of terriers into submission. They just wouldn't stop grinning.

And then I have to live with this bitch! She's older than me, like eleven, and she's the boss.
Whenever I steal her bone she puts me down and humps my head. So I lie there thinking:"You just wait, you. I'll get you one day. When I get my karate training complete."
But somehow she can always anticipate my moves. The snakewoman says that the bitch
is the real Einstein of the dogworld and I'm the Schwartzenegger. I don't get it: Ahnuld is
a boy and I'm a girl, aren't I? (HAHHAH! Bet you thought the bitch was the snakewoman!)

I hope next year will be better. I don't care if it's the election year, after all I'm just a Canadian! (HAHHAH! Bet you thought I was going to say just a dog!)

So that's all. Got to go out to sort out the squirrels. Seeya!

Hank

Cats and Dogs

This is just for fun, for those of you who plan to stay in your PJs all Sunday long. Armed with your favorite beverage and breakfast dish, check out the blog of Barney, the First Dog. A very smart dog he is, Barney.

If this isn't enough canine humor for you, I recommend weiner dog races.

And for cat lovers, there's this. Make sure that you have the sound turned up.
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Thanks fo ms. posters for the last two.

Money for Your Lingerie? (Or Retirement)

It is ever so Out these days to raise a peep about discrimination against women. If you are so unfashionable as to complain, you are promptly labeled a whiner. Hip young post-feminists will advise you to get over your "victim psychology," Dr. Laura will tell you to pull up your socks, and the women's magazines will advise you to try sexy lingerie for your problems.

This is how Molly Ivins begins her column on the gender wage gap, and she's got a point. It IS unfashionable to complain, and it IS fashionable to ignore the wage gap. That women make, on average, only 76 cents to every dollar men make, well, who cares? It's much more fun to learn pole-dancing and to discuss what is sexxee. Besides, lots of people will start screaming at you with red faces if you as much as peep about it.

On top of that, understanding the reasons for the gender wage gap is really hard. It's something economists spend years learning to do, so thinking about the wage gap can be daunting to even the most intellectually alert individual. (If you wish to have a very good introduction to the wage gap, read Ampersand's series at the Alas, A Blog. You won't get anything of same calibre here.)

Maybe that's the reason for the current meme that it's ok to treat the wage gap as something completely debatable, from whether it even exists to what causes its current size. I don't buy that personally, but I'll be glad to show you how it's done here.

Sadly, a little bit of economics is needed before the fun can begin: Basically, there are three possible reasons for the gender wage gap (and yes, all economists out there, I know that I am oversimplifying here):

1. Women can't / Men can (performance differences)

2. Women don't want to /Men want to (preference differences, or as some prefer, choice)

3. Women are not allowed to /Men are allowed to (discrimination)

In reality, the question how much each of these contributes to the wage gap is an empirical one: it should be answered by using proper data and careful methods. But in the medialand the game is played differently: simply pick one or two of the three based on which you like the best. Then write up something emotional to support your choice.

Even Molly Ivins falls for this. Her choice is number 3: discrimination:

Of course, more women could afford sexy lingerie if we weren't still the victims of wage discrimination. Equal Pay for Equal Work is the oldest demand in the feminist repertoire, and everyone gives it lip service; even the anti-feminists assure us that they certainly believe in equal pay for equal work.

Molly, the Equal Pay Act of 1963 applies only to men and women doing exactly the same job. Unfortunately, the vast majority of men and women don't work in the same jobs. Even if every single firm obeyed the Equal Pay Act (which not every single firm does), women would still earn less, because so many work in female-dominated low-pay occupations. If discrimination is to be the culprit, you need to look much deeper into the structures of labor markets.

The spunky ladies of the right-wing Independent Women's Forum choose number 2., choice, combined with the auxiliary argument that all nondiscriminatory factors should be taken into account before examining any residual discrimination:

According to the "wage gap" claim, women earn only 76 cents on the male dollar. But, this is a deliberately misleading claim that fails to account for a number of commonsense facts about women's workplace experiences. Women actually earn 98 cents on the dollar when factors such as age, education, and experience are taken into account. It is critical to compare apples to apples. For example, women often leave the work force to raise children and later return.

The claim about women earning 76 cents on the male dollar is not deliberately misleading, ladies. It's pretty much correct, subtract or add a few cents, depending on the year. What you are trying to say is that not all of the 24 cent difference can be attributed to discrimination without first controlling for variables such as education and work experience. This is true. (But age shouldn't be one of these variables to control for. It's sometimes used as a measure for work experience when the latter is not available in the data, and if you insist to include it even with work experience you are assuming that ageism is an ok thing to affect wages.)

What isn't true is all that stuff about women earning 98 cents on the dollar. This was the result from one study which compared highly-educated single, childless men and women in their first jobs. Lo and behold, the study found that the entry-level wages were almost the same for both sexes. This is a) not proof of equal wages more generally, b) not proof of lack of discrimination and c) not even new.

Economists have known for a long time that all sorts of people earn about the same starting salaries for a given set of education. This would be the case even if they were all hired by the most rabid bigot you can imagine, simply because it is against the law to discriminate in hiring (Title VII of the Civil Rights Act) and because it is against the law to pay different wages for the same job (Equal Pay Act of 1963). The rabid bigot (in my discussion a woman-hater) would have to wait a little longer before she or he could start throwing obstacles in front of the female workers. This could happen through not promoting women, through not giving them opportunities for on-the-job training , or through various forms of sexual harassment. (Though all of these are illegal, too, they are much more difficult to prove than obvious wage differences at entry level.)

I'm not saying that any of these alternatives would necessarily happen. Many women might simply opt out of promotions because of their childcare duties, as the IWF argues. But we don't actually know how much choice and discrimination affect women's earnings development over time. To imply that it's all choice ("For example, women often leave the work force to raise children and later return.") is part of the opinion-game.

My final example of the game is a real peach. It's from an article in the Mensnewsdaily:

The fact is, the "wage gap" disappears when you take into account such factors as training, years in the workforce, travel requirements, degree of physical labor, and risk to life and limb .
And truth be told, men essentially have no choice -- they are expected to be the primary breadwinner in order to support their wives and children . So they accept the high-paying, dangerous jobs that women are unwilling to accept.
In contrast, women have a broad range of options: Be a full-time mom, take on a part-time job, or do volunteer work.
So the so-called "wage gap" is really a "choices gap." And the feminist campaign to level wages really amounts to equal pay for unequal work.

Here the gentleman in question (one Carey Roberts) tells us that there is no discrimination, at least in his opinion. The wage gap totally disappears when proper attention is paid to the requirements of the job. Unfortunately, no evidence is provided for this opinion, probably because it doesn't exist. The gentleman appears to see the reasons in the wage gap mainly in number 2., choice, though including the degree of physical labor as one of the important explanations for higher wages and referring to equal pay for unequal work also smacks of an attempt to bring in number 1, performance differences.

The concept of choice is used in a very weird manner: women have all the choices but men have none. It seems more likely that if men feel constrained in their work choices, so do women. In particular, the society in the U.S. expects women to be responsible for child-care, and most economists agree that women's duties at home are one of the main determinants of the gender gap.

Some argue that these responsibilities make women 'choose' occupations which allow for flexibility in work hours and leave taking, even when this flexibility is at the cost of lost earnings and pensions. Many traditionally female occupations (the so-called pink collar jobs) do have these characteristics, though it should be noted that many high-paying jobs also have flexibility.

Do women make these sorts of choices? Many do, probably, but they are not free choices in the way a choice between chocolate and vanilla ice-cream might be. The work women do at home is valuable for the wider society; it produces the future tax-payers and soldiers and politicians, and the quality of these future citizens is of interest to everyone. At the same time, many observers would like the costs of these choices to fall totally on the women and their families. Also, even women who would not voluntarily choose to stay at home with their children may be pressured into this through societal disapproval of working mothers and life-long absorption of messages promoting a certain mothering style.

So it's not all that clear that the choices that women (or men) make are in some sense free and purely private. But it's also very difficult to prove to what extent women's earnings are affected by discrimination in the labor market.

Though discrimination clearly exists (as evidenced by court cases won by the plaintiffs and by audit studies in general), the current level of economic studies doesn't allow us to conclusively separate choice-based, performance-based and discriminatory reasons for earnings differences. What they can tell us is that once we have taken into account all the performance and choice-related aspects that we have data on, the remaining unexplained difference in men's and women's earnings could be due to discrimination. It could also be due to something else that we have inadvertently omitted.

Not a comfortable state of knowledge. But it's at least much more honest than the opinion games being played across the political spectrum. A recent, relatively well-done congressional study* shows that this unexplained difference amounts to roughly 20 cents on the dollar. (It's important to keep in mind that this study looks at men and women who work either full-time or part-time, while the gender gap in earnings as commonly discussed applies only to full-time workers. So the figures from this study are not directly comparable with the 76 cent figure in the preceding discussion.)

The raw data in this study show women earning, on average, only 44 cents for each dollar men earn, but factors such as working hours (especially in the form of women's part-time work), education, work experience and the number of small children the worker has at home explain a large portion of this difference. Still, these can only bring the women's adjusted earnings to 80 cents per each men's dollar. What causes the remaining difference is unclear. It could be caused by discrimination or possibly by women seeking jobs which allow greater flexibility. But note that some of the earlier factors could be discriminatory, too. For example, women might be working part-time due to pressures from societal gender roles rather than through free choice.

Why talk about something this boring? Well, it affects how much lingerie you can have. It also affects your old age, because retirement incomes go hand in hand with earnings. Women over 65 have an average annual income of $14,200 compared to men's $39,000.

It also affects families, as some observers have started noting. Whatever Mensnewsdaily might say, the fact is that many women and men live together in families, and the children and male partners of women also suffer when the women suffer.
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*The link to this study gives you an Adobe pdf file. If you want to download it, go here, but ignore the title of the article: it's incorrect.

Postscript: The gender wage gap I discuss here is based on comparing men and women who work full-time, though the specific study I discuss also includes part-time workers. I wish to confess that I haven't bothered checking if this year's figure is exactly 76 cents or not. But it's in the ballpark!

Leave My Snakes Alone

The news is that the longest snake ever measured has been captured in Indonesia:

Officials at the zoo in Curugsewu, central Java, told the Republika newspaper that the reticulated python is 14.85m (49ft) long and has a maximum body circumference of 85cm (almost three feet). It weighs, they say, 447kg (70 stone, 3lbs).

It was impossible to verify the claim yesterday because the only photos available were of the black and brown reptile curled up, apparently asleep.

He isn't anywhere that long. He's fat, though. His name is A''bngd, and he was always a bit of an idiot. That's how they could catch him.

They feed the poor thing brown dogs. Poor dogs, poor snake. He refuses dogs of other colors. Of course he does, he's supposed to eat deer you thickheads.

Nothing good will come of this, mark my words. And it's started already: Man bitten by snake, firefighter attacked by snake.

Sharia Law in Canada

The Toronto Star:

An informal arbitration system that has been quietly settling marital or business disputes in Ontario using Islamic law, or sharia, for several years has now become a more formal structure known as the Islamic Institute of Civil Justice — and a national Muslim women's organization is "gravely concerned" that women's rights will not be protected.

Supporters of judicial tribunals say they reduce the need to go to court, are more private, speed up resolution and keep costs low in civil disputes.

These are some of the reservations of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women:

Sharia, or more accurately Muslim law, is not divine, as argued by some. It is based on divine text, the Quran, but it was interpreted a few centuries after the death of the Prophet Mohammad, by jurists in different countries, who themselves insisted that these were only interpretations. It is a vast, complex judicial system, with many schools of thought and with adaptations to local customs.

For example, some countries where Muslim law is applied, such as Tunisia, have interpreted the law as limiting marriage to monogamy, while others, like Pakistan, allow polygamy if the first wife consents.

Also, there are some interpretations and practices which adversely affect women. For example in some schools of jurisprudence, inheritance favours males; a husband can divorce his wife without legal recourse; financial support for wives can be for a limited period of time; alimony is questionable; division of property can be against the woman; and child custody can be given to fathers , according to the age of the child. How and who will ensure that these are not the interpretations which are used by the arbiters?

They also note that although the participants in the arbitration can choose either the Canadian law or the sharia law, many religious women would feel obligated to choose the sharia interpretation, even when it is not in their best interest.
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Thanks to Mystic Bovine for the links.

And A Very Happy New Year To You!

May this coming year give you joy, peace and many wonderful memories!
May the snakes always protect you!
May you never grow tired of my blog!

Echidne of the snakes

The Glass Ceiling has Been Broken?

Or that's what the Washington Times would like us to believe. Quoting U.S. data from November 2003, the newspaper triumphantly (?) announced that women now constitute 50.6% of all workers in the occupational category that includes management, professional and related services.

What does this mean? According to the Washington Times:

"As a growing number [of women] move into upper management roles, those further down the ladder will reap the benefits by increasingly being targeted for advancement," said John A. Challenger, chief executive officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

In other words, women have finally broken the glass ceiling! Yeah!

Really? Let's look at the raw data in more detail. The classification: Management, Professional and Related Services doesn't contain only managers. It also contains occupations such as librarians, educators and health care workers. I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations of women in various subcategories of this overall category, and here's what I found:

-women constitute 50.6% of the overall category
-but only roughly 37% of the subcategory management

The reason women are over half of the Management, Professional and Related Services is buried deep inside the Professional and Related Services subcategory:
-women constitute 60% of workers in community and social services
-and 74% of education, training and library services
-as well as roughly 72% of health care and associated technical services

So. Has the glass ceiling been broken? Are some conservatives who worry about this so-called development suffering from valid fears? Unfortunately, the answer is no.
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Thanks for Pen-Elayne and AND THEN... for links.