Johannes Brahms

Op 44 Four Songs for Women's Chorus

Cambridge Singers

John Rutter conductor

I was looking for something for Walpurgisnacht but found these instead.

This Looks Right [Anthony McCarthy]

Matt Honan at Mother Jones Magazine, has made a very useful flow chart that explains how the corporate right manages to turn their lies into common received wisdom.

How to Make Your Lie Go Mainstream in 26 Easy Steps

Looking through it a few times, applying it to lies they've managed to make into a temporary substitute for the truth, it has explained just about every one I've come up with.

Everybody Knows That Men Marry Looks And Women Marry Money And Why.

Yes. Everybody knows that men marry women with good looks and that women marry men with resources, and that this is because of what took place in the area of evolutionary adaptations a long time ago somewhere on the African savanna!

I hate stuff like that, because what "everybody knows" is not based on any actual evidence of the prehistoric origins of hypergamy for women but not for men. In other words, women want to marry "up" in terms of resources because that provides for their future children best. What the guy looks like is immaterial and how old he is is also immaterial! As evidence people argue that Rush Limbaugh has had several wives and he is ugly as hell.

What made me irritated enough to write about this again were the comments to a David Sirota article about gender differences in how obesity is treated in the US. He argues that men get a pass when it comes to societal disapproval of fat.

Alas, the article itself stirs me less than comments like this (to be found attached to Sirota's piece)*:

The reason fat men don't matter is simple and goes to our biology, women have to be beautiful and men have to be rich.

Cassie is unrepentant about dating rich men. “Of course it is much better to sleep with men with lots of money,” said the 27-year-old lawyer from London.
“Any girl who tells you different is lying. Rich men are powerful and successful and confident and charismatic. They know what they want, and they go out and get it. That translates to being fantastic in bed.”
Cassie is living proof of the latest scientific discovery about human sexuality: that the number and frequency of a woman’s orgasms is directly related to her partner’s wealth.
Her explanation is simple. “Women don’t want to lie back and think of the gas bill,” she said. “It’s a lot more fun to have sex in the Ritz than the Swindon Travelodge. And to be ripping off Rigby & Peller underwear than M&S knickers.”
Wealthy men give women more orgasms.

The study that is referred to is something I have discussed on this blog. But note that firm statement at the beginning of the comment about it all having to do with biology! Women go for money, men go for looks, and that is how it is.

You can prove it by looking at the orgasmic frequencies of women married to poor and rich men in China under its current capitalist turmoil which leaves some people with nothing but stress and heaps others with all they wish, and then you can find an anecdote (a lawyer!) to prove a point about "women" and "men" in general.

Biology. Where does the idea that these particular mating habits are biological come from? From evolutionary psychology (ep), naturally. But the story told there doesn't actually bear closer scrutiny very well:

Suppose that those prehistoric women did want to mate with men who somehow had more resources, just as the evolutionary psychologists of a certain stripe assume that men wanted to mate with women who had more resources in terms of youth and high fertility. What would those male resources have consisted of? The tribes in the hypothetical area of evolutionary adaptation were presumably nomadic. What wealth do nomads have?

It seems to me that any resources in those hypothetical days would have been embodied ones, for both sexes. A woman might have been more interested in a man who could hunt well, was healthy, young and still strong, just as a man might have been more interested in a young and healthy woman. I see no clear advantage in mating with an older man under those conditions if the advantage is to be viewed through the eyes of maximizing the likelihood that one has children AND that those children grow into adulthood in order to have children themselves.

So my evo-psycho theory would be that in a nomadic society of the type ep commonly specifies women would look for young and fit men. That is not Rush Limbaugh, and that is not marrying money. Can the incentives to marry money be explained in other ways?

I can think of at least two very obvious explanations, though they are intertwined.

First, women have traditionally not had the same opportunities to amass wealth as men have. Childbearing and child-rearing have handicapped women in this particular competition, societal norms about women's proper place (at home) have exacerbated the problem and, lest we forget altogether, laws everywhere tended to make sure that daughters couldn't inherit as much as sons, guilds excluded women from most trades and married women lost control of any property they had (and any income they earned) for the duration of the marriage.

All this left only one common way for women to better their social position: marriage. There's no need to assume that the desire to marry "up" is in women's genes when historical explanations suffice.


And even though the laws no longer restrict women from amassing wealth, the societal norms about child-rearing still do, general societal norms and myths change slowly and it is still hard in many countries for women to acquire wealth except through marriage. As long as women are, on average, poorer than men we are going to observe more female hypergamy than male hypergamy.

The second explanation is in some sense the same as the first one, though it looks at the situation from a different angle. Return to that hypothetical area of evolutionary adaptations and put your ep glasses back on. The story we are usually told is that men in those days struggled hard to get resources so that they could attract those young nubile Barbie-lookalikes for some dating and mating. Forget about the tribes being nomadic and pretend that the men wore backpacks with goodies inside them.

Only the most successful men got access to the Barbies, and, presto!, we have all descended from those alpha males, the ones with the heaviest backpacks.

And from those fairly mindless gold-digger Barbies.

That's how the story is written in the most inane ep versions (the ones I abbreviate to EP), and it is intended to explain, among other things, why men are so much more energetic, ambitious and creative than us poor women.

You see, almost all women got to pass their genes on without any struggle (no, pregnancy wasn't hard in those days, and in fact children popped out of the vulvas already fertile and ready for another round of mating right away, so the fact that women didn't compete at all or evolve very much was of no great consequence). But only alpha males got to pass their genes on!

How the EP guyz know that it was the alpha males whose genes they now carry I do not know. No woman has ever had a bit of nookie on the side, for instance, and no woman has ever been adulterous or exhibited any other mate choice except that for the imagined alphas of EP. (Who am I kidding? Even chimpanzee females mate with anyone they can get hold of when in heat.)

But I digress. To return to the second explanation, the EP story wants to stress how men have an incentive to climb the societal ladders but women do not. What they don't appear to see is that women do exactly the same when they marry money, that women show rather strong tendencies towards the very same kind of societal climbing that presumably underlies the reason why women don't need to scale those ladders. It is just that women have been limited in the tools they can use in furthering their social ambitions.

Would women marry for resources in a world where men and women earn roughly equal amounts and where child-rearing responsibilities are equally shared? I doubt it.

If I had to guess between the rather caricatured motives: looks vs. resources, I'd pick the former by a large margin in such a world. Women would choose their partners on fairly similar grounds to those men use. But of course neither men nor women mostly marry for looks or money but for much more complicated and, well, human reasons: Shared values, shared interests, friendship and kindness.

There. That is the post I wrote, instead of the one I planned to write on Sirota's article. Maybe later.
----
*For a second example in the same vein:

This 70's feminist version of society is all wrong
Men are judged by success, women are judged by looks. It's as simple as that. No man ever slept with a woman because of the car she drove, but women do that all the time. This is of course all romantic notions aside, just basic lust and status. Men and women are equally shallow, just about different things. Men are shallow about boobs and waists, women are shallow about status/comfort/wealth/success.
So the reason fat successful men don't care if they're fat isn't because of chauvinist culture, it's because they can still attract women based on their success, and they don't *have* to be as physically attractive to be successful in attracting the opposite sex. There's no chauvinism, oppression, or brainwashing involved. It's just the basics of how men and women work.

There ya go.

Today's Action Alert

From Catholics for Choice:

Catholics for Choice is issuing the Catholics for Choice Matching Gift Challenge to support the women of DC and assist the DC Abortion Fund (DCAF) in its critical work. Women in the District of Columbia need your help—and we’re asking you to give now as generously as you can. By participating in this challenge, your gift will mean twice as much.

As Catholics, we are called upon to speak up and show our compassion for the poor. Our faith guides our commitment to social justice, including reproductive justice. CFC condemns using the reproductive health of low-income women in Washington, DC, as a bargaining chip to reach a budget agreement. When Congress chose to prohibit the DC government from distributing its own local funds to pay for poor women’s abortions it made an unconscionable decision.

You can donate here, but hurry, as there's only one day left of the gift-matching project.

Friday Music: Carola Standertskjöld

I recently learned about this Finnish singer of the 1960s, and right now I am hooked, both on her musical and her linguistic skills. Let's begin with the latter:

Carola was born into an upper class Swedish-speaking Finnish family. Here she sings in Swedish:





She spent her childhood in Switzerland where her diplomat father was stationed. Whether she learned French there I don't know, but her French sounds very good indeed:





Her father was later transferred to Spain. Carola singing in Spanish:





Her English isn't too bad, either. If you watch the silly video, please watch until the very end! It's worth it.





And her Finnish, too, is perfect:





She died of early onset Alzheimer's disease fairly young but as far as I can tell the fame she deserved was not going to be something she would have achieved by living longer.

The music industry has many similar cases, of talented singers not making it. Very sad.

To finish with, here Carola interprets a Finnish folk song. I'm not certain if the words are traditional, too, but they are worth translating*:

I walked the edge of fields with the young gentlemen,
yeah, yeah, and I walked the edge of fields,
yeah, yeah, and I walked the edge of fields.
Now I think I feel a kick in my belly
yeah, yeah, and a kick in my belly
yeah, yeah, and a kick in my belly.

Well, the gentlemen they tell stories and stories
yeah, yeah, stories and stories
yeah, yeah, stories and stories.
They look you in the eyes and praise you unctuously
yeah, yeah, and praise you unctuously
yeah, yeah, and praise you unctuously.

And how can a girl know every single trick
yeah, yeah, and every single trick
yeah, yeah, and every single trick.
But she is the one who must bear the consequences,
yeah, yeah, and bear the consequences
yeah, yeah, and bear the consequences.

Then winter arrived and snow covered the ground,
yeah, yeah, and covered the ground,
yeah, yeah, and covered the ground.
And the gentlemen no longer want to walk me home
yeah, yeah, and walk me home
yeah, yeah, and walk me home.

They now bow and scrape to other young women
yeah, yeah, to other young women
yeah, yeah, to other young women.
But me they pass by with a haughty mien
yeah, yeah, and a haughty mien
yeah, yeah, and a haughty mien.

I walked the edge of fields with the young gentlemen,
yeah, yeah, and I walked the edge of fields
yeah, yeah, and I walked the edge of fields.
Now I walk with my child the narrow road,
yeah, yeah, and the narrow road
yeah, yeah, and the narrow road.





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*A quick translation by me in which I took some liberties to give the flavor of the lyrics. I'm not sure if I got across that the "gentlemen" would be of a higher social class than the woman singing.

Santorum's Stupid Comments. Nothing Changes.

Here he goes, in his desperate and vanity-driven drive for presidency, once again:

Santorum, a father of seven and a former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, said he wrestles with balancing time with his family and the campaign trail as he explores a presidential bid, but his passion for repealing the federal health care reform law is part of what fuels his political aspirations. "I look at how society with socialized medicine treats children like Bella [his daughter, who was born with a genetic abnormality], and children like Bella don't survive," Santorum told The Des Moines Register today, the first leg of a three-day swing through Iowa. "Children like Bella are not given the treatment that other children are given." Santorum said the new health care law, championed by President Barack Obama, will mean disabled people are denied care more often, and repealing it is the best way to address mounting national debt.

How dare he? Where does he get the idea that children like his daughter don't survive in countries with socialized medicine? In Great Britain or Canada? And the US is not doing very well in international comparisons of infant mortality, either.

This is like that 2009 American interpretation of the chances that Stephen Hawking would have survived in one of those death panel countries:

In an editorial on July 31, Investor's Business Daily warned of end-of-life counseling in health care reform by saying people like Stephen Hawking "wouldn't have a chance" in the such a system.

People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.

In fact, Professor Hawking lives in England, where he has been treated by their National Health Service. And by his own account, it saved his life.

And what about the United States of America? Santorum does admit that some problems exist:

Santorum said that disabled children are denied care today.
“It’s not like this isn’t happening now,” he said. “But it will happen more under a much more budgetarily-driven health care system.”

Budgetarily-driven? What does Santorum think private health insurance companies are? Charities? Suppose that you have child who needs 30,000 dollars worth of treatment every year? Will your insurance company just agree to pay for all of it or will their be all sorts of lifetime caps and other limitations, hmh? And what about a severely autistic child or young adult who really needs long-term residential care? Does the money for that care fall down like manna from heaven in this here great country?

No. The most expensive cases end up in the budgets of the states, in most cases, and what have we learned about the states, recently? They are cutting, cutting and cutting.

It is not the smearing of other health care systems that angers me so much about Santorum's inane statements, but the way the sufferings of Americans under the free-market-for-all-who-can-pay system are so minimized and belittled.

That is what angers me about all that death-panels crap. You don't have to have an explicit death panel if the price of care is set high enough. You don't have to have an explicit death panel if insurers decide whether your expensive cancer surgery will be covered. You don't have to have explicit death panels if states decide to solve their budget problems by no longer covering the care of the most expensive medical cases. But the outcome will be the same.

Why Worry About Inflation And Not Unemployment?

On one hand politics is a mess, a chaotic war all based on greed, fear, desire to do good and egotism. And other emotions. It's like a gigantic daytime television show but we are not allowed to call it that so we use sport and war metaphors to make it look properly serious.

But on the other hand some types of politics are extremely easy to interpret. For instance, almost all the political pressure right now is in the direction of protecting the rich: The famous Ryan budget proposal which slashes away at the heads of the poor and the elderly but offers tax cuts to the rich, and also the recent statements by Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman:

The Federal Reserve has two jobs, which is often referred to as a dual mandate. One is to maximize employment. Bernanke has testified that there are things the Federal Reserve can do, like buying assets through quantitative easing, that will result in job creation.
However, the Federal Reserve's other job is to maintain price stability and not let inflation spin out of control. The Federal Reserve does that through selecting an inflation rate -- what it calls targeting -- and doing what it takes to maintain that rate. The commodities that are increasing in price, especially oil for gasoline, are being driven by fundamentals, notably demand from China and emerging markets, which are out of the Fed's control. There is very low core inflation, which is inflation on everything other than commodities like oil and food. This core inflation rate is what the Federal Reserve targets, and right now it is lower than what the Fed has targeted.

So the Fed is doing neither of its two jobs. Unemployment is too high, and inflation too low, so it should be doing whatever it takes to stimulate the economy. The natural question that puts pressure on Ben Bernanke is: "Are you worrying too little about unemployment? And are you worrying too much about inflation?"
But if you got all your sense of the world from the questions that were asked during the press conference, you would expect that unemployment wasn't a major problem and crushing inflation was just around the corner.

...

Bernanke himself reflected these priorities. He cited keeping the financial sector from collapsing as the extraordinary measure the Federal Reserve has accomplished. He discussed current Federal Reserve efforts as something that will prevent a slow down rather than promote a faster recovery towards the long-term trend of growth. He seemed far more worried about inflation than about the current level of unemployment, and more worried about the Federal government's deficit than putting fiscal policy into play.

Why is the government worrying about the deficit, worrying about the future governments (over which it has no control) and why is the Federal Reserve worrying about non-existing high inflation? Why is nobody worrying about unemployment enough?

The easiest and most obvious explanation is not that we have somehow slipped into an alternative reality or that politicians are extremely incompetent but that they are doing what those with power wish them to do.

Unemployment does not hurt the well-off but inflation does, because it affects the value of fixed income sources, including interest income. The focus on government deficits instead of the current high unemployment stops looking so inexplicable when one understands that such deficits might require future tax increases which would affect the higher earners more. Unless government budgets could be cut.

But not defense! Because that's the one part the rich want to be kept as private armies are still too inefficient and inexpensive. Hence the cuts need to be in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, all programs which neither the wealthy nor most of the politicans will ever really need for themselves or their families.

I'm waging a class war here, all by myself! No, I'm not. And neither am I arguing that all wealthy people are evil or that all poor people are saints or that all the wealthy would agree on the pro-rich policies or that all the poor would be opposed to them. But if you strip the policy proposals to their bare bones, take out the bits which are technically required and the bits which are neutral, then what remains IS something very class-tinged. And it is a good explanation of the events I cannot otherwise decode.

Seen On The Street (by res ipsa)

This evening, outside the New York Public Library: Women in Black. Wanted to take a picture, but it seemed rude. There are some online, though.

Meanwhile, eight blocks up and two blocks over, Obama held a fundraiser. Bet NYPD wouldn't have let the Women get even remotely close.

On Birtherism

This is so obvious that I probably should not write it down, but the phenomenon of birtherism (Is Obama really a natural-born citizen and thereby eligible to be the president of the country?) is wholly and completely explained by looking at it from the reverse end:

Certain Americans find Obama just wrong as the president of the country. His skin color is wrong, his father is wrong, his mother is wrong, his father's initial religion is wrong, his step-father's religion is wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong!

Most of that is simple racism, though some of it may also be xenophobia. Whatever it is, the feeling of "wrongness" about the president must be justified, and the idea that he might not be formally eligible to be the president chimes beautifully with those inchoate feelings of his essential ineligibility. Hence the weird phenomenon of birtherism. It would legitimize those feelings of wrongness without the taint of racism.

Now Women Love Feminine Faces on Men!

What do women want? It's not only Freud who had trouble with that. Evolutionary psychologists cannot make up their minds, either. Jennifer linked to a new write-up in the UK Daily Male Mail about a study which found that in one of those glare-at-computer-simulated-faces-and-decide-which-to-mate-with women (presumably heterosexual women) went for men with "feminine" features:

Men with feminine faces will be luckier in love as more women are attracted to them than masculine men, according to a new study.
Most women prefer men with more feminine shaped faces and darker skin, according the research by psychologists at New York and Princeton universities.
But the investigation found that men typically also want women’s faces to be feminine with plump lips and wide eyes.

Two groups of men and women were shown a selection of thousands of computer-generated faces of the opposite sex to rate, which had been manipulated to look either more masculine or feminine.

The computer model tested 50 dimensions of facial features, including nose size, plumpness of lips and facial colouring.
The scientists found that more men want women’s faces to have a feminine shape, while women want men’s faces to have a feminine shape, but darker skin.

The first comment to the story tells us that this is not true when women are ovulating! Then they wish to mate with men with cracker jaws and bushy ear hair.

Just kidding about the jaw and the ear hair. What at least one study argues is that women pick more masculine faces as attractive when they are ovulating, though the rest of their cycles they go for feminine-faced guys.

It would seem that defining feminine and masculine features in isolation from everything else is rather tricky. For instance, are plump lips feminine everywhere on earth? Don't men have wide eyes? And to the extent that we can define masculine and feminine features in a laboratory setting, how does this translate to reality when most people's faces might belong somewhere along the dimension from one extreme characterization to the other, or where a person might have "feminine" eyes and a "masculine" mouth or the other way round?

Also, what if studies like these end up slipping a bit and in fact measure something else than femininity/masculinity of features? Youth, for instance? Youth sounds like a pretty good candidate for a different explanation of those findings, assuming that the studies were properly done, because young faces share quite a few so-called "feminine" characteristics.
----
This post is about the Daily Male Mail write-up, not about the initial study which I have not seen. It's the popularizations that will turn up at cocktail parties or at the bars and pubs, not people who have read the studies and all the relevant literature, and that's why I write about the former.

On Rolls-Royces

You are gonna love this! When I mentioned to a friend recently that this here blog is not a BIG blog and never will be, he said that the market for Rolls-Royces is tiny, too. I choose my friends well as you can see!

I think the Phantom will serve as The Car of this blog. Feel free to send me one, naturally.

Read This And Then Go Bang Your Head Against the Garage Door

From Daily Texan:

In 1967, 26-year-old attorney Sarah Weddington joined forces with the Women’s Liberation Movement and took on one of the most perpetually controversial Supreme Court cases in American history — Roe v. Wade.
She was the first woman to represent Austin in the Texas Legislature and the first woman to hold the title of General Counsel to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. She served in the White House as an adviser to President Jimmy Carter before coming to UT to teach in 1988.

And how is she doing now? She is losing her teaching position due to budget cuts:

After 23 years at the University and more than a dozen state and national leadership awards, UT officials told Weddington, an adjunct professor in the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies, that she would no longer have a job at the end of the spring semester.
Weddington said she was aware of the looming budget crisis but was surprised to hear her position was in jeopardy.
“I always thought that tenure for me was not that important because I thought as long as you were really good at what you do and did a lot to work with your students, you’d be OK,” she said. “Now I know I was wrong.”

Do a gender reversal (or reverse her to an anti-feminists) here and ask yourself if the same would have happened to a man (or an anti-feminist) as famous as she is. Perhaps, but I doubt it. Though he might not have assumed that all would be well if he just did his job really well. There's lots more to academic politics than that.

Still, I find all this a disgrace.

In Praise of Hell

The conservative boyz in New York Times' stable of columnists, Douthat and Brooks, went wild over this Easter on the reasons why old-fashioned religion is Good For You! By "old-fashioned" I mean the sort of religion where sinners end up eternally barbequed in a hell staffed with demons wearing horns, and also the sort of religion where adulterous women will be stoned to death. It's good stuff, Douthat and Brooks both agree. You see, it keeps the masses under control.

Douthat's piece is the one that has been extensively discussed because of comments like this:

Doing away with hell, then, is a natural way for pastors and theologians to make their God seem more humane. The problem is that this move also threatens to make human life less fully human.
Atheists have license to scoff at damnation, but to believe in God and not in hell is ultimately to disbelieve in the reality of human choices. If there’s no possibility of saying no to paradise then none of our no’s have any real meaning either. They’re like home runs or strikeouts in a children’s game where nobody’s keeping score.
In this sense, a doctrine of universal salvation turns out to be as deterministic as the more strident forms of scientific materialism. Instead of making us prisoners of our glands and genes, it makes us prisoners of God himself. We can check out any time we want, but we can never really leave.

Douthat's religion would give us the choices of eternally singing hymns in white nightgowns or of being one of the dishes in that eternal hellish barbeque. The rules of how to get the entry ticket into either place? Consult the ancient nomadic patriarchs and their writings! A rigged game, I think, and still played in the prison of Douthat's god.

But then I'm not qualified to write about religious doctrines, being a goddess. Douthat seems to think that he is qualified to interpret what it means when people say that they believe in a divinity but not in a hell, and that interpretation is like a children's game. Hence my hunch that he is ultimately writing about the best ways to keep the masses under control. Pitchforks, flames and the chance of spending eternity with people like George Bush might do it.

Brooks writes on a related topic: How only the doctrinal, literal and traditional religions keep people under proper control. He starts his piece about a Broadway production set in Africa, "The Book of Mormons", and then deplores the waffly new-age Christianity for its feel-good message:

This warm theme infuses the play with humanity and compassion. It also plays very well to an educated American audience. Many Americans have always admired the style of belief that is spiritual but not doctrinal, pluralistic and not exclusive, which offers tools for serving the greater good but is not marred by intolerant theological judgments.
The only problem with “The Book of Mormon” (you realize when thinking about it later) is that its theme is not quite true. Vague, uplifting, nondoctrinal religiosity doesn’t actually last. The religions that grow, succor and motivate people to perform heroic acts of service are usually theologically rigorous, arduous in practice and definite in their convictions about what is True and False.

...

But it’s worth remembering that the religions that thrive in real-life Africa are not as nice and naïve as the religion in the play. The religions thriving in real-life Africa are often so doctrinaire and so socially conservative that they would make Pat Robertson’s hair stand on end.

I was once in an AIDS-ravaged village in southern Africa. The vague humanism of the outside do-gooders didn’t do much to get people to alter their risky behavior. The blunt theological talk of the church ladies — right and wrong, salvation and damnation — seemed to have a better effect.

Note that "socially conservative" phrase. It means that lesbians and gays get the death sentence and that women get to submit themselves to men. Order has been imposed on the chaos of modernity. Except that modernity is the wrong comparison in the example Brooks proposes. The proper comparison is to complete chaos, where only the powerful rule.

Who Cares About The Royal Wedding And Why?

Women care about the royalty and their lives more than men do. In Great Britain, for example:

Britain is a nation made up of moderate monarchists and reluctant republicans, according to a Guardian/ICM poll. More people are looking forward to an extra day off work than watching the royal wedding – but support for the monarchy has nonetheless climbed notably since the crisis following Princess Diana's death. The country is in no mood for a revolution.
The poll shows a large majority think the monarchy is still relevant to national life, makes Britain more respected around the world and is better than any alternative. But there seems to be tolerant scepticism rather than royalist hysteria around the wedding itself.
Only 37% agree that they are genuinely interested in the wedding, while 46% say they are not. Women are much more likely to be interested than men, and only 18% of all people questioned say they are strongly interested in the event.
Even so, 47% agree they will probably watch it on television this Friday, including a majority of women and people aged 18-24. Almost the same proportion, 49%, say they are more excited by the idea of an extra bank holiday than the wedding – only 31% disagree.

To care about princess Diana* and her life is viewed as silly and frivolous, and that's because it is women who are more interested in her. To care about the wedding of prince William to Kate Middleton (yes, I had to Google the names) is viewed as even more frivolous and silly, and that, too, is because women are more interested in it than men.

At least those are my impressions. So why would some women be very interested in queens or princesses without any real power, on their lives and especially on their weddings? Is it just some "inexplicable" aspect of femininity, like worrying about fashions or fat?

My theory is as follows: Princesses and queens show us the ultimate rewards for women in the traditional (old-old-old) patriarchal system. These are the women who obeyed the rules and got on top! These are the women who were judged on those patriarchal criteria of looks, charm and polite behavior, and they were not found wanting! Their reward is love, fame, celebrity and wealth. They won.

It's not just this that would make the royal wedding interesting to many. It's also the pomp and circumstance, the curiosity about the customs and manners of those life has set apart as "our betters", and it's the echoes which rise from the fact that ordinary people have been to other weddings, know what this ceremony means, and the fact that all is supposed to be happy on that day.

But none of that can explain the strength of the past interest women showed in the lives of royalties and also the royalty-like movie stars of the 1930s and 1940s Hollywood. That interest is based on something deeper, and I believe that it is the power some women gained without kicking against the system.

It seems like this interest is waning now. That, too, would support my theory, because women have other avenues to power and are not as dependent on the few female role models of the past which both "won" and were still regarded as good women: Princesses, actresses, female singers and ballerinas. Those women didn't take jobs from men, didn't have to act "masculine", didn't have to march to get their rights, but they still ended up adored and wealthy (though until the 20th century only "princesses" in that list avoided the possible label of a woman with loose sexual manners).

On the other hand, what is it that little girls seem, once again, to be emulating in their play? Cinderellas and ballet dancers. I believe that the reasons for those choices (by their parents and the toy industry and the society) are the same old ones: Here are role models for girls which apply even in a world of gender inequality, yet don't truly alarm more egalitarian parents. Those role models are not that different from the models given to boys: football players, space heroes, characters with gigantic muscles and super-powers. That they are fewer and more anemic goes with the territory of gendered expectations.

Sure, children grow past those types of toys, and they even grow past the gender-policing stage. But perhaps something remains, something which is then evoked by a royal wedding in women or a football game in men.
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*The story about princess Diana is more complicated and has feminist and quasi-feminist aspects to it. I'm not addressing those here but simply pointing out that her initial attraction was in the Cinderella-story, despite her roots in the British nobility.

Poor Jane's Almanac

Jill Lepore has written an interesting article on the sister of Benjamin Franklin, Jane Mecom. It has shades of Virginia Woolf's piece on Shakespeare's imaginary sister and why she would never have become famous even with the same talents, but it is even more cleverly linked to the current focus on the Founding Fathers and the idea that the world then was the perfect one, the world into which we should all return, that giving money to the poor is bad for their morals and morale and that letting the rich keep their money is, for some reason, good for their morals and morale.

Martin Luther King, Easter Sermon April 21, 1957

Looking around for something for Easter I found this pdf of The Reverend Martin Luther King jr.'s Easter sermon given in 1957. I was six when he gave it. It was the world of full blown American apartheid, in which violence was a tool of racial terror, in which young children were murdered by racists. It's good to remember that experience is well within living memory.

On Women's Desire

Amanda has written a fascinating post on women's desire. That she wrote it in the context of one of those link-bait* stories at Femail, The UK Daily Mail's we-hate-women section, is irritating because part of me wants so badly to rip that original article apart.

It is so alluringly easy to do, so attractively placed, just lying there exposed and helpless, yet so obviously link-bait. So watch me restrain myself against one fervent desire! (Though you might be able to talk me into that rampage later...)

What I wish to write about now is women's sexual desire. My focus will be on heterosexual desire because I am a heterosexual goddess, but I hope that others can tell me more about lesbian women's desires. We are going to build a map of female sexual desire here! Yes we are. And that can include no desire, too. I suspect that the map will be complicated and if you want to add "here be dragons" do so.

But for the purposes of this post the term "desire" will be limited to its narrowest definition: To desire another person sexually. Do women desire? And what does that desire consist of?

As Amanda points out, women are not quite allowed to actively desire, not men, in any case:

Anyway, I think this whole situation shines more light on Figleaf's famous two rules of desire in a patriarchal system:
1.It is simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a woman to have sexual desire.
2.It is simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a man to be sexually desired.
His theory is---and I agree---that the reason this has cropped up is because being desired is cast as "feminine" in our culture, and men are taught to run from anything feminine.  But being desired is such a fundamental human feeling that I've often wondered how you really trick men into it.  (And you really don't with many men, who are going to keep grooming and wearing clothes that look good no matter how often you fling homophobic slurs at them for doing so.)  And I think it may be this.  If women are free from desire, straight men are free to see women as consumable goods for purchase.  What name you call them---wife, prostitute---depends mainly on the price.  Such a system means you're never really rejected.  That peanut butter at the store doesn't look at you and say, "Nah."  You either can afford it or you can't.  Reducing women to that is comforting, I suppose.

These are the reasons why women's desire may be stealthy, unnoticed, not labeled as desire, why we might look for other terms to cover it, to shroud it and to push it back into the subconsciousness. Yet what was the teenage girls' response to the Beatles in the 1960s if not desire, and mostly sexual? That many observers failed to see it as desire, registered astonishment at the "inexplicable" behavior of these young girls and women, tells us much about the way the society looks elsewhere when it comes to women's sexuality.

To look at our own sexual desires can be difficult. It is so easy to adjust the task I give here, to replace it with thoughts about what one might want to have done to oneself in sex or with other thoughts which turn us away from active desire, the "female gaze" if you will. It is hard to focus on woman-the-active-participant, rather than on woman-the-passive-object, because it is the latter role we learn to play so well.

Or perhaps not. I cannot speak for all women, not even for all heterosexual women, and that is why we need to make the map. I'm going to begin by quoting snippets from my writing, things which may or may have ended as parts of whole stories. The first snippet:

I first saw him silhouetted against the setting sun, walking down a path from the forest, dressed in faded jeans and a ripped T-shirt. He was lanky, with narrow hips, inscrutable hooded eyes and lips made for kissing. His feet were bare. They touched the earth on each step like a lover. Then he stopped and saw me.

A royal deer suddenly freezing because of a sudden sound in the forest, turning its antlered head towards the sound, beauty and power ready to flee. A golden god come down from Olympus. He made the air around him radiate with desire.

He accepted the wine bottle I offered him and drank from its mouth. I watched him drink, the wine beading on his lips, and I wanted him so that my body hurt.

This snippet was part of a longer piece which I cannot find, but all of it was my attempt to write about desire, to acknowledge it.

Here is a different approach to the question of desire:

Eloise has trouble with joy.
"Come", Alan says, "comecomecomeCOME!", and thrusts deep into her. But she can't, she wont. She has to remember, someone has to remember: who will pay the bills, iron the shirts, see that he orgasms, buy the funeral plots, learn foreign languages. Eloise is full of lists, her body blocked by all the shoulds and should-nots, her lust a feeble throb deep inside her bones.

Alan rolls off her, their skins separating with a wet smack. But mostly it is his sweat. She pulls the sheet over her nakedness, listening to his breathing slowing down, turning into snores, and she closes her own eyes. Her body is aching, her shoulders frozen and her hips like creaky gates. Her lust has compacted, nested back, grown another layer of skin that wont be pierced.

Eloise thinks of her chores for tomorrow: the joyless business of making a living, the endless repetitions of housework, the conversations without meaning. Her hands worry the sheet; she wants joy, joy to come back.

This is the beginning of a short story about depression. Elaine hears Voices, and finally she runs away to New York City to escape them and begins to live again, bit by bit:

The sun is bright outside, spring is in the air. Eloise finds an outdoor cafe, sits down and orders a double cappuccino with whipped cream. The painkillers are beginning to work and she feels anesthetized, weightless. Locals walk by, grumpy and stressed, and tourists wander around aimlessly. Street hawkers are setting up their wares and the first discarded food wrappers blow down the street in the breeze.

Eloise tries to think of the street as the tip of the nose belonging to an old man sitting somewhere in Europe. Is all the traffic tickling him? Do the people look like ants to him, ants hurrying to and fro for some infathomable reason? Her cappuccino arrives and she licks off the whipped cream first. The third challenge: to open oneself to the risks of feeling joy or not.

Eloise doesn't think that she feels anything much. But she is keeping the usual voices quiet, barring them with her magical sword from the spaces of her mind. She orders a croissant to go with the cappuccino and settles down to watching men.

The voices don't like that. Watching men is sinful, women don't do that, good women don't do that. Eloise raises her sword high above the voices and slashes down. Temporary silence ensues.

Men's hips are fascinating, the way they move. Eloise studies the bottoms of young men strolling by, she studies the skins on their arms in all the different shades of earth, she studies their eyes, dreaming, worried, alert, hooded. She wonders what the men would be like in bed, what it would feel like to kiss those lips or those. The voices rise again with warnings of violence, of disease, but the voices are faint for Eloise is just watching, just listening to the gentle stirrings of lust in her body.

It is your turn now. The discussion is not limited to just women, by the way, but I would like to see it kept on the topic of women's desire.
-----
*Meaning a poorly argued and poorly researched story with the sole intention of getting people outraged enough to disperse it widely. Lots of clicks means lots of advertising income and, sadly, more link-bait stories for the future.

Latest in the Republican "I Can Be Crueler To Orphans and Widows" Contest [Anthony McCarthy]

Thanks to QL and Atrios for the heads up.

Michigan State Senator, Bruce Caswell has introduced a bill that would mandate foster children could only buy used clothes.

Under a new budget proposal from State Sen. Bruce Casswell, children in the state’s foster care system would be allowed to purchase clothing only in used clothing stores...

... Under his plan, foster children would receive gift cards that could only be used at places like the Salvation Army, Goodwill and other second hand clothing stores.

,,,, Casswell says the plan will save the state money, though it isn’t clear how much the state spends on clothing for foster children or how much could be saved this way.

Caswell's previous career was as a public school teacher, superintendent and sports coach. I would love to know how much he was paid for being superintendent and coaching. I'd also like to know how he treated poor kids at the schools he worked in.

Republicans around the country are in a contest to see how cruel they can be to the weakest, most defenseless. There seems to be no bottom when they get into that. It wouldn't be a surprise if they required poor children to wear drab, grey shifts of scratchy, skimpy material so they can be identified by "decent children" who would shame them, if not throw rocks and sticks at them. Or maybe they should be sent to modern day work houses so they can earn their keep. That's the way they think, they are the personification of evil.

Lies And Free Speech [Anthony McCarthy]

Would there be any harm to our freedom, our liberties, our lives from this terrible regime of the truth?

Note: I've decided to repost this piece I wrote last year. I don't see anything that isn't born out in subsequent events and experience, especially the ongoing nuclear disaster in Japan.

Reality is real, a wise Rabbi once said. That which really happens is what our lives are made of. What really happens is the source of whatever benefit we can get from life as well as the source of all harm. It is the professed faith, at least, of most of us that the real is good, or at least unavoidable. And it is the real that has to be contended with in our actions and thoughts. What is asserted to be unreal is denigrated and the charge of believing in what is deemed to not be real constitutes one of the more serious contemporary sins among the relatively educated class of most western societies. At least that is the profession of faith which most of us would make if pressed. Which I won’t investigate further just now. The esteem that the real is given is based in hard won experience about the consequences of wishful thinking unconditioned by consideration of the predictable results that flow from our actions. Often the lessons are unwelcome. But experience keeps a hard school as compared to desire, until the final exam results are in. When bad results can’t be avoided, the least foolish thing to do is to forgo that part of desire which leads to them. Oligarchies and other elite systems have rigged things, to insure that it’s others who pay the cost of actions and conditions not of their making. The history of non-democratic governments could be written in the measures which elites have taken to make other people pay for their privilege and the eventual collapse due to the accretions of those awful results. Democracy is dependent on The People making decisions about governing society and making the laws with which a society regulates itself and its members. The quality of those laws, the quality of the results, inescapably depend on the extent to which those laws are in accord with reality. The farther they are from reality, the worse results can be expected. Experience seems to confirm this idea, the seductions of self-interest being very powerful, only hard experience consciously considered could overcome that motive to be deluded. I’ll also note that democracy is also dependent on equality before those laws. Very crudely put, laws that result in inequality will inevitably lead to a similar situation to the one described in the last paragraph. We have an especially dramatic example of what happens when laws and actions are dangerously out of sync with what is real in the Gulf Oil disaster. A disaster which could destroy one of the most important eco-systems which life really and inescapably does depend on. Clearly the laws and regulations that allowed that well to be drilled were based on false information, much of it provided by people with degrees in science and engineering, some of whom certainly knew the possibility of something like this happening. It seems when large profits are in the mix, that these catastrophes repeatedly override experience, the lessons of past ones and the resultant destruction of the very basis of life. Yet those who repeatedly create them, are always able to profit from them. There is a reason for this situation. My question, stemming from this past week’s discussion and the spectacle of the Gulf oil disaster, is there a right to lie? I mean is there a real, and not just theoretical right to lie, which should be allowed to remain embedded in our laws and which has a real effect in real life. Most importantly, given the reality of how our country is ruled in 2010, what are the consequences of a legal system, a free press and a society which allows profitable and convenient lying to enjoy the functional status of a civil right*? Under the regime of free speech, free press, the champions of free speech apparently believe there is and the danger it imposes on all of us, isn't something they really care about. Is there a right to knowingly lie in a way that can result in a catastrophe like the one we are all fixed on in the Gulf of Mexico**? Is there a right to lie in a way that will put liars in control of our government and regulatory agencies, and our courts? Don’t forget the courts, which, often don’t seem to feel it is their job to punish the most massively consequential lies, so long as those aren’t told in court, under oath or in a context that can be construed as the equivalent of a contract. And quite often, even when those are. It is exactly that part of the government which is supposed to consider what is real and what isn’t that has allowed the corporations and the congress and administrations to ignore reality as hard experience shows will obviously lead to disaster. ------------ I’m sure that, as in the discussion of violent porn, this question will elicit an immediate response with the most extreme of hypothetical scenarios presented. It’s often the classic questions. What about lying to the Nazis about where the Jewish children are hidden? That kind of thing. And, of course, when those situations are real, they are all important. Of course, any moral person with a functioning brain would lie to the Nazis. But pretending that moral imperative to lie as an exculpatory factor in the official lies that gush like oil from the insanely drilled hole in the Gulf, is willfully and stunningly dishonest. The two situations are made definitively different by the illegitimacy of the Nazis’ genocide and their demented despotism. Naziism can, in no way, be equated with the aspirations and the goals of egalitarian democracy. To deny that difference is to lie, to assert those two situations are equivalent is a colossal lie. The imperative to lie is founded in the choices of Nazis. The requirement to tell the truth an essential prerequisite for democracy to be possible. In my experience, the very people who would bring up this hypothetical in defense of lying are the same who will absolutely hold that any suppression of Nazi propaganda is a crime against civil liberties. Those European countries whose children were rounded up and murdered by the Nazis are often criticized for their outlawing of Naziism and Holocaust denial. This pseudo-ethical stand is an example of denying the hardest of reality in favor of the soft comfort of an abstract principle. The history of that genocide is as real a fact as exists. It is as real as anything in science or mathematics. It is more real than anything asserted in the entire history of philosophy. It is a definitive justification for the suppression of Naziism. Denial of a that lesson, consisting of the murders of millions of innocent people, discredits those who refuse to learn it. There comes a time when you have to acknowledge a lesson like that delegitimizes an abstract principle that airily accepts the possibility of its repetition. You just do. Eventually people have to stop pretending that is a serious point of view held by credible people. And the same thing can be said for other genocides, the extermination of the population of Tasmania by the British, the genocides on every continent that continue to today. Genocide didn’t end. It is a constant danger around the world today. The clear morality of lying to save innocent people doesn’t set aside the fatal effect of serious lying in a democratic society. In fact, one of the likely cumulative results of that kind of lie, is the supplanting of democracy with despotism, and despotisms always try to keep themselves in power by the kind of violence that comprises the extreme hypothetical of the “free speech” absolutist. ----------- The only legitimate reason for a government to exist is for the protection of The People and the promotion of their common good and other such benefits. Foremost, that requires protection of the biosphere that all rights depend on. To do that, we have found, a democratic government is indispensable. As an extension of our personal rights and the necessity of their protection, we also find it necessary to protect democratic government. Our laws have protections of our constitution built into them, laws that protect the government against attack. Even the Bill of Rights and the rest of the protections of individual liberties are held to allow anti-treason and similar laws. Clearly supporting the enemies of the United States is not expression that is without legal jeopardy for those who express it in an actionable manner, especially during times of war. But there is a far greater danger to a democratic society than the ones we are all told to fear, one that is allowed the freest of free reign today, and no where more freely than those in the mass media and government who are deflecting attention with fear of terrorism, often based on nothing in reality. Why should a democratic society allow lying about serious public issues? It shouldn’t. It certainly shouldn’t allow it in the mass media or by politicians or judges. The lies that fill the airwaves used to be mostly heard during political campaigns but are now a perpetual feast of toxic garbage on the airwaves and, even more so, on cable and the internet. I think that today those lies are a far greater danger to democracy and the Constitution of the United States than any foreign or domestic enemy. As an example, it is estimated that 40,000 Americans die every year as a result of our for-profit insurance system which denies them timely care, in many cases, it denies them any care. The well financed lies of the insurance and associated industries have perpetuated a protection racket that kills far more Americans that have been killed by any foreign or domestic enemy of the government and our society. And that’s only those who die from our terrible health insurance system. Corporations kill many more of us than that. Democracy that allows lying a free reign in its politics can't survive as a democracy. The evidence is that our system that is fueled on lies, freely told, freely broadcast, told by professional liars paid by the most filthy rich and larcenous crooks, is destroying our society and, indeed, the very basis of life. I don’t think there is any moral or political reason to allow that. Citing free speech in defense of liars isn’t just an irrational, one law fits all occasions, refusal to consult reality, it is dangerous to our democracy and our lives. Using the language of rights and freedom to hand over our minds to lies is criminal insanity. Using the excuse that sifting the lies from the truth is hard and takes an effort is inexcusable. If it’s too hard to do that, then it’s too hard for us to make informed political decisions. It is to pretend that responsible voting and participation in democracy is impossible. It is to assert that democracy isn’t possible. There is no royal road in reality. If it’s even very very hard to do what is essential, that’s just too bad. -------- Indulging in a bit of non-reality, just call it an extreme hypothetical, imagine a society where no one told lies, where no corporation interested in maximizing profit over the welfare of The People or the environment could misrepresent the reality of their intentions and proposed activities. Imagine if they had to be honest about what really happens. Imagine if they couldn’t hire scientists, engineers, lawyers, and other, assorted professions --- and in today’s reality, quite a sordid bunch they are — to lie to us and our government. Would we The People let them drill where they couldn’t fix an oil well blow out before it caused the death of a major ecosystem? Would we allow them to ration health care on the basis of what is most profitable to them, including the deaths of tens of thousands every year? And imagine if politicians and lawyers and judges didn’t lie. Let’s go wild and imagine if the broadcast and cabloid media couldn’t lie? Would there be any harm to our freedom, our liberties, our lives from this terrible regime of the truth? Would getting even half way there from the cesspool of lies we are in today hurt or enhance those benefits of democracy? * Of course, there are other lies that are not permitted, some have been noted in the discussions last week and I won’t go over those again here. Libel and slander among them. A good part of the Clinton administration was a lesson in what happens when media corporations and pseudo-religious corporations are given a free reign in slandering and libeling elected officials. It was the Supreme Court, in decisions some foolishly hail as a great bulwark of free speech that led to that crippling of democracy. ** In another recent discussion there was something of a scandalized reaction when it was proposed that scientists, engineers and others who, from positions gained through their academic credentials, lied or irresponsibly and catastrophically misjudged the situation that led to the oil gusher into the gulf, should lose their credentials. Including revoking their degrees. Universities are supposed to be institutions that place the highest value on truth in accord with reality. “Veritas,” the often ironic slogan is. “Lux et Veritas, ”... This is supposed to be especially true in academic departments in the sciences, engineering and schools of law. What are we supposed to think of the universities which trained corporate scientists and engineers who bend their work product in ways that are no different from lying about what is real? What are we supposed to think about those who have also proven, in the most horrible way, that their professional judgement is criminally negligent at worst, disastrously incompetent at best? Should people who have done those kinds of things retain their credentials? Shouldn’t universities which produce these people take their measure of blame in that? What is the real value of a university education if the people they tout in the alumnae propaganda are proven liars and incompetents? And that doesn’t even begin to ask about law school graduates. It also doesn’t go into the fact that the faculties of many of our most prestigious universities are well salted with corrupt corporate hacks, crooks and liars. Eventually, reality being real, the corruption behind the ivy and ersatz parchment becomes undeniable. I think we are rapidly reaching the crisis stage when our universities are adjuncts of a corrupt corporate oligarchy. The signs of rot are undeniably visible now. Note: This was the last of the posts I’d planned on writing on this topic for now. It became considerably longer in response to some of the points from the discussion which I though had to be considered. My thinking on this has changed considerably due to the spectacle of the dying democracy in the United States, the corporate oligarch that is replacing it and the willful acquiescence of what functions as our intelligentsia to the means which that is happening. The free speech industry, certainly in the vanguard of that acquiescence and even enablement.

Today's Krugman. How Health Care Is Not a Loaf of Bread.

Well, Krugman doesn't say that. I do. But what Krugman says does relate to that loaf of bread:

Earlier this week, The Times reported on Congressional backlash against the Independent Payment Advisory Board, a key part of efforts to rein in health care costs. This backlash was predictable; it is also profoundly irresponsible, as I’ll explain in a minute.
But something else struck me as I looked at Republican arguments against the board, which hinge on the notion that what we really need to do, as the House budget proposal put it, is to “make government health care programs more responsive to consumer choice.”

...

Medical care, after all, is an area in which crucial decisions — life and death decisions — must be made. Yet making such decisions intelligently requires a vast amount of specialized knowledge. Furthermore, those decisions often must be made under conditions in which the patient is incapacitated, under severe stress, or needs action immediately, with no time for discussion, let alone comparison shopping.

Imagine this: You walk into a bakery, wondering if you are hungry and if some kind of bread might take care of that. Instead of feeling hunger, you need to have an expert examine you to verify what that gnawing in your belly means.

That same expert then recommends the kind of bread that best fits your symptoms and in most cases it is bread sold at that same bakery. Which means that the expert's sales and profits will depend on what she or he recommends to you.

You buy the bread and eat it. It may or may not turn out to be the right kind of bread for your particular type of hunger, in which case you need to go back to that bakery or perhaps to another one to get a second opinion.

All that sounds crazy. But it's the way we consume health care when ill. The differences between the consumption of bread and the consumption of say, blood pressure medications, are enormous: We usually cannot self-diagnose blood pressure problems and we cannot buy the necessary medications without a middleman/woman.

The need for bread is predictable and the quality of the product is fairly easy to judge. The need for many health care products is unpredictable and their quality very difficult to evaluate even after testing them for a while. And the sellers of the bread don't have the same double incentives as the sellers of health care would do in the absence of professional and ethical constraints, because bakers don't tell us if we need bread but sellers of health care do tell us if we need their services.

The examples I give may sound silly but they should be taken very seriously. Health care is not the same as a loaf of bread and it cannot be traded in exactly the same manner to gain imagined market benefits. Concepts such as "consumer choice" are not totally without benefit in the medical markets but their impact is tiny. The reason for that is simple: Consumers lack the necessary information not only about the complicated treatments in the medical marketplace but even about what they ultimately might need.

Providers play a double-role as both sellers of products and services and as the consumers' agents. That double-role means that the people who have the best information in the markets are also the people whose incentives are not necessarily towards less consumption or lower costs. Higher health care costs usually mean that someone gets paid more, after all.

Combine that with the low price-elasticity of medical care (i.e., the fact that seriously ill people are willing to pay almost any price for relief and survival) and the still wide availability of insurance coverage, and you might see why markets are unlikely to offer price competition and efficiency. In any case, competition in price may be meaningless if consumers cannot evaluate the quality of the package they buy.

Krugman might scold at me for using the term "consumers" here but I agree with his basic point. It's one thing to argue that consumer choice by healthy people among competing insurance policies is doable. It's quite another thing to send the sick or high-risk elderly out to the private health insurance markets with a voucher with shrinking real value. Yet this is what the conservatives recommend.