The Posts I Didn't Want To Write. On Weiner. Part I: The Background

As Lewis Carroll wrote:

“"The time has come," the walrus said, "to talk of many things: Of shoes and ships - and sealing wax - of cabbages and kings”

So I am the walrus and the topic of the day is pictures of peckers and pecs and Representative Anthony Weiner who sent them.

The time has come to talk about that because the media has decided to do. Oh yes. The unemployment may still be 9.1%, the forced-birthers are introducing amendments everywhere to make a zygote more important than the aquarium it swims in, wars are happening. But it's time to talk about penises. As a nation.

I look at this deep wiener question from three angles: First, is there anything in this topic for a feminist goddess to chomp on? Second, what are the political implications of the Wienergate? Are all wieners deemed equal? And third, how is the media doing here? Was it a good idea to ask Andrew Breitbart to take over Wiener's Moment of Public Humiliation press conference and did they ask sane questions?

Here is a rough summary of the events so far:

A picture of a man's gray underpants with a possible bulge was sent from Rep. Weiner's Twitter account in late May:

The photo in question was a close-up shot of a man's underwear, which was tweeted from Weiner's account Friday night. The picture, addressed to a Seattle college student's Twitter handle @GennetteC, was visible to all of the congressman's followers.
Weiner's office over the weekend said the congressman's Twitter account was hacked, but on Tuesday, Weiner resisted answering questions about the incident.

Weiner denied knowing the young woman or sending the picture.

Then Andrew Breitbart, a wingnut cooperative, published more pics of Weiner's body, sent to young women:

Conservative publisher Andrew Breitbart published a series of alleged photographs of the congressman Monday that he said Weiner emailed to an unidentified young woman, including a shirtless photograph. In addition, tabloid website RadarOnline.com posted a sexually explicit Facebook exchange allegedly involving Weiner and an unidentified woman that the website claimed took place in March.

And one of those women came forward:

And Weiner's admission came as ABC News prepared to release an interview with 26-year-old Meagan Broussard, who provided the news outlet with "photos, emails, Facebook messages and cell phone call logs that she says chronicle a sexually-charged electronic relationship with Weiner that rapidly-evolved for more than a month, starting on April 20, 2011."

As the quote states, by that time Weiner had admitted sending the photos and so on. Though as a joke and something that mostly took place before his marriage:

Weiner, who appeared in a ballroom at a New York City hotel, said he sent the initial photograph as "part of a joke," and that he deleted it in a panic after he realized it had been sent to the public. He said his decision to lie to the public was a mistake.
"I was trying to protect my wife, I was trying to protect myself from shame, and I really regret it," he said. He said she knew about some of the online relationships before they were married.

Next came the press conference where Weiner confessed to having had various Internet relationships and apologized to his wife:

A teary Rep. Anthony Weiner apologized on Monday for having "inappropriate" telephone and email conversations with six women over three years, though he said he did not break any laws and would not step down.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi immediately called for an investigation of Weiner's actions.
The New York lawmaker admitted he posted a photograph of his bulging crotch on Twitter, saying he had lied when he previously characterized the photograph as a prank.
"The picture was of me, and I sent it," he said.
He also said he had several "inappropriate conversations" that he described as "explicit in nature" with half a dozen other women over three years - including after he married his wife, Huma Abedin, an aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He said he had not met any of the women.

Andrew Breitbart entered the room at the press conference. The journalists present asked him to step up to the podium so he did, before Weiner entered the room. Breitbart gave a speech and raved and ranted.

Then the Republicans asked for Weiner's head:

A top Republican called on Democratic U.S. Representative Anthony Weiner to resign on Tuesday, saying Congress cannot afford to be distracted by the sexually charged photos and tweets he sent to women.

House Republican Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia became the first top U.S. lawmaker to say that Weiner, an outspoken liberal who easily won a seventh two-year term in the House of Representatives last year, should step down.

"I think he should resign," Cantor told reporters during a trip to Virginia.

And the Democrats were angry:

The Democrats said his sexual indiscretions took the spotlight off an unpopular Republican plan to cut the Medicare healthcare program for the elderly.
"Just as we get a boost from the Republican's Medicare plan, Weiner effectively changed the topic" to his flirtatious tweets and photos of himself, another aide said.

Were the women receiving these communications willing participants? That is the crucial feminist question here. I am unable to find evidence of any who were not but such evidence may be forthcoming. It's actually the important part of the whole story for the feminist analysis which comes next.

Awful News From Syria

ADDED LATER: It turns out that all this was a scam by a married American man who lives in Scotland. My apologies for reporting on it.


Amina Arraf, a Syrian blogger has been abducted:

A blogger whose frank and witty thoughts on Syria's uprising, politics and being a lesbian in the country shot her to prominence was last night seized by armed men in Damascus.
Amina Arraf, who blogged under the name Amina Abdallah, holds dual Syrian and American citizenship and is the author of the blog A Gay Girl in Damascus, which has drawn fans from Syria and across the world.
She was kidnapped last night as she and a friend were on their way to a meeting in Damascus. The kidnapping was reported on her blog by a cousin.
"Amina was seized by three men in their early 20s. According to the witness (who does not want her identity known), the men were armed," wrote Rania Ismail.
"Amina hit one of them and told the friend to go find her father. One of the men then put his hand over Amina's mouth and they hustled her  into a red Dacia Logan with a window sticker of Basel Assad."

She has faced violence in the past and so have other bloggers in Syria. It is unclear what group abducted her. Amina's cousin:

"Unfortunately, there are at least 18 different police formations in Syria as well as multiple different party militias and gangs. We do not know who took her so we do not know who to ask to get her back. It is possible that they are forcibly deporting her," she wrote.

I hope she is unharmed.

Two Posts I wrote for Eschaton

They might be of interest here, too. The first one is about deep questions, such as whether ketchup is a vegetable or a major continent. Anthony McCarthy also wrote on the same topic, pointing out the hypocrisy in the Republican policies.

The second one is an equally pondering one, asking when an economic recovery is not a recovery.

The Peonies

This is a draft for a short story I wrote some years ago. You might enjoy it at the peony time of the year. Or not, given that it's a bit O. Henryish.


The tulips were pushing up from the black soil. They looked like knives, Bruce thought. From his window he could see sharp green knives piercing the cold soil all over the front yard. The tulips were Rosie's. She had planted them last fall, pushing the bulbs into the soil one by one, leaning on her crutches.

There was a list somewhere. A list about the tulips, what they were called and what plants would rise up around them. Bruce knew that he should look for the list; Rosie had spent what little strength she had left to write lists about all her plants, lists about the tasks of gardening, even lists telling him what to anticipate, what to look for, how to enjoy the beauty of her garden. He wasn't ready to look for the lists yet.

The house was silent. Bruce took his breakfast dishes back into the kitchen and then climbed up the steep stairs to the top of the house. There he had his study, his lair as Rosie had called it. The walls were covered with bookshelves and the shelves with books he loved. This is where he had escaped family Thanksgiving parties and rowdy grand-children's visits. This was where he used to relax, put his feet up and lean back in his old armchair while listening to the faint sounds of pre-dinner clatter Rosie was making in the kitchen downstairs. All was well in the world.

Now, of course, nothing was well in his world. He took down a favorite volume about the Civil War and opened it randomly. The words were just words printed on the paper. He put the book back in its place and turned around. He could see the back yard from his high window. Green knives in the back, too. He turned on the television set and sat down for another day of existence.

Some weeks later he noticed the first buds on the tulips. Most of them were plain green but a group near the dining-room window sported buds which shimmered darkly through the green. Were they infected with something, Bruce wondered? Rosie would have known. Her lists might tell him. He should look them up. He spent the day vacuuming, doing laundry and buying groceries. At night he put on a cardigan and opened the door to Rosie's room, her study. It was cold and smelled stale. He turned on the light and saw the lists she had left him, neatly stacked on her desk. The top one was about tulips.

He sat down to read.
"The ones under the dining-room window are called 'Queens of the Night', Bruce. They are as black as tulips come."
That explained the color of their bulbs.
"They are beautiful. I planted them in the middle of yellow-leaved hostas for contrast. The hostas are probably not up yet."
Bruce couldn't remember about the hostas. It wasn't something he normally noticed. But he would check tomorrow.
"They are stern, these tulips, and sad. But they also have a flame of life in the middle, a kind of sexiness as the name suggests. Do you remember New Orleans, Bruce?"
He couldn't read any further that night.

The following weekend Bruce's son came to visit with his young family. The house was full of children's laughter and cheerful-sounding conversation. Bruce wanted to ask his son about the tulips but couldn't get the topic introduced. They spent the afternoon out, and Bruce came home tired. The sun was setting and its rays struck the now open black tulips with a malicious glee. Bruce glared at them. His anger was quite impartial; he was angry at the tulips, his son and Rosie. He was angry at the idea of gardening. Gardening was what Rosie did.

That night he couldn't sleep because of the heavy meal they had had in a noisy restaurant. He took the tulip notes to bed with him and continued reading.

"The ones in the back yard are lily-shaped tulips. Their petals are tipped. I always thought of them as butterflies trying to take off. The most beautiful ones near the fence are called 'Ballerinas'. You'll see why when they flower: They look just like dancers in their tutus standing on point."
'Ballerinas', Bruce mouthed. What did he have to do with 'Ballerinas'? Who invented these idiotic names in the first place?

"They should flower at the same time as the bleeding hearts behind them. The bleeding hearts should echo the pink in the tulips, or so I hope. Oh Bruce, I so wanted to see them together! I know that you don't care for such things but won't you watch out for them, for my sake?"

Bruce turned off the light and lay there, his eyes filling with tears of anger. How dare Rosie do this, play him like a violin? She always fought unfairly, and now he couldn't even point that out to her.

In a few days all the tulips were in flower. The garden looked deceptive, as if Rosie was still there to care for it. Bruce made notes of the heights of the different varieties and counted their blooms. He tried to appreciate the color harmonies and contrasts, but for this he had to take Rosie's list out and to study it sitting on the front steps. Neighbors passing by complimented him on the tulips. He didn't want to remind them that he hadn't planted any himself. Then he became worried about the upkeep the tulips might require. Surely Rosie used to do something to them every spring?

He looked up her list of garden tasks. It was written differently, it was businesslike with chores, tools and times listed in a table. This was Rosie, too, her cool, professional side. Still, Bruce read through the list twice seeking in vain for a more personal note. He was impressed by the sheer volume of physical labor needed for gardening. Rosie never asked for his help.

He began the following morning with the cleaning of the flowerbeds, raking and aerating the soil. He carted compost from the pile by wheelbarrowfuls and spread it across the beds. His shoulders ached and sweat trickled down his nose. The earth had a deep smell. He didn't know if the compost was spread to the right thickness and he wasn't sure if he hadn't removed something from the beds that was supposed to stay, but he slept well that night.

It rained in the morning. The rain pelted the windows and smeared the view through them with tears. The tulips stood up against the grayness like so many colored flags, like soldiers in gaudy uniforms, refusing to bend in the face of the inevitable. Bruce cracked the window open. The smell of wet earth and green leaves drifted in, mingling with the rain and the soreness in his muscles.

He suddenly missed Rosie so much that his body felt stretched thin, pulled infinitely long until it reached the borders of the realm of the dead, until he turned into an insistent throbbing of one desperate thought, this thought knocking on the sealed doors of the dead, asking for Rosie O'Leary. The pain was unbearable, not bearable, but he bore it anyway. After a few moments, or an eternity, it receded, and Bruce stood there looking out into the rain again. He hated being alive.

Later that day he moved all Rosie's lists up to his study and arranged them in an order that seemed logical. He took the top one, titled 'Late Spring-Early Summer' and sat down to read it in his armchair. The rain drummed on the roof. It was almost cozy in his den, warm and dry. He shuffled the papers in his lap and a faint whiff of Rosie's perfume touched his nose. It pierced him for a second.

"You are going to hate the weeding, Bruce. I always hated it. The weeds crop up so fast this time of the year and you can't let them win, that's how you are. That means an aching back, my dear. There is some liniment for that in the medicine cabinet. I am sorry for your pain, but the weeding will do you good."
Bruce grimaced at the thought and turned the page.

"My favorite moment of late spring was always the opening of the peonies. I never planted them, they came with the house, and I don't know what they are called. They have these small hard buds, like hands held in a tight fist against fear or anger, and ants crawl over them, seeking the sweetness in them. I could never decide if it looked like a horror film or the prelude to some erotica. The first spring when we moved to the house, remember, when the children were tiny?, I wanted to pull the peonies out because they gave me the shivers, but there was so much to do that I never got around to it. Now, of course, I am grateful for that, for the next stage is the opening of their buds and that is worth everything. They opened for us all those years, love. All those years we had together."

Bruce was crying now, his body releasing the sobs in tune with the rain on the roof. He stumbled up and leaned against the cold window panes, crying.

When the rain slowed down his tears also did and he was able to stand straighter again. He didn't really want to go back to the list but he wanted to know about the opening of the peonies.

"The buds break open when you're not looking. Perhaps they just can't take the stroking of the ants any more, or perhaps the mild night wind blows them open. Anyway, one morning when you go out there they are, these gigantic, blowsy, crushed flowers, like white-and-pink silk, straining to open even more towards the sun. It is so sensual, Bruce. You must touch them, put your senses in your fingertips and lips and touch them. And then you must inhale their scent. Hurry, for they won't last very long.

I miss your body, Bruce. Even in this hell of pain, with my body being pulled apart by the final crunching of death's teeth, I want you. I know that you can't want me now, I understand. But you will want me when I am dead and the peonies will help."

When Bruce went to bed that night the sheets felt like Rosie's hands on his chest. The air was heavier, moister, than usual, and as he drifted asleep he turned to Rosie's side of the bed trying to pull her into his embrace. He dreamt about naked flesh and sex and woke up half-guilty half-relieved.

The spring speeded up. The tulips stretched their petals wider and wider and then dropped them. Other flowers took their place. Bruce fertilized and weeded, staked and weeded, watered and weeded. His muscles ached and he couldn't get his nails clean. He now knew Rosie's early year lists by heart and had started reading her gardening books. He wasn't going to be a gardener; that was what Rosie did, but he wanted to do this one thing for her. When his daughter who lived in France called him he told her all about the garden. She seemed pleased.

Then the peonies opened. It was just like Rosie had written. Yesterday they were all holding their closed fists up to the sky, today they were bending down, heavy with blossoms both celestial and obscene. Bruce looked around to make sure that nobody was looking and then buried his face in them. They were scented with innocence and hope and the smell of love and frenzied couplings. They caressed his face, their silkiness a thousand remembered nights with Rosie. Bruce stood there, half-crouched, while his body filled with longing, grief and desire. That moment Rosie was there with him, one with him, and also saying goodbye to him.

He spent the whole day with the peonies, until a hunger made him so weak that he barely made it back into the house and to a gigantic supper. After supper he moved Rosie's gardening books up to his study and selected a volume to read. He wanted to buy something new for his garden. A rose bush, perhaps.

Meanwhile, in Saudi Arabia, Women Apologize For Driving

At least according to this article:

JEDDAH: Wajnat Al-Rahbini, a Saudi actress who was arrested after driving her car Saturday along Jawazat Street in Jeddah, expressed regret for her actions and apologized to the Interior Ministry.

...

On May 21, police detained 32-year-old divorced mother Manal Al-Sharif after she was caught driving her brother's car in in Alkhobar. She was first arrested after uploading a video on YouTube in which she talked about the challenge of having to rely on drivers. Al-Sharif was released last week after appealing to high officials with a promise not to do it again.

...

In the city of Bisha, police arrested another woman, aged 48, for driving car. A large number of people gathered when police and Haia officials stopped the woman at a school. The woman was released after taking an undertaking that she would not do it again.

From the Annals of How To Maintain Gender Inequality. Subsection: Religious Policing.

I should note here that the laws of Saudi Arabia do not ban women from driving. It is religious fatwas which do that.

A Guest Post By Anna: A Literary Canon of Women Writers, Part Three: The Fifth Century to the Seventh Century

(Echidne's note: Part One of the series is here, Part Two here.)

The Middle Ages are generally considered to be the fifth until the fifteenth century, for the record, but of course I couldn't do that all in one post. So here is a beginning.

Aelia Eudocia Augusta (c. 401-460 CE) was the wife of Theodosius II, and a prominent historical figure during the rise of Christianity during the beginning of the Byzantine Empire. She wrote a poem entitled The Martyrdom of St. Cyprian in two books, of which 800 lines survived, and an inscription of a poem on the baths at Hammat Gader.  Her most studied piece of literature is her Homeric cento, which has been analyzed recently by a few modern scholars, such as Mark Usher and Brian Sower. It is the longest Homeric cento and has stories from the book of Genesis and New Testament stories about the life of Jesus added to it, showing the mix of Eudocia's Greek upbringing and her Christian faith. She had to convert in order to marry the Emperor. She impressed Theodosius II with her eloquence as well as her beauty, despite her poverty; she had been left only 100 coins in her father's will, though he gave much more to her brothers. Aelia Eudocia Augusta is a good source for those interested in the literary output of those raised in ancient pagan faith who became Christian. She is an understudied poet and has been neglected due to lack of complete and authoritative text.

Tumāḍir bint ʿAmr ibn al-Ḥarth ibn al-Sharīd al-Sulamīyah(575-645 CE), usually simply referred to as al-Khansā’, is the best known female poet in Arabic literature. In her time, the role of a female poet was to write elegies for the dead and perform them for the tribe in public oral competitions. Al-Khansā’ won respect and fame in these competitions with her elegies for her brothers, Ṣakhr and Muʿāwiyah, who died in battle.The contemporaneous male Arabic poet al-Nabighah al-Dhubyani said of her: "al-Khansā’ is the finest poet of the jinn and the humans."

Layla Bint Abullah Bin Shaddad Bin Ka’b Al Akheeliyya, or simply Layla Al Akheeliyya (c 600s CE) was a famous seventh century Arab poet who was renowned for her poetry, eloquence, and strong personality as well as her beauty. Layla depended highly on her poetry for income, and it provided her with connections to rich and powerful people.

Princess Nukata (c. 630-690 CE) (also known as Princess Nukada) was a Japanese poet and wife of Emperor Temmu.  Thirteen of her poems appear in the Man'yōshū, which is the oldest existing collection of Japanese poetry, compiled some time after 759 AD during the Nara period. The Man'yōshū is one of the most revered of Japan's poetic compilations, and is widely available in English.

If You Invite People To See You As An Object They Will Be Happy To Treat You As An Object [Anthony McCarthy]

Have you ever wondered why you never see female impersonators dressed in sensible shoes and regular clothes? Probably not. Female impersonation isn't really a question of imitating women as real people who are the possessors of rights, they are impersonating depersonalized, unempowered roles. I think just about everyone gets what female impersonation is really about.

It happens that I had a disagreement last week that impinges on the idea of "slut walks". "Boob quake" was an off-hand idea of a college student in response to a stupid thing said by an Iranian cleric, that earthquakes are caused by women dressing "immodestly". I didn't research it enough to see how the cleric explained the horrible earthquakes that The Islamic Republic, with its morality thugs and dress codes, suffered. But that's not my subject, here.

"Boob quake", topless walks and "slut walks" don't strike me as being very useful as political demonstrations. At best they carry a heavy burden of double meaning, one which is inescapably tied with objectification and the utilitarian potential of women as objects. While sexual self-determination is an essential part of both women's' and gay men's liberation that self-determination has to be ALWAYS understood and expressed in the context that all people have a status higher than material objects, that no one is available for use, that sex which reverts to the politics of users using people as objects are unacceptable, it is the exact opposite of liberation, it is the perpetuation of patriarchal privilege. I don't think that any of these forms of demonstration can escape the use of them by the champions of patriarchy of both genders and of any gender preference*.

In the argument I got into I referenced a "topless walk" in Portland, Maine last year. Here is what happened.

The women, preceded and followed by several hundred boisterous and mostly male onlookers, many of them carrying cameras, stayed on the sidewalk because they hadn't obtained a demonstration permit to walk in the street. About a thousand people gathered as the march passed through Monument Square, a mix of demonstrators, supporters, onlookers and those just out enjoying a warm and sunny early-spring day...
... Ty McDowell, who organized the march, said she was "enraged" by the turnout of men attracted to the demonstration. The purpose, she said, was for society to have the same reaction to a woman walking around topless as it does to men without shirts on.

Does anyone who bothers thinking about it really expect that won't be the outcome of this kind of thing? As I said in the argument, I am in favor of laws being unisex and that I favor men being required to wear shirts in public. Both due to aesthetic reasons and because it is impossible for women to go shirtless without it becoming more than a personal choice.

Gay men will never lead free lives until they both achieve legal equality AND THEY REFUSE TO FOLLOW THE NORMS OF PATRIARCHY. While I get the intended meaning behind "slut walks" and the other forms of demonstration, that's not the meaning they will have in the present political climate. I doubt there is anything to be gained by women identifying themselves with a form of stigmatization that covers both women who practice real sexual self-determination and women who are victimized by their inability to practice real self-determination.

* Pornography, by far the largest media and literary presence which gay men are allowed, is, in the majority of cases, an expression of patriarchal power over a subjected man. It is a demonstration that patriarchy is just a subset of economic and physical dominance over people, over all women and over a subset of men who can be used. Allowing that dominance in different variations isn't liberation it's just extending oppression masquerading as liberation.

Yet Another AIDS Anniversary [Anthony McCarthy]

Yet another AIDS anniversary, yet another year when there are no condom ads on American TV as they explicitly talk about geezers' erections and how they can have more of them eight times an hour.

I started counting up the people I knew who died of AIDS, got depressed in the forties and decided not to go that way. Most of those people I knew were gay men who almost certainly got it from unprotected anal sex, though some of them were straight too. Two were straight women who got it from sex with men who identified as straight.

I've written here about how horrified I am that straight anal sex has become more common and has become seen as trendy even as HIV infection rates rise among young gay men who practice unprotected anal sex. As the frat boys at Yale clearly said it, anal sex is seen as a culmination of male privilege so it's no surprise that the major vector of patriarchal propagation, secular commercial pop culture, has promoted it as cool*. About the only thing I can think is that most straight people either didn't know gay men who died of AIDS or who are kept alive only by extremely complex drug therapies which have major health consequences as well.

So, I'm asking you to testify. Have you watched a loved one die of AIDS? More than one loved one? What do you think of the straight anal sex fashion? Please, share your experience and ideas.

* I won't again go into the dominance politics and internalized hatred expressed through anal sex among gay men since the 1970s at this time.

Republicans: Starvation Not Abortion [Anthony McCarthy]

While Republicans around the country are making laws which really end legal abortion in state after state, Republicans in Washington are voting to starve the very fetuses Republicans so hypocritically claim to care about, the women carrying them that they so obviously don't, and the mothers and children who they care even less for.

If House Republicans get their way in the federal budget for fiscal year 2012 beginning in October, nearly 500,000 women, infants, and children could be deprived of basic nutritional assistance. Though Republican leaders justify this decision on the grounds that budget deficits require "shared sacrifice," the tax cuts they recently fought to extend will give away more money to America’s 300,000 millionaires this week than it will cost to adequately fund nutrition programs for all of next year.

That’s the story and the math behind the Republican-led House Appropriations Committee decision to slash the budget for the Special Supplemental Nutritional Program for Women, Infants and Children, or WIC, by $833 million in FY 2012. WIC provides nutritious foods to low-income pregnant women, new moms, babies, and children under 5 who have been identified as nutritionally at risk. The program has done this successfully for nearly 40 years at a relatively modest cost to the federal government, which is why the program has traditionally enjoyed strong bipartisan support.

Nothing could be a clearer, real life proof that Republicans don't care about the abortion issue except as a tool of the dirtiest kind of politics.

When politicians' stands are this much at odds, when the results of an issue they claim to care about so deeply that they have made it the focus of their legislative year is the exact opposite of when it's a matter of financial support, you know that they are lying when they say they care about it.

Conservatives don't care about anyone's babies but their own. They don't care about anyone but themselves and their own.

The only thing Republicans care about in regard to fetuses is in how they can be used to get them power.

That slashing food for poor women and children can be done with little to no outcry in our media while, at the same time, that money and much, much more is handed by Republicans and a tragically unskilled Democrat to billionaires and the rest of the obscenely rich should be a final judgement on our media and our political class. The United States has fallen so far that our government can act like the most undemocratic oligarchies in the third world and it is acceptable to those in control.

We must remove them from control, both the oligarchic power holders and the media that gives them power. Our lives depend on it. It's a ground floor, foundational level definition of who we are.

Some International Stories to Read

In France, women are protesting sexism. The Strauss-Kahn case has served as a lightning rod.

On the other hand, in Malaysia the police are alleged to have chained and branded foreign women suspected of prostitution. Do read the excuses at the end of the piece for their pitiful nature.

For really nice news (from some days ago) about all those women who can't do physics and don't want to, either:

A 22-year-old Australian university student has solved a problem which has puzzled astrophysicists for decades, discovering part of the so-called "missing mass" of the universe during her summer break.
Undergraduate Amelia Fraser-McKelvie made the breakthrough during a holiday internship with a team at Monash University's School of Physics, locating the mystery material within vast structures called "filaments of galaxies".

Feminine Tosh?

That's the opinion of the Nobel-price winning author V.S. Naipaul on women writers:

Nobel-prize winning author V.S. Naipaul claims that there is no woman writer who could serve as as his literary match. Described by some as “the greatest living writer of English prose,” the Trinidad-born Naipaul sparked controversy in an interview at the Royal Geographic Society this week, saying the work of female writers, even famed and beloved author Jane Austen, is inferior. The 78-year-old said he couldn’t share Austen’s ” sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world.”
Naipaul believes that women writers are “quite different” and says he can read a paragraph and know instantly whether it was written by a woman or not. He added: “And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too.”

What a Catch-22 there! Women are sentimental creatures not even in charge of their own houses. So no wonder they are second-rate writers.

Jane Austen's sense of the world is sentimental?

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

I do not want people to be agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them.

A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.

Nothing amuses me more than the easy manner with which everybody settles the abundance of those who have a great deal less than themselves.

For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?

We met Dr. Hall in such deep mourning that either his mother, his wife, or himself must be dead.

In all the important preparations of the mind she was complete: being prepared for matrimony by an hatred of home, restraint, and tranquillity; by the misery of disappointed affection, and contempt of the man she was to marry.

Naipaul is a sexist. And a pretty poor reader, it seems.

A Few Weeks In the Life of a Wingnut Governor: Rick Scott, a Ringwraith.

That would be Florida governor Rick Scott. My, what a busy beaver he is! He has managed to turn large chunks of the Medicaid system to for-profit health care providers:

Florida Gov. Rick Scott signed two historic Medicaid bills Thursday, placing the health care of nearly 3 million Florida residents into the hands of for-profit companies and hospital networks.
Lawmakers said the program was overwhelming the state budget and needed to be privatized to rein in costs and improve patient care. Critics fear the bills build on a flawed five-county experiment where patients struggled to access specialists and doctors complained the treatments they prescribed were frequently denied.

Medicaid pays for the health expenses of certain groups of the poor but it also covers 60% of all nursing-home care for the elderly in this country. Many of those elderly were not poor until they spent down their own funds.

So it is pretty fascinating that the privatization will begin with the latter group:

Long-term care patients will be the first to enroll in the statewide program starting in October 2013. The rest of the population will join the following year. The developmentally disabled population will not be included in the privatization program and will operate for three years under an 'I Budget,' which offers patients more flexibility.
Those seniors were not included in the original part program "because everyone knew they were too frail," said Rep. Elaine Schwartz.
"Extra vulnerable seniors who do not have the stamina to struggle with the Medicaid web of claim denials that HMOs practice should not be the first to be thrown under the bus, state-wide," said Schwartz, a Democrat from Hollywood.

I have not kept up with the research that studies quality of care in nursing homes but when I did follow that field the for-profit nursing homes had more problems than the not-for-profit nursing homes.

But wait! There is more! Rick Scott also signed into law new abortion restrictions:

House Bill 97 removes coverage for abortions in health care insurance exchanges created by federal health care reform. The law provides exceptions for cases of rape, incest and a threat to the woman’s life.

AND he cut funding for the care of at-risk infants. I'm not kidding you:

Last week, Gov. Rick Scott signed the state’s budget, which proposed reductions to health services for women and children. He also vetoed millions more in health service projects set aside specifically for women and children. Programs that aim to lower infant mortality and increase women’s health in the state have seen a major setback since Scott took office.
Among the many vetoes from last week: a program that would add a test for Severe Combined Immunodeficiency Disease, or SCID, to the list of genetic diseases newborns are tested for in Florida.

There you go! Unborn children are valuable but once they are born children Rick Scott does not care. Neither does he care about the elderly or the poor.

At The Freedom And Faith Conference

Republicans have gathered together to appeal to the social conservative base of the party. "Social conservatives" is a (an?) euphemism for people who want gays and lesbians in the closet and womenfolk in the kitchen. "Freedom and faith" are also tricky concepts here, given that others don't exactly push for a world full of prisons and a ban on all religions. Come to think of it, the "freedom and faith" bunch meeting right now do like prisons and seem to have a clear preference for fundamentalist Christianity. They also declare that they own god.

Whatevah, as all blaze political writers say. Former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman spoke at the conference to explain how he is all for freedom and faith:

"As governor of Utah I signed every pro-life bill that came to my desk," Hunstman told the crowd. "I signed the bill that made second-trimester abortions illegal, and increased the penalty for doing so. I signed the bill to allow women to know the pain an abortion causes an unborn child. I signed the bill requiring parental permission for abortion. I signed the bill that would trigger a ban on abortions in Utah if Roe v. Wade was overturned."

Perfect Teamwork

Eleanor Powell and Fred Astaire

On The Latest Arizona Shootings

A man killed five people and gravely wounded at least one additional person:

The shooting spree "stemmed from a divorce situation," Yuma Police Chief Jerry Geier said. He declined to give details.
Police identified the shooter as Carey Hal Dyess, 73, of Yuma. Dyess shot six people, killing five and gravely wounding another, before he killed himself, Yuma community relations director Greg Hyland said.

There are several questions this horrible event elicits, having to do with intimate partner violence, access to guns and so on. But it also links to something I think I may have noticed recently: Murders or killings carried out by men in this particular age group seem to be growing more common.

This may be a misconception. Does anyone here know what the statistics of homicide are by the age of the perpetrator?

Fluff Post For the Day

Because I have been running errands, including the filling-in of a zillion forms. I hate them but actually don't really mind bureaucracy, because without some such system the weaker ones will lose even more.

But the fluff is not about that. It's about to-do-lists. I use them all the time but even so I realized that mine are fairly undeveloped. For instance, it's not a good idea to put down eighty things to do for tomorrow, because even the ten one manages to actually do will look like a failure afterwards. But I still put down far too many things, ranging from "sew button" to "fix the world."

And "send package to mom" is a disastrous number on that list. Much better to put down on one day: "gather together things for mom in one place," and on another day: "find a box of the right size," and on yet another day; "find tape and scissors", then: "prepare package," and finally: "mail package to mom." That way it gets actually done, and you feel full of achievement for a week.

Making An Army on Horseback Out of A Nail That Might be From a Horse-Shoe. Today's Science Critique.

Lots of research into the possible ancestors of modern humans does that. There is a find of something, but nobody can actually tell whether what was found represents a common aspect of the life of the studied hominids. The find consists of not much: A few bones or some remains of a possible camp-site or some fossilized footprints. Then one builds theories on that basis.

I'm not saying that the theories are necessarily wrong ones but we really have very little actual evidence, and most of that could lend itself to several different interpretations. Too often the suggested interpretations become what we learn from the research, not what it really, truly found.

Then the interpretations get further interpreted by our current popular culture. Or by earlier cultures; we still get cartoons about the "caveman" going out hunting while the "cave-housewife" stayed behind to mind the children in the "cave-nuclear-family."

A recent piece demonstrates all this. Note that it is not a bad piece of research, not at all. It is just limited by the problems I discussed:

That we really don't know how representative the few finds we have are, that most of the finds don't tell us much about the sociological frame for the find and that the numbers of finds are exceedingly few. In some ways it is as if an archeologist finds a nail which could have come from a horse-shoe and then slowly moves into the argument that an army with horses and riders must have traveled through the area.

Here is the study which started all these thoughts:

Ancient forerunners of modern men stayed close to where they were born but paired up with females from far beyond their local stomping grounds, a new study claims.
The research provides a rare insight into the social behaviour of primitive "hominins" that appears to match closely that seen in chimpanzees and bonobos today.
Scientists analysed fossilised remains around cave networks near Johannesburg in South Africa and found that while 90% of males appeared to have spent their whole lives in the area, at least half the females had come from farther afield.
The work suggests that males regularly stayed with the community they were born into, with females roaming into new territories as they reached sexual maturity, the scientists report in the journal, Nature.

This is the it-must-have-been-a-horse stage. The earlier stage, that of finding the nail from the horse-shoe, involved looking at the fossilized teeth of two extinct species to analyze the amount of strontium in them. Strontium levels may be linked to the area in which the individual grew up. The research found that:

The strontium tests revealed that most of the individuals lived and died in the same area, where the rock is dominated by a limestone called dolomite. But results from the smaller teeth, which most likely came from females, showed many must have spent their youth elsewhere.

This doesn't sound bad at all, right? But when you find that the percentages (90% of males, at least half of females) in the first quote above were based on EIGHT Australopithecus africanus individuals and ELEVEN Paranthropus robustus individuals you might begin to see the horse-shoe aspect of the problem. Only the Australopithecus africanus is regarded as a possible forerunner of modern humans, by the way. Thus, from one nail to a horse-shoe.

But the results are then interpreted to get that army on horseback:

"Here we have the first direct glimpse of the geographic movements of early hominids, and it appears the females preferentially moved away from their residential groups," said lead author, Sandi Copeland at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.
A similar situation is seen among modern chimpanzees, where females tend to move out of their groups, in part because males form strong ties that help them protect a troop's territory.
"By virtue of the fact that the males choose to remain, the females are indirectly forced to leave their communities in order to avoid close inbreeding. It could be that among these early hominins, female dispersal has some correlation to close cooperative behaviour between males," Copeland added.

Perhaps. Or the small teeth might not be female teeth at all. Or the females might have been kidnapped by the males from other groups. Or, as the title of the quoted piece suggests, perhaps females were the ones with the wanderlust? And where all these finds from roughly the same time period? From the same groups? Could it be that the teeth belong to different times and different groups?

Neither do we know anything about the cooperative behavior of the hominid males, or even whether the males "chose" to remain in the same communities.

The final round in the horse-shoe games always consists of the popularizations. The Guardian isn't really playing that game, even inserting a different interpretation by the choice of the headline. But think how the story would be interpreted if the findings had been that it was the male hominids who appear to have come from elsewhere.

The interpretation would not be about female cooperation as the reason for their dispersal. It would be all about man-the-explorer, and how that aspect of men explains their current dominance in various ways.

Women: 21. Governing Body: O (by res ipsa)

Hey, remember the female badminton players?

Well, they won one.

(I want to give you a nice little excerpt from the article, but Blogger isn't cooperating.)

Not only did the Badminton World Federation abandon the "Girls must wear skirts" rule, but they also say that future efforts to improve presentation of the game will include the men's game. No idea if one EOTS commenter's suggestion that men play in the nude will be considered.

Eric Cantor: The Authoritarian Head of the American Household

You probably know that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) wants federal aid to the tornado-struck Joplin, Missouri, to be matched with cuts elsewhere in the federal budget.

On CBS's "Face the Nation", Cantor elaborated on his views:

On Sunday, he compared the situation to that of a family putting off buying a new car when a family member became ill.
"When a family is struck with tragedy -- like the family of Joplin ... let's say if they had $10,000 set aside to do something else with, to buy a new car ... and then they were struck with a sick member of the family or something, and needed to take that money to apply it to that, that's what they would do, because families don't have unlimited money. And, really, neither does the federal government."

So Eric Cantor's imaginary family has no health insurance. Well, that is to be expected, given his earlier views on health care.

Comparing the federal government to families is often pretty misleading because governments are NOT families. They have different duties, for one thing.

But if we accept the metaphor, Cantor's imaginary family, with him in the position of the dictatorial decision-maker, seems to be doing something more than cutting back on other expenses because of lack of health coverage. It seems to be negotiating with its sick member about whether the money will be spent on the needed treatment in the first place.

Reader Appreciation Day

I love you people. You are smart, kind and mostly polite and teach me so much. So thanks very much for reading and commenting here.

Meanwhile, in Egypt: Not Like Your Daughter Or Mine

According to CNN, virginity tests were performed on arrested Egyptian female demonstrators after the March 9 protests:

At that time, Maj. Amr Imam said 17 women had been arrested but denied allegations of torture or "virginity tests."
But now a senior general who asked not to be identified said the virginity tests were conducted and defended the practice.
"The girls who were detained were not like your daughter or mine," the general said. "These were girls who had camped out in tents with male protesters in Tahrir Square, and we found in the tents Molotov cocktails and (drugs)."
We didn't want them to say we had sexually assaulted or raped them, so we wanted to prove that they weren't virgins in the first place," the general said. "None of them were (virgins)."

Well, that's OK then. Except that the rape excuse is a feeble one unless we believe that only virgins can be raped and that the raped women could somehow prove, after the rape, that they had been virgins before it.

The real intention behind this practice is clear: To make participating in demonstrators more dangerous and more humiliating for women. Then they will stay at home as they are supposed to do.
---
Via Jennifer Armstrong.

“Non sono una donna a sua disposizione!” (by res ipsa)

Translation: "I am not one of the women at your disposal.” --Italian politician, Rosy Bindi, to President Silvio Berlusconi, who is the subject of this jaw-dropper of a New Yorker article by Ariel Levy. At one point, Levy asks Marco Ventura, Berlusconi's coordinator for foreign press, if she can meet Berlusconi:

...Ventura thought for a moment and replied, “Would you consider having plastic surgery first?” It wasn’t so that I could look like a velina, he explained; he would feel better about arranging the meeting if I had my face messed up, because then there would be a better chance of the Presidente keeping his hands to himself.

Mamma mia.

On Memorial Day

This is what I wrote last year. It is still what I think about this day.

Meanwhile, in China, A Return to Mistresses As Status Symbols?

Having a mistress raises a man's status, especially if the woman is college educated:

Throughout China's dynastic history, keeping mistresses was not only tolerated, but actually had the official seal of approval from the men at the top. The country's emperors maintained legendary harems of concubines, as did noblemen, wealthy merchants and anyone seeking to enhance their social status. Indeed, the country's most famous classic novel, Dream of the Red Chamber, relates the story of an imperial concubine in the Qing dynasty who supports her entire family, including its own numerous concubines, thanks to the emperor's patronage.
That historical context has perpetuated the notion that having a mistress equates to having status and power. Now, in today's status-hungry China, keeping a mistress is once again the fashionable thing to do. In some cities, an entire ecosystem has sprung up to support the ernai industry. A recent online exposé revealed an ernai agency in Shanghai that provided a menu of potential college-student mistresses for men willing to pay. The annual maintenance fees ranged from just $3,000 for students in less renowned schools to about $26,000 for students from the best campuses. (See pictures of China on the wild side.)

I have no idea how common this phenomenon might be, but it seems that girls are now being educated in how to avoid becoming mistresses. As the end of the linked article notes, it would seem to make more sense to educate the men. Or to educate both sexes.

It's shocking how most of the communist countries return to very traditional views about women when allowed. As if no real societal change could happen while the government ruled everything. The people slept like The Sleeping Beauty, and woke up to roughly the mores and norms which prevailed at the installation of the communist system.

That was probably somewhat exaggerated. But sexism certainly thrives in several ex-Communist countries, still awaiting the Prince(ss) Charming of real feminism.

Never mind. What I really wanted to write about is the oddity of this whole mistress idea especially if it really has something to do with the idea of having multiple mistresses or a wife and a mistress.

Consider that China is a country with excess men, a problem which will only become worse in the future. The last thing that would seem to make sense under those circumstances is unofficial polygamy. There will be millions of men who can find no female spouse at all even without it.

Smiling Guys Finish Last

In sexual attraction, that is. I have been told this by at least eighteen Internet popularizations of a new study about emotional expressions and sexual attractiveness among heterosexual North American men and women. Here is the summary of the study:

This research examined the relative sexual attractiveness of individuals showing emotion expressions of happiness, pride, and shame compared with a neutral control. Across two studies using different images and samples ranging broadly in age (total N = 1041), a large gender difference emerged in the sexual attractiveness of happy displays: happiness was the most attractive female emotion expression, and one of the least attractive in males. In contrast, pride showed the reverse pattern; it was the most attractive male expression, and one of the least attractive in women. Shame displays were relatively attractive in both genders, and, among younger adult women viewers, male shame was more attractive than male happiness, and not substantially less than male pride. Effects were largely consistent with evolutionary and socio-cultural-norm accounts. Overall, this research provides the first evidence that distinct emotion expressions have divergent effects on sexual attractiveness, which vary by gender but largely hold across age.

The emotional expressions tested in the studies were shown by photographs, many showing the top half of a person, and were listed as a) a neutral expression, b) a smiling expression, c) a proud expression (head back and arms raised in the air or head back and arms akimbo) and d) an expression of shame (head bent forwards). In some cases photographs were rated by a panel of psychology students as expressing happiness, pride, shame or neutrality, without the arm positions and so on.

Leaving aside my thoughts of how we are creating a brand new science about people looking at photographs and how this relates to our overall lives, I should still notice that we cannot be certain if the expression of "shame" indeed looks like "shame" to the viewers or if the expression of "pride" registers just that in the viewers.

But that's not what I want to write about. It is how the studies are interpreted. An example (thanks to Jennifer Armstrong for this link):

Women find happy guys significantly less sexually attractive than swaggering or brooding men, according to a new University of British Columbia study that helps to explain the enduring allure of "bad boys" and other iconic gender types. The study – which may cause men to smile less on dates, and inspire online daters to update their profile photos – finds dramatic gender differences in how men and women rank the sexual attractiveness of non-verbal expressions of commonly displayed emotions, including happiness, pride, and shame.

...

Tracy and Beall say that other studies suggest that what people find attractive has been shaped by centuries of evolutionary and cultural forces. For example, evolutionary theories suggest females are attracted to male displays of pride because they imply status, competence and an ability to provide for a partner and offspring.
According to Beall, the pride expression accentuates typically masculine physical features, such as upper body size and muscularity. "Previous research has shown that these features are among the most attractive male physical characteristics, as judged by women," he says.
The researchers say more work is needed to understand the differing responses to happiness, but suggest the phenomenon can also be understood according to principles of evolutionary psychology, as well as socio-cultural gender norms.
For example, past research has associated smiling with a lack of dominance, which is consistent with traditional gender norms of the "submissive and vulnerable" woman, but inconsistent with "strong, silent" man, the researchers say. "Previous research has also suggested that happiness is a particularly feminine-appearing expression," Beall adds.

Note, first how the "expression of shame" became brooding! That's not what the study was calling it. The popularization changed something rather important, I think, and the whole "allure of the bad boys" is similarly tagged on. There was nothing in the studies (at least based on the draft I got hold of) which attributed any of the emotions to being a "bad boy."

That is an example of the slippage which keeps happening in these popularizations.

Now to something which is not slippage. The above quote argues that the expression of pride was preferred in men by women because it is linked to status and the ability to provide for the offspring. But then how do the researchers explain why women, especially younger women, rank expressions of shame in men fairly high, too?

Ah. The answer is to tack on a different theory altogether!

Displays of shame, Tracy says, have been associated with an awareness of social norms and appeasement behaviors, which elicits trust in others. This may explain shame's surprising attractiveness to both genders, she says, given that both men and women prefer a partner they can trust.

Let's remind ourselves that women pick the picture depicting pride most often because, supposedly, that picture is all about male dominance and ability to provide for any offspring. But then the women pick a picture of depicting male shame next often, even before the neutral picture and certainly the smiling picture! Male shame is certainly not about dominance. As the manuscript I downloaded* tells us in its introduction:

In contrast to these generally positive emotions, shames' low status message may reduce attractiveness, at least in male expressers. Women who display shame might benefit from the gender-norm consistent message of low status and submissiveness, but, when sent by men, this message would be both gender-norm inconsistent and indicative of low mate value.

The results didn't support this part of the theory. Thus, a different explanation was adopted to explain this:

Women picked the high-status guys as most attractive (high-status being arms up in the air or akimbo on the hips)
Women picked the really low-status guys as the next attractive (the ones with drooping heads)

I understand that different theories can be applied to explain parts of the same set of data. But in this particular case the explanation for the two highest ranked male expressions of emotions by women contradict the underlying overall assumption that heterosexual women pick sexual partners on the basis of the men's high societal status. Despite this, the favored explanation for why the smiling expressions were ranked lowest by men returns to the social status scheme: Smiling is a sign of submissiveness and thus not something that makes men attractive to women, though of course it makes women attractive to men as men like submissive and low-status women!

It's time to point out that the draft I read does pay some attention to possible alternative societal norm explanations** by discussing how women are expected to be low-status and submissive and men high-status and dominant.

Hmm. Well, I guess that's one very concise way to add alternative explanations to the evo-psycho ones.

It also tries to avert some of the worst types of popularizations, such as the idea that men shouldn't smile at women at all or be nice. But this is not really possible, because all the popularizations in this particular class are going to be about those very ideas!

Finally, the manuscript ends with this:

In sum, although future studies are needed to test explanatory accounts for these findings, and examine how widely these results generalize (e.g., whether they hold in other cultures)...

You might have to kiss your backside goodbye on the possibility of doing untainted work on this question in the future if a sufficient number of those Internet popularizations are read by future test subjects. Just by reporting on how happy guys finish last and how bad boys are still in the fashion, the popularizations might change what will be reported and which theories people believe to be the correct ones. So it goes.
-----
*It is possible that the final article differs from the manuscript which is labeled "in press."
**Though not enough when it comes to the idea that women prefer men with resources for evolutionary reasons. The obvious reasons that a) resources have mostly been in male hands throughout the known history, and b) that the routine way for women to acquire any resources at all has been through marriage or other sexual encounters with men are ignored in the draft copy.
As a final post-script, the researchers simply removed the responses by gays and lesbians because the study subjects were shown different-sex individuals. But this seems a real waste. The responses by gays and lesbians could have told us more about the societally learned ideas of what is supposed to look sexy or not, even when the respondent had no direct sexual interest in the pictures.

A Guest Post By Anna: A Literary Canon of Women Writers, Part Two: The Common Era Before the Middle Ages

(Echidne's note: This is the second post in the series. For the first one, go here.)

Faltonia Betitia Proba (c. 306/c. 315 - c. 353/c. 366) was a Roman Christian poet, the most important and influential poet of the Late Antiquity who wrote in Latin. A member of one of the most influential aristocratic families, she composed the Cento vergilianus de laudibus Christi, a cento composed with verses by Virgil re-ordered to form an epic poem centred around the life of Jesus. Pope Gelasius I (492-496) declared the poem an apocryphal; therefore, even if it was not considered heretical, its public reading was forbidden. Yet despite this prohibition, the work had some success: it is known that Emperors Arcadius (395-408) and Theodosius II (408-451) requested copies of the poem; furthermore, during the Middle Ages this cento was used in education, and Proba's fame caused Giovanni Boccaccio to include her among a most influential women list, in his De mulieribus claris. The printed edition of the De laudibus Christi, dating back to 1472, was probably the first of a work composed by a woman. An English prose translation (since she wrote in Latin) is available in The Golden Bough, The Oaken Cross: The Virgilian Cento of Faltonia Betitia Proba, by Elizabeth A. Clark and Diane F. Hatch (Chico, California: Scholars Press., 1981).

Egeria or Aetheria (often called Sylvia) was a Gallaeci or Gallic woman who made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land about 381-384. She wrote an account of her journey in a long letter to a circle of women at home which survives in fragmentary form in a later copy. This may have been the first formal writing by a woman in Western European Culture. The manuscript has been translated several times, but perhaps the most recommended English translation for the average reader (Egeria wrote in Latin) is Egeria's Travels: Newly Translated, by John Wilkinson, especially since it includes supporting documents and notes. Another English translation of Egeria's writing for the average reader is the Gingras edition in the Ancient Christian Writers series.

The Staple Singers

It's Gonna Rain

I love The Staple Singers.

Squinting through the looking glass: Finding transparency in health care costs (by Skylanda)

How much did you pay for your last prescription? How much was your copay? How much did your insurer (should you be so lucky) cover? How much did the insurer bargain the pharmaceutical provider down before they paid their share? How much of that net difference did they tell you about? What is the difference between what would have been paid on your behalf if you had been insured and what you paid yourself if you were not? Which of these numbers do you know – are you allowed to know – and how hard would it be to find them out if you wanted to know?

Now ask the same questions about your last visit to a primary care clinic, specialist, emergency room, or hospital. If you have ever tried to scrutinize one of these itemized bills, you will already know that the layers of obscurity between you and a bottom line serve to obfuscate until you just give up and pay what they ask (or just give up altogether).

Now ask the same question about the last time you had your car repaired, or the last time you bought a refrigerator, or the last time you utilized the services of legal counsel. You may not have liked the final bill, but at least you probably know how much you were paying for which goods, parts, and services.

There are many reasons for this complexity in health-care costs. Fracturing of billing systems, multiple points of service, technological complexity, high overhead, and a number of other factors contribute to this chaos. It cannot be missed, however, that the layers of obfuscation in the health care industry both put the consumer at a distinct disadvantage and contribute the ability to incur spiraling costs - and as long as the ball is in the biller’s court, there is no incentive to change this labyrinthine structure.

For all the Rand-ian railing on health care as a free market enterprise, the health care market as it stands today defies every tenet of Adam Smith’s principles of the free market. The sellers of health care goods hold all the cards. The barriers to entry and exit from the market (for insurance products, pharmacies, and providers alike) are extraordinarily high. The ability to negotiate prices and mobilize the market in response to changing prices is impaired by the obscuring of what those prices are. The demand for certain goods is fixed because these are not goods people choose – they are goods whose need is bestowed on people by the winds of fate, and whose utilization is not optional. The only invisible hand is the one that reaches out and smacks you good and proper when you realize that the fine print of your insurance coverage specifically excludes the one condition you need it for.

Nevertheless, health care is a market, and reclaiming some of the concepts of the free market may help both with the everyday frustration of the health care system and with that elusive beast called “cost control” that everyone talks about but no one seems to be able to tame. Interesting models have arisen that give us some clues about how the world might look if health care costs were prone to a little more transparency; pry open the looking glass and take a peek.

The first model out there is the pure fee-for-service clinic. These clinics are usually small, often run with minimal to no back-office staff, and have taken the remarkable step of refusing insurance reimbursement. The charge by a deli-counter list of services and fees, and you know before you walk in how much you are going to owe before you walk out. No copays, no deductibles, no $40,000/year billing specialist to support in the back: you pay the whole bill (or submit it yourself to your own insurance), and that’s that. These have been remarkably popular options – in no small part because they tend to employ other innovative strategies like same day-only appointments, but also because of the transparency of cost: no surprises, no variation, no sifting through confusing bills, no time spent on your part puzzling over whether you’re getting a deal or getting screwed. This predictability has proven popular with both uninsured and insured patients alike.

Another more powerful – and more startling – model of transparency comes from a most unexpected place: your friendly local Walmart store. In 2006 Walmart initiated a plan to sell a couple hundred generic pharmaceutical products for $4 per month. This was not a benign gesture; it was designed to break the dominance of specialty chain providers like Walgreens and had the venomous side effect of putting a good number of mom-and-pop pharmacies on short notice also. Some of the medications cost Walmart less than $4 a month to sell, some cost more (in fact, if you read the fine print at the bottom of these lists, you will note that several of these drugs are not available in certain states at these prices; this is because these states have outlawed selling certain goods below cost as a form of unfair competition). Many people have a legitimate beef with Walmart and I won’t argue with that beef, but I will argue this: by publishing a clear list of cheap generic medications at a single price right there on their website, Walmart revolutionized the market for pharmaceuticals in America. Their list became the standard-bearer for providers caring for uninsured patients – even if there’s no Walmart in a hundred miles, the list still tells you what has gone generic, and what is most likely to be cheap at another pharmacy. The list empowered everyday Americans to be able to ask their providers if their medication was on the cheap list or not – and if they could switch to one that is. You don’t even need internet access; if you walk up to most Walmart pharmacy counters, they will hand you a paper copy of the list right there.

Several other retailers followed rapid suit, and if you don’t like Walmart, you can also find lists for Kmart, Target, the Smiths grocery chain, and some other regional chain pharmacies. Some vary slightly, so medications that you might not find at one may be available on another – but for the most part, the Walmart $4 list remains the definitive guide to low-cost drugs in America.

But, the market for drugs remains free, and just because Walmart will fork over a month’s worth of your blood pressure drugs for $4 does not mean that everyone else will too. Notorious for the highest cost among the chain pharmacies is Walgreens; I once paid $17 for a prescription that (I later found out) was on the Walmart $4 plan, and I once saw a patient pay $40 cash for a medication that was on the Walmart $4 plan. That’s up to a 10-fold difference – a full 1000%. The new twist on the pharmaceutical block is the mail-in pharmacy: some insurers “require” that you use a mail-in pharmacy, pay a set copay, and wait for your prescription to arrive in the mail; what they don’t tell you is that your total for cheap generic drugs at a chain that has a $4 plan may be less than your mail-in copay – and remember, you only have to use your insurance if you want them to pay for something. If you wanna swallow the $4 yourself, that’s your business.

At my practice (which is a pretty even split between insured, under-insured, and uninsured patients), I routinely bring up the variable cost of medications. Uninsured patients are of course interested to know that they can get medications at the most reasonable cost, and in turn I do my best to keep to the low-cost formularies whenever possible. Insured patients show some interest, especially when they have high copays or deductibles that place a larger burden on them. Interestingly, the least interested patients tend to be those on Medicaid – because at least in this state, they have no copay at all on medications; it makes no difference if their carrier pays $4 or $40, because the patients pay none at all (and while I philosophically agree with charging nothing to patients poor enough to be on Medicaid, this philosophy bangs straight into reality when I read in yesterday’s headlines that my state’s Medicaid budget take up nearly a fifth of the state’s general fund and has to cover almost a quarter of the population).

And this is why I so fervently believe that transparency of cost should apply down to the consumer level: because people are capable of making good decisions when the information to make good decisions is readily available to them – and good decision-making at the personal level can translate to cost savings at the system level. And in turn, transparency means forcing the purveyors of these goods and services to compete openly - there is no reason why one pharmacy chain can charge rapacious prices, except that consumers are kept in the dark both by a lack of an open price list and the filtering of the true cost through the insurance system.

Transparency means putting drug prices on the internet and in paper form at the point of service, and running side-by-side comparisons of costs at different pharmacies. Transparency means setting prices and sticking to them for all services that can be reasonably quantified: basic clinic visits and procedures, imaging like xrays/CT scans/MRIs, and durable medical goods. Transparency means having to compete – no more hiding behind the refusal to list prices out in the open, no more obfuscation through the filter of complex insurance algorithms, no more indulging the mistaken perception that medical costs are somehow fixed and universal. Everyone should be able to know – like they do about groceries, gas, and plumbers – who are the cheap suppliers in town and who are the pricey ones.

Overall though, transparency requires a major philosophical gear shift within the practice of medicine itself. Theoretically, cost should not impair a provider’s decision to pursue care, choose a drug, look for a cause, identify a diagnosis. I have often been told at various places that I work that I should not consider cost when I make clinical decisions; one clinic where I served was very hesitant to allow me access to a basic price list for our services because it was thought that this would bias my practice, even though patients begged to know ahead of time how much they would be on the hook for. I have called local imaging centers to try to get generate a comparative price list for patients only to be told, “Well, it depends.” (For an xray?, I want to ask, it depends on what?!).

But this world of worry-free decision making is not the world we live in – not in the free-marketeering United States, and not in any variety of the socialized medical systems either (all of which have formularies and protocols for cost control as well). We all operate in a resource-limited world, and it’s time we started acting like it: when all else is equal, choose the cheaper drug from the cheaper store; when two imaging centers are hawking high-quality MRI services, choose the one that costs less; if two primary care clinics have equally good providers at two different costs, establish yourself out of the gate at the one that costs you less.

Patients have to be able to know. Providers have to be able to know; they have also to care. And given the full power of the free market – with a transparent view through what is now a one-way looking glass – we can all start to see where costs come from and where the fat can be cut from the meat before we are instead forced to cut meat from bone.

Cross-posted from my recently relocated and re-launched blog, America, Love It or Heal It.