Friday Fun: Rush LImbaugh and Camilla Paglia in The Same Earful!

Content warning:  If you listen to this audio your ears will detach, circle the whole globe and reattach themselves on the wrong sides of your head.  Upside-down and backwards.

Any logical parts of your brain will explode in blue smoke, after trying to make some sense out of the garbled word-salad and the odd juxtapositions and the utter total impression that you are consuming the equivalent of a scraped-from-the-kitchen-floor gourmet dinner, prepared by a mad-hatter-chef.  Well, two of those.

Finally, the assertion that Paglia is a feminist makes you scream so loud that your vocal cords will turn into a very small British pork pie.

But other than that, go ahead and have a good listening experience!

No children? You're Gonna Die Young!

Here's an interesting Danish study and its popularizations for you!  When I was going through several of the popular media summaries I had to go and bang my head against the garage door, to get some relief from the inanity of much of it.  To see why:

Let's start with some of those popularizations:

First:

By Maggie Fox, NBC News
They may feel like they are going to be the death of you, but having kids may not take years off your life. In fact, a study published Thursday shows that people who tried but failed to have children are two to four times more likely to die young than parents.
The startling findings support other research that shows childless couples don’t live as long as parents. They also add another piece to the puzzle: This one looks at people who either adopted children, or had them through fertility treatments.

Second:

People who have never had children are more likely to die prematurely and develop mental problems than those who have had children, researchers from Aarhus University, Denmark, reported in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

The authors added that the link between shorter lifespans, mental health and childlessness is particularly noticeable among women.

The belief that having children may shorten our lives is a myth, the researchers explained, as the reverse seems to be the case.

Third:

Dec. 5, 2012 -- Many parents might good-naturedly scoff at the notion, but a new study shows that being a parent may help you live longer.
Danish researchers compared men and women who had children with those who did not to see if the childless were more likely to die early.
They were. "Childless couples are at increased risk of dying early of all causes," says researcher Esben Agerbo, PhD, associate professor at Aarhus University in Aarhus, Denmark.
The benefit of parenthood on longevity was stronger for women than for men, says Agerbo.
The study findings echo those of previous research. It is published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

Look at those url codes in more detail!  The-secret-to-a-long-life-children!  Having-kids-doesn't-kill-you-after-all!   And note how we are offered  a causality going like this:

having children > you live longer

Not all the popularizations I read were that bad.  (That second one above is a real humdinger, making false claims, as is the whole piece it comes from).  But some that stuck closer to the abstract about the study included interesting little jabs and pushes which may be even worse.  Here's the now-with-more conservatism BBC website on the study:

Involuntary childlessness may increase the likelihood of early death, the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health reports.
The Danish study looked at more than 21,000 couples seeking IVF treatment.
They found women who were unsuccessful in having a child were four times more likely to die prematurely than women who had been mothers.
Critics stress that the risk of early death was low - with just 316 people in total dying over the 11 year study.
The authors of the paper also point out that their research suggests a link between childlessness and premature death and not a cause. They wrote: "Mindful that association is not the same thing as causation, our results suggest that the mortality rates are higher in the childless."
The researchers based their findings on data obtained from various population registers in Denmark on births, deaths and IVF procedures from 1994 to 2005.
During this time 21,276 childless couples registered for IVF treatment, 15,149 children were born and a total of 96 women and 220 men died.
Four times more likely
After analysis, the results suggested having a child cut the risk of early death, particularly among women.

That's the beginning of their piece.  A little bit later down it notes that mortality rate among the men was twice as high in the group which failed to have a baby.   This makes it certain that we see the problem as one of being a mother or not.   Then note this sentence in the above quote:

They found women who were unsuccessful in having a child were four times more likely to die prematurely than women who had been mothers.

Very sloppy writing, given that the whole sample in this study consisted of couples who sought fertility treatments.  A better way of writing it would be:

They found women who were unsuccessful in having a child were four times more likely to die prematurely than women who were unsuccessful in that endeavor.

If there is a propaganda story here it is one which suggests that women would live longer if only they had children. 

That's enough about the popularizations, though I would like to point out that even though the BBC asked other experts for their opinions, those experts pretty clearly were not aware of the actual piece of research they were asked to comment.  I base this on the fluffiness of their comments.

Then to the study itself. 

 Or to its abstract because I haven't obtained access to the study:

Background Childlessness increases the risk of premature mortality and psychiatric illness. These results might, however, be confounded by factors that affect both the chance of parenthood as well as the risk of premature death and psychiatric illness. 

Methods Using population-based health and social registers, we conducted a follow-up study of 21 276 childless couples in in vitro fertility treatment. 

Results The crude death rate ratio in women who become mothers to a biological child is 0.25 (95% CI 0.16 to 0.39). In other words, childless women experience a fourfold higher rate of death, that is, 4.02 (2.56 to 6.31). The analogous death rate in fathers is approximately halved: 0.51 (0.39 to 0.68) and 0.55 (0.32 to 0.96) associated with having a biological child and an adopted child, respectively. With substance use disorders being the exception, none of the crude rates of psychiatric illness in parents of a biological child were statistically distinguishable from the rates in the childless. These findings were slightly confounded by age, calendar year, income, education, somatic comorbidity and marital breakup. 

Conclusions Mindful that association is not causation, our results suggest that the mortality rates are higher in the childless. Rates of psychiatric illness do not appear to vary with childlessness, but the rate of psychiatric illness in parents who adopt is decreased.

With all due respect and understanding for those who write in a foreign language, that is an awfully poorly written abstract.   The first three sentences of the Results section must have something missing (that "in other words" bit)  and the "analogous" term doesn't refer to anything in what goes before.

I couldn't get very far with the abstract alone.  But what I have been able to gather from various sources is that the study looked at the death rates among 21 276 couples who had resorted to in vitro fertility treatments.   Here's one popularization on the data and study design:

In the study, which was published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, the scientists from Aarhus University looked at data from more than 21,000 couples who underwent IVF treatment between 1994 and 2005. They saw that 15,000 children were born and almost 1,600 were adopted during that time period. Unfortunately, 96 women and 200 men who were included in the study died.
Statistically, the death rate for childless women was four times as high as those who gave birth to their own child, while childless men were twice as likely to meet an early death. These findings caused the researchers to conclude that a couple who cannot conceive is at increased risk of early death.
Study co-author Esben Agerbo, an associate professor at Aarhus University in Aarhus, Denmark, pointed out that his team simply found a correlation and not a cause-and-effect relationship.
“My best guess is health behaviors,” he told WebMD. “When people have kids, they tend to live healthier.”
He suggested that having children promotes healthier and more responsible living as parents feel the need to both provide and set an example for their children.
The study also examined the mental health aspects of failing to conceive and found that childless couples were twice as likely to suffer mental illness as those who adopted children.

Can we trust that popularization?  Note that the abstract states that with the exception of substance abuse,  there was no difference between the mental health indicators of couples who succeeded in having a biological child and couples who did not succeed.   Yet the popularization tells us in that last sentence that there was!

Never mind.  Let's assume that the study was carried out properly, that it did, indeed find four times higher crude death rates among the women who failed to conceive after the treatment and twice as high crude death rates among the men whose partners failed to conceive after the treatment. 

What does this all mean?  

1.  Can we generalize from this study to everyone in the world?  Is a sample of people who are all seeking in vitro fertilization treatment just the same as a random sample of from the general population?   Is it OK for those popularizations (far above in my post)  to say what they did say : that children help us live longer, given that the sample in this study consisted of only people for whom fertility was large enough a problem that they resorted to in vitro fertilization?

I can think of a whole bunch of reasons why that would not be the case.   

First,  the infertility of some of the couples, at least, could have been caused by pre-existing ill health.  This ill health could make conceiving via in vitro fertilization less likely and it also could make premature death more likely.

Second, the infertility treatments themselves may have health risks for women.  Those who conceive stop any hormone treatments, for example, but those who have failed to conceive may continue the treatments for several more rounds.  The overall impact of the treatments themselves could cause fatal illness in some women among the failed-to-conceive group.

Third, wanting a child when one cannot have it may be a major stress factor in a person's life.  Major stress factors are a known health risk, and the longer they last the more likely it is that they affect either behavior or the health of the body itself.  Couples who failed to conceive live in that stress longer than couples who conceived early in the treatment.


2.  You may have noticed that my three points above all suggest reverse causality to explain the findings.  I'm not arguing that my suggestions are the correct ones, just that we cannot run quickly to the other extreme and argue that having children protects us from dying young. 

Esben Agerbo, one of the study co-authors, does warn us about correlation not necessarily being causation, and so does the study abstract.  Yet in that last quote where he is interviewed he offers a causal explanation for lower death rates of those who succeeded in the fertilization treatments:

Children promote healthier and more responsible living.

And that is probably true.  But is it the major causal arrow which explains these findings?  Let's put this into a diagram.  We have two simple options for the main arrow directions:

childlessness  >>>  ill health

ill health >>> childlessness

These simple options are not meant to be the only two possibilities.  My guess is that the lower one is the explanation which accounts for more involuntary childlessness, because most individuals born with severe health conditions never have children, for instance.  But the general explanation allows for a smaller arrow going in the direction, from having children to better health behavior, say.

You may have noticed that my three points about why the Danish sample cannot be seen as a perfect microcosm of the general population are all about the possibility that the causality mostly runs from ill health to childlessness or that at least the meaning of "childlessness" is closer to something of a major life trauma than the absence of children as such.

Conclusions

My apologies for not covering the actual study.  I couldn't get hold of it without paying thirty dollars.  But I suspect that it does what I've been able to glean from the various (though rather imprecise) popularizations.  What would have been interesting is to see what role suicides played in those death rates, but one study author notes that the information is absent from the official records.

If you care to read this post again (as if!), note how many errors the popularizations make.  The abstract tells us that the mental health indicators, with the exception of substance abuse, did not differ between those who conceived in the in vitro fertilization and those who did not.  Yet two of the popularizations I quote do state that they differed, and one states that they did so especially so for women.

One final comment:  I have never really thought about the possible correlation between having children and longevity, but had you asked me about it before I started waded in this mud puddle I'd have supposed that those without children might live longer.  That's because of anecdotal evidence from my own life and should be discounted.  Still, having children has real health risks for women, and a proper study of the relationship between having children and health should take those into account. 

It should also compare like with like.   If we wish to measure any impact having children has one one's health, then the pre-existing health states of the individuals in the study should be the same.  If they are not the same, the study tells us nothing much, because those with chronic conditions may simply be less likely to partner with someone and also less likely to have the physical health needed to conceive and, for women, to give birth.

On Guns, Victim Blaming and Conservative Interpretations Of Kasandra Perkins' Death

Content:  Violence

Sometimes watching Fox News is like being offered a glimpse from another reality altogether.  Here's Dana Perino suggesting, probably in the context of the Jovan Belcher case,  that women who are victims of violence should have made better decisions:


http://mediamatters.org/video/2012/12/05/perinos-advice-to-women-who-are-victims-of-viol/191702

There are people whose detectors are not well-tuned when it comes to danger in general.  But to suggest that better decisions would keep *someone* from becoming the victim of a violent crime is just bunkum/buncombe.  For one thing,  a person bent on committing violence would find another victim if the first choice "made the correct decision."  Then Perino could scold the second person as not having made good decisions.  And so it goes.

If we go down that route, it's the perpetrator of a violent act who should have made better decisions.  That would protect everyone!

This whole thing veers so close to victim-blaming that the two are identical twins.

Elsewhere at the  Daily Caller, Louise Trotter from the Independent Women's Forum (a gals' auxiliary to wingnuttery)  tells us that Kasandra Perkins died because she wasn't armed or that she may have died because she wasn't married to Jovan Belcher but just cohabited with him.  Given that Trotter's main point in the piece is to attack what she considers  a false causal argument:  that guns cause people to die, her own proposed causal chains are enjoyably suspect.

For instance,  several sources suggest that the Perkins-Belcher residence contained eight guns.  Unless they were locked away from Perkins, she did indeed have access to firearms.  Also, at least one study suggests that the presence of a gun in the home increases the likelihood of homicide rather than reverse (note that I haven't checked this study for accuracy). 

Then there's Trotter's argument that being  "healthily" married protects a woman from violence:

Imagine that the real reasons for this crime were conclusively shown to involve a complex interplay of factors including drug and alcohol abuse, domestic abuse, sexual competition and a lack of a healthy marriage relationship. In that case, is there any doubt that liberal elites would suddenly lose interest in the admissibility of causation? “Move along, folks, nothing to see here.”

I have never seen any studies which would have proven such a causality, and seriously suspect that the causality runs the other way:  One can't have a healthy relationship with a person who is bent on abusing you and even killing you.  Whether you are married or not.

Trotter's focus is on defending guns.  I don't think anyone believes that guns sneak away from a locked cabinet in the middle of the night and go out on a killing spree without any humans being involved in any of it.  So, using the old NRA argument, guns do not kill people but people kill people. 

What that saw ignores is the fact that guns make people extremely effective killers.  The killing happens almost instantaneously and there is no way of going back to the moment before that first shot, no time to reconsider.  Likewise, guns make killing many people in a row possible.  That would be extremely unlikely an outcome if a person tried to do it bare-handed or even equipped with a knife.

The high US murder rates are directly related to the availability of guns.  Alternative explanations would require Americans to be much more violent than otherwise similar people living elsewhere.  Which I don't believe.

Trotter's advice to women is to be armed.  She writes "Guns make women safer." 

But her opinion piece doesn't say anything about learning to handle a gun, practicing shooting or role playing various forms of attack to make sure that one doesn't shoot an innocent bystander or someone who came to the door trick-or-treating.  The police trains a lot with guns and police officers still sometimes kill innocent bystanders.  IF guns were ever to keep women (or any other population group) safe a lot of real training would be required.

But if gun-carrying amounts to something akin to quasi-religion, such concerns are unimportant.

The Scent of A Woman. Science Thursday At Echidne's.

This is a tale of two studies.  The first, by Saul L. Miller and Jon K. Maner,  was published in 2010 and you may remember it.  Here's the abstract:

Adaptationist models of human mating provide a useful framework for identifying subtle, biologically based mechanisms influencing cross-gender social interaction. In line with this framework, the current studies examined the extent to which olfactory cues to female ovulation—scents of women at the peak of their reproductive fertility—influence endocrinological responses in men. Men in the current studies smelled T-shirts worn by women near ovulation or far from ovulation (Studies 1 and 2) or control T-shirts not worn by anyone (Study 2). Men exposed to the scent of an ovulating woman subsequently displayed higher levels of testosterone than did men exposed to the scent of a nonovulating woman or a control scent. Hence, olfactory cues signaling women’s levels of reproductive fertility were associated with specific endocrinological responses in men—responses that have been linked to sexual behavior and the initiation of romantic courtship.

Sniffing sweaty t-shirts worn by women near ovulation caused a higher testosterone response in men than sniffing either clean t-shirts worn by nobody or t-shirts worn by women not near ovulation, get it?  Testosterone is associated with sexual desire in both women and men, so the results suggest that men can smell ovulation, on some deeply unconscious level.

Now fast-forward to the present.  Another study, actually completed before the Miller-Maner study summarized above, didn't find any such relationship between men's testosterone and smelling the sweat of ovulating women.  From this recently published study, by  James R. Roney and Zachary L. Simmons:

Unlike Miller and Maner (2010), we did not find more positive testosterone
responses in men after exposure to ovulatory chemical stimuli than after exposure to
control stimuli. Importantly, our study was not an exact replication of the Miller and Maner
(2010) study, and so should not be construed as a direct replication failure. Nonetheless, the
discrepancy in findings raises important issues regarding which differences in methods may
have led to the distinct outcomes.

...

A second difference between the studies concerns the male participants’ knowledge
of the stimulus source. As explained in the Introduction, male participants in Miller and
Maner (2010) were explicitly told that they were smelling shirts worn by women, and this
knowledge may have triggered mental images that contributed to the observed hormonal
responses. In the present study, men appeared to be in a state of uncertainty regarding the
identity of the odor stimuli: men were not significantly more likely to report detection of
human odors in the experimental as opposed to the control condition, and participants
generally reported detection of nonhuman odors more often than detection of human odors.
Even in cases in which men reported detecting sweat or body odor, there was never any
reference to women’s scents in particular, such that there is little reason to think that the
male participants were visualizing women. Differential likelihood of having visualized
women thus stands as another possible explanation for the discrepant findings between the
two studies: perhaps chemoreception of ovulatory cues is by itself insufficient to trigger a
neuroendocrine response in human males, which may instead require additional stimuli,
such as visual images triggered by knowledge of the stimulus source.

The bolds are mine.


Get it?  The Roney-Simmons study found no increase in the testosterone levels of  men who smelled the sweat of a near-ovulation woman as opposed to just water. 

As the authors state, this is not an actual replication of the original Miller-Maner study, but it is better in at least some ways, and the most important one of those is that the study subjects were not primed by telling that what it is they are smelling is the body odors of women.  If the conclusions of the Miller-Maner study really are about some subtle biological cues women's sweat offers about how close those women are to ovulating, then the Roney-Simmons study basically finds those conclusions rejected.

Why am I writing about these two studies?  Because the popular media prioritizes the first type of studies.  I'm willing to bet you almost anything that this new study doesn't make Fox News change what it wrote about the earlier study:

Forget Perfume, Ovulation Is the Way to Attract Men, Study Says
Published February 15, 2010


Perfumes and scented lotions only go so far when it comes to attracting a man; the body does the rest, MyFox National reported Monday.

According to a study done by researchers at Florida State University, men are unconsciously attracted to the natural scent of a woman, even more so when the woman is ovulating, Discovery News reported.

This is what is wrong with the popularizations.  They don't popularize studies which have null findings or which disprove earlier, gender-clickable ones.  And of course all that about a perfume is utter rubbish.  The initial study had nothing to do with perfumes and could not make any kind of statement about their value in attracting men.

Because of those popularization biases, the general public gets a distorted view of what the studies actually find, and are practically never told about a study which has been found quite wrong.

 

On Mammograms

The background for this debate:

Last week The New England Journal of Medicine published a study with the potential to change both medical practice and public consciousness about mammograms.
Published on Thanksgiving Day, the research examined more than 30 years of United States health statistics to determine, through observation, if screening mammography has reduced breast cancer deaths. The researchers found that, as expected, the introduction of mammogram screening led to an increase in the number of breast cancers detected at an early stage. 

But importantly, the number of cancers diagnosed at the advanced stage was essentially unchanged. If mammograms were really finding deadly cancers sooner (as suggested by the rise in early detection), then cases of advanced cancer should have been reduced in kind. But that didn’t happen. In other words, the researchers concluded, mammograms didn’t work. 

This is a bold claim for an observational study. There are countless reasons why conclusions from such studies are commonly fraught with error. What if, for instance, the lion’s share of advanced cancers occurred among women without access to screening mammograms—a fact often not available in health statistics? Or what if mammography successfully prevented a major increase in advanced cancers, leaving the health statistics unchanged? 

Hippocrates, the father of medicine, called experience “delusive.” He recognized that uncontrolled observations may lead to faulty conclusions. For centuries the flawed logic of observational data seemed to validate bloodletting, an unhelpful and often harmful therapy. But most who were bled eventually improved—no thanks to the bloodletting—an observation that led medical authorities to believe in the practice. 

Fortunately, we have learned something about bad logic. Today we seek studies designed to neutralize illusions. By enrolling people in a study and assigning them randomly to treatments, for instance, groups tend to be evenly balanced in every way except one: the treatment. Controlled studies led to the discovery that bloodletting is harmful rather than helpful, and randomized trials of screening mammography would therefore be a worthy gold standard to answer once and for all the question of whether the test saves lives.
It may be surprising, therefore, to learn that numerous trials of mammography have indeed randomly assigned nearly 600,000 women to undergo either regular mammography screening or no screening. The results of more than a decade of follow-up on such studies, published more than 10 years ago, show that women in the mammogram group were just as likely to die as women in the no-mammogram group. The women having mammograms were, however, more likely to be treated for cancer and have surgeries like a mastectomy. (Some of the studies include trials from Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden, and this major review of the data.)

In other words, mammograms increased diagnoses and surgeries, but didn’t save lives—exactly what the researchers behind last week’s observational study concluded.

Those European trials and the recent observational study might not be enough to conclusively determine that mammograms don't do very much to cut back breast cancer mortality.  But what if they are correct?  What then?

These questions obviously matter.  They bring up agonizing arguments about women losing the one tool of secondary prevention (i.e. screening) they thought they had against breast cancer.  IF mammograms are of limited value in prolonging survival, what can women do instead?  Just wait for a lump in the breast tissue?

But they also suggest that  mammograms as a secondary prevention tool might never have done very much prevention, that the cancer survivors who thank an early mammogram and consequent early treatment for their survival may, in fact, have had one of the cancers which doesn't advance very rapidly or at all.

This is tricky ground, mostly because our understanding of the possible types of breast cancer is so limited.  Perhaps some types of tumors remain small and never spread much?  Perhaps some types of tumors might even disappear on their own?  Perhaps the most aggressive (and often lethal) cancers develop so very rapidly that a mammogram is of value only if it happens to be performed at the exactly right moment?

There is something distasteful about those arguments.  But on the opposite side, consider the potential distastefulness of spending vast amounts of money providing routine mammograms to all women above a certain age if mammograms, indeed, turn out not to have much value in reducing mortality rates.  Those funds could be used for developing alternative screening methods or better treatments for breast cancer.

Then consider the radiation risks from mammograms every year or two and the financial costs and medical risks from potentially unnecessary treatments those mammograms may cause.

Clearly, something better than hope or entrenched industry interests is necessary to justify routine mammograms.  What is needed are proper prospective randomized trials where women are randomly assigned to a group which will have regular mammograms and a group which is somehow kept from having them.  Ideally, the two groups would otherwise be as similar to each other as possible.  A follow-up of these groups for a few decades might give us decisive information about the value of mammograms.

But studies of that sort are an impossibility in most places.  Mammograms are widely available and the control group could not be ethically kept away from having them, too.   And I'm sure that many would find such a study unethical,  because it would keep one group of women away from what is regarded as an established part of breast cancer prevention.   (That's the snag, of course.  If we truly are not sure about the mortality-reducing effects of mammograms, then they probably shouldn't be part of the established prevention pattern.)

All this may be premature.   It could be that new, and better, studies find mammograms of greater value in reducing breast cancer mortality or it could be that better understanding of the etiology of the disease allows us to use mammograms more efficiently.  Some alternative way of diagnosing breast cancer early might be developed and make mammograms but a part of medical history.

Still, when I was writing those musings I felt that odd kind of discomfort.  Even wondering about the validity of mammograms makes me feel like a traitor, like someone who would abandon an orphan in a life-boat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, like a callous and mean-minded Echidne.  But then looking at the other side of the arguments makes me feel pretty miserable, too.

Yet what ultimately matters is whether mammograms work or not.  That should be distinguished from the general efficacy of various forms of medical screening.  Some, such as the PAP-smears for cervical cancer, are very effective and fairly low-cost. Recommendations about others, such as prostate cancer screening,  are now more qualified.  We may simply not have sufficient information on breast cancer to make the best recommendations about who should get mammograms and when.

Where does that leave us, as individuals?  Trying to muddle through the best we can, I guess, with the help of those health care professionals who base their advice on the most recent state of relevant knowledge.


 

More on Kasandra Perkins' Death

The one thing you may not have read but should read is this one (violent content).  The piece ends:

So in closing, because I can never say this enough, the person responsible for Kasandra Perkins' death is Jovan Belcher. There was nothing Miss Perkins could have done to cause Mr. Belcher to murder her in cold blood. He pulled the trigger the 1st, 2nd, 3rd,4th,5th,6th,7th,8th, and 9th time he shot her.

That ending is necessary because of the many, many stories which discuss the possible role of drugs, alcoholism and brain injury in what made Jovan Belcher kill Kasandra Perkins.  One piece even suggests that Perkins was a "catalyst" to her own killing.

I understand the search for explanations and the search for hypothetical scenarios where Kasandra Perkins might not have died.  But these very easily shift into victim-blaming or something equally nasty:  The apparent justification of a killing.

The Decadence of It All! Ross Douthat on the Baby Dearth.

Ross Douthat has written the predictable piece about the baby dearth in the United States.  Sadly, he has to use euphemism in lots of places because it's not kosher to call the race wars race wars in the New York Times.

Thus, Douthat argues for "more babies!" by giving these reasons:

IN the eternally recurring debates about whether some rival great power will knock the United States off its global perch, there has always been one excellent reason to bet on a second American century: We have more babies than the competition.

Based on that argument, some rather unexpected countries could become the next United States.  Birth rates were very high in Iran, until quite recently, for instance, and they are high in many African countries.

Douthat confuses two different things:  The population size of a country and its birth rate.  Sure, one might ultimately be able to create a large country just through atypical population growth.  But most giant countries were created by the invasion and combination of many smaller countries.

Or put in another way, the European Community intends to have a role not dissimilar from the United States, not by birth rates but through accepting more member states.

The rest of Douthat's piece wonders what might happen if the drop in fertility becomes permanent.  He even hesitantly suggests public sector support for families with children but not the kind of support which has been shown to raise birth rates:  Paid parental leaves and subsidized daycare.  Those were probably omitted because they allow women to work in the labor force AND have more children.  But anything which does NOT support women's ability to remain in the work force will not affect the reduced fertility rates.

Whether high birth rates are desirable, from a global point of view, is a different question.  Douthat limits his viewpoint to competition between countries, failing to ask how many people this earth can support if, as is most likely, all of them wish to have a style of living which is currently available for only the wealthier parts of the world.

Be as it may, what I truly enjoyed about Douthat's column was when he got going on decadence!  Stuff like this:

Beneath these policy debates, though, lie cultural forces that no legislator can really hope to change. The retreat from child rearing is, at some level, a symptom of late-modern exhaustion — a decadence that first arose in the West but now haunts rich societies around the globe. It’s a spirit that privileges the present over the future, chooses stagnation over innovation, prefers what already exists over what might be. It embraces the comforts and pleasures of modernity, while shrugging off the basic sacrifices that built our civilization in the first place.
Such decadence need not be permanent, but neither can it be undone by political willpower alone. It can only be reversed by the slow accumulation of individual choices, which is how all social and cultural recoveries are ultimately made.

Wonderful!  I imagine all those decadent individuals reclining in bedrooms covered with dark-red velvet, incense burning in lamps shaped like naked women!  Everyone wears nothing but tiny smoking jackets and everyone smokes long black cigarettes at the end of those 1920s holders.  Monocles!  Brothels!  Wombs arid like stone!  Decadence.

Sorry.  It's odd how even the term "decadence" evokes ideas from the Victorian era, its brothels and the men who were their customers.  Note that this is the era of the history which presumably created the comforts and pleasures of modernity.

What really bothers Douthat is that such "decadence" might now have been adopted by those uppity women who aren't breeding enough.  The basic sacrifice he talks about surely must be that one?  It's women, after all, who must give birth to all those large families, and in Douthat's reality it's women who must take care of all those multiple children the greatness of America demands.

But of course any woman who decides to have, say, twelve children, just on Douthat's say-so will have no time to enjoy the comforts and pleasures of modernity.  Except in few cases, she is going to find herself and her family in poverty.  The Republican Party is opposed to policies which would support her.

Hence the need to evoke shame, the real function of the term "decadence" in this context.

The Kasandra Perkins Case

Kansas City Chiefs' starting linebacker Jovan Belcher killed his girlfriend, then drove to the football training facility and killed himself in front of the coach and the general manager of the team.

When I first read about this awful story, I found the reports one-sided.  It was as if the death of Kasandra Perkins was almost accidental, something to be skimmed past quickly in order to get to the main topic:  the suicide of yet another football player.  After giving the fact that Belcher killed Perkins the rest of the stories were about him:  What a gentle person, what a great athlete, how very sad it all was and so on.

An example:

"Pioli and Crennel and another coach or employee was standing outside and appeared to be talking to him," Snapp said. "The suspect began to walk in the opposite direction of the coaches and the officers and that's when they heard the gunshot. It appears he took his own life."
The coaches told police they never felt in any danger.
"They said the player was actually thanking them for everything they'd done for him," Snapp said. "He was thanking them and everything. That's when he walked away and shot himself."
Members of the Chiefs mostly laid low Saturday, but a few reacted on Twitter.
"I am devastated by this mornings events," Pro Bowl linebacker Tamba Hali wrote. "I want to send my thoughts and prayers out to everyone effected by this tragedy."
A large group of Belcher's friends and relatives gathered Saturday at his boyhood home on Long Island.
His family turned the front yard into a shrine, with a large poster of Belcher, an array of his trophies, and jerseys and jackets from Kansas City, Maine and West Babylon High.
"He was a good, good person ... a family man. A loving guy," said family friend Ruben Marshall, who said he coached Belcher in youth football. "You couldn't be around a better person."
At least 20 people gathered for a large group hug in the driveway.
"He was a tremendous player and all those things, and his accolades speak for themselves, but he lit up when he spoke about his mom, or when he hugged his family after games," said Dwayne Wilmot, who was Belcher's position coach at Maine and is now an assistant coach at Yale.
"It's difficult to talk about Jovan in the past tense," he told the AP. "There's going to be unanswered questions, the why's of this tragedy. It'll never be truly known to us."
Wilmot said he'd stayed in touch with Belcher the past few years through social media.
"He was someone who took genuine pleasure in bringing happiness to others," Wilmot said. "I was so excited when he became a father, because I knew he'd be a great father."
His girlfriend's Facebook page shows the couple smiling and holding the baby.
Belcher is the latest among several players and NFL retirees to die from self-inflicted gunshot wounds during the past few years. The death of star linebacker Junior Seau, who shot himself in the chest in at his California home last May, sent shockwaves around the league.

There was even one story where an economist explained why Belcher's suicide was rational!  This one day after Perkins was killed.  I find that in poor taste.  In any case, to explain Belcher's suicide as rational would seem to require a similar explanation for Perkins' killing.

It may be only my impression that the coverage of the murder-suicide improved a little over the hours.  I may have just happened on the worst treatment early.  But later coverage was more objective, i.e., covering the case the way it would be covered if the killer was someone unknown. 

You may have spotted, though, that I had to dig for those stories.  Most stories stay firmly on Jovan Belcher, because he was the famous one, because he was the gladiator we want to see face the lions (at a very good price) every day.  That the team decided not to cancel the game after one of the players turned out to be a killer tells me a lot.  The Business Of Football Must Go On.

Skimming through the headlines now I see stories about the large numbers of suicides in the NFL, stories asking questions about brain injury (but not about the use of steroids?).  These stories (including questions about gun availability) are looking for a cause for the events outside the person who killed someone and then killed himself.

That's fair, assuming that it can bring some change in the future.  But Kasandra Perkins still remains an unintended casualty in these stories, someone who got killed because Belcher didn't get the help he needed or perhaps someone who got killed because she fought too much with Belcher and so on.  She is made to play a bit part in her own death. 

What causes this biased coverage?  Some of it may have the flavor of the general way domestic killings are covered:  What made him do it?  Did he lose his job?  Was she cheating on him?  But mostly this is about celebrity and what happens when a killer or a suspected killer is the celebrity.  The publicity lens fogs up, needs to be adjusted, and suddenly writers are faced with how to cover a killer who only yesterday was their hero.

The killed ones tend to be forgotten if they are not also celebrities.  I have always felt that the coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial committed that sin.  Do you remember the name of the second victim in those deaths?

Ronald Goldman.  He and Nicole Brown Simpson died that night. 

Friday Fluff

I want snow.  The time of the first snow is magical, the landscape turns into the purest kind of architecture and the silence is full of suppressed sounds of the past summer.  Besides, mold spores will die and my sinuses will recover.

Here's  a picture of snow from the Tove Jansson Moomin books for children:

Music:

The Slave Privilege List

You may be familiar with lists such as "the white privilege list", "the male privilege list," the "female privilege list."  There are even serious (as well as satirical) attempts to make up a "black privilege list".   These have been used to make arguments about who it is who is most privileged in the society in general.

I've been thinking of writing a post on this topic for a long time, because of the problems in the privilege approach.  But I have delayed and delayed as the topic is important and I felt I didn't have enough research under my belt.

Well, the research will not get done so here are my basic thoughts on the use of privilege lists:

They are handy for self-examination and for understanding how different life can be for others.  They are not, however, at all useful in the way they are generally used, i.e., to argue that someone has it better because of gender, race,  ethnicity and so on.

And the reason for that is a simple one:  I could make up a slave privilege list and some people would find it credible. 

For instance, slaves don't have to worry about mortgages or what school their children should go to.  They don't have to worry about their children, at all, because they belong to someone else!  Slaves don't have to worry about how to plan their day.  Slaves don't have to worry about taxes.  Slaves don't have to worry about where to live or what education to acquire.  Slaves get their meals delivered or easily have the time to make them.  Slaves don't have to deal with money.  And so on.

Essentially any position in a society can be twisted into a privilege list, and that's what makes such lists pretty useless as tools in fighting for social justice.

The Baby Dearth. HELP!

I've always found the writings about fertility fascinating, and not the least because it gives one of those wonderful opportunities to blame women.  Either uppity and selfish women want BMWs and careers* and not enough babies, or uppity and selfish white women refuse to keep the white race going or ignorant and oppressed black women keep Africa backwards by having too many children and so on and so on.

What's fun about those pieces is that the fault hardly ever belongs to anyone else and that the solutions never include carrots for women but just whips.  For instance, white race proponents want white women not to have access to abortions at all or demand that women should, once again, become interested only in making more babies (I think that was in Pat Buchanan's book.)

That having children and bringing them up is much, much more expensive and much less productive in the developed countries than in poorer agricultural countries is ignored.  Each child in the western world costs a lot to bring to adulthood, yet produces mostly only emotional benefits to its parents, whereas children in a labor-run agrarian societies are low-cost labor from fairly young age onwards.  They are also the old-age security for the parents.

The most recent story about the US fertility drop isn't quite so bad (though I didn't read the comments at this link).  It points out that in recessions people have fewer children.  Because of that uncertainty about the future and the greater likelihood that the family can't afford extra children at a time when jobs disappear like soap bubbles. 

Thus, the main gist of the article is that births are down because of the recession and that they have dropped the most among immigrant women.  The latter can be explained fairly easily:  This group of women is already economically challenged and the initial birth rates are high enough to easily allow a large percentage drop.

The recession-related fertility changes cancel themselves when economic times improve.  But the Washington Post article I linked to talks about something else, too, and that is the US dependency on high birth rates by immigrants to keep the population from not falling.  That is unlikely to be a permanent solution, simply because immigrant birth rates end up being similar to the birth rates of the new host country.

Time, now, to make my radical proposal:  If the US wants to see higher birth rates, support families with children, make having children compatible with work in the labor markets (proper maternity leaves, good daycare) and encourage fathers to participate in child-rearing (both to share the joys of children more and so that women aren't discriminated against in the workforce because of their parental responsibilities).  This has worked quite well in the Scandinavian countries, for instance.
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*Ideally, the protagonists of high fertility would like to blame feminism for the birth dearth in general.  But as Japan is the country with the most severe problems and as it is thoroughly conservative in its assumptions about the proper place for mothers (at home, by the cradle), this approach doesn't work terribly well.

What's Wrong With These Republican Guys?

Do you think that the best way to get more women to vote for the Republican Party is to dis them?  That's what Fox News thinks is the winning formula.  The poor dears just can't help themselves.

Here's Dennis Miller telling Bill O'Reilly what is wrong with American women, in particular American single women:  They want free goodies.





Those comments are fraternity brother to the Mitt Romney comment that 47% of Americans are leeches upon the Body Politick. 

Add all this to those rape commentaries by Republican male politicians before the elections, and I wonder if this isn't all about some sort of a political death wish?

Or turned into business language (so beloved by the Republicans), when would a firm ever try to lure more customers by telling them how disgusting they are?

I wouldn't be surprised if comments like these might not ultimately make the Republican Party lose even more women voters.

Note also the improper generalizations Miller makes.  He uses his views on Sandra Fluke to hate on all American women first and later on all American single women. 

This is the lesson the Republicans drew from the gender gap in the election results?

Oh.  I almost forgot to mention that the Republican Party picked only men, and only white men at that, to lead all the major House committees.

The only conclusion I can draw from this is that the future will be full of the same old Republican  contempt towards women.

Epistemic Closure Among Conservatives. Or How Bruce Bartlett Saw The Light.

Bruce Bartlett, a conservative political and economic writer, has written an interesting confessional piece, well worth reading in its entirety.  It has two main topics:  What happens when a proper study of data makes someone change his/her mind, and what happens when that new interpretation of the data conflicts with that person's earlier political and economic beliefs.

Bartlett has come to disagree with certain basic conservative tenets, and in that disagreement has come to find himself shunned by the conservative community that used to be his spiritual home.  One long quote suffices for the purposes of this post:

A couple of weeks before the 2004 election, Suskind wrote a long article [1] for the New York Times Magazine that quoted some of my comments to him that were highly critical of Bush and the drift of Republican policy. The article is best remembered for his quote from an anonymous White House official dismissing critics like me for being “the reality-based community.”

The day after the article appeared, my boss called to chew me out, saying that Karl Rove had called him personally to complain about it. I promised to be more circumspect in the future.

Interestingly, a couple of days after the Suskind article appeared, I happened to be at a reception for some right-wing organization that many of my think tank friends were also attending. I assumed I would get a lot of grief for my comments in the Suskind article and was surprised when there was none at all.

Finally, I started asking people about it. Not one person had read it or cared in the slightest what the New York Times had to say about anything. They all viewed it as having as much credibility as Pravda and a similar political philosophy as well. Some were indignant that I would even suspect them of reading a left-wing rag such as the New York Times.

I was flabbergasted. Until that moment I had not realized how closed the right-wing mind had become. Even assuming that my friends’ view of the Times’ philosophy was correct, which it most certainly was not, why would they not want to know what their enemy was thinking? This was my first exposure to what has been called “epistemic closure” [2] among conservatives—living in their own bubble where nonsensical ideas circulate with no contradiction.

Something like epistemic closure is happening all over the political marketplaces, not just on the right.  But the phenomenon is strongest on the right, the isolation and insulation are the most extensive on the right, and the Fox News provide a news source which doesn't look as filtered as it really is.  Thus, we get large groups of individuals conversing mostly with each other, reading only about certain types of news and only with a certain tilt, and the outcome is, as you may have noted, pretty disastrous:  People don't only hold different opinions, they assume completely different "facts."

But as we all know, we are entitled to our own opinions but not to our own facts.  (You are also entitled to my opinions, heh.)

I've tried to understand the phenomenon of hedgehoggery (my earlier term for "epistemic closure").  I can see the emotional benefits of having the world presented only from the angle the audience already believes to be the correct one.  It gives one a warm feeling, righteous anger and a peace of mind.  Still, the costs of being misinformed can be enormous, and hedgehoggery all across the net, for instance, means that I frequently get into debates with people who really don't have the correct information.  It's not possible to have a debate in less than a lifetime if the basic premises and actual facts are all under debate, too.  And that's what I see more and more often.  The dangers in all this are that we cease to remember how to talk to people across the political aisles of various types.

How to avoid all this?  There are no easy answers.  The first step is to be aware of these dangers, the second step to create some neutral places for debate, with extremely good moderation and extremely careful links to sources of information.  Is there any incentive to do that, for anyone?  I'm not sure.

Now, when I wrote in the title that "Bruce Bartlett saw the light" I didn't necessarily mean that he saw the light because he is now ever-so-slightly closer to my views.  I meant that it's like working in a large, darkened room, with just a small bulb burning in the desk lamp, and figuring out the room from that angle.  If you then turn on all the lights in the room, you suddenly see bookshelves, spider webs, those shoes you couldn't find yesterday, those unpaid bills and so on.  You see more when the lights are on.


 

On Trash

This is not an area I follow religiously, but if the following is true, then wow!

Due to Sweden’s innovative waste-to-energy program and highly efficient recycling habits, the Scandinavian nation faces an interesting dilemma. They have run out of trash.
Sweden’s waste management and recycling programs are second to none as only four percent of the nation’s waste ends up in landfills. By contrast, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, over half of the waste produced by U.S. households ends up in landfills.
Because the Swedish manage waste so effectively and then use what remains to partly power their country, they are now living an environmentalist’s dream; a shortage of garbage.

Because Sweden uses some garbage/rubbish/trash (a beloved child has many names?) to heat buildings, they now import trash from other countries.

I should learn more about how Sweden managed to achieve such a low level of landfill use.

The New War on Men. Women's Fault.

There's a new War On Men discussion going on!  I almost missed it.  Too bad that I did not.

It was started by Susan Venker at Fox News.  She seems to make her living by pretending to be a traditional feminine housewife who does not compete with men.  Or so I learn from Feministe.

What's this war all about?  An article at the Salon tells us that it's about how important it is for women to STOP competing with men, because, as Venker says:

Contrary to what feminists like Hanna Rosin, author of The End of Men, say, the so-called rise of women has not threatened men. It has pissed them off. It has also undermined their ability to become self-sufficient in the hopes of someday supporting a family. Men want to love women, not compete with them. They want to provide for and protect their families – it’s in their DNA. But modern women won’t let them.

Such interesting DNA information!  Even scientists don't have access to that one!  But whatever.

Sigh.  I've read far too many similar stories over the years.  Usually the gist of them is that everything is the fault of feminism but that "everything" only really hurts women, at the end. 

Logically, therefore, we should look to the countries which never had feminism to see what makes people, and especially women,  happy.  Such as Afghanistan?

This Venker rant is in the same school:

Fortunately, there is good news: women have the power to turn everything around. All they have to do is surrender to their nature – their femininity – and let men surrender to theirs.
If they do, marriageable men will come out of the woodwork.

Something in that reminds me of the old-style Freudianism, my friends:  You have an innate feminine nature but somehow you are not obeying it!  An illogical argument, again.

But Venker's story  also shares the general trend in all these stories which is the idea that Women Cannot Get Married Unless Women Give Up On Dreams Of Equality.  Oddly enough, in those stories men never want to get married.  Indeed, the problems which always begin by being problems with men (in these anti-feminist writings) always turn into problems of women and marriage.   The bait:  Give up everything else and then you can get married.

The reality looks quite a bit different.  As the MRA sites remind me, women now initiate more than half of all divorces, sometimes much more than half, and as that Feministe piece points out, the actual survey results about the importance of marriage are not that different between men and women*.  Both sexes think that marriage is important.

What is seldom made clear in these stories is the misandry of them.  Men only want sex, so why bother buying the cow when milk is freely available.  Men only get married if they are hooked into it because of sex or if they get free housekeeping services and sex just by paying bed-and-board.  Men can't cope with women who have any skills or talents which are not purely complementary with those men are deemed to possess.  Men can't survive competition from women at work.  Men need a submissive partner.  And so on.

If I were a man I'd be insulted by all that.  But I'm quite adequately insulted by being told that if I only succumbed to my innate femininity (I do own makeup!),  there would be a line of suitors at my door.  There's a line, in any case.

Sadly, I'm so bored with this topic because it crops up as regularly as the sun.  When a topic bores me I can't think of anything to say about it that I haven't heard before.  Except perhaps to point out that the current problems are transition problems:  As time passes by, the cultural norms about gender will change (because those  breadwinner/male genes have NOT been found by anyone but what has been established is that women have always worked) and, I hope, so will the way we educate our children for their lives.  Nobody should expect to be able to obtain either a paycheck for life or free housekeeping services from someone just because of their sex.
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*Venker's piece  is a very good example of the way popularizations of studies and statistics turn things more extreme.  In this case, Venker argues that women want to get married, men do not, when the actual Pew findings are that 37% of young women and 29% of young men said that marriage is "one of the most important things in their lives."  In general, 84% of women and 83% of men stated that a good marriage is "one of the most important things or a very important thing in their lives."

How Venker got from those statistics to "women want to get married, men do not" is one of those sleight-of-hand things which research popularizations in general teem with.

Today's Funny Pictures

This one is about global warming:

This one is from Toronto's Walk A Mile in Her Shoes parade to end violence against women.

It's lovely to see those men walking for such a good cause, but of course what's funny about the picture are the shoes.  That the shoes ARE funny should make us think a bit, sadly.


Cat calls:

 

Finally, just for the sake of it, baby hedgehogs:

 

The Light-And-Frothy Post: Turkeys and Thanksgiving

Which I promised.  It didn't work out very well, did it?  So this is an attempt to fix things a little.

First, wild turkeys outside attacked a car driving by.  Revenge for Thanksgiving?  You decide.  The attack wasn't terribly efficient but it was heroic.

They are handsome birds, by the way, those wild turkeys.  The domestic variety must have been created by Mary Shelley, who wrote about  Frankenstein's monster.  She is the Mother of Horror Literature.  And also the daughter of the famous Mary Wollstonecraft.

That had nothing to do with turkeys!  But it's the lateral way my snake brain slithers.

More on Thanksgiving:  I don't eat turkeys and I don't eat pumpkin pie.  The first refusal is a principal one, the second refusal a taste-bud one.  Pumpkin pie stands high on the rankings of Thing That Should Never Have Been Invented.  Right after currants which look and taste like rabbit poo (don't ask me how I know).

Now you will all hate me...

Pecan pie, on the other hand, is delicious, especially if made fairly small so that the crust and the filling are in balance.

Thanksgiving is a wonderful idea, especially if detached from its historical contest and just thought of as a time to give thanks.  I give thanks for not having to eat currants (because I'm an adult!  adults can refuse!) and I give thanks to all of you invisible smart and kind people out there.

Good News on Gender Bias In Politics. It's Getting Less!

Jennifer Lawless and Danny Hayes have conducted two studies on female candidates in politics, the first one about how the media covered them in 2012  and the second one about possible voter sexism (based on data from 2010?  not sure).

The results, assuming the studies are OK (which I haven't checked), are very encouraging:  Lawless and Hayes found that neither the media nor the voters in their study were particularly sexist in their treatment of politicians by gender.  Gender bias is declining, in other words.

That's fantastic news, if true.  Really great.  On the other hand, I beg to differ on the conclusion of the summary in the Washington Post:

It might seem surprising that the media and voters aren’t to blame for women’s underrepresentation. But the data make it hard to argue otherwise.

Hayes ignores there the long incubation time to make a politician.  Past media treatments of, say, Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin may well have made some women decide not to run for office.  Past voter biases have partly contributed to the current situation where women are not terribly common in the corridors of power.  In other words, if the media and the voters have suddenly become completely gender-neutral, it will take time before we see the impact of that in the numbers of women getting elected to the Congress.

Women not running for office is certainly a problem, and it's important for more women to run and for others to encourage them to run.  At the same time, the decision to run depends on many variables, some private and some public, and the past public treatment of a few well-known female politicians has certainly not been something that would encourage more women to run.

Why Is Feminism 'A Dirty Word?'

That's in the address of a Guardian piece with the final title:
Why is 'feminism' such a tough badge to  wear?'

Do read the piece.  What I want to write about are the comments because they are more illuminating about the possible answers.  Let's see if I can put them into some kind of classes:

First Class of Arguments

This is the argument that the piece itself mentions:

As Siobhan Garrigan, who studies English at the University of Lincoln, puts it: "Young people don't want to identify as feminists because there is this man-hating, frumpy, lesbian image forced on us."

You must have heard about those accusations many, many times before!  I certainly have.  I'm gorgeous, lurve men (especially with pesto and garlic) and, sadly, fail to be anything but quite heterosexual.  Well OK.  I'm not gorgeous.  But I certainly am not frumpy!  The gall, she mutters.

All joking aside, those three accusations don't have anything to do with each other.  The first one states that anyone wanting gender equality must hate men.  That's pretty weird.  The second one argues, that women who want gender equality cannot be attractive enough to get men in a system where women are second-class citizens.  Only unattractive women would want equality!

That's illogical, too.  Finally, one's sexuality has nothing to do with one's desire for a gender-equal society.  All illogical, says Echidne.

But squint your eyes a bit, and you see the underlying pattern,  what all three of these things share:  These women do not try to please men.  Or that's the suspicion of anyone using those accusations.  Wanting equality means not wanting to please men.  Therefore, women who want equality must hate men, be unattractive or prefer women in their sexuality.

Now, I don't accept those accusations.  I'm also willing to admit that there have been feminists who hate men (but nowhere near the numbers of MRA guys who hate women), that all social justice movements have more or less frumpy people of both sexes in them and so on.  But no other social justice movement is taken to task for anything similar.  No other social justice movement needs to say "but of course we love you, other guys!" or try to make sure that their members are nicely made-up and properly behaved.  It's only demanded of feminism, and that, I suspect, is because of women's traditional roles and traditional gender stereotypes.

Besides, the sexes are not independent of each other, and statements which ostracize feminism have a powerful impact because of that.  Nobody wants to be shunned by the groups of their peers, after all. 

Second Class of Arguments

This crops up quite a bit in the comments.  In the more sophisticated form it's a criticism of feminism as a political movement without intersectionality.  In the rougher forms the argument is about rich women perhaps being slightly worse off than rich men but who cares?  As one commentator states, how do poor women get helped if some women become judges or famous television personalities?  Her life remains the same.

From the latter angle feminism is unimportant because it is  seen as a movement which only focuses on wealthy, educated, white women who are better off than, say, poor, uneducated, black men.  Or poor women of any race.

Here I want to draw a distinction between feminism as-a-political-movement and feminism-as-a-theory.  The two are different, I've come to believe, and while intersectionality is important in both fields, the idea that focusing on gender in isolation isn't useful for anyone but the top women in the society is misplaced when it comes to theory. 

It helps to understand how gender plays a role in the hierarchical ladders. One possible way that game might go is that women are slightly worse off than men who are otherwise the same in the kinds of things which determine the rung of the ladder we inhabit.  If that's the case, then poor women could be slightly worse off than poor men, for instance.

Or perhaps not.  The question is ultimately an empirical one and the studies must be done separately for each society.  But that has been the traditional setting when it comes to comparing men and women and it is probably still valid in most countries of this world.

Beliefs about the proper roles of men and women and beliefs about women's worth have an impact on all members of the society, including its women.  Seeing powerful women performing well in areas which have not traditionally allowed women that chance can change stereotypes and sexist beliefs.  In that sense what happens at the very top of the society does matter to all women and men.

Those who argue that the problems with sexism otherwise privileged women have don't matter fail to understand that similar and worse problems affect women further down the ladders.  Not studying those problems will hurt all women, ultimately.

I'm not sure how clear I have been.  There's a difference between intersectionality and between the argument that feminism should be a social justice movement which supports every cause and all people. 

Intersectionality plays a useful and important role.  Turning feminism into some kind of a general social justice movement would leave the question of gender unexamined.  Other social justice movements are unlikely to take up the slack.

This class of arguments also fails to appreciate that much feminist writing IS about intersectionality.

And to argue that some different cause (such as income inequality)  is more important than feminism is to fail to take into account the intersectionality in that place.  It also assumes that we must pick one cause and focus on that alone.  I don't know about you but I can run and chew gum and plan my next blog post all at the same time.

Third Class of Arguments

These are the arguments that it is the men who are worse off in Western societies.  Feminists are accused of not working to reduce the rates of male-on-male violence, including the rates of male suicide, or of not trying for the most dangerous jobs in equal numbers or of not working to get more fathers child custody in the case of a divorce.

Yet a very consistent tone in the orchestra that is feminist music has always focused on the evils that traditional gender roles can cause.  A few examples: 

Mothers are more likely to get custody in the case of a divorce when the society believes that mothers should do the hands-on care of the children. Stay-at-home parents are more likely to get custody than the family breadwinners, and the vast majority of stay-at-home parents are women.  (It's a completely different question whether fathers, indeed, are treated especially unfairly in custody courts.  Evidence suggests that in most cases the divorcing parents agree on who should have custody and when this is not the case, fathers win at least one half of all the cases in the US.)

Traditional definitions of masculinity have sometimes glorified violence.  To the extent that feminism has opposed such definitions, it has also opposed one of the many causes for male-on-male violence.

The most dangerous traditionally male jobs do not always welcome women with open arms.  Sexual harassment can be used as a way to defend one's turf.  It's important to note that women don't necessarily make a simple choice not to become, say, firefighters.  Also, as I've mentioned before, prostitution is probably the occupation with the highest risk of violent death, and it is a female-dominated occupation.  But because it is often an illegal one, its riskiness does not enter occupational safety statistics.

It's a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't argument.  Feminists should work hard on men's liberation because women have more "choices" than men do.  But when feminists do suggest that men should be able to become stay-at-home-parents or that men should be encouraged to react to anger in ways other than violence, they become interfering bitches who disobey biological imperatives and so on.   It's hard for me to know what some of these extremist MRA people want, because on the one hand they want feminists to work for the liberation of men and on the other hand they want the old-time gender roles to come back and feminists to shut up.

The best way to address these issues (in addition to getting the actual facts about them) is by pointing out that feminism wants equal opportunities by gender and equal valuation of traditionally male and female spheres of activity.  Feminists who encourage women to take up the bread-winning role or who encourage women to become firefighters or police officers should please these types of MRA people, right?  Because that way more women will die in the dangerous jobs and more men will be SAHDs and then get custody in the case of a divorce.   Well, that last sentence is only half-serious.  The point is that much of feminist agenda IS giving men more choices, should they want them.

Perhaps one could also mention that violence IS studied a lot in the society, and much of that study is about male-on-male violence.  It's hard to see what input the feminist movement with its meager funds could contribute to what is already being done.

I have trouble with this group of argument because it veers from one end to the other.  At one extreme, the argument is that the most traditional gender norms were the correct ones.  At the other extreme, feminists should work to liberate men whom those traditional gender norms have enslaved. 

Fourth Class of Arguments

This is another familiar one:  The feminist movement was needed in the past (and perhaps still is,  in places like Saudi Arabia) but women in the Western countries are now completely equal with men.

What makes the argument familiar is that people wrote about it earnestly in the late nineteenth century and then again in the 1930s and so on and so on.  Makes you think, doesn't it?

Women in the West are certainly much better off now than, say, a hundred years ago.  We can vote, for one thing.  But the Church of England still won't have female bishops, the Catholic Church is an all-boys-club and so is Islam.  The number of women in the parliaments of most countries is nowhere near 50%,  sexual violence is still a problem and, most importantly, misogyny still manages to exist.

I'm grateful for the changes past generations of feminists spent their lives bringing about.  Very grateful.  But I don't think the job is over and done with.  Whenever I feel like that, I go cruising on the net and get my head put right again.  All it takes is participation in some poorly moderated forum while using a female-sounding pen-name.  Or reading YouTube comments...

And as long as we are not affecting the gender roles at home we will not see ultimate gender equality in the wider society.

Conclusion

To conclude, let me state that, yes,  some aspects of feminism have gone astray in the past, and, yes, there are always ways to make the social justice movement that is feminism more inclusive and more effective and fairer.  At the same time, the feminism of the past got women the vote, fairer laws and fairer retirement benefits.  It got women access to schools and colleges and jobs.  It got women mentioned in the history books.  It got women their own bank accounts and the right to enter contracts.   It cast light on the once-common belief that rape is a shame for the victim and better kept hidden.

And today?  We discuss how dirty a word "feminism" might be.

The paradox of my kind of feminism is this:  The problems of sexism have been fixed when each individual is judged as an individual, not as a representative of a whole gender.   Yet the only way to see the sexist treatment of any one individual is by looking at how it is affected by  the beliefs and prejudices and societal practices which apply to one's whole gender.  

That's what I have tried to do on this blog, over the years (send money!).  It may not be the kind of feminism this Guardian article or the comments attached to it discuss.  It may not even be feminism, who knows, and it may have very limited value.  But from my snake's-eye-viewpoint most of the arguments classes I amassed miss the point of feminism, and it really is to remove that ankle-cuff with your sex etched on it.  So that we can all run free or something.

Funny Protest Signs

At this site.

I like this one:

And of course the one at the link about the vagina vs. the rib debate...