Much To Be Humble About

You may have heard that old joke about humility.  Goddesses, for instance, have much to be humble about, which means that they (we) can be both arrogant and befittingly modest at the same time*.

This is harder for mere humans.  Hence the need for courses on humility.  David Brooks,  from the New York Times columnist stable, is giving a course on humility at Yale University.  Given the fact that David isn't exactly humble himself, the course has provoked the kind of friendly kidding many think it deserves.  Charles Pierce, for example:

New York Times columnist David Brooks is teaching a course at Yale on "Humility."
...with a duck on his head.
No, not really. Do not mock this. Do not mock the fact that Brooks is going to teach about humility by assigning his own writings to a captive audience.

The duck may be a reference to Terry Pratchett's Diskworld books which include a street person who wears a duck on his head but is unaware of it.

I feel somewhat divided about this.  On the one hand, the street cred needed to teach a course in humility should perhaps include being humble in the first place.  On the other hand, humble people rarely get any notice whatsoever, and are thus unlikely to be asked to give courses at Yale or write columns for the New York Times.

But then I also agree that too many people are arrogant and have inflated balloon views of their own merits.  Not taking ourselves so very seriously, not hating on others so very much, those would be most excellent achievements.  Or just being aware of what we all share:  our humanity, and what connects us all.  Or understanding that many of our talents are random happenstances, not something we have "deserved" by hard work or genetic endowment.

Here's another snag in Brooks' thoughts such as these:

"All of us have been raised in a culture that encourages us to think well of ourselves and to follow your passion and all that kind of stuff," he continued. "I don't see why it is ridiculous to spend a few months reading people who tell us not to be all that self-impressed, to suspect you aren't as smart, virtuous and aware as you think. Surely this is a potentially useful antidote for me or anybody else."

 A very large number of human beings have, in fact, always been brought up to be humble or at least to pretend humility, to let others take the center stage, to become good cheerleaders and never the stars in the field.  This is not just true of the way girls have traditionally been brought up but it is also true of the traditional norms applied to the Lower Classes in England and of the social norms for American blacks in the past.

Which leads to my question:  Who is the target group for Brooks' lectures?  Some people would mightily benefit from being taught to be more humble, others would benefit from the exact reverse.  But Brooks doesn't appear to see this complexity.
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*There's a story about how I became the avatar of a snake goddess.  Fighting against a very thorough humility training is part of that story.

Labiaplasty. Why On Earth?

This story about labiaplasty may not describe a truly common new type of surgery, but that something called vaginal rejuvenation surgery exists is pretty astonishing stuff.  This is cosmetic surgery, for the most part, not surgery to correct something which causes physical pain or discomfort:

While labiaplasty is increasingly popular, it remains controversial, sparking debate within the medical profession broadly, among specialists, and in wider society. The surgery is relatively unregulated and frequently botched, as indicated by the staggering number of clinics that advertise discreet revisions of bungled previous surgeries. At the same time, detractors claim that women have been manipulated by the media to believe in a mythical “perfect vagina.” Some women undergo labiaplasty for medical or practical reasons—large labia can cause irritation and pain during sex and exercise—but the vast majority elect to undergo the surgery for cosmetic purposes, anxious to achieve a more attractive genital area. The desired “look” is consistently that of a smaller, less obtruding vulva, with “neat,” even labia, and this “streamlined” ideal is becoming increasingly minimalist.
“But I kept getting patients who wanted almost all of it off. They would come in and say, I want a ‘Barbie.’ So I developed a procedure that would give them this comfortable, athletic, petite look, safely.”
Dr. Red Alinsod, a urogynecologist in Laguna Beach, California, claims that his most requested surgical procedure is the Barbie: a procedure that excises the entire labia minora. This results in a “clamshell” aesthetic: a smooth genital area, the outer labia appearing “sealed” together with no labia minora protrusion. Alinsod tells me he invented the Barbie in 2005. “I had been doing more conservative labiaplasties before then,” he says. “But I kept getting patients who wanted almost all of it off. They would come in and say, I want a ‘Barbie.’ So I developed a procedure that would give them this comfortable, athletic, petite look, safely.”

Bolds are mine, to make you read the sentences I want you to read!

First, what is this media which manipulates women into believing in a mythical "perfect vagina?"  Could its name possible begin with the letter "p", continue with the letter "o" and end with the letters "r" and "n?"  Duh, that is really completely obvious.  For most women, relatively few people see their labia in the first place and doctors are unlikely to make comments about how they look.

When I wrote "why on earth?" in the title I meant that.  Why on earth do women think that they need to have their genital area trimmed to look like that of a prepubescent girl?  Because that's what the "Barbie look" implies, unless we wish to be literal and assume that women should look like a doll which doesn't have any genitals at all.

The answer cannot be in the advent of the Barbie doll herself.  Barbie is pretty old and labiaplasty as a cosmetic operation is fairly recent.  No, this has to do with the spread of pron views about how women ought to look.  Female pron actors may have had such surgery themselves to increase camera access.  Shaving the pubic area may have some of its (now shaved) roots in the same need for camera access.

It's my guess that "what is normal" in female genitals has become partly defined by pron.  That actors in pron may not be "normal" in the sense of not-surgically-treated-or-enhanced can be forgotten because we don't really talk about this stuff.  Pron is everywhere but consumed in privacy.  Impressions from pron are not tested in discussions and debates.

Another reason to ask "why on earth" has to do with the fact that surgeries are not without risks.  Thus, it's fair to ask why at least some women find those risks worth taking.  What has happened in their lives?  Are their vaginas and labias actually any different than the normal vaginas and labias, when defined not by beauty standards but by actual frequencies in the real world?  What or who has made them want such surgery?

These are not just righteous feminazi questions, my friends.  We can all be extremely vulnerable to any intimate criticisms and since women don't usually (or ever?) compare their labias with other women, no single woman can really know if criticisms of how her labia or vagina looks has any kind of validity (defined on whatever value system you wish or none).  So we should really talk about it, before someone dies in that surgery, for cosmetic reasons.

Third, why is the desired look that of a prepubescent girl?  I already stated that this most likely comes from pron.  But the question also links to how the question of "normality" oddly changes when women's bodies are the field.  We forget what "normal" breasts look like when so many celebrities have artificial breasts.  Artificial becomes the normal.  If you don't happen to match that artificial new-normal norm, then you need to have surgery.

“Women wanna reduce as much as possible while still looking normal,” he says. To this end, he developed the “Alter labia contouring” procedure. Rather than simply trimming or amputating the labia, this technique removes a wedge-shaped segment of tissue from the central section of each inner lip, then sutures the upper and lower edges of the excision together, creating smaller labia from the remaining tissue. The idea is to reduce the size of the labia while preserving the normal color and contour of the labia edge.

Fourth, and finally, isn't it possible that there is a reason for the labia?  Something to do with health and well-being, perhaps?  I have no idea if that's the case, but in general we humans are not terribly eager to cut out parts which our bodies might actually use for something.

None of this is exactly new when it comes to cutting and shaping the female body.  The cutting of  the clitoris and the labia, in Female Genital Mutilation  is an obvious example of such unnecessary surgery, and so are the anecdotes about Victorian women trimming their lower ribs to attain narrower waists or the Chinese foot-binding.  But I'm hoping that we can grow out of such practices.

Outsourcing of A Different Kind

If this story is correct, an enterprising worker outsourced his own job to China, paying the Chinese worker a fraction of his own salary:

A security audit of a US critical infrastructure company last year revealed that its star developer had outsourced his own job to a Chinese subcontractor and was spending all his work time playing around on the internet.

My first thought was that it must have been utterly boring to have to sit there every day, surfing the net.  Why not do the work?  It can't be more boring.

But what's more interesting about this example is that most people would find what "Bob" did unethical.  Yet we don't think that firms which do the same are acting unethically.  They are just carrying out good business practices.

The two cases differ, of course.   Outsourcing firms tell us explicitly that now their t-shirts or whatever are no longer made in the home country but abroad.  The firm saves money by this arrangement.  Whether the consumers do is unclear.  I haven't studied whether consumer prices go down after outsourcing but they don't have to.  The quality of the products may, in some cases, fall.  Yet none of this is regarded as exactly unethical in itself.

As a different example, think of the way mortgages are sold and resold and resold.  A person or a family makes a contract with one particular bank for the financial services.  Then the bank simply chooses not to be a part of the contract anymore, and the person or family is just assumed to go along with the continuous change in where to send the payments.  For instance, I picked a traditional careful type of bank for the mortgage.  After time has passed, the mortgage is now held by a company about which I read Very Bad Things in the news. 

I would not have picked that company in the first place.  But most would argue that as nothing in the initial contract has changed, why should I care?  So why should Bob's employer care how he gets his job done?

On The Pregnancy Police

Lynne Paltrow and Jeanne Flavin have just published a survey on the arrest rates of pregnant women since Wade v. Roe came into force:

Our study identified 413 criminal and civil cases involving the arrests, detentions, and equivalent deprivations of pregnant women’s physical liberty that occurred between 1973 (when Roe v. Wade was decided) and 2005. Because many cases are not reported publicly, we know that this is a substantial under count. Furthermore, new data collection indicates that at least 250 such interventions have taken place since 2005.

In almost all of the cases we identified, the arrests and other actions would not have happened but for the fact that the woman was pregnant at the time of the alleged violation of law. And, in almost every case we identified, the person who initiated the action had no direct legal authority for doing so. No state legislature has passed a law that holds women legally liable for the outcome of their pregnancies. No state legislature has passed a law making it a crime for a pregnant woman to continue her pregnancy to term in spite of a drug or alcohol problem. No state has passed a law exempting pregnant women from the protections of the state and federal constitution. And, under Roe v. Wade, abortion remains legal.

Yet, since 1973, many states have passed feticide measures and laws restricting access to safe abortion care that, like so-called “personhood” measures, encourage state actors to treat eggs, embryos, and fetuses as if they are legally separate from the pregnant woman. We found that these laws have been used as the basis for a disturbing range of punitive state actions in every region of the country and against women of every race, though disproportionately against women in the South, low-income women and African-American women.  

Emphases are mine.  This treatment of pregnancy as something that removes a woman's full legal rights does not fall upon every woman evenly but affects women of color, poor women and women in the South more than other women.

Many cases are about the use of illegal drugs where the pregnant woman is viewed not as a patient needing help to quit but as a criminal procuring drugs to "minors."  But not all.  In one case, a woman trying to commit suicide while pregnant ended in prison accused for murder.  And:

A Louisiana woman was charged with murder and spent approximately a year in jail before her counsel was able to show that what was deemed a murder of a fetus or newborn was actually a miscarriage that resulted from medication given to her by a health care provider.

Do read the other examples at the link.

If the "Egg-Americans Are Full People" movement starts winning, expect more of these types of cases.  They would be a logical consequence of fetal personhood measures.  If the embryo is a full person from the point of conception then the pregnant woman is no longer a full person.  She cannot have the same legal rights as other adults because she is now an aquarium or the outermost of those Russian dolls.  Everything she does can be judged from the point of view of fetal well-being.

The Paltrow-Flavin survey found a troubling trend in all this, having to do with what apparently is a practice consisting of Other People Just Deciding What Should Be Legal and then acting on it, even if laws supporting those acts did not exist.  And this trend is quite ubiquitous when it comes to pregnancy.

Thus, the current problem isn't usually a different legal treatment of pregnant women, as opposed to women who are not pregnant or men, but something nastier:  A personal decision by someone else to override the legal rights of the pregnant woman because that someone else has decided that he or she knows best what should be done to protect the embryo or fetus.  Swooping in like an avenging angel,  filled with righteousness and laws be damned.

An example of this:

For example, last week, a Tennessee woman who had been in a car accident was tested to see if she had been driving under the influence of alcohol. According to local press, her blood alcohol content was well below the legal limit. Nevertheless, because she told a police officer that she was four months pregnant, she was arrested and taken to jail. Tennessee apparently recognizes a special crime reserved just for pregnant women:  driving while not intoxicated.

 Of course she was arrested because the police officer decided she might be harming her fetus.  The Pregnancy Police is usually not an actual police officer but a private citizen or a group of private citizens.  The Pregnancy Police decides whether a pregnant woman should have a glass of wine or not.  It sometimes even decides where she is allowed to be:

Michelle Lee was catching up with friends at a nightspot near her parents' home when a bouncer pulled her aside.
"Can I ask you a personal question?" Lee recalled him asking. "Are you pregnant?"
She responded yes because, at eight months along, it would have been difficult to argue otherwise, she said later.
Lee, 29, said the bouncer who was staffing the Coach House bar near Roselle didn't care that she was only drinking water.

She said he asked her to leave shortly after midnight Thursday, telling her the bar would be liable if anything happened to her. She complied, but grew angrier over the weekend, questioning whether she had been discriminated against as a pregnant woman.
"He just said, if anything happens, if a fight breaks out and you get hurt, we are responsible," Lee said. "That can happen anywhere. If I am going somewhere, I am taking responsibility."

In that 2011 example the pregnant woman, drinking only water, wasn't allowed to stay at a place for adults because she was a container for a fetus.

But this is really about the fear that she might take a sip of alcohol from someone else's glass, I think.  Yet it's probably quite unlikely that the occasional glass of wine or beer would harm a fetus.  After all, the French, the Spanish and the Italians have drunk wine with meals for centuries, and pregnant women were not told to abstain from it.  If moderate use of alcohol was really bad for a developing embryo or fetus then all citizens of those countries should have suffered from clear signs of alcohol damage.

The health warnings about alcohol are based on studies of severe alcohol use during pregnancy, such as is the case with alcoholism.  That the health recommendations from such studies became recommendations to cut out all alcohol during pregnancy can perhaps be understood as a policy of choosing to minimize all risk to the fetus while noting that a short abstention from alcohol is unlikely to have any negative health consequences for the woman. 

But one consequence of framing the health recommendation that way is that it has flashed a green light to all the eager Pregnancy Police Officers (whether official or amateur) out there to try to control the lives of pregnant women.  Not One Sip Of Wine Will Pass Those Lips As Long As I Am Here!

In short, we, as a culture, already regard pregnant people as having fewer rights than others, including their right to privacy, and we, as a culture, already assign pregnant women our own ethical rules about how they should act.  Just imagine what an increase in state level personhood measures would do to those tendencies!  Pregnant women might have to start hiding at home if they don't want to be subjected to the Pregnancy Police.

Note, also, that the more the legal authorities treat medical problems as crimes (but only in the case of pregnant women), the less likely it is that women with, say, drug addiction problems will turn to those legal authorities for help.  One unintended (and severe) health consequence of such policies could well be that pregnant women with problems will not contact the health care system at all.  That's something we really do not want.

And Whose Fault Is It?

Digby writes about Pat Robertson, that old-style wingnut and patriarch:

So a kid writes a letter to Maxim Magazine:

“I’m 17 years old and I’ve noticed that there has been a change in my father’s behavior. He spends too much time at the computer playing a war game. I’ve noticed how alone my mom feels. I just want my father to spend more time with my mom. What should I do? How can I talk to my father? I feel shame for him. Please help.”

And Pat Robertson, apparently a big reader of the Lad Mags, replied to the poor boy on his show:

“The romance is obviously going out of the marriage ...You know, it may be your mom isn’t as sweet as you think she is, she may be kind of hard-nosed. And so, you say it’s my father, he’s not paying attention to mom, but you know mom…..”

Robertson then tells a joke about a woman whose husband drank because she had let herself go.

But of course Robertson knows nothing about this married couple, except for the teenager's letter.  To attribute any additional cause for the possible marital problems means digging it out of Robertson's .... head.  Thus, what we learn is that dear old Pat views women as the ones responsible for how well a marriage fares.  Perhaps she isn't sweet enough, perhaps she has grown fat or hasn't had her hair styled.  Whatever, she better shape up.

And neither do I know anything about that particular marriage.  It might not even be in trouble.  The letter might not be real.  And so on and so on. 

Still, the idea that women alone are responsible for not only marriage but sex has cropped up quite a bit recently.  This responsibility is not of the type where someone, say a therapist, has actually studied a couple seeking help and has decided that the blame in that particular case lies more with the woman than with the man. 

This is something much more nebulous, having to do with deeply entrenched views that relationships are women's work, that they in some way get paid for that work, even if they do not, and that they are ultimately responsible for the outcome.  And sure, these views are most entrenched in older people such as our Pat who may regard marriage as women's work.

Does any of this share something with the victim-blaming in recent rape cases?  I'm not sure if the two are relatives to each other or not.  What do you think?

The Football Jesus

I found this Laura Nyro YouTube song recently and have been listening to it:



Until yesterday, when I checked the lyrics I heard her sing:

"I was raised on the football Jesus"

How clever, I thought!  Exactly the term for those god-bothering athletes who believe that their choice of a divine power takes an interest in the outcomes of football games.

It turns out that Nyro sang "I was raised on the good book Jesus."

A Confession Post

Which you may skip if you prefer only meaningful epistles from me.  I'm writing this in case some of you think that I'm perfect, what with being a goddess and all.

I'm not perfect, sadly.  I procrastinate when it comes to sending parcels by post to friends and relatives and I'm utterly addicted to high-quality chocolates.

When these two flaws collide, watch out!  I've been intending to send a parcel to my sister for several weeks now.  It sits on the table, with all the tools needed to finish wrapping it up and addressing it.  But I wanted to let her taste some of the wonderful Vermont chocolates, so I bought four bars.

And then bought four bars again.  And again.

The parcel must now go without chocolate...
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And no, nobody paid me for this post, sniff.

Worth Reading, On Sexual Violence

Jessica Valenti and Nicholas Kristof have both written worthwhile columns on this topic. 

My brain is still cooking up (slow stewing) a post about the many meanings of the term "rape culture."  I hope to have it done by the end of this week.

The Death of Journalism

Journalism is dying, and we all watch calmly while the death throes go on.  This is a severe problem.  Not so severe as the impact of climate change, but the two come together in this:

The New York Times will close its environment desk in the next few weeks and assign its seven reporters and two editors to other departments. The positions of environment editor and deputy environment editor are being eliminated.

Read the linked article for additional information.  Perhaps closing the environment desk won't affect environmental coverage, after all.  But that's not the reason the desk is closed.  The reason is money.

Journalism is in great trouble.  In the past it was mainly funded by advertising income.  Today Craigslist and similar sites have stolen that thunder, and newspapers are struggling to make ends meet.  Nobody has found a workable new funding mechanism. 

Experienced journalists are let go all over the world and those who still have jobs are expected to work 24/7 and to have expertise in everything.  Instead of carefully researched pieces, many newspapers offer space for opinion blogs which are cheap to run (I should know!) or outsource writing to a few columnists.  I have even come across a paper (not in  the US) which seems to consist mostly of the ravings of readers in "reader blogs", the kinds of Letters To The Editor which in the past found their way directly to the wastepaper baskets. But they are available for free!  And Huffington Post, for example, uses the concept of free writing to keep its site going.

The Internet is naturally the murderer of the print media, but for several reasons Internet journalism is not able to pay the piper.  Or the writers and editors.  We all know how easy it is to read everything we wish on the net for free.  Isn't it great?  The negative side, naturally, is that one day the content will not be there because nobody is paying for it to be created and very very few people can afford to work for almost nothing (perhaps goddesses).

I have followed these developments for some time, gathering opinions on what is taking place and what the solutions might be.  The ultimately problem is that the digital media has run straight into that public good aspect of information dissemination:  Once the information is there, passing it on, without paying, really is very very cheap*.  That creates the incentives for people not to pay.

As a slightly different example of the same problem, I've heard from writers whose books are pirated on the net, available for nothing.  Those writers will soon find that they cannot afford to write full-time, what with the dropping earnings, and the outcome is that they will write fewer books, perhaps no books at all.  Talent will disappear, variety will disappear, and when this is added to the much-narrowed concentration of the publishing industry on just a few "winners" we are all ultimately going to suffer.

You can all observe some of the death throes of the print media.  Those desperate attempts to punch all our buttons, to get scandal and fear onto the front pages of magazines.  The herd chase of The News Of The Moment.  The focus on celebrities and their doings.  The slimmer and slimmer print versions of newspapers.  All those failed attempts to extract payment from the readers or to attract advertising to the websites.

What is truly dying is not rubbish journalism or fun journalism but the proper production of the kind of information we really need but don't that much care to pay for.  The kind of information which requires a journalist in Afghanistan or in South Africa or in Timbuktoo.  That's expensive journalism and there is no real substitute for it.  Yes, blogs can take care of some information production but bloggers do not have the funding or the ability to send journalists to other countries or to get training in how to interpret medical studies.  If they did, they would be newspapers.

I am worried about these developments.  Knowing what is happening, understanding the events, getting the best, widest and most objective information possible, those are all crucial aspects of democracy.  They can ultimately be crucial for survival.  Given that, the relaxed attitude so many take on that show which is the demise of journalism is quite sad.  What will take its place?  And will whatever that might be happen fast enough so that we don't all end up in our small pseudo-information bubbles, the way those who follow Fox News do?
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*Or, in reverse, stopping that from happening is very expensive or ineffective.  Taking people to court for infringing the copyright of books is expensive, and beyond the reach of most writers.  Blocking the Internet piracy is nearly impossible which is another way to say that it is very expensive.  Charging money for visiting websites is easily circumvented, and so on.

The Return of The Sun

To the very north:

This is a suitable musical accompaniment to the picture

And Even More Gun News

These news seem to have turned into a series, all about the problems with a gun nation.  It's not a polite nation and it's not a safe nation.

Here are today's installments:

First, the angry gun-lover I mentioned in an earlier post (part 2)  had his handgun carry permit suspended by the state of Tennessee.   That was because he threatened to start killing people with his gun.

Second, a home invasion with guns resulted in more guns stolen from the family living in that home.  Being armed didn't work as defense in that case.

Third, young men get shot in Chicago and in San Francisco,  Sometimes these are drive-by-shootings,  without any reason at all but made possible by a weapon which can hurl out bullets from a distance.  Sometimes the victims are children as in this Boston case.

Just following the news about shootings tells me how blind I have been to them in the past.  Perhaps how blind we, as a country, have been to them when they are not mass massacres.

Meanwhile, in Mali, French troops arrive

The New York Times tells us that French troops have arrived in Mali, to fight the Islamist takeover of the northern parts of that country.  That Islamist takeover has odd roots in the events which took place in Libya, or that's what at least the linked article argues.

But if we dig deeper into the Original Causes, so to speak, this is what we find, all over the world, whenever a radical kind of Islamist thinking takes over:

Such a draconian interpretation of Islam has shocked Malians, yet it has been creeping in for several years. The Saudi government has funded the building of mosques in the capital, Bamako. The head of the High Islamic Council, Mohammed Dicko, who is negotiating with the jihadis in the north, studied in Saudi Arabia. Wahhabism is a rising trend.

A spokesman for the Islamist section has stated that they hold Afghanistan's Taliban as their model.  Perhaps that is the reason for the destruction of cultural artifacts?

An extreme form of the shariah law has been adopted in the Islamist controlled areas of Mali.  As a consequence, there is the usual focus on women's behavior:

Fanatical Islamists have imposed the strictest form of sharia on the moderate Muslim population of northern Mali, forcing women to adopt a strict Islamic dress code and enforcing segregation of the sexes.

...

According to Prezi extremists are now compiling lists of unmarried mothers and detaining Malian Muslim women not adhering to the Islamic dress code. One human rights activist reported that forced marriages are becoming commonplace. USA Today reported Ivan Simonovic of the U.N. Human Right's observed: "The price to buy a wife is less than $1,000 and it's often misused." He explained the forced marriages were often a smokescreen for prostitution and rape.

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Thanks to Moonbootica for the original links.

A Clarification in The War On Women. Rep. Gingrey Speaks.

It's very good of the Republicans to keep that war as clear as possible, because otherwise we with the fleeting memory capabilities might forget.  This way we won't.

Rep.  Phil Gingrey (R-Ga), used to be an ob-gyn and is still a wingnut.  He clarified Todd Akin's "legitimate rape" comments:

“‘Look, in a legitimate rape situation’ — and what he meant by legitimate rape was just look, someone can say I was raped: a scared-to-death 15-year-old that becomes impregnated by her boyfriend and then has to tell her parents, that’s pretty tough and might on some occasion say, ‘Hey, I was raped.’ That’s what he meant when he said legitimate rape versus non-legitimate rape,” Gingrey said. “I don’t find anything so horrible about that.”

He also argued that women DO have a way of "shutting all that down,"  meaning that a nervous and frightened woman won't ovulate!  Gingrey knows this:

Rep. Phil Gingrey, an ob-gyn and chairman of the GOP Doctors Caucus, explained to the audience at the Cobb Chamber of Commerce breakfast Thursday in Smyrna, Ga., that Akin wasn’t far off on the science when he said rape victims rarely get pregnant because their bodies have “ways of shutting that whole thing down.”
“I’ve delivered lots of babies, and I know about these things. It is true,” Gingrey said, according to the Marietta Daily Journal. “We tell infertile couples all the time that are having trouble conceiving because of the woman not ovulating, ‘Just relax. Drink a glass of wine. And don’t be so tense and uptight because all that adrenaline can cause you not to ovulate.’ So he was partially right wasn’t he?”

An interesting theory.  I wonder how that could be tested in the cases of rape and if that "not-ovulating" thing would work in a microsecond or so, say, at the time of the rape, or if it might take a few months of tension to happen.  I tend to think it's the latter case because the hormones releasing the egg are not working instantaneously but over some amount of time in the cycle.

But it's that first quote which is the really interesting one because Gingrey removes the curtain to show us the sculpture.  It's called False Rape Accusations.  That's what those boys mean by a rape not being a "legitimate rape."  The woman is lying.

If you cruise certain kinds of MRA sites on the net you will find large flowering False Rape Accusation subcultures, like bright green mold patches in a lab!  On some of those sites 90% of all reported rapes are false accusations, and in essentially all of them at least half of all rapes are not real.  And given that I was cursed at birth by that "see-all-sides" flaw, I understand where all that comes from.  For heterosexual men who never plan to rape anyone the looming menace of false accusations is the only truly frightening bit about rape, at least until someone they know becomes a rape victim.

But that's no excuse to inflate the likelihood of false accusations.  They are a small minority, and inflating their numbers will become a true injustice to all those women (and men) who actually are raped but get no help in a culture which has prepped people not to believe them in the first place.

Of course Gingrey ends his clarification by defending Mourdock's comments, too:

Gingrey also addressed the campaign season comments by GOP senate nominee Richard Mourdock in Indiana, who said that pregancy from rape “is something that God intended.”
“Mourdock basically said ‘Look, if there is conception in the aftermath of a rape, that’s still a child, and it’s a child of God, essentially,” Gingrey is quoted as saying Thursday.

So what do we get when we put together all these measured slight clarifications?  That women who are raped are not terribly likely to get pregnant, that women who say they are raped might not be raped and that women who ARE pregnant from rape are still carrying a child of God. 

Wonderful Political Babble

Provided by Bobby Jindal, Louisiana Governor and one of the Republican hopes for one-day-president of this country.   Jindal has proposed scrapping Louisiana's income and corporate taxes and replacing them with a sales tax.  The change is supposed to be revenue neutral, meaning that the state government should get the same amount of money under either system.

Jindal explains his proposal like this:

"The bottom line is that for too long, Louisiana's workers and small businesses have suffered from having a state tax structure that is too complex and that holds back economic prosperity," Jindal said in a statement released by his office. "It's time to change that so people can keep more of their own money and foster an environment where businesses want to invest and create good-paying jobs."

That is precious!  Note that verb "to suffer" and then note that it actually refers to the complexities of the tax system!  That's what holds back economic prosperity!  By scrapping the income and corporate taxes, somehow "people" (still Louisiana workers, too?) can then keep more of their own money.

But but but.  There will be a sales tax, and if it's to be revenue-neutral it might have to be fairly large.  So people won't, after all, be able to keep their "own" money.  They just pay it out in a different tax.

The change is not meaningless.  Sales taxes are more regressive than income taxes, which means that if Louisiana actually follows Jindal's proposal, lower-income people will pay more than now and higher-income people will pay less than now.  The reasons:

1.    Wealthier people spend a small portion of their income on goods and services than poorer people. Wealth is not the same thing as income, but the two are closely related. 
2.    Income taxes typically have a minimum income level at which you do not have to pay taxes. In Canada, this exemption is for people who make around $8,000 or less. Everyone, however, is forced to pay sales taxes, no matter their income. 
3.    Most countries do not have a flat tax income rate. Instead the income tax rates are graduated - the higher your income, the higher the tax rate on that income. Sales taxes, however, stay the same no matter your income level.

Because of this regressive nature, many sales tax systems omit the tax for necessities, such as basic food and shelter.  But if Louisiana decided to do that, to avoid really hurting the poorest, then the average sales tax would have to be made even higher.

Recent Gun News

1.  What's the saying about those who grab the sword getting pierced by it?  Whatever it is, it appears to apply to this recent homicide:

One of the operators of a popular YouTube channel promoting high-powered guns and explosives was found shot to death last week in northeast Georgia.
Keith Ratliff, 32, was found dead at 5:45 p.m. Thursday at his business on Hayes Road in Carnesville, said Franklin County Sheriff Steve Thomas in a press release.
Ratliff, of Frankfort, Ky., had been shot once in the head, and his death is a homicide. He had been dead for some time when the body was discovered, Thomas said. He was last seen alive Wednesday around 7 p.m.

Another newspaper notes that

Police found numerous weapons at the crime scene, according to WSB-TV. Some of the weapons were even manufactured by Ratliff himself. "He (Ratliff) did sustain a gunshot wound that was not self-inflicted,” Mike Ayers of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation told FoxNews.com.

Those guns didn't help Ratliff to defend himself.

2.  A video at this site tells us about the strong feelings of one gun lover.  If you watch the video, note th way the term "patriot" is being used.  One cannot be anything but a far-right-winger to be called a patriot, these days, it seems.

3.  In California, a school shooting could have ended much worse had it not been that a teacher, together with a campus counselor, were able to talk the shooter (a student) into surrendering.  As things stand, one student is in hospital critically injured.
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More recent accidental gun news here, here and here.

The Government Pipeline: Empty of Women?

Given the recent appointments of the Obama administration, including that today of Jacob Lew for the 76th US Treasury Secretary, some are asking questions about what happened to all that diversity.

The New York Times article mentions pipeline problems in the context of women applicants and that age-old need for mothers to be the hands-on parents with their children:

But Mr. Obama’s recent nominations raised concern that women were being underrepresented at the highest level of government and would be passed over for top positions.
For instance, many Democrats had hoped that Mr. Obama would name Michèle Flournoy, a former under secretary of defense, to the Pentagon post. They had also hoped that he might name Alyssa Mastromonaco or Nancy-Ann M. DeParle, who are top White House aides, to the chief of staff job, or Lael Brainard, an under secretary at the Treasury Department, as secretary. But speculation about the chief of staff position now rests on Denis McDonough, the deputy national security adviser, and Ronald A. Klain, a former chief of staff to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. For the Treasury position, most expect Mr. Obama to name his current chief of staff, Jacob J. Lew.

Interviews with current and former members of the administration, both men and women, suggested that there was no single reason for the gender discrepancy in administration appointments, and several repeatedly spoke of the administration’s internal commitment to diversity and gender equity.
But several said that the “pipeline” of candidates appeared to be one problem. They said it seemed that more men than women were put forward or put their names forward for jobs. In part, that might be a result of the persistence of historical discrepancies: men have traditionally dominated government fields like finance, security and defense.

...
 

 “It is not just a pipeline issue,” said Marie C. Wilson, a women’s leadership advocate who is the founder of the White House Project, a New York-based nonprofit group. “The pipeline in government has loads of talented people in it, and loads of talented women.”
She noted that women with young families, more so than men with young families, tended to drop out of jobs that demanded long hours — a trend also noted by administration officials. Perhaps as evidence of that skew, there were about 57 percent more male appointees than female appointees at the assistant or deputy assistant level.

The Salon article argues that the pipeline problem cannot be as bad as it was during the Clinton administration, yet the Obama administration has pretty much only matched what Clinton could achieve:

Still, leadership matters, and here we are with this top-level lineup of too-familiar faces. Hillary Clinton is gone, and we don’t have Sheila Bair, Michele Flournoy or Susan Rice (a pretty good selection given that “pipeline problem”) and another white man is expected to succeed Jack Lew as chief of staff should be become the treasury secretary. The numbers look even worse now that Hilda Solis, a Latina woman, has resigned as secretary of labor.

It's hard to know what the pipeline might look like now, as compared to the early 1990s, but it's certainly true that there are women who are qualified.  Susan Rice seems to have been Obama's initial  pick for Secretary of State  though he caved on defending her fairly early.

I have no deep thoughts on any of this except for the fact that until we are all used to the history of women in powerful jobs everywhere someone has to keep poking the powers-that-be in the back and reminding them of the fact that competent women exist.  Yes, it gets very boring very fast, but I don't see any good alternatives to doing just that.  The squeaking wheel and the oil, sigh.

Today's Idle Question

How many newspapers or newspaperish websites have a labor section?  How many have a business section?  And what do we learn from the comparison of these numbers?

The Saddest Graph You Will See Today

From Washington Post's Wonk Blog:

It's an impressive looking graph.  Too bad that the actual numbers are trickier to interpret.  The graph was put together by the Enliven Project, and they provide a discussion of where the data came from.

Much of it appears to be a guesstimate.  For instance:

For those of you who have asked, here is the background on the stats we used:

• Some reports suggest that only 5-25% of rapes are reported to authorities.  Other suggest that close to half are reported.  We assumed 10%, which is dramatic, but possible.
• Of the rapes that are reported, approximately 9 are prosecuted. 
  

The link to the 5-25% figures is to British data.  The link to the 9% prosecuted is to US data, and as far as I can tell from the latter link, the 9% seems to be the percentage likelihood of going to prison for rape in the last year the statistics give us, not the percentage of a prosecution.

Amanda Marcotte mentions a few other problems with the underlying data, especially with the numbers of little men in it, because much of rape is caused by a small number of men raping repeatedly.  She also points out that the graph overstates the number of unreported rapes in the United States.

I don't think that the creators of this graph intended anything more than to start a conversation about the magnitude of unreported rape, the magnitude of cases where someone is falsely accused and so on.  It's pretty certain that a lot of rapes go unreported, for instance.

But they did choose to pick fairly extreme estimates for each number, and now they are going to be taken to task for the kind of statistical accuracy problems which even professional research might ultimately be unable to avoid, except by giving extremely wide safety margins for the various items.  But that's how it goes.

The link (pdf) the Enliven Project gives to false rape accusations is very useful, however, because it puts together a larger number of studies concerning those numbers and thus places the favorite of the MRA sites into a more proper perspective. I quote from the pdf:

In the most frequently cited study on this topic, Professor Eugene Kanin (1994) reported that 41% of the 109 sexual assault reports made to one midwestern police agency were deemed to be false over a nine-year time period. However, the determination that the charges were false was made solely by the detectives; this evaluation was not reviewed substantively by the researcher or anyone else. As Lisak (2007) describes in an article published in the Sexual Assault Report: 

Kanin describes no effort to systemize his own ‘evaluation’ of the police reports—for example, by listing details or facts that he used to evaluate the criteria used by the police to draw their conclusions. Nor does Kanin describe any effort to compare his evaluation of those reports to that of a second, independent research— providing a ‘reliability’ analysis. This violates a cardinal rule of science, a rule designed to ensure that observations are not simply the reflection of the bias of the observer (p. 2).2 

In other words, there is no way to explore whether the classification of these cases as false was simply made as a result of the detectives’ own perceptions and biases, without any real investigation being conducted.This concern is compounded by the fact that the practice of this particular police department was to make a “serious offer to polygraph” all rape complainants and suspects (Kanin, 1994, p. 82). In fact, this practice “has been rejected and, in many cases, outlawed because of its intimidating impact on victims” (Lisak, 2007, p. 6).The reason is because many victims will recant when faced with apparent skepticism on the part of the investigator and the intimidating prospect of having to take a polygraph examination.Yet such a recantation does not necessarily mean that the original report was false. 

In reality, there is no way that an investigator can make an appropriate determination about the legitimacy of a sexual assault report when no real investigation has been conducted—and the victim is intimidated by the department’s policy of making a “serious offer to polygraph” all rape complainants.As we will discuss at length below, the determination that a report is false can only be made on the basis of findings from a thorough, evidence-based investigation. 

As a result of these and other serious problems with the “research,” Kanin’s (1994) article can be considered “a provocative opinion piece, but it is not a scientific study of the issue of false reporting of rape. It certainly should never be used to assert a scientific foundation for the frequency of false allegations” (Lisak, 2007, p. 1) In contrast, when more methodologically rigorous research has been conducted, estimates for the percentage of false reports begin to converge around 2-8%.

For example, in a multi-site study of eight U.S. communities involved in the “Making a Difference” (or “MAD”) Project, data were collected by law enforcement agencies for all sexual assault reports received in an 18- 24 month period. Of the 2,059 cases that were included in the study, 140 (7%) were classified as false.This is particularly note- worthy because a number of measures were taken to protect the reliability and validity of the research. First, all participating law enforcement agencies were provided training and technical assistance in an ongoing way to ensure that they were applying consistent definitions for a false report. In addition, a random sample of cases was checked for data entry errors. More information on the MAD Project is available at http://www.evawintl.org.

To date, the MAD study is the only research conducted in the U.S. to evaluate the percentage of false reports made to law enforcement.The remaining evidence is therefore based on research conducted outside the U.S., but it all converges within the same range of 2-8%.

For example, Clark and Lewis (1977) examined case files for all 116 rapes investigated by the Toronto Metropolitan Police Department in 1970. As a result, they concluded that seven cases (6%) involved false reports made by victims.There were also five other reports made by someone other than the victim that were deemed by these
researchers to be false (e.g., a relative or boyfriend).

Grace, Lloyd, and Smith (1992) conducted a similar analysis of the evidence in all 348 rape cases reported to police in England and Wales during the first three months of 1985. After    reviewing    the    case    files,    reports from forensic examiners, and the statements of victims and suspects, 8.3% were determined to constitute false allegations.This study was sponsored by the British Home Office.

A similar study was then again sponsored by the Home Office in 1996 (Harris & Grace, 1999).This time, the case files of 483 rape cases were examined, and supplemented with information from a limited number of interviews with sexual assault victims and criminal justice personnel. However, the determination that a report was false was made solely by the police. It is therefore not surprising that the estimate for false allegations (10.9%) was higher than those in other studies with a methodology designed to systematically evaluate these classifications.

The largest and most rigorous study that is currently available in this area is the third one commissioned by the British Home Office (Kelly, Lovett, & Regan, 2005).The analysis was based on the 2,643 sexual assault cases (where the outcome was known) that were reported to British police over a 15-year period of time. Of these, 8% were classified by the police department as false reports.Yet the researchers noted that some of these classifications were based simply on the personal judgments of the police investigators, based on the victim’s mental illness, inconsistent statements, drinking or drug use.These classifications were thus made in violation of the explicit policies of their own police agencies.The researchers therefore supplemented the information contained in the police files by collecting many different types of additional data, including: reports from forensic examiners, questionnaires completed by police investigators, interviews with victims and victim service providers, and content analyses of the statements made by victims and witnesses.They then proceeded to evaluate each case using the official criteria for establishing a false allegation, which was that there must be either “a clear and credible admission by the complainant” or “strong evidential grounds” (Kelly, Lovett, & Regan, 2005). On the basis of this analysis, the percentage of false reports dropped to 2.5%.

Finally, another large-scale study was conducted in Australia, with the 850 rapes reported to the Victoria police between 2000 and 2003 (Heenan & Murray, 2006). Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, the researchers examined 812 cases with sufficient information to make an appropriate determination, and found that only 2.1% of these were classified as false reports. All of these complainants were then charged or threatened with charges for filing a false police report.

Of course, in reality, no one knows—and in fact no one can possibly know—exactly how many sexual assault reports are false. However, estimates narrow to the range of 2-8% when they are based on more rigorous research of case classifications using specific criteria and incorporating various protections of the reliability and validity of the research—so the “study” does not simply codify the opinion of one detective who may believe a variety of myths regarding false reporting.

Note that all the scientifically better estimates of false rape accusations are less than ten percent of reported rapes, the one US study giving us a figure of 7%.  The 2% figure is the extreme lower bound of these estimates, and probably shouldn't have been picked for the graph, just as ten percent reporting rates shouldn't have been picked for the graph. On the other hand, Marcotte discusses additional problems with the way the concept of a false accusation is treated.

It's pretty sad if the problems behind this graph are going to result in the assumption that the best possible estimates wouldn't give us a fairly sad-looking graph, too.







  

Religious Dress Codes For Women. And Some Confused Echidne Thoughts.

I came across two stories about attempts to regulate what women may wear.  The first consists of the specific instructions one rather strict Israeli rabbi is providing for the women in his flock,  I presume:

Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, known as one of the strictest Religious Zionism leaders when it comes to women's modesty, has formulated a new dress code in which he orders women to avoid wearing red, keep their hair tied in a braid and put on 40 denier stockings.

...

According to the new "regulations" published in the "Be'ahava U'bemuna" synagogue leaflet, a woman's garment must not be transparent or tight, must cover the entire body and be "calm and reserved."


Girls must be educated on modesty rules starting at the age of three, or seven at the latest, the rabbi stated.

There are very specific measurements  about the width and length of dresses and so on.   Somehow it's weird that the rabbi knows so much about women's stockings.

The second story is from Aceh, Indonesia, where a modified shariah law is applied.  As is often the case, it's applied to women's clothing:

Authorities in Indonesia’s Aceh province are pressing ahead with a proposed Islamic law that would ban female passengers from straddling motorbikes despite reported opposition from the central government.
Aceh introduced a version of Shariah, or Islamic law, in 2009, after it gained autonomy from the government in a 2005 peace deal to end a long-running separatist war there. The Aceh laws regulate women’s dress and public morality, require shops and other places to close at prayer time, and are enforced by a special unit. Punishments can include public caning.
On Monday, authorities in northern Aceh distributed a notice to government offices and villages informing residents of the proposed law, which would apply to adolescent girls and women. It states that women are not allowed to straddle motorbikes unless it’s an “emergency,” and are not allowed to hold onto the driver.
Suaidi Yahya, mayor of the Aceh city of Lhokseumawe, said a ban was needed because the “curves of a woman’s body” are more visible when straddling a motorbike than when sitting sideways with legs dangling.
“Muslim women are not allowed to show their curves, it’s against Islamic teachings,” he said, declining to give details of what the punishment would be for violators.

I wasn't able to find out if women can straddle their own motorbikes, as the person holding the handlebars or if they have to somehow make the bike go while riding side-saddle.  Or perhaps that question is a purely academic one.

Given that these two stories are about two of the three Abrahamic religions, I looked to see if I could make the trifecta today.  But alas, no fundamentalist Christian sect helped me by recently publicizing their female modesty codes.

What lies behind these modesty codes?  In some ways they are an attempt to control heterosexual  men's lust, or so I read.  The assumption is that if a woman dresses modestly the men who see her won't get all sexually excited.  If, on the other hand, should a woman dress immodestly (the meaning depending on the place and culture) she has only herself to blame for the sexual furor she has roused and its consequences.

The problems with this way of thinking are at least two.  First, all the apparent responsibility for sexual incontinence is shifted on women's (properly covered) shoulders, even though we know that this particular solution does not work.  Second, and related to the first point,  as dress codes become stricter and stricter the erotic areas of women's bodies follow suit.  Thus, an ankle is sexually exciting if women's legs are usually completely covered and a wrist is sexually exciting if women's arms are usually completely covered and so on.  In other words, if we try to make a female dress code do the work of controlling all heterosexual sexuality, we might as well give up because it's far too weak a police force.

The third problem with all this is of course the assumption that men cannot control themselves at all or avert their eyes, say.

The concept of religious modesty in female dress is a fascinating one.  Women are not supposed to dress in a way which might remind someone of the fact that they are women,  yet at the same time they certainly cannot dress to look like men!

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This is the point where I stopped writing this post yesterday, not being quite sure where I was planning to go with it.  On some deeper level the two questions I struggled with were these:

1.  What are the BENEFITS FOR WOMEN from following the religious dress code?  This is important to answer because most benefits, subtly implied, seem to accrue in the form of protecting men from the lustful nature.

In a sense the benefits for women are obvious, of course, when not following the dress code results in a legal punishment.  Beatings, say.  But when the behavior is not legally sanctioned, there still must be benefits.  Are they simply in terms of societal approval from those who follow the same rules?  Or does the religious dress code truly protect women from getting raped, for instance, or from general sexual harassment?

I don't know the answer to that question.

The second question is completely different and has to do with the much wider question:

2.  What is APPROPRIATE DRESS FOR BOTH MEN AND WOMEN?  Is there some societal judgment on that?  And if so,  should the code differ between men and women?  Or should we even try to define appropriate dress because once we set out on that path some will surely bring in that modesty aspect for women? 

Yet clearly most of us would agree that it's not appropriate to go to a funeral dressed in swim suits, say, (unless the dearly-departed wished for exactly those outfits at the funeral,) and that's because we don't want to hurt those who are grieving by our flippant form of dress.

So I really struggle with the concept of appropriateness.  Perhaps you can help me with that?

The final thought I had before deciding to scrap the post (which I didn't, as you can see) has to do with the subtle pressures for women to dress "immodestly."  They are not really explicit dress codes but just something we absorb from the air of the popular culture in some countries.  Even "immodest" dress is ultimately determined by how it impacts heterosexual men.

Perhaps, then, we should address appropriateness of dress while explicitly excluding any thoughts about modesty from it?  Concentrate on health, comfort and so on?  Or is even that infringing on people's rights to dress as they wish?

Today's Poems

These are  real poems, not my jokey bad pomes,   by Edith Södergran, a Swedish-speaking Finnish poet:

I

I am a stranger in this land

that lies deep under the pressing sea,

the sun looks in with curling beams

and the air floats between my hands.

They told me that I was born in captivity –

here is no face that is known to me.

Am I a stone someone threw to the bottom?

Am I a fruit that was too heavy for its branch?

Here I lurk at the foot of the murmuring tree,

how will I get up the slippery stems?

Up there the tottering treetops meet,

there I will sit and spy out

the smoke from my homeland’s chimneys. .



Edith Södergran, 1916
- translation © 2010 David McDuff



She was my favorite poet when I was a teenage goddess, full of age-appropriate angst and alienation.  I still like her work and the seeking it reveals.  The poem above lends itself to many different interpretations, including a feminist one.

This is the one I love best from her:

I saw a tree…

I saw a tree that was greater than all others
and hung full of cones out of reach;
I saw a tall church with open door
and all who came out were pale and strong
and ready to die;
I saw a woman who smiling and rouged
threw dice for her luck
and saw she had lost.
A circle was drawn around these things
that no one crosses over.

Edith Södergran, 1916
- translation © 2010 David McDuff

And one more for the road:

Two Ways

You must give up your old way, your way is dirty:
there men go with greedy glances
and the word “happiness” you hear from every lip
and further along the way lies the body of a woman
and the vultures are tearing it to pieces.

You have found your new way,
your way is pure:
there motherless children go playing with poppies,
there women in black go talking of sorrow
and further along the way stands a pale saint
with his foot on a dead dragon’s neck.

Edith Södergran, 1916
- translation © 2010 David McDuff