Men Caused The Menopause. Today's Funny Research.

I love these weirdo studies, I do!  Now we are told, based on computer simulations and nothing else, that human females have the menopause because "at some point" in our evolutionary history men decided to mate with younger women.  So there was no point in keeping that energy-intensive fertility machine going for older women and the ones who had the menopause mutation (that part is my guesswork) took over.  Here's how one of the researchers explains all this to us:

"This paper is saying that men have played the major or dominant part in choosing mates," said biologist Rama Singh, who is a professor of population genetics and evolution at McMaster University in Canada. "Somewhere along the line in our evolutionary history, males did not mate randomly but preferred young women because they are more attractive."

I like that very scientific-sounding statement in that last sentence.  It's a bit circular, preferring young women because they are more attractive, which is the same as preferring younger women because one prefers them.*

As the study summary states, there are many theories about why menopause exists.  None of them seem to be based on anything but theoretical speculations, however.

But this one elicits a few interesting questions:  We are told that men are the more selective sex.  That goes straight against the usual evolutionary-psychology argument that women are the more selective sex.  It also goes against the usual evolutionary-psychology argument that men can mate with thousands of women, no trouble.

So why would men not mate with older women, too?

Another problem with the study is that the researchers seem to assume nothing bad happens to sperm quality as men age.  Research suggests that this is not correct.  The number of mutations in the sperm grows with age, the motility of the sperm decreases as well.  Ignoring all that may not matter for the arguments in this piece, but it shows a lack of knowledge of the relevant area.

Finally, chimpanzees appear to prefer older females for mating purposes.  Given that we are so often told to look at our closest relatives for guidance about our biology and behavior, that difference might be worth pondering about.

I'm not excluding this theory among the many menopause theories.  But the fact is that we really have no evidence about the origins of the menopause and I wish researchers expressed the usual careful academic skepticism when talking about the meaning of their own research.  That tends to disappear in these kinds of studies, at least when it comes to statements made to the public.
----
*There's a deeper kind of circularity in these arguments, because usually the male preference for younger females is explained as a consequence of the greater fertile period those females have ahead of them.  That's a reference to menopause, not just to getting older.

Things Which Can Get You Fired: Beauty and Being the Target of Domestic Abuse

Last year it was beauty:

Dental assistant Melissa Nelson was fired for being too attractive, so she sued her employer. But Iowa's Supreme Court has upheld her firing as lawful.
In general, looking good is a positive trait. Attractive people tend to get paid more and get promoted more frequently.
But the opposite was true for dental assistant Melissa Nelson. Her employer viewed her as "irresistible" and a "threat" to his marriage, so he fired her. And according to Iowa's all-male Supreme Court, that was perfectly fine, ABC News reports.

Nelson did nothing wrong.  She didn't try to seduce her employer, she acted professionally and did her job well.  Her firing was declared legal because it was based on an unprotected characteristic of workers, "beauty," and not on her gender or race or age. In a weird way it was her employer who acted unprofessionally.

But the Iowa all-male Supreme Court's argument that this has nothing to do with Nelson's gender is a bit simplistic.  It has quite a bit to do with gender roles and the fact that looks are regarded as much more important for women than for men.   And it seems that at least in Iowa you can now fire someone for how they look.

The more recent case tells us that in some cases it may be acceptable to fire someone because that person is the target of a potentially violent abuser.  The woman with the abusive ex-spouse, Carie Charlesworth, teaches young children and the Catholic Diocese running the school she worked in decided to have her around is too big a risk.  So she was let go:

It’s a story that has domestic violence advocates outraged, fearing it will only reinforce an age-old problem where victims stay silent — but equally concerned are the school's parents, not wanting their kids in the middle of it.

“Basically, we’d had a very bad weekend with him, we’d called the sheriff’s department three times on Sunday with him,” said Charlesworth, referring to an incident in January that put her leave of absence in motion. 

She went to her principal at Holy Trinity School in El Cajon the following morning and told the principal to be on the lookout for her ex-husband.  As many domestic violence cases go, this one has a trail of restraining orders and 911 calls. When Charlesworth’s ex-husband showed up in the school parking lot, the school went into lockdown. 

Charlesworth and her four kids, who also attended Holy Trinity School, have not been back since the January incident. A letter was sent home to parents the following day, explaining the situation and noting Charlesworth and her children were being put "on an indefinite leave.”

While Charlesworth’s husband went to jail on two felony charges, she says she felt like a criminal too.

“And that’s what it felt like, the kids and I were being punished for something we didn’t even do,” she told NBC 7 San Diego.

Three months later, another letter arrived in the mail delivering a crushing blow.  Charlesworth was fired for good, and after 14 years in the district not allowed to teach at any other Diocesan school.

What both of these cases share is the innocence of the workers who got fired.  The firings were to protect someone else.  In the domestic abuse case, those are the children at the school, in the beauty case those are the dentist and his wife and their marital harmony.

On Forced Fatherhood

Laurie Shrage has written a blog post on the New York Times Opinionator blog on the question whether men now have fewer reproductive rights than women, especially once an "accidental" conception has happened.  This is a topic on which I'm likely to write a very loooooong commentary.  My apologies for that in advance.

What Shrage argues is that once the flock of happy little sperm escapes confinement and one of them (at least) ends up devoured by that omnivorous egg (or eggs), the man has been yoked to fatherhood, whether he wishes it or not,  if  the owner of those eggs decides on motherhood.   What that involuntary fatherhood seems to mean, when viewed in minimal terms, is that the man must pay child maintenance for over a decade.

The impregnated woman (a disgusting term, I think, for some reason) has the choice of abortion (at least in a few states in the US and until the Republicans cut off that option), and she has the choice of completing the pregnancy.  She even has the option of giving the child up for adoption or abandoning it legally.  But Shrage thinks the man has none of those  options.

I think she is mistaken about the latter two alternatives.  A single father, with custody of his child, could give the child up for adoption, in the absence of the mother or any knowledge of her, and a single father could also deposit the child in one of those hospitals which allow it as a legal option.  Thus, it is only the abortion alternative that men who don't want to be fathers are not allowed to enforce.  And that's because the process is taking place inside the woman's body, which gives her some additional rights.

So what do I think about this question of forced fatherhood?  My thoughts are complex, but I can tell right off the bat that until we invent an artificial womb and 100% effective birth control when not using it, the basic setup remains tilted because of the fact that it is the woman's body in which the process takes place. 

And in that sense men do, indeed, have fewer non-reproductive and reproductive rights, in a few privileged places where both contraception and abortions are widely available.  In large parts of this world men probably have better non-reproductive and reproductive rights than women do.

The basic setup would be tilted the other way round if men were like seahorses and performed the pregnancy.  Then they would have extra say in what is going to happen to their bodies.

Historically speaking, a man having sex with a woman he wasn't married to mostly got away scot-free, whether she got pregnant or not.  That's the background against which these developments should be judged.  Getting away scot-free is not what happens with unintended pregnancies.  The woman must undergo pregnancy and birth or an abortion, as a minimum, and it's not realistic to argue that the man should have zero negative consequences from having unprotected sex or a contraceptive fail.

And once the child is born, there are three individuals one must be concerned about.  The rights the parents have at that time must be balanced with the rights and needs of the child.  Child maintenance, for instance, is about the child, not its custodial parent.  If the custodial parent cannot make it on her or his own, then the government (all of us) must chip in.

In short, the question is complicated and doesn't lend itself to easy or flippant answers of the type the pro-lifers or forced-birthers use as advice to women:  If you don't want to be a parent, just keep your legs crossed.  I wonder if they are going to use a related exhortation to men who don't want to become parents, either.

An extreme interpretation of Srage's arguments suggests  to me something utterly impractical:  The idea that a man could simply declare he didn't want to be a father and then escape all consequences of the conception, with the possible exception of paying some of the pregnancy- or abortion-related costs (as Srage proposes).  If such a rule was adopted and applied across the board, the incentives for men to use contraception could be vastly reduced.  And logically that should result in a lot less free-wheeling heterosexual sex in general, once the rules became generally known to all women, too, because such a rule would increase the costs of sex-for-just-fun for women.  Like returning to the old historical rules, eh?

Still, I can see how the current arrangement can be rotten for men who end up becoming fathers when they don't wish that outcome.  Nobody should be forced into that position, or tricked into it and so on.

That's why I wonder why there seems to be no lucrative market for a truly effective male contraceptive pill.  It would solve all these problems in the simplest possible way.  Couples could still use condoms for the prevention of disease but a breaking condom would not be such a calamity.  And men would be in control of their own fertility and could not be forced into fatherhood that easily. 

Indeed, creating pressure on a male contraceptive pill seems the obvious answer here.  It would much reduce the magnitude of the problem, given comparable data from the female contraceptive pill.

The Man-Brain in Maine

This is just a delicious story abut a Maine Republican telling us that man-brains get that health care costs money, woman-brains think it's free and want it:

House Minority Leader Ken Fredette (R-ME) invoked the classic gender-stereotyping book, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus to explain how he is struggling to reconcile his rational male consideration of costs with Democrats’ apparently female desire for free things.
The Maine People’s Alliance flagged the sexist speech:

As I listen to the debate today and earlier debate on this bill, I can’t help but think of a title of a book, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. And it’s a book about the fact that men sort of think one way in their own brain, in their own world. And women think another way in their own brain and in their own world. And it really talks about the way that men and women can do a better job at communicating. Because if you listen to the debate today, in my mind — a man’s mind — I hear two fundamental issues. From the other side of the aisle, I hear the conversation being about: free. ‘This is free, we need to take it, and it’s free. And we need to do it now.’ And that’s the fundamental message that my brain receives. Now, my brain, being a man’s brain, sort of thinks differently, because I say, well, it’s not — if it’s free, is it really free? Because I say, in my brain, there’s a cost to this.

Bolds are in the original.  I think Mr. Fredette is just a Bear of Very Little Brain.   What he does isn't terribly unusual, that labeling the opposition as stupid and as not thinking very clearly.  I've done that myself in some sudden rage.  What's less usual is to loudly state that woman-brains don't understand money.

David Brooks: The Ties That Bind....And Chafe

David Brooks  laments the loss of all those social ties and regards Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower/leaker, as a major example of what happens when our intimate ties fray and break:

According to The Washington Post, he has not been a regular presence around his mother’s house for years. When a neighbor in Hawaii tried to introduce himself, Snowden cut him off and made it clear he wanted no neighborly relationships. He went to work for Booz Allen Hamilton and the C.I.A., but he has separated himself from them, too.
Though thoughtful, morally engaged and deeply committed to his beliefs, he appears to be a product of one of the more unfortunate trends of the age: the atomization of society, the loosening of social bonds, the apparently growing share of young men in their 20s who are living technological existences in the fuzzy land between their childhood institutions and adult family commitments.
If you live a life unshaped by the mediating institutions of civil society, perhaps it makes sense to see the world a certain way: Life is not embedded in a series of gently gradated authoritative structures: family, neighborhood, religious group, state, nation and world. Instead, it’s just the solitary naked individual and the gigantic and menacing state.

I bolded the most interesting sentence in that quote.  Brooks is an authoritarian, though heavily disguised.  Like a lone wolf pretending to be one of the sheep, telling the sheep how good the various ties are that bind them, and lamenting the awful fate of a solitary sheep lost from the flock.

I'm not disagreeing with Brooks on the importance of social ties, but pointing out that he never questions the nature of those traditional ties he so adores.  He offers us his alternatives:  Either suffer alone or live your life in the place the "gently gradated authoritative structures" give you.

But those traditional ties are not equally protective or equally demanding for all, and many of the most powerful in the society appear not to be too bothered about the ties supposedly binding them, unless it's to a very close and small group of like-thinking and similarly positioned individuals.

------
This post is about a small sliver of Brooks' arguments.  For a very good take on the whole of it, read Amy Davidson's take in the New Yorker.

Speed-Blogging, June 12, 2013: On Market Information, Wingnut Beliefs About Pregnancy And Other Stuff

1. This bit about some traders paying for advance government information matters quite a bit, because the economists' market models require that information be available for all for competition to work properly.  Besides, the high price of getting the early warnings benefits the wealthier market players.

2.  Yet another wingnut politician, Trent Franks,  who knows  that one cannot really get pregnant from rape.  The reason for these arguments is to pave the road for banning abortion even in the case of rape.  Other forced-birthers tell us that abortion is never necessary to save the pregnant woman's life, and that argument is used to pave the road for banning abortion in all cases.  That's what El Salvador has, by the way...

3.  Even feminists need to be hot to get their point across.  Except that it doesn't work that way, because the imagined causality, among the opposing camp,  assumes that a woman becomes a feminist because she is ugly.  Therefore, all feminists are ugly, QED.   The other crap that link mentions is much worse, of course.

4.  Americans disapprove of the government surveillance programs.  But there's the predictable party-based difference.  The disapproval probably increases if the party you oppose is in power.

The Slut-Or-Madonna Culture: Who Is The Goalkeeper?

Contents:  Sexual violence.

The story I link to from here is a distressing one, about child molestation and alleged rape and what the consequences of it are for a young pregnant girl:

Now, a 14-year-old in Elwood, Indiana who is eight months pregnant faces ongoing harassment simply because her neighborhood sees her as a very young pregnant girl. But a reporter at the Indianapolis Star writes that her town does not know the full story of the 17-year-old boy who physically overpowered her after she told him “no.” On Tuesday, he faces sentencing for three counts of child molestation.
At the same time the girl has encountered vicious public shaming from her community, she and her mother Kristy Green have spoken out because they worry her assailant will walk free in juvenile court:
“I can’t walk out the door without someone calling me a whore or slut,” the girl said. “I used to have a lot of friends, or people I thought were my friends, but as soon as this happened I just isolated myself.”

The repeated vandalism incidents at the family’s home — including the words “whore” and “slut” scrawled on the garage doors — were reported to police. But Green said no charges were filed because there were no witnesses to the acts.

I don't know enough about this particular incident to tell whether the vandals are supporters of the boy who is accused of having raped the girl or whether the vandals are from the community in general.  Though the latter seems more likely, given that the court case is not common knowledge in the town.

If it is the latter, what we see here is the gatekeeper methodology in full action:  Women and girls are supposed to be the goalkeepers.  Men and boys are supposed to try to score.  The game is cruel, as we can see, and it is also illogical, both in assigning  the responsibility to stop the goals to young girls but not the power to do so, and also in its underlying assumption that the game is supposed to be adversarial, that the women and girls should not want to score at all and if they do, well, then they are sluts and whores.  The cruelty is at its apex when the girl tried to keep the goal but the puck was rammed through.  As seems to be the case here.

It's that game we need to change.  Sex and love and so on are not a game of hockey or football.  Scoring in such a game is not winning, and encouraging the game scenario is one way of creating rape cultures.

Meet E.W.Jackson, the Republican nominee for Lieutenant Governor of Virginia

The Republican  nominee for lieutenant governor of Virginia (Virginia is for lovers, according to tourism promoters), E. W. Jackson, has pretty unusual ideas.  He has written that birth defects are caused by sin.  Whether that is just general free-floating sin of all humans or specific sins of the parents of the child isn't clear to me.

E.W. Jackson has also stated that Planned Parenthood is more lethal to blacks than the KKK ever was.  That's the idea of abortions as intended racial genocide.  But E.W. Jackson must have forgotten about all those pap smears and breast examinations that Planned Parenthood also provides.

And in 2012 the nominee for lieutenant governor in the loving state of Virginia expressed his intense dislike of gays and lesbians, calling them bad names.  He has continued telling us what is wrong with gays and lesbians as well as many other types of Americans.

Mr. Jackson is clearly running as a very fundamentalist preacher.  Whether that's what the state of Virginia really wants remains to be seen.

And a Joke

From here:

Good News on Gender Issues

First, this story about a letter sent fifty years ago to a female Harvard applicant is salutary reading.  The world has changed for the better, at least in some countries.  Much work remains to be done on the global level, however.

Second*,  as a response to those who argue that girls and women just can't do science or at least don't want to do science, well, some, at least, are  good at it.



Third, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologist has (finally) made a statement about all those things the forced-birther politicians require them to do:

The statement specifically denounces several types of laws, including those that tell physicians what to say to women about breast cancer risk and breast density, those that mandate outdated abortion treatment protocols, and those that require women to undergo ultrasounds and view the images before having an abortion.

ACOG in the statement acknowledges that laws can promote public health and help provide for medical services, but it cautions that "laws that veer from these functions and unduly interfere with patient-physician relationships are not appropriate." 


What they are supposed to say about breast cancer risks are untruths.  Or lies, if you prefer a more direct word.  Abortions do not increase the risk of breast cancer, based on all large studies with good data.
----
*KHBuzzard in the comments noted that this is an old story, from 2011.  My apologies for that.  I have faced this possibility a lot in my blogging career  (because people re-start a discussion about something old without mentioning that it is old),  This is the first time I failed to spot that something wasn't new.  As an aside, I once wrote a really neat and funny post about something and then couldn't use it because the original piece was five years old...

Why I Don't Write About the NSA And Other Important Topics

Blogging is a weird business (let's pretend that it IS a business), because once a blogger has developed a voice (a gruff one, a whining one), whether that voice is used or not starts to matter to the blogger if to nobody else.

It's like the empty space in paintings.  That matters, too, for the totality of the experience.

Duh.  What I mean is that there are zillions of topics I never write about, however important they are, because they are not within my pay grade.  Others have the years of experience that properly addressing them requires, others have better sources and a better platform, others actually live a particular experience.  Even us divines must specialize in something.

But I still wonder if my silence on certain topics is taken as a statement about something more than the limits of my expertise.  The reality is that on many, many topics I do better as the reader than the writer.

But it's true that I pick and choose even among the topics that I know a lot about, and that I often go for the topic I enjoy writing about,  though I do want to cover whatever seems very important to cover.   Feeling that little engine starting to purr away inside me is a sign that one of the tiny windows to our general subconsciousness might be ajar, that I might be able to quickly snatch something of wider significance out of it, that the topic is for me, in some odd way.

On the other hand, I just like certain writing assignments and dread others.  For the latter I need moolah.

Double duh.

All that is a long and self-involved prelude about topics that I think I should write more about (say, guns in the United States and how they make the society polite ("an armed society is a polite society"), if they do,  by removing large numbers from it in neat and polite coffins).

One of those topics is always whatever the current public debate concerns, such as right now the question of government surveillance.

I don't have the expertise to write on the topic, just the kinds of concerns anyone in the audience might have:

The lack of safeguards, the scope of the program and the fact that someone working for a subcontractor, with just a few years of experience, appears to have had access to the data on a very high level.  The question how many terrorist attacks all this surveillance has prevented, the obvious lures it has for whichever party is in power at any particular moment, the fact that once this became entrenched, under the Bush administration, no future head of the state would wish to relinquish such powers and so on.

Then there are the side-issues:  How the conservatives were all for the system under Bush but now opposed to it.  That political game.  And the question what ordinary Americans (and people in other countries) think about this.

My own impressions match with those at Alicu blog, in the sense that I have sorta assumed all this was going on once the floodgates were opened.  And it's not just the government which collects information on us.  The corporations do, too.

Those beliefs of mine don't make what has been revealed any less worrisome or any less important to fix,  but they dull my instant-outrage reflex.

Some of it may be similar to what happened with the airport gropings etc.  Those of us who have been groped for years both for medical reasons and because of street harassment and such have a different background, more time getting accustomed to something and that, too, dampens the instant-outrage reflex.  Similarly, if one has assumed that this crap is happening, then finding out that it IS happening is less shocking. 

It still needs to be fixed, naturally.

Men in Skirts

This is both an interesting piece of news and an opportunity to point out how reporting changes what the reader comes away with.

The story, as it is given at the website of the Finnish public television system (yle), is that some local train services in Sweden  were last year taken over by a company called Arriva.  Whether that is a privatization of services which in the past were not private is unclear.  But in any case Arriva gave the staff on the trains a new dress code:  No shorts, only long pants or skirts.  Shorts were allowed before Arriva took over.

What happened then, according to the yle site?  It has been very hot in Sweden recently, and according to one train driver the temperature inside his compartment rose to over 90 degrees.  More than ten men working the line have chosen to come to work in skirts.  They are cooler in the heat and the dress code allows them.  You can watch a video of a couple of skirt-wearing men at the site.

When I decided to write about this I tried to find an English language source.  The one I found gives a slightly different story:

Male staff on Stockholm’s commuter trains have begun wearing skirts to circumvent a ban on shorts as sweltering heat hit the Swedish capital this week.
Around 15 male train drivers and other staff wore skirts this week on the suburban Roslagsbanan train service, where temperatures inside the carriages can reach 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit), transport company Arriva said on Sunday.
“Our policy is that you have to look well dressed and proper when representing Arriva, and that means trousers if you’re a man and a skirt if you’re a woman, but no shorts,” Arriva spokesman Tomas Hedenius told AFP.
“But if there’s a man who is keen to wear women’s clothing, such as a skirt, we have said that’s okay,” he added.
The company could change its policy this autumn after receiving feedback from its employees.

It focuses on the idea that skirts are for women and trousers are for men and then goes on to explaining Swedish gender policies and so on, and it lets Hedenius imply that the men who are doing this want to wear "women's clothing" rather than something cool in the summer.

The differences are subtle in the two interpretations, but it made me think how very easily we can be influenced by that very subtlety.

As far as I can tell, the point the men who wear skirts wanted to make is that skirts are more comfortable in the heat than long pants. 

The reverse point is equally obvious but not stated:  Skirts can be extremely uncomfortable during the long and cold Scandinavian winter and shouldn't be required for either sex because of that.  One engine driver also mentions that the skirts are cumbersome for certain tasks which require climbing, say.  If the company really requires women to wear them all the time, it may keep women out of certain jobs.

Then there's the fact that all this is about what employers can demand from their employees, that dress codes affect the comfort and even the health of the workers.

And Yet More on The Ezekiel Gilbert Case in Texas

When I wrote my first blog post on this topic, I expressed a bit of cynicism about the idea that Texas could actually acquit someone on the shooting death of an escort,  based on the right to retrieve stolen property.  But then I got carried away with the flow of articles on the topic.

Now Bridget Dunlap at Rheality Check has written a piece about the case which clarifies some issues:

First, the defense used two arguments, one of which was the Texas law about retrieving stolen property.  The second one was the argument that the accused aimed at the tires of the car in which the victim and her driver were seated, and therefore did not intend to kill.

We cannot tell which of those arguments (if the jury chose one over the other) was used as the basis of the acquittal decision.  Thus, the outrage shouldn't have been aimed at the jurors but at that particular Texas law which the defense used.  And perhaps at the judge in this case.  Dunlap writes:

One would expect the jury to find that shooting at a car with an AK-47 is at least “reckless,” in which case he could have been convicted of manslaughter. But the prosecution didn’t charge him with manslaughter, only murder. Manslaughter is a “lesser included offense” of murder and the judge is entitled to instruct the jury if the evidence supports that charge, but it appears she did not. The jury can’t convict on a charge that isn’t before them.
I think Texas’s defense of property law is abhorrent and my gut reaction was that it was a reprehensible defense. This reaction suggests, that you should think twice before hiring me as your defense attorney, sadly. As Professor Michael W. Martin of Fordham Law’s Federal Litigation Clinic reminded me: “If the law allows the defense, the lawyer must use it, if it is viable, unless there is a good strategic reason not to. Otherwise, it is ineffective assistance of counsel. If the lawyer feels like he is ethically barred from using a legal, viable defense, he should ask to be relieved.”

I'm glad about this additional  legal information.  I feel a little less like someone suddenly waking up in an alternate reality.

You're Doing it Rong. John Pilger Explains What Feminists Should Do.

In a Truthout piece titled "There Is a War on Ordinary People, and Feminists Are Needed at the Front."  By ordinary people Pilger means the poor and perhaps the middle class.  His argument is a class argument, though it's more than that, as I will discuss further down.

But for the time being it's enough to note that John Pilger wants feminism to be about class concerns and not about gender.  I guess the term "feminism" has so many definitions (lots of them  reviled and hated, many of them contradictory, quite a few of them unknown among the larger public) that it's no longer regarded as odd for someone to argue that feminism shouldn't be about gender.  But it's like saying that anti-racist movements shouldn't be about race.

There have been many,  many nights where I have lain awake, staring into the darkness while asking myself if I AM a feminist.

That's because of the many and very complicated debates that are ongoing within various circles interested in either explaining women's roles and economic lots in life or working to improve the status of women.  My mind runs around a squirrel wheel, going from "yes, but" to "on the other hand" and back again.

So far I think the important distinction when comparing and contrasting various groups of people in the Oppression Olympics is this:  Whatever our own activism,  we need to understand that  the underlying theories about why certain groups don't fare as well in the society are not interchangeable.  It matters to understand where misogyny comes from and it matters to understand where sexism comes from.  It matters to understand poverty and attitudes towards poverty, and it matters to understand the roots of sexism.  One single theory cannot account for all of those.

It also matters that feminists can be classist and racist, that anti-racists can be sexist and classist, and that those who fight classism issues can be at least sexist, if not racist (the latter depending on the country).

Back to John Pilger who will teach me more about what feminists are all about and what we should do.

He begins rather wonderfully, by arguing that the UK Daily Mail is a feminist publication.  It's an inauspicious opening if he wishes to persuade feminazis of my kind, because I have studied that publication intensively in the past, and here are the kinds of things the newspaper's Femail section, intended for women, gives us in the archives for searching the word "feminism":

Feminism was going to liberate both sexes, but instead it destroyed a generation of men

How feminism destroyed real men

Has feminism killed the art of home cooking?

Why I loathe feminism... and believe it will ultimately destroy the family

Feminism has turned men into second-class citizens, but have women's victories come at a price?

You've got what you want, girls, stop whining: Has feminism made women unhappy? (well THIS certainly will)

'Quit work to help your husband', says a controversial new book that has infuriated feminists


And so on and so on, for 407 references. 

Pilger goes on in his article in a way which suggests that he has been personally hurt and angered by feminist writings about gendered violence, feeling accused himself and feeling powerless to affect the debate, which he believes has been kidnapped by feminists:

This is now standard media practice. "Most weeks some lovely, caring berks tell me I am a man-hating witch," wrote Suzanne Moore recently in the Guardian, "so let's get it out there. Sometimes I am. The acceptable kind of suck-it-up feminism (I love men really!) is hard to sustain after yet more abuse stories … Do I think all men are rapists? No. Do I think all women can be raped. Yes?"
How quickly the broad brush of blame is applied to a rash of dreadful murder and kidnap cases. Throw in an abduction in Cleveland, and the arrest of "yet another TV personality," and, according to Cynthia Cockburn and Ann Oakley, this represents "the profound, extensive and costly problem of male sexual violence."
Part of the problem, another commentator insinuates, is that men don't care as much as women because they don't use Twitter enough to express their abhorrence of rape and kidnap. This all adds up to a "crisis in masculinity," requiring men to join in a "conversation" about their social and moral deficiencies on terms already decided.

...

The problem with media-run "conversations" on gender is not merely the almost total absence of male participants, but the suppression of class. It is tempting to say real politics are missing, too, but bourgeois boundaries and prescriptions are real enough. Thus, gender, like race, can be presented in isolation. Class is a forbidden word, and gender subordinate to class is heresy. The Daily Mail model is built on this.

One might argue that feminists "kidnapped" this topic because it was an orphan nobody else wanted at all.

But I can understand Pilger's hurt feelings.  Generalized guilt on the basis one's sex, race or ethnicity is not a terribly productive start for solving any types of problems in the society, as we should have learned from recent discussions of Islamic extremists, just as generalized prejudices about one gender or race are bad.  Still,  Pilger may be skipping stages there, by assuming that the "crisis in masculinity" is about men as biological beings or about something that cannot be changed, rather than about socially defined norms of masculinity, especially among teenagers, athletes and other groups which build their own sub-cultures based on the approval of others in those sub-cultures.

Whatever,  Pilger is  clearly angry and clearly not on the same side with feminists.  That's what makes his argument that feminists are not on his side interesting.

His side is classism, roughly.  But here's the deeper problem about Pilger's arguments:

Feminists have, for many years now, used the lens of intersectionality to gender issues, by noting that those issues intersect with race, income, ethnicity and religion.  Likewise, there are many, many feminists organizations which work on the issues of immigrant women in the US, on the issues of race and gender, on the issues of poverty and gender, on the issues of LGBT and women, and on and on and on.  Pilger probably didn't think of using Google to  research all that.

May I now say that I think Pilger is mansplaining a bit?  Giving us a hastily written and angry first draft, rather than doing the additional research that was needed?  Hmm.

Finally, there are problems with the assertion that feminists should stop caring about violence and other issues and focus on poverty and class issues.  First, many feminists are already focusing on poverty and class issues.  Second, if feminists don't talk about the gendered aspects of violence, then nobody will, pretty much.  And third, obviously there are feminist activists who are not into class issues, just as there are class activists who equally obviously are not into gender issues.





 

More on Ezekiel Gilbert And The Right To Use A Weapon To Retrieve Stolen Property in Texas

I wrote about this case yesterday.  A man hires an escort, expecting sex (note that this expectation was not based on a written contract, say,  given the illegality of the trade).  The escort comes into his house, is given the money but the sex doesn't happen.  She leaves, or at least goes out, and he shoots her, paralyzing and ultimately killing her.  He is sued for the act but the jury acquitted him, based on a law which gives Texans the right to use a gun to retrieve stolen property "after nightfall."

It was the money ($150) that was viewed as stolen property by the jury, which interpreted the trade the way the accused did:  He should have been given sex or his money back.  Thus, the jury regarded an illegal trade (in Texas) as one that the john had the right to enforce.

But reverse this.  Suppose an escort has sex with a client in Texas, and then the client refuses to pay.  It's after nightfall, they are in the escort's house.  Based on this acquittal, she has complete rights to kill her client dead, to retrieve her stolen property.

Based on this Vanity Fair article, my interpretation should work, because the law used in the case was all about the right to use guns.  But I very much doubt that the jury would have acquitted an escort for the reverse crime.

Fox And The War on Women

Andrea Tantaros of Fox News gives the usual (for Fox)  alien-from-outer-space statement about the appointment of Susan Rice as National Security Advisor:






For those who cannot watch the video, Tantaros states that the Obama administration appoints women as human shields, possibly in the Republican war on women! 

Isn't that precious?  I never have so much fun with the lefties or the muddy middle.

A war on women would mean that men are used as the human shields.  Or possibly children.  But not women, because women are that enemy, see?

Whatever.  Tantaros implies that to avoid being blamed for waging war against women the Republicans cannot criticize Democratic female politicians at all.  Not at all.

I love that, and wish that rule to be immediately applied on this blog.  Nobody can criticize Echidne because then you are waging a war against a goddess.   Send chocolate or I will be thunderous.

But criticism is a requirement in politics.  We have to keep our elected and appointed servants honest and their noses to the grinding wheel, and polite but cogent criticism is the way to go.  So yes, Andrea, Republicans can criticize Democratic women in politics. 

But if they wish not be viewed as sexist asshats, that criticism should not be about the women's  looks,tits,  butts or how those women somehow in general exactly replicate the worst aspects of all those billions of people in the group: women.  Just keep your criticism on the issues and you will do fine.

Could it be that this is  a novel idea in the land of Fox News?  That distinguishing between the two types of criticisms is just beyond those folks?

More on Fox News' difficulties with that weird and awkward half of humanity can be found here.

Only in Texas?

The Google doesn't have a lot about this story, so you may wish to take that into account in judging it.  But the outline is this:

In 2009 a man, Ezekiel Gilbert,  contacts a woman working as an escort, Lenora Ivie Frago,  via Craigslist,  and gives her $150, in expectation of sexual services which are not forthcoming.  Rather, the escort leaves the man's house with the money.

He shoots her, paralyzing her. Ms Frago  dies several months later from the consequences of the shooting.   The case goes to court, and the jury acquits the man in her shooting death:

The verdict came after almost 11 hours of deliberations that stretched over two days. The trial began May 17 but had a long hiatus after a juror unexpectedly had to leave town for a funeral.
During closing arguments Tuesday, Gilbert's defense team conceded the shooting did occur but said the intent wasn't to kill. Gilbert's actions were justified, they argued, because he was trying to retrieve stolen property: the $150 he paid Frago. It became theft when she refused to have sex with him or give the money back, they said.
Gilbert testified earlier Tuesday that he had found Frago's escort ad on Craigslist and believed sex was included in her $150 fee. But instead, Frago walked around his apartment and after about 20 minutes left, saying she had to give the money to her driver, he said.
That driver, the defense contended, was Frago's pimp and her partner in the theft scheme.
The Texas law that allows people to use deadly force to recover property during a nighttime theft was put in place for “law-abiding” citizens, prosecutors Matt Lovell and Jessica Schulze countered. It's not intended for someone trying to force another person into an illegal act such as prostitution, they argued.

Can this really be true?  If it is, why is a transaction that is illegal in Texas (selling sex) given this type of property rights protection?  If I hired someone to kill another person in Texas, and the hired killer ran off with my money without doing the agreed-upon murder, could I then kill him or her and not get punished for it at all?  Or is it the case that Mr Gilbert will get a separate punishment for being a john?  Is that even illegal in Texas?  (I'm too lazy to research it.)

Then there's the sum of money which is deemed adequate to cause someone's death, 150 dollars.  Is that the worth of a life?

The story is hard to believe.  I'm also concerned about the jury thinking that being an escort automatically means selling sexual services, when that is not written down anywhere at all.  My concern is because similar one-sided interpretations could spread to all sorts of exchanges, and juries appear to be ready to favor the "buyer's" interpretation here.

Let's flip this over.  Suppose that Ms Frago had had sex with Mr Gilbert and Mr Gilbert then refused to pay her.  Would she have been within her rights in Texas if she had then killed Mr Gilbert?  As far as I can tell, that should be the case.  But I very much doubt the jury would have acquitted her.
----
Via Gawker 

Stuff To Read, June 5, 2013

Or speed-blogging, if you wish.

First,  the Republican-led Wisconsin legislators don't like the idea that journalism students learn investigative journalism:

At the conclusion of a marathon overnight session, Wisconsin legislators early this morning added a provision to the state budget that would expel the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, a nonprofit investigative journalism institute, from its offices at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. The measure also prohibits university employees “from doing any work related to the Center for Investigative Journalism as part of their duties as a UW employee.”
With the budget now cleared by the Joint Finance Committee and poised for final approval soon, journalists and educators are scrambling to preserve what is widely regarded as a successful collaborative model that both trains emerging reporters and produces high-quality investigations.

There may be more valid reasons for the move.  But investigative journalism is part of our world's total immunity system.  It gives us early warning about dangerous social and political diseases.

Second, the International Monetary Fund now admits that it may have sorta miscalculated when it placed its hand-made stockbroker shoe on the necks of the Greek people:

The International Monetary Fund is to admit that it has made serious mistakes in the handling of the sovereign debt crisis in Greece, according to internal reports due to be published later on Wednesday.
Documents presented to the Fund's board last Friday will reveal that the Washington-based organisation underestimated the damage austerity would cause to the eurozone country, which has required two bailouts in the past three years.

I hope this won't end up as one of those mistakes-were-made-now-let's-move-on debacles which never change anything.

Third, the Smithsonian Magazine has a story on the color pink as denoting girliness and all things icky.  It mentions the relatively late onset of the craziness that is pink, pink and a little purple for girls.  This is the part I especially liked:

Another important factor has been the rise of consumerism among children in recent decades. According to child development experts, children are just becoming conscious of their gender between ages 3 and 4, and they do not realize it’s permanent until age 6 or 7. At the same time, however, they are the subjects of sophisticated and pervasive advertising that tends to reinforce social conventions. “So they think, for example, that what makes someone female is having long hair and a dress,’’ says Paoletti. “They are so interested—and they are so adamant in their likes and dislikes.”

The more I've read about gender-awareness in early childhood, the more I think that this theory is correct:

It's not that girls innately prefer pink to other colors.  It's that girls and boys, possibly due to innate reasons, really want to know what it means to be a girl or a boy, and until they realize the genders are not dependent on stuff such as what one wears or what one plays with, children will gender-police themselves.

On Sexual Assaults in the US Military

A topic on which Powerful People (US Senators) are pontificating right now:

Sometimes one picture really does tell more than a thousand words (unless they are my words, natch.)

I have followed the events, including the worrisome news that the men responsible for programs aimed at reducing sexual assaults  themselves got caught acting like foxes in charge of the chicken coop:

Last week, the Pentagon said the U.S. Naval Academy is investigating allegations that three football team members sexually assaulted a female midshipman at an off-campus house more than a year ago. A lawyer for the woman says she was "ostracized" on campus after she reported it.

In recent weeks, a soldier at the U.S. Military Academy was charged with secretly photographing women, including in a bathroom. The Air Force officer who led the service's Sexual Assault Prevention and Response unit was arrested on charges of groping a woman. And the manager of the Army's sexual assault response program at Fort Campbell, Ky., was relieved of his post after his arrest in a domestic dispute with his ex-wife.

I have also heard that the Senators are not going to hear from many (any?) female victims of sexual assault at these hearings, though that could be incorrect.

The reason I haven't written more about the case is that to say something worthwhile requires the kind of data I can't access. 

A few examples:  The reported cases of sexual assault have gone up:

The Pentagon estimated in a recent report that as many as 26,000 military members may have been sexually assaulted last year, up from an estimated 19,000 assaults in 2011, based on an anonymous survey of military personnel. While the number of sexual assaults that members of the military actually reported rose 6 percent to 3,374 in 2012, thousands of victims were still unwilling to come forward despite new oversight and assistance programs aimed at curbing the crimes, the report said.

Do we know how much of this increase may be because there's more encouragement to report than in the past and how much is due to an actual increase in the number of sexual assaults?

Then there's the question about who should have the authority to investigate and decide on sexual assaults.  Right now that authority is vested in the complaint-maker's superior officers.  There are several reasons why that is not a good idea, and perhaps some reasons why it might be a good idea:

Dempsey and the service chiefs warned against making the dramatic changes called for in Gillibrand's legislation. Removing commanders from the military justice process, Dempsey said, would undercut their ability to preserve good order and discipline in their units.

"We cannot simply legislate our way out of this problem," said Gen. Ray Odierno, the Army's chief of staff. "Without equivocation, I believe maintaining the central role of commander in our military justice system is absolutely critical to any solution."

But Gillibrand defended her proposal, which has garnered 18 co-sponsors in two weeks. She said victims of sexual assault are reluctant to report the crimes to their commanders because they fear their allegations will be dismissed and they might face retaliation. Aggressive reforms in the military's legal code are needed to force cultural changes, she said.
"You have lost the trust of the men and women who rely on you," Gillibrand said. "They're afraid to report. They think their careers will be over. They fear retaliation. They fear being blamed. That is our biggest challenge right there."

To judge this would really benefit from finding out how often those who commit sexual assaults are in a superior organizational position to those who become the objects of the assault.  If that is frequently the case, then giving all the powers to the superior officer pretty much guarantees that no complaint will be taken seriously.

Let's finish this post with some hilarity.  Well, the healthiest take on this is that it is ludicrous:

Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) on Tuesday suggested that the “hormone level created by nature” was to blame for rapes in the military and that all pregnant servicewomen should be investigated to make sure their condition was the result of consensual sex.
At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on sexual assaults within the military, Chambliss opined that the Pentagon’s decision to allow women in combat roles was only going to make the problem worse.
The Georgia Republican recalled that “several years ago when we had the first females go out on an aircraft carrier, when they returned to port, a significant percentage of those females were pregnant.”

It's a wonderful tangled knot of both victim blaming (though men, too, are among the victims of sexual assault in the military) and of excusing assaults as just-hormones-gone-wild. I love it when a wingnut remains consistently illogical. 

Get Lucky at 35 000 feet

That's the new (late April) Virgin Airlines promotion campaign.  Sir Richard Branson explains how it works  in a video.  The idea is that a passenger can send drinks, snacks or meals to someone else on the plane, with perhaps a message which says "your seat or mine?"  Branson states that the chances of deplaning with someone new are at least 50% after this.

Mmm.  What a great campaign if you want to fly in an enclosed singles bar with no escape hatches.  If, on the other hand, you just want to get to your destination and deplane only with those people you began with, can you turn this whole thing off?  So that you don't get unwanted approaches of any kind?

The campaign doesn't tell us, which suggests to me that if you don't wish to be approached this way you should probably fly with some other airline.