Vacation Post 1

I am all red and peeling which means that the vacation is working.  Today I visited Hattula church.  It has wonderful medieval wall paintings.  According to the female minister I spoke with, the paintings may be the work of Bridgettine nuns, so there's even a feminist flavor to my day.

The small wooden sculptures are also charming.  This is the Hattula Madonna, from around  1300 C.E.

In other gender news, young dads here seem very involved with their children.

The new potatoes are heavenly.  Why that is the case is a mystery.  It may have something to do with the long days of the short but intense summer.

Gotta go and swim....

Roman Concrete

An older piece of news, but fascinating, about people figuring out the formula for Roman concrete.  Knowledge can also be lost over time.  That's a stupid statement, but we humans often seem to think that everything gets better all the time.

Many things do, of course.  Still, I would love to be able to read the writings in the ancient library of Alexandria, though more for what they would have taught us about the people of that era.

Three Posts Worth Reading About The End of Men

This one, which discusses many of Hannah Rosin's arguments.  And then a post about Stephanie Coontz' take on them and a post about Rosin's response to her.

They are all on economics but digestible.  Like oatmeal with chocolate drops.

Mademoiselles Who Dabble With Paints

This is a four-part series I wrote about nineteenth century (into the twentieth century) Finnish female painters.  It's not about artistic criticism as much as about social criticism.  Or trying to use one specific example to increase our understanding of the way privilege works.  Someone oppressed can still have specific sneaky openings into power, depending on the various intersections between social class, gender, language and geography in this case, and also naturally between ethnicity, religion and race more generally. 

The four stories I tell in the series are all different, yet they share certain same features.  And the paintings are fun, too.

Part 1:  Fanny Churberg

Part 2:  Ellen Thesleff

Part 3:  Maria Wiik

Part 4:  Helene Schjerfbeck (she was awesome!)

Echidne on Guns

I've written quite a bit about guns in the past.  These two posts are within the last twelve months and still worth reading, I believe.

First, guns don't kill people, people kill people.

Second, on guns and concepts of masculinity.

Both of those relate to the horrible massacre of children in 2012, but their message is more lasting.

David Brooks on Gender Through the Ages

(This is a re-posting from here.   It's still useful because I put together Brooks' views on women in one place.  When they slowly drip-drip on us it may be harder to notice how consistent they are.)



I do tend to dissect Brooks' writings often, don't I?  But the truth is that I stopped reading him so obsessively some years ago and mostly forgot what he actually says about women, girls and the wider question of gender. 

Working in my archives reminded me why I dislike him so.  Here's a smorgasbord of Brooks on the question of gender:

March 2006:

According to David Brooks, thymos is the secret ingredient in men, the thing that makes them tick. Not the puppydogs' tails, after all. Had there ever been a female Freud she might have had her question about what men want answered easily: men want to be recognized:*

Let me tell you what men want. Let me tell you why some middle-age men wear the sports jerseys of semiliterate behemoths half their age while others customize their cars with so many speakers they sound like the hip-hop version of the San Francisco earthquake as they roll down the street.

Recognition. Men want others to recognize their significance. They want to feel important and part of something important.

Some people believe men are motivated by greed for money or lust for power. But money and power are means to get recognition. They are markers of success, and success makes men feel important and causes others to pay attention when they walk in the room.

Plato famously divided the soul into three parts: reason, eros (desire) and thymos (the hunger for recognition). Thymos is what motivates the best and worst things men do. It drives them to seek glory and assert themselves aggressively for noble causes. It drives them to rage if others don't recognize their worth. Sometimes it even causes them to kill over a trifle if they feel disrespected.

Brooks is trying to hedge his bets about whether women might want similar things, too. On the one hand, he has just read a really fun and supportive book about Manliness. On the other hand, he wants recognition from women as the kind of guy who might not bash them on the head and drag them back to the cave for some... recognition.

April 2006:*

All great scandals occur twice, first as Tom Wolfe novels, then as real-life events that nightmarishly mimic them. And so after "I Am Charlotte Simmons," it was perhaps inevitable that Duke University would have to endure a mini-social explosion involving athletic thugs, resentful townies, nervous administrators, male predators, aggrieved professors, binge drinking and lust gone wild.
...

The educators who used this vocabulary several decades ago understood that when you concentrate young men, they have a tropism toward barbarism. That's why these educators cared less about academics than about instilling a formula for character building. The formula, then called chivalry, consisted first of manners, habits and self-imposed restraints to prevent the downward slide.

Furthermore, it was believed that each of us had a godlike and a demonic side, and that decent people perpetually strengthened the muscles of their virtuous side in order to restrain the deathless sinner within. If you read commencement addresses from, say, the 1920's, you can actually see college presidents exhorting their students to battle the beast within — a sentiment that if uttered by a contemporary administrator would cause the audience to gape and the earth to fall off its axis.

Today that old code of obsolete chivalry is gone, as is a whole vocabulary on how young people should think about character.

The concept of "chivalry" is offered to women in lieue of equality on several MRA sites, by the way.  So far we have learned that men want recognition and that they should be taught chivalry.

June 2006 (note that I wrote two posts on one column there), to analyze in greater detail this Brooks column:

Over the past two decades, there has been a steady accumulation of evidence that male and female brains work differently. Women use both sides of their brain more symmetrically than men. Men and women hear and smell differently (women are much more sensitive). Boys and girls process colors differently (young girls enjoy an array of red, green and orange crayons whereas young boys generally stick to black, gray and blue). Men and women experience risk differently (men enjoy it more).
It could be, in short, that biological factors influence reading tastes, even after accounting for culture. Women who have congenital adrenal hyperplasia, which leads to high male hormone secretions, are more likely to choose violent stories than other women.
This wouldn't be a problem if we all understood these biological factors and if teachers devised different curriculums to instill an equal love of reading in both boys and girls.
The problem is that even after the recent flurry of attention about why boys are falling behind, there is still intense social pressure not to talk about biological differences between boys and girls (ask Larry Summers). There is still resistance, especially in the educational world, to the findings of brain researchers. Despite some innovations here and there, in most classrooms boys and girls are taught the same books in the same ways.

That's a wonderful stew of all sorts of observations, some clearly proven false!   Brooks wants sex-segregated schools, of course, and believes that things like color preferences (pink!) are innate.   That Iran, with its sex-segregated schools, geared towards boys most likely, shows the same gender differences as the US doesn't matter to Brooks.  Neither does the fact that schools were created for boys, not for girls, initially, and that the sitting quietly in classrooms was a feature of all those boys' schools.

September 2006:

That would be a good name for a movie, starring David Brooks as the earnest and impartial neuroscientist who finds, after all, that girls are icky. Brooks has written yet another column about how the old sexual stereotypes are all validated by science:

Over the past several weeks, I've found I can change the conversation at any social gathering by mentioning Louann Brizendine's book, "The Female Brain." Brizendine is a neuropsychiatrist and the founder of the Women's and Teen Girls' Mood and Hormone Clinic in San Francisco. She's written a breezy — maybe too breezy — summary of hundreds of studies on the neurological differences between men and women.

All human beings, she writes, start out with a brain that looks female. But around the eighth week in the womb, testosterone surges through male brains, killing cells in some regions (communications) and growing cells in others (sex and aggression).

By the time they are three months old, girls are, on average, much better at making eye contact with other people and picking up information from faces. During play, girls look back at their mothers, on average, 10 to 20 times more than boys, to check for emotional signals. Girls can also, on average, hear a broader range of sounds in the human voice, and can better discern changes in tone.

...

This shift in how we see human behavior is bound to have huge effects. Freudianism encouraged people to think about destroying inhibitions. This new understanding both validates ancient stereotypes about the sexes, and fuzzes up moral judgments about human responsibility (biology inclines individuals toward certain virtues and vices).

Once radicals dreamed of new ways of living, but now happiness seems to consist of living in harmony with the patterns that nature and evolution laid down long, long ago.

That's pretty hilarious, given the criticism Brizendine's books have received!  She is not a neuro-scientist, by the way.

October 2006:

This is a tale of two predators. The first is a congressman who befriended teenage pages. He sent them cajoling instant messages asking them to describe their sexual habits, so he could get his jollies.

The second is a secretary, who invited a 13-year-old girl from her neighborhood into her car and kissed her. Then she invited the girl up to her apartment, gave her some vodka, took off her underwear and gave her a satin teddy to wear.

Then she had sex with the girl, which was interrupted when the girl's mother called. Then she made the girl masturbate in front of her and taught her some new techniques.

The first predator, of course, is Mark Foley, the Florida congressman. The second predator is a character in Eve Ensler's play, "The Vagina Monologues."

Enough said.  A fictional story and actual events are treated as equal.

July 2007.

This was in response to a column where Brooks worried about the anger of women.

August 2007.

This, in turn, was a reaction to Brooks' attempt at creating a masculine mystique.

At this point I stopped following Brooks so obsessively and my mental health instantly improved.  I even spotted him changing some of his ingrained opinions on gender:

June 2009:

In 2000, Geoffrey Miller, a leading evolutionary psychologist, published a book called "The Mating Mind," in which he argued that the process of sexual selection among early human groups hardwired many of the behaviors we see in humans today. Some of the traits are physical. Men generally prefer women with a 0.7 waist-to-hip ratio (that's a 24-inch waist and 36-inch hips, for those of you reading this at the gym). Women generally prefer men who are taller and slightly older.

Some of these traits are more subtle. Men, Miller argues, tip better in restaurants, because they've been programmed to show how much surplus wealth they have. The average American adult knows 60,000 words, far more than we need. We have all those words because we like to mate with people who caress us with language.
....
 

But individuals aren't formed before they enter society. Individuals are created by social interaction. Our identities are formed by the particular rhythms of maternal attunement, by the shared webs of ideas, symbols and actions that vibrate through us second by second. Shopping isn't merely a way to broadcast permanent, inborn traits. For some people, it's also an activity of trying things on in the never-ending process of creating and discovering who they are.

The allure of evolutionary psychology is that it organizes all behavior into one eternal theory, impervious to the serendipity of time and place. But there's no escaping context. That's worth remembering next time somebody tells you we are hardwired to do this or that.

The allure of evolutionary psychology is actually in the fact that anyone can do it, over a cocktail wiener, and that it can be bent to support any bias one might have, given that evidence is impossible to obtain.  But I take whatever crumbs fell of Brooks' table here.

December 2010, however, shows Brooks back in his old form.

And in January, 2012, he seems to recommend wage subsidies for men so that they can get married to us the gold-digger females of Evolutionary Psychology.

Finally, in July 2012 Brooks was back to arguing that social engineering is an absolute necessity to save boys at school.

OK, that looks a bit like a laundry list.  It most likely omits many similar pieces, given that I stopped keeping a snake eye on our David, what with finding enough irritation elsewhere in my life.

But there are certain general patterns, more easily discerned in such a list.   Brooks believes in innate differences as the explanation for all gender-based stereotypes (which he regards as the truth), and he fishes in the rivers of academia for those studies (or pseudo-studies) that would support that belief.

Thus, what is is for reasons of biology and no government policies are necessary to correct it.  Women don't enter mathematics and the sciences because of innate gender differences, for instance.

The one exception to this can be found in Brooks' concern about boys at school.  There he urges social engineering of a type, albeit one based on his presumed gender stereotypes.

This contradiction is an interesting one and worth thinking about.  After all, evolutionary psychologists have argued that anything widespread across various cultures has a good chance of being innate.   Girls are doing better than boys in essentially all countries which allow girls entry to the school system.  Given this, one might propose that the observed gender differences in school success are innate, right?

That's rubbish, and I only present it here to point out that Brooks picks selectively from his menu of possibly biological sex differences.  The ones that hurt women are clearly biological, the ones that hurt men must be cultural or environmental and need correction.

So.  I was also struck by Brooks' pining for the golden era of chivalry.  Doesn't it sound wonderful?  Chivalrous men holding doors open for you and letting you get the best jobs going and so on?

That's not what chivalry is all about.  From the column Brooks wrote it sounds more like a promise not to assault or rape someone, to be honest.
-----

The links to dates are to my old posts.  The links attached to the direct quotes go to Brooks' columns.
*I couldn't find the links to two of Brooks' original columns except as dead ones.

A Sluttty Dresser. Re-Posted

Re-posted from here

Euro-English

This is an old joke about the English language:

EuroEnglish

The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the EC, rather than German, which was the other possibility. As part of the negotiations, Her Majesty's government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a five year phase in plan that would be known as "EuroEnglish".
In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump for joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of the "k". This should klear up konfusion and keyboards kan have 1 less letter.
There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year, when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like "fotograf" 20% shorter. In the third year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.
Governments will enkorage the removal of double letters, which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of the silent "e" in the language is disgraseful, and they should go away.
By the 4th year, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v". During ze fifz year, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters. After zis fifz year, ve vil hav a realy sensibl riten styl.
Zer vil be no mor trubls or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi to understand each ozer.
ZE DREAM VIL FINALI KUM TRU! 

English is a fun language to learn as a foreign language, because it's very easy to acquire some small skills in it.  It is, however, very hard to learn truly well after pupadom.  I should know as I have tried to do just that.

And yup, English is seldom written as it is spoken.

Happy Fourth of July

That's an old embroidery of mine,  an attempt to reverse the usual eye-of-the-beholder argument.  Flowers, in short, but curious ones.

Voting is Not Like Buying A Pair of Shoes Or A New Car. A Re-Posting

(Initially posted here)


Three odd things I have recently noticed (again) when people talk politics, both in the media and in private lives:

The first has to do with the idea that voting is just like buying a new car or a pair of shoes!  If you decide not to make the purchase, you won't have to pay for it.  So it's all OK.

But voting is NOT like buying a new car.  If you don't vote in a political election you get someone ruling over you anyway, and if that person causes havoc the fact that you didn't vote for him or her makes no difference.  The consequences are there.  You pay for the shoes or the car and someone else picks them out for you.

It's also true that the American political system throws a humongous number of votes down the toilet and then flushes it, while happily telling us who the winner in each state was.  I get that voters become discouraged about that, but the answer is not to take a consumerist stance.

The second odd thing has to do with judging political candidates as "deserving" to lose because of bad campaigning or bad debate performance or similar ultimately non-essential aspects.

Even that is OK if the task is to judge campaigning performance.  But when someone happily crows about a candidate "deserving to lose" they might spend a minute considering the fact that the political platform of that candidate then also loses, whether it deserves to lose or not, and that all those whom the platform would have helped more are among those losers.

I think both of these odd things (and several others) have to do with a confusion between our role as consumers and as citizens.  The former gets practiced all the time, the latter not so often.  But the media is not helping when they focus on the horse race aspect of politics.  The underlying policy questions are the crucial ones, after all, and I, for one, prefer to have a clumsy performer of the platform I prefer to a slick performer of the platform I frequently visit in my nightmares.

The third odd thing is not about voter or journalist behavior but about the way politicians offer us false dualistic choices.  For instance,  the Republicans tell us that women want jobs and a better economy for themselves and their families, not reproductive rights.

But reproductive rights don't clash with policies which push for jobs and such.  Indeed, providing women with reproductive rights is almost costless, as policies go, and the provision of free or subsidized contraceptives to poor women would save the government money in the long run (thus decreasing the deficit!).

We are asked to look elsewhere, pretty much.

Perhaps at the awfulness of the government subsidy to public television and radio?  The money that could be saved by killing Big Bird is miniscule.  The loss of information and childhood education would have an immense cost.  But the killing of public television is dear to the conservative hearts and the hunt goes on and on.

The same reason applies to women's reproductive rights.  Conservatives don't want women to have those rights, and that's why women are told that they must choose between jobs and reproductive rights.  Because the Republicans don't want women to have the latter.

So.

Vacation

I'm going to take the rest of July off.  I need the break.  I have prepared posts for the time in advance.  Some of them haven't been on the blog before and some old ones I have enlarged with more commentary.  If I get a chance I will do some vacation blogging, too.

I will keep an eye on the comments and check my e-mail, in case you need to get in touch with me.
Wish all you you a wonderful July!

From The Past

This is an interesting piece about women as bosses in 1956.  It's worth reading through it and thinking about what is the same and what has changed.  It would be more interesting to find an old story about women working in the labor force in general, but I doubt those were published in popular magazines even sixty years ago.

On Egypt

Contents:  Sexual violence


I have no special knowledge about what's going on, but it's beginning to look more and more like a military coup.  The argument that Morsi had no understanding of how a democratically elected president acts has some merits.  Democracy doesn't mean that the winner can then ignore the other side or try to destroy it completely.  Though the US politics has some of that same flavor.

I feel very bad for the Egyptians, even the ones who would like to see people like me without much rights.  The economic situation in the country is horrible, tourism is pretty close to dead and the current government doesn't seem to be equipped to run the country.

Or those are my fairly uninformed opinions.

On the other hand, the gang rape of a journalist at Tahrir Square demonstrates that Egyptian women face problems which will not disappear whoever ends up on top in these fights.

On Abortion, July 3, 2013

Florida is eagerly joining Texas, Ohio and other Republican-run states in  the abortion wars.  The idea is to ban abortions after twenty weeks of pregnancy, even though a small percentage of abortions  (1.5%) takes place after that point in time and even though that percentage includes essentially all the ones where either fetal abnormality or serious health concerns for the woman make continuing the pregnancy very difficult.

I've been watching this stuff unfolding with some horror.  What we learn about how those Republicans view women chills my heart.  In North Carolina strict abortion measures were tacked onto an anti-sharia bill at the very last minute, tho forced-birthers knew about them earlier!  The bitter humor of doing that in the context of sharia (which wouldn't exactly give women abortion rites) probably flew right over the heads of the politicians who were doing that.

In other views, a very large number of those regretting their abortions seem to be men.

10,000 Posts

I noticed that my previous post was the 10,000th on this blog.  Not all of those were written by me but most.  That's a lovely round number, 10,000. And I think the vast majority of those were served at least with some intellectual granola!  Mental pushups, perhaps, or deep knee bends with the little gray cells, eh?

My fiction-loving emotional side hasn't had such a great time all through this, but perhaps in the future I will post snippets from my Little Book Of Horrid Thoughts and similar stuff.  Or perhaps my emotional side better shut up in public, that goddess of doom.

Because there's a reason for my blog handle.  I was called Viper Tongue as a child, but I have worked very hard to turn that into a gentle and polite goddess chat with only hidden barbs.  Not completely successful but getting there, right? 

Some of you, my kind and sharp readers, have been along for the whole ride, and you have a special place in my heart.  I'm not sure how you did it, but my war helmet goes off for you.  And sincere thanks to all who read here and who teach me so much.

Cheers.

Speed-Blogging July 1, 2013: That War on Women And SImilar Stuff

Ohio Governor John Kasich proudly signs into a law new abortion restrictions:

The provisions in Ohio will make it more difficult for family planning groups to receive funding for preventive care; require ultrasounds for anyone seeking an abortion; and limit abortion providers’ ability to get transfer agreements with public hospitals.

Here's a picture of the general budget signing though it could be about the signing of that abortion law.  In any case, the global feminist conspiracy which runs the world, according to some MRA sites, is sorely missing in Ohio:

In Texas, however, some women and men are fighting back against Governor Rick Perry's desire to get similar abortion restrictions into place.

Picture credit.

I wonder how many fetal aquaria that picture contains?  Must get them under control.

In Egypt, one sheikh explains to us why female genital mutilation is necessary:

Female genital mutilation was made illegal in Egypt in 2008 but is still very widely practiced. Some estimates suggest over 75% of women, Muslim and Christian, still have had the procedure in some areas of the country.
Debate on the subject has re-opened after the recent death of a 13-year-old girl while having the operation. Studies have also documented cases of serious health and psychological complications.
Sheikh Yussef al-Badri is one of Egypt's biggest advocates for what he refers to as female circumcision, and has petitioned the country's courts to make it legal again.
He told Aleem Maqbool that it removed a woman's "need for man".

You can watch a video on the linked site.  The solution to control female lust is to cut that lust out, the solution to control male lust is early marriage.  That the men would be married to women who don't get any enjoyment from sex appears a trifle.

This speech about sexual abuse in the Australian army is a couple of weeks old but it's very much worth watching.   Thanks to WP for the link.

Finally, the reviews of these women's running shoes, worn by Senator Davis for her filibuster,  are  hilarious.

The Near-Invisible Economic News: Wages

If you think of the division of the economic gateau happening between labor and capital, the news we mostly get are whether the slices the capital gets are moist enough, have sufficient whipped cream and chocolate savings and so on.  We may be told something about the size of those slices but not much.

The slice labor gets is among those largely unreported things in mainstream news.  There are a few exceptions, such as this NYT story which shows how somebody may be legally paid less than the minimum wage, what with fees which are required to get hold of the wage package one has earned:

A growing number of American workers are confronting a frustrating predicament on payday: to get their wages, they must first pay a fee.

For these largely hourly workers, paper paychecks and even direct deposit have been replaced by prepaid cards issued by their employers. Employees can use these cards, which work like debit cards, at an A.T.M. to withdraw their pay.

But in the overwhelming majority of cases, using the card involves a fee. And those fees can quickly add up: one provider, for example, charges $1.75 to make a withdrawal from most A.T.M.’s, $2.95 for a paper statement and $6 to replace a card. Some users even have to pay $7 inactivity fees for not using their cards.

These fees can take such a big bite out of paychecks that some employees end up making less than the minimum wage once the charges are taken into account, according to interviews with consumer lawyers, employees, and state and federal regulators.

Another piece of economic news which hasn't got much coverage is this:  Wages Are Falling:

Breaking news alert! Wages fell at the fastest rate ever recorded during the first quarter of this year, the government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics reported.
Hourly wages fell 3.8 percent in the first quarter, the biggest drop since the BLS began tracking compensation in 1947. Productivity rose half a percentage point. The result was that what economists call “labor unit costs” fell 4.3 percent.
In plain English, that means paychecks overall shrank, but work output grew. If you are a business owner, that is news worthy of a toast with a bottle of the finest Cristal champagne, which at $595 is more than the $518 that a median-wage worker earns in a week.

Here's the truly troublesome thing about those numbers:  Productivity rose, which would make a sincere economist ask why wages didn't rise as well.  If worker productivity rose and wages fell, guess who it is who is making more than before?   The division of that economic cake is changing, again...

Today's Saying

It's not by me, and I don't know who invented it.  But it's a beautiful political parable:

Americans are like mushrooms:  Kept  in the dark and fed with shit.

The Wussification of American Men. Eric Bolling of Fox News May Just Be the Last Non-Wuss Standing, Possibly With His Foot On Someone's Neck.

The official mouthpiece of wingnuts, Fox News, had a chat about a girl who was banned from playing football with the boys at her private school, because, among other reasons, the boys might have impure thoughts.

The whole conversation from  here, is such fun*:



Four out of five people in that chat, including all three men, are adamantly opposed to the idea of mixed football teams (one is neutral) even in childhood.  The most commonly argued reason is that the girl could get hurt!  She looks to me like a pretty strong and big sixth grader, and at that age boys can, in fact, be smaller than girls.  But because she could get hurt at some future and unspecified date, she must stop playing immediately.

Eric Bolling somehow draws the conclusion from this case that it's all about the wussification of American men.  I don't get the connection, probably because I have a brain, but the only interpretation that makes any sense is that Bolling thinks men should put their foot down firmly, preferably on women's necks, on all this equality bullshit.

As an aside, I've been astonished by the number of times I read from anti-feminists about the enormous value of getting doors opened for nothing.  On some MRA sites it's a tremendous service which today's women, in their demands for equality, have relinquished.  Now they can only blame themselves when nobody opens that H-E-A-V-Y door for them or, as the case may be, punches them in the face.

These folks seem to think that we once had an implicit gender contract which gave women the advantages of receiving (wholly voluntary and optional) chivalry from men and which presumably kept women from ever being molested in any way whatsoever.  What women relinquished in return to these benefits is rarely spelled out  in that scenario but it looks like that would be all legal equality and the right not to have a custodian.

That bargain looks to me one that no woman would have voluntarily entered, but it must appeal to MRA types because their sites are full of stuff about the tremendous value of getting doors opened for you.  It's worth almost anything!

Bolling mentions those doors which he probably now slams in the face of all uppity bitches.  He also mentions how he can no longer complement a woman on her dress, in case people experience that as sexual harassment. 

But real men can't tell a dress from a tarpaulin, Eric!  If you can assess the artistry of a dress you are a wuss.  Unless the dress consists of a piece of string between her buttocks and two one-inch discs over her nipples.

Enough about Bolling.  Others at Fox News  chime in with agreement, stating that often-used but ultimately meaningless argument that men and women are equal but different.   This means that sixth grade girls are not allowed to play in a boys' team.

The equal-but-different, as it is used by anti-feminists,  is as meaningless as the old racial argument about separate-but-equal, because the assumed differences, whether real or not, are used to stop actual equality from taking place where it could. 

As a nasty example, Fox News' female and male  commentators are equal but different in the sense that all the women are beautiful in the Barbie-doll style, whereas the men often look like potatoes which have just been dug up from the field.  Because more of us people look like potatoes than Barbie dolls (or Ken dolls), the desired difference (women are eye-candy and should be content with getting their dress praised and doors opened for them) causes inequality in the selection of men and women into this job at Fox.  It's easier for men to get in (those doors are HEAVY)  and they probably get paid more, what with having to open doors to the chicks, too.

Then the argument from one of the other guys, about the logical extension to this equality rubbish:  Let the boys play on all girls' teams where they will then dominate everything!  How do you feminists like them apples, eh?

But that's an inane argument, because this girl was on the football team solely for the reason that there wasn't a football team for girls.  If a boy wanted to play a sport only available to girls at a school, he should be allowed to play with the girls.  So I think.

In general, the whole conversation degenerates into pure sexism of the type where all-men-are-that-way and all-women-are-this-way and the amount of thinking behind the various blurts is close to zero.  But that's not unexpected from the political party which wages a war on women on several different fronts.
----
*Note, also, that the text at the bottom of the screen is incorrect.  The girl didn't say that boys might have impure thoughts, the school argued that.  If that's the reason the school used, by the way, the girl was excluded to protect the boys against their own thoughts.  Which demonstrates an interesting value judgement.

Speed-Blogging, June 27, 2013

First, American Apparel advertises its unisex shirts rather interestingly.   Several photo series show women with bare bottoms.  Those women must be too poor to afford panties after paying for that flannel shirt?

For the sake of fairness, I combed the site for revealing pictures of men in the unisex shirts.  There were a few series where the men could afford underpants but not jeans or slacks.  Still, none of them had bare bottoms.

American Apparel is a fascinating corporation.  It's opposed to sweatshops  but it is for extra objectification of women.

Second,  Tammy Duckworth addresses someone who seems to have abused the system for claiming Veterans' disability.  I hope she will never get angry with me.

Third, does Alito mock female Justices from the bench?

Fourth and finally, the NYT wrote about male victims of sexual abuse in the military.  The article appeared a few days ago.  Adele Stan wrote a commentary on it.

It's important to acknowledge both the fact that men are the majority of victims (because of much greater numbers of men than women in the military) and that women have a fivefold chance of becoming victims of sexual abuse.  The problem, therefore, is not specifically about women in the military but the problem is larger for the women in the military.