Speed-Blogging, Oct 30, 2013. Contents: Rape, Sexual Violence And Societal Views on Those

 



This article, caused by the recent debate about whether women should stop drinking too much as a way to cut back on college rape at least opens the conversation on the difference between things one can do not to become a victim and things that can be done to cut back on perpetrators.

The studies it links to are a bit too often older,  from 1980s and 1990s,  and perhaps because the data is from sites where it is offered for a different purpose (rape crisis counseling for possible victims), it doesn't delve deep into questions of frequencies in the characters of the perpetrators, but just points out that rapists can come from all backgrounds.  Even when that is true it may still be the case that certain variables predict rape better and that we should work on whatever those variables might measure (such as belief that women are mostly wheelbarrows for c***t transportation etc.)

I had Cousin Insomnia visiting, so I read through all the comments at the linked article (those that were there last night).  They are revealing.  There are two schools of though, pretty much.

One argues that we shall always have rapists among us and that therefore the best potential victims (women and men and children etc.) can do is to do the equivalent of risk minimization.  Lock your doors, don't wear flashy jewelry, leave your vagina at home when you go out, and naturally don't get soused out of your head.

The other school argues that most rapes are not stranger rapes, that the rapist is more often someone known to the victim and that rapes can happen inside the victim's home or place of work, and that the idea of risk prevention can be a slippery slope, moving from not drinking to not going out to not wearing anything that shows your body and on and on.

I lean much more towards the latter school of thought, because rapes are common in India and in societies where people don't drink and because South Africa, for instance, has such humongous rape rates that there is no way countries simply have a fixed percentage of evil people who are born that way.  I also believe that our ideas about rape affect its likelihood.  If rape is something young men joke about, in public, that's bound to have an impact on how seriously the crime is taken.  So we must change the societal conversations on all this.

At the same time, I think that taking care of yourself is good for all of us human beings, that knowing where you are and what you are doing is very useful, if only to protect yourself against that rarer kind of stranger rape or other forms of violence, and this applies to both men and women.

 I also think that the reasons why rapists rape might vary.   We need more research on this (or someone needs to give lazy me links to the relevant research).  One commentator at the linked article argues that the motivations of male rapists who rape women include cases of extreme woman loathing but also cases where the rapist simply doesn't see the victim as a human but as that wheelbarrow which somehow contains the sex he is entitled to.

I think the person commenting on this stated that the views were based on clinical experience of some type, perhaps based on sentenced individuals' statements, so the wider motivations (given that only a tiny percentage of rapes end up in convictions) need more studying.

And when it comes to teenagers the confusion about what the concept of rape is in the teenagers' minds and what saying no means to them needs a lot more work.  The bro-culture, stereotypically, is seen as almost advocating rape as a form of scoring.  The wider society tells the teenagers that rape is wrong, but I'm not sure how the messages from the popular culture, the peer groups, the parents, the schools etc. interact.  We need to find what works, for a real prevention policy.

Speaking of rape sub-cultures of one type, Oxford University in England is giving us a peek of what's called "lad culture" in the UK:

Last Monday, the social secretary of the Pembroke College Rugby Football Club, Woo Kim, sent his members an email with the subject line "FREE PUSSY". In the email, Mr Kim proposed a "challenge" to the male members of the college; to "pick" a female fresher of their choice as a guest for the upcoming crew date. Mr Kim's email continued, "please bring TWO bottles of wine - one for yourself and one for your guest". This second bottle of wine is to be tampered with. He wrote, "You must open the bottle in advance, and include a substance of your choice. It may be spirits or food or anything you like."
"Please be as clandestine as possible in your deed."
As if this were not chilling enough, he elaborated that the theme of the Crew Date was 'VILLIANS' and that "Villains must be discrete [sic] in their work".

It's VILLAIN, by the way.

If I had to guess I'd think that this email is meant as a joke, not as an actual invitation for a mass rape event.  But we really should ask ourselves why this young man thought the joke would be appreciated by others, what the sub-culture was that he grew up in, why he thinks of "freshers" as prey and of the male football players as predators.  When would this joke be funny?

I'm not part of its intended audience but I think it's funny if you fundamentally believe that what those young men really want is free pussy and that the wheelbarrow wheel must be greased so that the pussy rolls out more handily.  If that's your basic belief, but you know all about the "politically correct" idea that no means no etc, you would find it hilarious.

Finally, and from my personal life:  This is the time of the year (near the day when the dead are on our minds) when I send love and good thoughts to the memory of a man I only met once, a long time ago, when I was in my teens and he was about eighty.

He was out walking his dachshund, clad in a dapper suit, about seven pm on an October night.  I happened to be walking on the same street, going to a study meeting at my friend's house (exams!).

Suddenly, a man in his forties, smelling of alcohol (SEE!),  grabbed me from behind, tore my long coat and pulled out large chunks of my hair by the roots.  I screamed for help.  A couple on the other side of the street made some comment about a marital quarrel (honestly).  I managed to pull myself free and ran up the street (a steep hill at that point), all the time calling for help and for someone to call the police (before cell phones, my sweetings), while my attacker was stumbling after me.

The only person who crossed the street was the old man with the dachshund.  He came to me, asking if I was all right, if I would like me to walk him to wherever I was going.  His hands were shaking, but he was there.

I have never forgotten that, and in recent years I light a candle to his memory.  A good person.

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This petition about the police response to a horrible rape in Kenya is worth signing.

Black Women May Be Less Likely To Be Protected by the HVP Vaccine

Think Progress writes about this:

The human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine that has cut teen girls’ risk of cancer in half is less likely to shield African American women, according to new research unveiled Monday. Black women, who have higher rates of cervical cancer than the general population, are susceptible to different strains of HPV than the most common types for white women. Unfortunately, the only approved HPV vaccines in the US target the strains that most affect white women, leaving black women more or less unprotected.

The likely reason?  The strains of HPV which are most common in white women are not necessarily the most common in black women, and the vaccine protects against the most common strains found in clinical trials before its creation.  Because there are more white women, the results are driven by the fact that they were the majority in the clinical trials for the vaccine, because they are still the majority racial group among US women.

But those clinical trials may have also included too few black women.*

In developing Gardasil and Cervarix, scientists relied on studies to pinpoint the strains of HPV most likely to lead to cancer. Studies were done on all ethnicities, Hoyo said, noting that there may have been insufficient numbers of black women in the research studies to pick up the differences in HPV subtypes.
"There has always been some skepticism about whether there are other strains that are important, other than 16 and 18," she said. This study is not the first to report the differences, she said.

And Think Progress:

The HPV vaccine is hardly the only medical breakthrough that failed to account for racial differences. Even though the Food and Drug Administration has mandated proportional representation of minorities in clinical research, minorities are still drastically undercounted. One recent report found that many clinical trials exclude non-white subjects; the Hepatitis C vaccine trial, for instance, was 83 percent white, 14 percent African American, 2 percent Asian, and 2 percent other. Latinos, who comprise 16 percent of the total U.S. population, account for just 1 percent of clinical trial participants.

The problem may be more complicated when there are major (and perhaps previously unknown) differences in the incidence or form of a disease in different racial groups (such as the case of different strains of HPV being most common here).   A group small in numbers (say, American Indians) might not be under-counted in a study, compared to their population size, but because of the nature of those differences it should really be analyzed separately.  This requires taking larger samples of small population groups, because small samples have more scope for the effects of sampling error.

Many epidemiological studies already do that, in any case.  But these news are a good reminder that there are real reasons for  including women and men of all racial groups in clinical trial studies when the diseases apply to all of them.

Should black women get the currently available vaccine?  The general answer seems to be that they should.  It still gives protection against two strains.  But its protective value may be lower for them than for white women, and the vaccine should either be adjusted or offered in different forms for different racial groups.
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* I can't figure out from just the summaries if this means that black women were not their population percentage in the trials but fewer, or if they were represented in their population percentage, but the numbers were too small to bring out the strain differences.

Folders We Need

I am now making folders of material which one needs to argue with weirdos on the net.  For instance, some time ago a story about a woman whose son got accused of sexual harassment in college led to the odd statement that colleges always find the man guilty in these cases, always.  I knew it wasn't necessarily so, because I had read many stories which argued that the alleged victim got no help from the college at all, but I hadn't saved those stories.  Well, now I do save them, and this one goes in that folder.

I am also collecting stuff on domestic violence, rape arrest and sentencing rates, the treatment of fathers in custody courts and so on.

The need to do this is lamentable, but necessitated by the fact that people on the net seem to have their own facts, in the way they used to have their own opinions.  If you don't have "your" facts stored, you are handicapped in any debates, and that handicap is unfair when the other people's "facts" are all one-sided.

We also need more general websites will all the information together and in easily found forms.  I'm going to try to do some of that on my own blog, but it's really a bigger endeavor than one puny goddess can undertake, all on her lonesomeness.

-- This is about my Ten Year Blog Anniversary coming, under the folder:  The Changes We Need.

Speed Blogging, Monday Oct 28, 2013: On Women Leaning In, Driving and Giving Talks in the Urinal Position

bell hooks writes about the LeanIn movement.  She makes good points about many of the limitations of the LeanIn ideas (their bad fit for women who are not white, upper class or blessed with a wonderful partner, the fact that they leave the corporate frameworks unchallenged, even though the success depends on the receptivity of those very frameworks etc.). 

On the other hand, tackling the problems she spells out is a much more difficult endeavor than the LeanIn emphasis on mostly self-help, especially if we are to address capitalism itself.   -- That comment does not mean that I didn't enjoy reading her analysis of this or that I wouldn't agree on much of it.

Saudi women protest the fact that they are not allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia.  That may be the most famous part of the rigid rules which govern women's lives in that country.  The rest of the oppressive iceberg is submerged, though the article I link to discusses it.  Yet there are a few very small signs of positive changes in the attitudes of government.

Finally, that urinal position.  It cropped up in an internal memo of a Manhattan law firm, intended to teach female employees how to give a good speech.  A lot of it is applicable to anyone giving a speech, which made me wonder why male employees aren't given all that good advice about how to dress and groom themselves or how to prepare their speech and delivery.   Or perhaps they already got their internal memo with lots of good advice?

In this one,  the section on the voice use is all about how the speaker should try to lower her speaking voice ("Your voice is higher than you hear.  Think Lauren Bacall, not Marilyn Monroe.)  And there is advice about cleavage and not letting people look up your skirt.

Which sounds pretty conservative and sorta common sense.  Well, except later on the speaker is told not to look like a mortician (If wearing a black suit, wear something bright.).  So all this stuff is extremely complicated and nuanced, whereas nobody would expect that a guy wears something bright with a black suit etc.

The funniest bit in the whole memo is the "urinal position."  It must have something to do with hands as it's in the section about choreographing your hands.  You should watch out for the urinal position!

The dreaded urinal position.  I have a guess on its meaning.  But I doubt it means that this law firm believes that women would otherwise, say, squat, while giving presentations.

Who Sucks Off The Government Teat?

When I first wrote about this bit from Media Matters for America, I didn't know that others had already pointed out the group which also gets subsidized when low-wage workers get food stamps or other help from federal and/or state governments.  That group is the firms themselves and ultimately their owners, because the low wages help to keep the profits higher .  From the article on Moyers&Company:

• More than half (52 percent) of the families of front-line fast-food workers are enrolled in one or more public programs, compared to 25 percent of the workforce as a whole.
• The cost of public assistance to families of workers in the fast-food industry is nearly $7 billion per year.
• At an average of $3.9 billion per year, spending on Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) accounts for more than half of these costs.
• Due to low earnings, fast-food workers’ families also receive an annual average of $1.04 billion in food stamp benefits and $1.91 billion in Earned Income Tax Credit payments.
• People working in fast-food jobs are more likely to live in or near poverty. One in five families with a member holding a fast-food job has an income below the poverty line, and 43 percent have an income two times the federal poverty level or less.
• Even full-time hours are not enough to compensate for low wages.

One person at Fox News made this comment about the idea that perhaps the low-wage workers should be paid more:

PAYNE: There is a lot of unfortunate parts of the story. If you want to create a society where these jobs -- $8 jobs go for $15. Then what you're saying to people is like, okay, "don't improve your life. Don't finish high school. Don't go to college. Don't, you know what, have three or four kids out of wedlock. Don't put yourself in a predicament where this is your only option. In fact, keep doing what you're doing, smoke weed all day if you want. Doesn't matter. You'll get rewarded because in this society Mickey D's has got the money. They owe it to you." And I think that's a work mentality.

This is the whip-not-the-carrot policy to everything, the one which appears to be the preferred approach in US politics.  Make certain jobs (working at McDonald's, say) so poorly paid that you cannot survive.  Now, that will give you a good incentive to better yourself!

But it does nothing about the need for someone to work those kinds of jobs, and it shows very little empathy towards those who are employed in them.  Neither does it make any kind of moral inferences about those whose profits are made larger due to the subsidies the government provides, only about the workers in the low-wage industries.

Today's Quote From Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

I have a 1906 edition of her collected letters.  She lived from 1689 to 1762 and is most famous for introducing*  inoculation for smallpox in Britain  from Turkey where her husband was the British ambassador from 1716 to 1718

Her letters vary in quality, but I love the very early ones which she wrote as a teenager.  This quote is probably from a 1709 letter.  It's to Mrs. Hewett:

Next to the great ball, what makes the most noise here is the marriage of an old maid, who lives in this street, without a portion, to a man 7,000 pounds per annum, and they say, 40,000 pounds in ready money.  Her equipage and liveries outshine anybody's in town.  He has presented with 3,000 pounds in jewels; and never was man more smitten with these charms that had lain invisible for these forty years; but, with all his glory, never bride had fewer enviers, the dear beast of a man is so filthy, frightful, odious and detestable.  I would turn away such a footman, for fear of spoiling my dinner, while he waited at table. 

They were married on Friday, and came to church en parade on Sunday.  I happened to sit in the pew with them, and had the honour of seeing Mrs. Bride fall fast asleep in the middle of the sermon, and snore very comfortably; which made several women in the church think the bridegroom not quite so ugly as they did before.

The letters have quite a bit of feminism (and some anti-feminism), but this quote made me chuckle.
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*She may not have been the first who tried that but she was the first who succeeded.  Edward Jenner developed the technique of vaccination somewhat later.

And The Party Approaches. My Tenth Blog Anniversary.

Shocking, isn't it?  In early November I will have spent ten precious years blabbing about everything here.  This will have to be a time of stock-taking.

A Few BIzarre Things About How Women's Sexuality and Fertility Are Viewed

If I were Alfie, the friendly alien from outer space, I would probably be shocked by this tweet today:

South Korea Struggles to Confront Stigma of Sexual Assaults

Because if I were an alien, I wouldn't know that the stigma attaches itself to the victim and not the perpetrator.  When you think of the fact that almost all of us know stigma is the victim's problem, what does that tell us about our sexual mores?  I think Alfie would be aghast.

This is bizarre, this extreme form of victimization.  First you get abused, then you get shamed.

The roots are probably in the very old idea that a young woman is like a gift-wrapped box of sexual and fertility goodies,  and that it is her parents who decide whom to give her to.  Nobody wants a used present, so the owners of the young woman (initially her parents) must make sure that she doesn't get prematurely unwrapped or soiled.  It doesn't ultimately matter if the soiling was involuntary, because the woman's value drops in either case.  And in many cultures so does the family's honor.

Add to that the view (once common everywhere and still common in many places) that once the present has been unwrapped, everyone should be entitled to have what's inside it.  Hence the Victorian  plot of a raped housemaid ending up on the streets, what with the stigma causing all other jobs to be closed for her. It's as if the gift-wrapped box has been tossed away and no longer belongs to anyone so every by-passer is entitled to some of its contents.

I am not singling South Korea out here.  This problem has been global and most likely still applies to the majority of sexual attack survivors.  It is the reason for "silence as the best remedy".  It is the reason why feminists fight victim-blaming so vigorously. It is, however, still bizarre.

Something every bit as bizarre applies to fertility.  It struck me forcibly some days ago, and I had to stew the idea for a bit to decide if I'm oversensitive or not.  I decided I am not.

Here's the thought:  If you wanted to make having children as difficult and costly as possible, both in monetary and psychological ways, how would you go about doing it?  I think the answer is that you would follow many of the current policies in the US:  Minimize parental leave, refuse to make allowances for fertility in how the labor markets treat workers (no subsidized daycare, no real flexitime etc.) assume that all childcare will be done by the woman who gave birth to the child, fight to remove subsidized education as a viable alternative and support instead home-schooling, largely done by mothers.

Or think of the literature on child development.  Ninety-nine percent of articles about parenting are about the mothers, and the vast majority of those look at what mothers are doing wrong (not enough breast-feeding, not enough bonding, too much bonding,  too much fatty food cooked for the children, the cooking always assumed to be the mother's responsibility, bad mother-child relationships as the cause of childhood depression etc etc.)  And the later popular-psychology pieces are still very often about bad mothers and how they messed up their children.  Think of the "Mommy Dearest" branch of memoirs.  Think also of the Control Of The Bad Mother movement!  This begins before the child is even born.

Then add the legal rules about what constitutes child neglect (leaving a child under twelve alone in a parked car for a few minutes, say), the persistent media-supported fears about pedophilia, the requirement that middle-class parents (mothers) chauffeur their children from one event to another, how listening to Mozart during pregnancy or watching Little Einstein after it with the baby are necessary parts of child-rearing and if you don't follow them, you are a Bad Mother.  Or a Bad Parent.  At the same time, the wider public spaces are ultimately not child-friendly at all, what with complaints from other plane passengers or other restaurant diners etc.

The restrictions on parental life keep growing, and the guilt (aimed at mothers, in particular)  comes from all directions, including from other mothers in the Mommy Wars.  But to an alien from outer space, whatever gender that creature might be, all this surely looks like an intentional policy to cut back on fertility rates!

And when the logical happens and birth rates fall?  Then, my friends, the effort is directed towards making abortion and birth control unavailable.

That's how I framed the initial thought.  It's a little exaggerated, because we still have Medicaid for children and a few other safety nets of similar sort and because pain relief is still available for women giving birth. But the policies I see (and not only in the US) are almost all whip and only a few withered carrots when it comes to the debate about women and low birth rates.*

And sure, wanting to have children is a human drive.  Is that why we think it's OK to make it an option with high costs?
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*The question what the birth rates should be, right now, is a separate one.  There's a sense in which low birth rates might be part of the therapeutic treatment Mother Earth requires, especially if we wish all humans on earth to have the same high standard of living and still have nature left over for other animals.

Common Sense=Men And Emotions=Women. So Limbaugh Tells Us.

Our old pal Rush is not really worth writing about because his shtick is so stale.  But his recent piece about the pink campaign for breast cancer cure or prevention among professional athletes as a sign of a general national assault on masculinity (wear mascara already, Rush!) offers me some material to talk about how some bad debate on gender is framed:

It goes like this:  You exaggerate and simplify, you lump all men into one group, all women into another group, and then you state that all men are the same as other men and that all women are the same as other women.  And the overlap in the groups?  Doesn't exist!

This is done so often that when you hear or read it you may just skate across, never noticing the crack in the ice.  Still, this assumption is usually what carries the rest of the story it is attached to.  If you become aware of this assumption, the other arguments frequently disintegrate.

Thus, Rush in this tirade labels women as emotional people and men as possessing no emotions but just common sense.  So he employs the trick I explained above.

But he also uses two other tricks:  The first is to resort to old stereotypes (men are thinkers, women are feelers), and the second is not to really think about what emotions are and what common sense is.

These two are related, because the stereotype about men not being emotional excludes anger, say, from the list of things which are deemed emotions, and because the gender stereotypes may make individuals choose a particular way of presenting their arguments, based on what they deem as most likely to work, irrespective of what they actually think and feel.

Although Rush doesn't use one further distorting trick common in much of bad gender debate, he has done so in the past and others use it frequently.  Thus it's worth mentioning here, too.

That trick is to compare men and women by picking examples from the opposite two ends of the distributions of various characteristics by gender.  For example, pick a man from the top of the male distribution (Einstein in intelligence)  and a woman from the bottom of the female distribution (the dum blonde of blonde jokes) and then compare the two.

I see this done quite a bit, and especially in the direction described above.  But I have seen it used in the reverse direction, too.  

Speed Blogging, Oct 24, 2013: On the Rights of Fetuses, Men and Women

This case spells out one consequence of the fetal rights movement, combined with the usual type of inattention to the rights of the womb-carrier as a full human being.  I can appreciate the complexity and difficulties of some cases of "fetal endangerment," but this case looks quite a bit simpler.  The woman is simply not believed.  The case also tells us why criminalization of drug use during pregnancy is likely to result in the exact reverse of what its supporters desire, if being honest and open about past drug use leads to such difficulties.  Better not to say anything or stay out of the health care system altogether.

Jaclyn Friedman has written about the many types of men's rights movement and what is wrong with them.  She is one brave writer!  If you wonder why I say that, follow the blog Manboobz for a few weeks or months. 

My experiences with debating some MRM members match Jaclyn's experiences.  The underlying beliefs about how the world works and what is really happening are so different that a real debate is, by definition, impossible in any meaningful length of time.  That, plus the large number of personal (and misogynistic) insults I received, made the work exhausting and pointless.

To finish, something quite different.  This Guardian article on the dangers of creating "nontroversies" in the social media is well worth reading.

And Then Some More Fun Gender Research! On Textual Analysis of Gender in Emails. Or on Water Rats.

To explain why I write about this particular study, I have to mention the sites which picked it up hot from the oven.  They are a physics site and a tech site (you might not want to read the comments there).  Someone then brought the study to me the way my mom's cat used to bring her water rats:  Like a prize but not really.  In my case it was more like:  See?  Women and men are really very different and it's physics and tech guys who are interested in this matter, possibly because they want to tell us that women aren't in the STEM careers because of biological gender differences.

The study (pdf), however, is not about biological gender differences, or at least cannot prove that the differences it argues it found are biological.  It isn't even about mathematics or tech!  It has to do with a textual analysis of Enron management e-mails when it comes to emotions!  A girly topic, really, but whatever. 

The Enron managers'  e-mails are publicly available, and that's probably why they were picked for the analysis of gender differences in the language people use in e-mails.  The here-relevant conclusions of the study:

 We show that there are marked differences across genders in how they use emotion words in work-place email.  For example, women use many words from the joy-sadness axis, whereas men prefer terms from the fear-trust axis.

The e-mails used in the research came from the Enron corpus which contains more than 200,000 e-mails.  Sounds very impressive, right?  One can do a lot of statistical analysis with that amount of data.

Except that the study doesn't do any statistical inference.  What this means is that the results cannot be generalized to anything outside the studied groups of male and female Enron managers, and the number of those, after various prunings, consists of 41 women and 89 men, and their e-mails (a total of 32,045, 12,125 of those sent by women and the rest by men).

Likewise, we are not told what positions the men and women had in management.  In theory, emails by a marketing manager might well differ in tone from emails from an accounting manager, and if men and women are not equally dispersed among all the jobs, the analyses may not be about gender as much as about the position a particular manager has.

Never mind.  The point of what I'm doing here is this:  A possibly interesting but statistically a bit simplistic study creates ways to group words into categories such as "joy," "trust," "fear," "surprise," "sadness," "disgust," "anger" and "anticipation," and then compares the created groups to love letters and suicide letters in an attempt at partial validation. 

The categories are then used to analyze the emotional content of emails sent to and by 41 women and emails sent to and by 89 men, and conclusions are shown as bar graphs of differences in the percentages of various words by gender.

It's not that the study is terrible.  It reads like a pilot study.  But the attention it received from certain groups seems interesting, especially given that the summary I reproduce above should be written like this:

We show that there are marked differences across the male and female Enron managers in how they use emotion words in work-place email.  For example, the 41 women use many words from the joy-sadness axis, whereas the 89 men prefer terms from the fear-trust axis.
 

Those corrections are because the reader is given no information which would allow her or him to construct confidence intervals or test hypotheses, and that means that nothing in the study can be reliably generalized to groups outside it, and we can tell nothing about the statistical significance of the differences the tables in the article summarize, which, by the way, makes the adjective "marked" also pretty meaningless.

The other problem I came across while reading the study has to do with the percentage differences given in the tables.  However hard I tried, I couldn't get the same differences from the  data the researchers gave.  Because I can really be quite stupid (not often, but those female genes, you know), I wrote to both the researchers asking for clarification on how the figures were obtained.

That was two weeks ago.  Usually researchers are very nice to me and respond when I ask them questions which I often do, so I'm beginning to think that this particular question will remain unanswered.

To repeat, the point of this post is not the particular study as such, but the people who found it interesting, even considering its lack of statistical analyses and its pilot-study nature.

So that's how I baked the water rats for you. 

No Sex For Us. We Are Japanese!

That's a reference to the old joke about the British and sex.  The reason it's now about the Japanese is a story in the Guardian about how Japanese young people no longer ever plan to have nookie, ever! Both sexual intercourse and marriage are dying in Japan.  A story at Slate suggests that this new celibacy could be a viable cultural pattern for societies in general!

Which is hilarious, as the Shakers' experience demonstrates.  Unless we mean that it's a viable pattern for some people, not for whole cultures.

You don't really want to be me when reading stories of this type, because my brain is permanently set in the critical mode, and I always, always want better data and more data, and so I go grumpy.  Take this statement, from the Guardian article:

A survey earlier this year by the Japan Family Planning Association (JFPA) found that 45% of women aged 16-24 "were not interested in or despised sexual contact". More than a quarter of men felt the same way.

What do those numbers mean?  We need to understand what answers the Japanese culture expects from men and women to such questions.  For instance, if young women are supposed to be pure and cute and virginal, as the article tells elsewhere, would such young women admit that they are interested in sexual contact?  And what were the findings of studies like this in the past, if such studies were carried out?  My guess is that in the 1950s close to a hundred percent of Japanese unmarried women might have answered that they are not interested in sexual contact. Because that was expected of them.

In other words, you need proper frameworks to understand what we are talking about.  And though interviewing individuals is always delightful, those anecdotes tell us nothing about how common some phenomena are.  For example, the women interviewed in the Guardian article are all at least middle class or higher, if I can read the class markers.  Would the same things apply to working class women?  To working class men?

All this means that I'm not completely convinced of the idea that the young Japanese will mostly never have intercourse or children again.  At the same time, something is going on, and part of it certainly has to do with two aspects of the Japanese society.

First, the very patriarchal norms about women and marriage and men and marriage:

Aversion to marriage and intimacy in modern life is not unique to Japan. Nor is growing preoccupation with digital technology. But what endless Japanese committees have failed to grasp when they stew over the country's procreation-shy youth is that, thanks to official shortsightedness, the decision to stay single often makes perfect sense. This is true for both sexes, but it's especially true for women. "Marriage is a woman's grave," goes an old Japanese saying that refers to wives being ignored in favour of mistresses. For Japanese women today, marriage is the grave of their hard-won careers. 

I meet Eri Tomita, 32, over Saturday morning coffee in the smart Tokyo district of Ebisu. Tomita has a job she loves in the human resources department of a French-owned bank. A fluent French speaker with two university degrees, she avoids romantic attachments so she can focus on work. "A boyfriend proposed to me three years ago. I turned him down when I realised I cared more about my job. After that, I lost interest in dating. It became awkward when the question of the future came up." 

Tomita says a woman's chances of promotion in Japan stop dead as soon as she marries. "The bosses assume you will get pregnant." Once a woman does have a child, she adds, the long, inflexible hours become unmanageable. "You have to resign. You end up being a housewife with no independent income. It's not an option for women like me." 

Around 70% of Japanese women leave their jobs after their first child. The World Economic Forum consistently ranks Japan as one of the world's worst nations for gender equality at work. Social attitudes don't help. Married working women are sometimes demonised as oniyome, or "devil wives". In a telling Japanese ballet production of Bizet's Carmen a few years ago, Carmen was portrayed as a career woman who stole company secrets to get ahead and then framed her lowly security-guard lover José. Her end was not pretty.

The point of the article here is an excellent one:  Why would women with alternatives get married in a society which requires them to relinquish everything for it except a submissive and maternal role, fully at the mercy of the breadwinner in the family?  Even for women who want children,  being yelled at by the government about the low birth rate is not much of an incentive.  It's the whip, again, and not much carrot.

But men aren't offered such a great deal there, either.  The "salaryman," expected to provide for the family all on his own, is also expected to work twenty-hour-days, and the economic realities today,what with high cost of housing etc., means that families need two breadwinners.  But then the wife is a "devil wife" and round and round we go.

The second factor, other than the gender roles, has to do with the hi tech substitutes for sex in the Japanese society, such as Internet pron.  The incentive to use those (especially for heterosexual men as the markets cater for men's fantasies) is greater when living together and other such forms of heterosexual dating are disapproved of.  Nobody knows what you are doing with your computer.  And there are some slight hints (of which I might write about later) that a strong focus on technical masturbation makes real human individuals of the desired gender look like racks for genitals, not like human beings.

All these are first thoughts and written from outside the culture.  But consider the change in Japan:  Eleanor Roosevelt once wrote about the Japanese politicians whose wives had to walk a certain number of steps behind them.  Now we discuss Internet pron and gender roles in Japanese families.  So my guess is that the slow pace of change in norms and values is what is causing the problems, to the extent they exist, and that it is those norms and values which must change.   Add to that the real overpopulation of today's Japan.  Perhaps a lower fertility for a while IS the right path to follow?

Finally, the current ecological disaster in Japan would certainly put most people off the idea of a pregnancy in the near future.  It is that problem the Japanese should see to first, for all our sakes.

On Sock Puppets

(http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sock_puppet)




There are two types of sock puppets.  The first type you can make out of socks, by stitching on eyes and a mouth (at the closed end of the sock).  The second type is  a way for one person or institution to comment on the net while appearing to be thousands!  Thousands.

The former you slip over your hand and then use your fingers to open and close its mouth while making silly comments in a squeaky voice.  I've done that.

The latter I have never attempted.  But sock puppets of that type exist.  A new book, according to Media Matters for America, suggests that Fox News has used these puppets.  I have no idea if that is true or not, but I have certainly come across comments threads in my surfing where people with quite different names write English broken in exactly the same way (not mine!) or where not only what they say is the same but the way they say it, too.  And sometimes on my own blog I find that these varied comments all come from the same address.

Does sock puppetry matter?  That depends on what we are focusing on.  If our only concern is the topic of the debate, sock puppetry doesn't matter.  After all, it's like one person shouting the same thing over and over again, and we have all seen that phenomenon, too.

On the other hand, sock puppetry has two serious problems.  The first one is that it exaggerates the number of individuals who bother to comment about something in a particular way.  The second one is that people using sock puppets also create elaborate sub-conversations with themselves, pretending that there are many participants in those.  These can destroy the main conversation of the thread.

The first problem is probably the more severe one.  But then it's not terribly different from the astro-turf campaigns (like false grass-roots) where a political site, say, tells all its readers to go and bomb the same comments thread.  This is common on many MRA sites.  The similarity comes from the fact that both phenomena will look like spontaneous reactions by many people to an article they just happened to come across, the way other commentators probably did come across it.

This changes the game.

Is sock puppetry trolling?  What do you think?

Some Speed Blogging, October 18, 2013: On Education in the US

I had to travel last weekend and into late Tuesday.  Not having had much of a real break (even snakes need them), my writing well is running on empty of energy even though there are important topics to tackle.   Perhaps early next week...

What's fascinating about traveling inside the US is that one skips from culture to culture to culture, even over shorter distances.  This is not really one country but a large chunk of a continent, and even houses and streets and nature look different between the lunch stop and the dinner stop en route.  To take a more extreme example, Louisiana and Massachusetts are two different countries in everything but name.

And that diversity may be the reason why the politics in the US is so very violent in tone.

Some of that "diversity" is visible in this article about the percentage of poor students in the southern and western parts of the United States.  I'm not an expert in judging studies about education, but it is certainly true that funding schools largely from local property taxes exacerbates existing income inequalities and passes them on to future generations, and if the majority of children live in poorer areas getting the future workers (including teachers, physicians and nurses) we all need may become more difficult.  I have long advocated compensatory funding:  More money should go to poor areas.

But the paradox of "diversity" that article reflects is perhaps in the fact that the winning political party in the southern areas of the United States is not interested in spending money on education.  Very sad, because they are eating their seed corn by ignoring the long-term negative effects of short-term tax savings.

If You Read Nothing Else Today, Read This

An article by Joseph Stiglitz on global income inequality and what it means to all of us.  A snippet:

Of the advanced economies, America has some of the worst disparities in incomes and opportunities, with devastating macroeconomic consequences. The gross domestic product of the United States has more than quadrupled in the last 40 years and nearly doubled in the last 25, but as is now well known, the benefits have gone to the top — and increasingly to the very, very top.
Last year, the top 1 percent of Americans took home 22 percent of the nation’s income; the top 0.1 percent, 11 percent. Ninety-five percent of all income gains since 2009 have gone to the top 1 percent. Recently released census figures show that median income in America hasn’t budged in almost a quarter-century. The typical American man makes less than he did 45 years ago (after adjusting for inflation); men who graduated from high school but don’t have four-year college degrees make almost 40 percent less than they did four decades ago.
American inequality began its upswing 30 years ago, along with tax decreases for the rich and the easing of regulations on the financial sector. That’s no coincidence. It has worsened as we have under-invested in our infrastructure, education and health care systems, and social safety nets. Rising inequality reinforces itself by corroding our political system and our democratic governance.

I see this as one of the major longer run problems,  right after climate change.  And what is worst about it is that it does, indeed, corrode our chances of democratic governance.

Don't Drink And Rape

That's a clickbait headline if there ever was one.  I'm trying to learn this game, my dear readers, because it IS the game when talk turns to the so-called "wimminz' issues."

Such as the women's astonishing ability to get raped.  Emily Yoffe at Slate has written an article on that, and many responses to her omit the link to reduce its clickbaitiness.  I don't think I can omit the link because I want to look at some direct quotes from the piece.  This makes me sad, as I'm contributing to the game.

At the same time, Yoffe's piece has a few pearls in it, scattered among the pig dung, and I want to spend some time separating the two, if I can.

Let's see what the pearls might be in Yoffe's piece:

She points out that binge drinking is not good for you.  It's not good for your health and it's not good for your safety.  Bad things can "happen" to you if you are too inebriated to take care of yourself, and bad things can "happen" to other people if, say, you decide to get behind the wheel of a car while drunk out of your mind.  Yoffe also suggests that binge drinking can turn you into a rapist, and she certainly states that binge drinking can make you a victim of a rape.  Or perhaps a mugging?  Or a beating?  A theft?

But Yoffe's main argument is about rape and young women.  Here's what she says:

In one awful high-profile case after another—the U.S. Naval Academy; Steubenville, Ohio; now the allegations in Maryville, Mo.—we read about a young woman, sometimes only a girl, who goes to a party and ends up being raped.    As soon as the school year begins, so do reports of female students sexually assaulted by their male classmates. A common denominator in these cases is alcohol, often copious amounts, enough to render the young woman incapacitated. But a misplaced fear of blaming the victim has made it somehow unacceptable to warn inexperienced young women that when they get wasted, they are putting themselves in potential peril.

Bolds are mine.  I use them to point out how Yoffe's foggy writing hides the pearls and covers them up with the pig dung.   We begin with "awful" high-profile cases where a young girl "ends up" being raped.  Note that the active voice is about a girl going to a party.  Then the passive voice takes over and she "ends up" getting raped.  Bad things "happened" to her, because she was drunk and went to a party.

The pearl in her story:  That we should all take care of ourselves and make sure that we are not the slowest zebra in the herd running away from the hungry lions.  The pig dung in the story:  The lions* will still chase the zebras and the slowest one gets eaten.  Yoffe pays little attention to that aspect of the story.

Let's repeat that quote and bold a different part of it:

In one awful high-profile case after another—the U.S. Naval Academy; Steubenville, Ohio; now the allegations in Maryville, Mo.—we read about a young woman, sometimes only a girl, who goes to a party and ends up being raped.    As soon as the school year begins, so do reports of female students sexually assaulted by their male classmates. A common denominator in these cases is alcohol, often copious amounts, enough to render the young woman incapacitated. But a misplaced fear of blaming the victim has made it somehow unacceptable to warn inexperienced young women that when they get wasted, they are putting themselves in potential peril.

Is this truly the case?  That young people are not taught about the dangers of being too drunk to take care of themselves because it would come across as victim blaming?  Or is Yoffe arguing that young men are warned about the dangers but not young women?   Or is this all about the presumed behavior that will trigger a rape event and get a woman (or a man) raped, using the passive voice Yoffe did herself earlier in the quote?

The borderline between "rape prevention" of the kind Yoffe advocates (don't be the slowest zebra) and victim blaming (why did the zebras graze so close to the lions?) is a fuzzy one. 

Think of other examples from different types of crimes:  Should someone parking an expensive car in a poor neighbor be told that doing so was just inviting car theft?  What about a man or a woman wearing large diamond rings and fat gold chains in the subway late at night?  Yet avoiding those forms of behavior probably does reduce a person's chances of getting eaten by the human equivalent of lions.  But we tend not to blame the victims for their "bad choices" after a crime has taken place.  There's something different about rape as a crime, almost a whiff of it being "natural."

I quite like the lions-and-zebras parable (initially suggested by Yoffe herself, in " Sometimes the woman is the only one drunk and runs into a particular type of shrewd—and sober—sexual predator who lurks where women drink like a lion at a watering hole"), because it also serves to show that Yoffe seems to think that rape is either committed by alcohol or that the small percentage of hard-core rapists out there will always be on the lookout for the slow zebras. In either case the onus is on the victims to protect themselves by not drinking too much.  By running faster, really.

So the pearl in the story is that taking care of oneself is an important skill and women and men should both be encouraged to practice that self-love. 

I didn't find a pearl about how we should teach our children to take care of others, too,  to not let a friend get raped or get behind the wheel drunk and so on, and I didn't find a pearl about teaching young people that when an "inexperienced young person is wasted" perhaps we shouldn't see whether that person gets exploited or "ends up" exploiting someone else but instead make sure that they get safely home.

And I didn't find the pearl about the reason why victim blaming matters.  Nothing about the long history of rape victims being blamed for the crime, because of the time of the day they were out, because of the part of the town they were found in, because of the length of their skirts or the visibility of their arms or because they smiled at a stranger or didn't smile at a stranger and so on and so on.  This is not just history, either, but a current undertow in the stream of public debates about sexual violence both in the US and abroad.  If you read enough comment threads on events such as the recent gang rapes in India, you will find opinions which suggest that women, by their very existence anywhere outside their locked homes, are the real cause of rape.

That's what is tricky about Yoffe's arguments.  There will always be the slowest zebra, and teaching zebras how to run faster will not change that.

Which does NOT mean that I advocate getting drunk out of your mind for anyone or that it would be a good way to stay safe.

Finally, to the part of Yoffe's article which is both untrue and pure clickbaiting:  Female binge drinking is the fault of feminism!

The text under the attached photograph says:

Young women are getting a distorted message that their right to match men drink for drink is a feminist issue.

Funny, that.  I've never read a single feminist book which would have advocated binge drinking or matching men drink for drink.  Now who is it that has distorted the feminist message?

 Yoffe says more about this:

I’ve told my daughter that it’s her responsibility to take steps to protect herself. (“I hear you! Stop!”) The biological reality is that women do not metabolize alcohol the same way as men, and that means drink for drink women will get drunker faster. I tell her I know alcohol will be widely available (even though it’s illegal for most college students) but that she’ll have a good chance of knowing what’s going on around her if she limits herself to no more than two drinks, sipped slowly—no shots!—and stays away from notorious punch bowls. If female college students start moderating their drinking as a way of looking out for their own self-interest—and looking out for your own self-interest should be a primary feminist principle—I hope their restraint trickles down to the men.

Knowing your own limits is good advice.  Suggesting that this restraint trickles down to the men is rubbish, because the lure of drinking a lot in college has its roots in very different and more masculine places than whatever the chicks might do.

To summarize, feminism shouldn't be just about how not to be slowest zebra in the herd running away from the lions, and neither should the concept of rape prevention be about that, even though Slate advertises this article by "The Best Rape Prevention: Tell College Women to Stop Getting So Wasted". 

And there's a very real need for us all to teach our children not just how to take care of themselves but also how to take care of others.  At the minimum, we should teach that "don't drink and rape" slogan to the general society.
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*The term "lions" does not refer to all men here.  I use it in Yoffe's sense as some proportion of the male population who she thinks will always predate on vulnerable people.  The term "zebras" should be interpreted as applying to all women and men who are viewed as prey by the "lions."

Y.O.U.N.G.

CONTENTS:  Sexual Violence, Rape


When I read this story about the freshman week events at Leeds University, in England, I remembered something similar happening in Canada this fall.  A chant used in at least two Canadian universities in freshman initiations goes like this:

Students told CBC that the chant — led by a group of SMU orientation leaders during "frosh week" — has been a tradition at the school for years. The video shows a group of men and women saying, "SMU boys we like them young ... Y is for your sister, O is for oh so tight, U is for underage, N is for no consent, G is for grab that a**."
A spokesman for SMU told Global News that the chant differs every year, and this year's version "was more sexually charged than earlier chants" and that it's "certainly the last year the chant will be sung."

 

"Sexually charged???"  Perhaps in the sense that cannibalism is a cuisine.  A 2010 newspaper article casts light on what might be happening to terms such as rape among the young that makes them see it as "sexually charged":

Not long ago, Professor Lise Gotell, an expert on sexual assault law at the University of Alberta, was taken aback to hear her 15-year-old son describe his football team’s crushing defeat as being “totally raped.’’
She wasn’t sure whether to call the coach, or the cops.
“Can’t you just say that you were humiliated? I asked him,’’ she recalls on the phone from her Edmonton office. “He explained that he meant to convey that ‘They turned us into their bitch.’’’
As if that were any better.
“There’s something about this sexualization and the use of rape as a colloquial verb that is really startling,’’ Gotell says. “Culture is a terrain that we should take very, very seriously.’’

The terms and idioms about rape and sexual violence  have been domesticated.  This does not mean that they have been tamed, but that they have been brought into general conversations like wolves in sheeps' clothing.

And the result?  If you watch the YouTube video in the above link you notice that the people chanting about "no means yes" are not thinking about what they chant.  These rape idioms serve to normalize one-sided sexual aggression or violence as simply normal sex, sex as it is supposed to be, sex as it is served to many on some pornographic sites.  Or at least something worth joking about in the sense of sexual titillation.

 For example, in Leeds:

An investigation into a student club night has been set up by Leeds City Council, after it received complaints from a local councillor and individuals. The investigation comes as over 2,000 students sign a petition to close the night down.
The club night, called Freshers Violation is run by Tequila at Mezz club in Leeds. Students on social media have complained about a video posted on the club's Facebook page which, the objecters say, "promoted rape culture".
The video, which has since been taken down, included a presenter asking a student: "How are you going to violate a fresher tonight?" The student replied: "She's going to get raped."
The text under the video, which can still be read on the Facebook page despite the video's removal, reads: "Fu*k me I'm a fresher! Another huge night at Tequila with pole dancers, a violation cage and lots of second and third years seeking out new freshers."

Mmm.  Hard to see how those messages wouldn't  promote rape culture.  After all, these are messages used to lure students into the club.  And notice how the event has the flavor of happening in a "gentlemen's" club! 

But note, also, the fact that all the events I linked to provoked strong and swift opposition and a shutting-down of the phenomena.  Still,  we need to understand much better what causes this idea that rape is at least funny if not what sex should be all about, on the level of popular culture and inside some sub-groups.  What drives this thinking?  To what extent has it become more common?  What are its ties to popular music, pornography, movies?  And what are its consequences in terms of sexual aggression in actual relationships?

The More Things Change... A Quote from Woolf's Three Guineas.

During my flu I read again Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas.  It is a fascinating book, almost oracular at places and much ahead of its time (especially the end-notes*), yet the basic tie-in of pacifism and women's status is, I think, weaker than it should have been to make the argument convincing.

I'm not going to amble on those by-roads, because what I really want to point out here is one of her end-notes, this one.  (Woolf was writing at the eve of World War II):

Even at a time of great political stress like the present it is remarkable how much criticism is still bestowed upon women.  The announcement "A shrewd, witty and provocative study of modern woman," appears on an average three times yearly in publishers' lists.

The author, often a doctor of letters, is invariably of the male sex; and "to mere man," as the blurb puts it (see Times Lit. Sup. March 12th, 1938), "this book will be an eye-opener."  Presumably the need for a scapegoat is largely responsible, and the role is traditionally a woman's.  (See Genesis.)  It is a curious fact that although the "practical obliteration" of her freedom is assured if certain characteristics generally if erroneously associated with aggravated masculinity remain unchecked, the educated woman not only accepts criticism, but if publishers' lists are to be taken as evidence, makes no attempt to return it....

This struck a bell.  Think of all the writing about how women are now supposed to be less happy than in the good old days when they had fewer choices,  think of the (discredited) stories about how educated women can't find partners, think of some of the popular evolutionary psychology studies about the "basic nature" of women as coy and submissive and monogamous and ultimately home-bound, think of the way feminism is blamed for a Pandora's box of evils in this world, ranging from the hookup culture, women's alcohol use, the plight of boys at school, all the way to the destruction of the Western civilization and even its churches!

Gender-reversed articles on similar issues are not so common.  This may be because of the default setting of men as the human beings.  If that is how we view the world, then the sub-group or special group of "women" sticks out like a sore thumb and almost begs for analysis, but such aspects as violence tend to be seen largely as human problems (in, say, stories about crime) and not gendered problems, even if they show a big percentage difference by the perpetrator's sex.   But problems coded as female (however small their actual percentage is)  are treated as if they apply to all women or at least to all uppity women or all poor women and so on.

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*I love footnotes and end-notes in books and always read all of them.  Am I the only person who does this? 

The 2013 Values Voter Summit

This is an annual conservative event in the US where the so-called "social conservatives" get to tell the rest of us which values they are going to force us to follow.  It is also a window those conservatives use to misinform the rest of us on various issues.

The name of the event is fun, in a sick way.  It implies that nobody else has values at all!  And the assumption is that the values espoused in these conferences (the submission of women, death to gayness etc.) are good things, despite the obviousness of anger/wrath as the energy which motivates much of what I have seen.

Here's the funniest quote from this year's Values Summit,  so far:

“Obamacare is, really, I think, the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery…it is slavery, in a way, because it is making all of us subservient to the government.”

It's not ha-ha funny.  It's funny in the sense that it freezes the eyeballs of the reader for a second and triggers those primitive flight reactions.  But then my analytical half or quarter starts immediately wondering whether the same isn't true about taxes or the health care for the elderly or even the fact that we are forced to drive on the right side of the road.

Never mind.  We are talking about a different reality, and that might be OK if the Values Voters didn't have such an urge to make me obey according to their desires which they call values.

Speed Blogging, October 11, 2013. On Mansplaining, Stock Market Shenanigans, How To Deal With Extortionists and Boobs in Politics

A wonderful sermon, this one:

“You know, there are those of us in this society who have told women that there’s a war on them because that cute little baby inside of them, they may want to get rid of it and there are people that are keeping you from doing that,” Carson continued. “And women say, ‘No, no, they’re not doing that to me! No!’ And they get all riled up.”
He added there was obviously not a “war on women” because men give up their seats to pregnant women.
“There is no war on them, the war is on their babies,” Carson insisted. “Babies that cannot defend themselves. Over the past few decades, we have destroyed 55 million of them. And we have the nerve to call other societies of the past heathen.”
“What we need to do is re-educate the women to understand that they are the defenders of these babies.”

The term "mansplaining" * was invented because of statements like this one.  Well, it's not just "mansplaining," in the sense of assuming that one's audience knows nothing and must be schooled, but something even more revealing because Carson himself appears not to have spent any time thinking about the issues at all.  He's waging a war on behalf of the egg-Americans and has blinders on about everything else having to do with women as people.

This is an interesting story about the possible effect of power in the regulation of stock markets:

In the spring of 2012, a senior examiner with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York determined that Goldman Sachs had a problem.


Under a Fed mandate, the investment banking behemoth was expected to have a company-wide policy to address conflicts of interest in how its phalanxes of dealmakers handled clients. Although Goldman had a patchwork of policies, the examiner concluded that they fell short of the Fed’s requirements.
That finding by the examiner, Carmen Segarra, potentially had serious implications for Goldman, which was already under fire for advising clients on both sides of several multibillion-dollar deals and allegedly putting the bank’s own interests above those of its customers. It could have led to closer scrutiny of Goldman by regulators or changes to its business practices.
Before she could formalize her findings, Segarra said, the senior New York Fed official who oversees Goldman pressured her to change them. When she refused, Segarra said she was called to a meeting where her bosses told her they no longer trusted her judgment. Her phone was confiscated, and security officers marched her out of the Fed’s fortress-like building in lower Manhattan, just 7 months after being hired.

  I have no further information on the particular case, but it is certainly true that the overseers were not allowed to do any overseeing for many years.

And here Michael Kinsley argues that the best way to solve the government shutdown by the Tea Party conservatives is for Obama to cave in:

President Obama should give in.

...

He should speak to the nation and say,

...

“The sad truth is that if you don’t care about any of that, it gives you tremendous power over those who do. Perhaps unfortunately, I do care. And I believe the stakes are too high to let this become a testosterone contest. So I have sent a letter to Speaker Bohner, saying that I will agree to a year’s postponement of the Affordable Care Act, if he will agree to a rise in the debt limit that is at least big enough to spare us another episode like this for a year.

What to say about that, eh?  The way to deal with extortion is by giving in to it, I guess.  Or rather, the Tea Party wants to kill the Affordable Care Act, and delaying it by a year gives them more time to kill it.  That is the reason for the government shutdown, as I have mentioned before.   So they should get what they are aiming at, never mind the precedents and never mind the fact that this is redoing elections by other means and so on.  Indeed, democracy itself is unimportant here.

Finally, a piece which elicits no comments from me that could be publicly posted.  It's about boobs and politicians.  You decide what or who the boobs are.
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*Others can act this way, too.

Fox News on Welfare Leeches, Shame and Who Deserves to Leech on the Government

This is such a beautiful piece of television journalism, right? 




Vague insinuations, a carefully picked anecdotal interview, lots of emotional arguments based on...what?  A graph showing the impact of Medicare and Medicaid (health care access for the elderly and some groups of the poor)  on a drop in poverty from the 1960s to 1970s and then no drop (because there were no additional large changes in what makes people poor).  And what do we conclude from this chain of events?

That people have become welfare leeches because there hasn't been any further drops!

The funniest bit of all is the argument that Stossel has paid for HIS government freebies but those "other people", they have not!  What if they, too, paid for it all before they got it?  No investigation into that, naturally.

If we took these folks seriously I would think that Stossel should refuse to use his Medicare.  He is loaded with money, he can afford all uninsured care, and that way he would be less of a leech on the society, right?

Hasselbach then complains about welfare payments beating the minimum wage incomes in many states.  I haven't checked if that is true, but the conclusion Hasselbach draws seems to be that the welfare payments should be lowered.  That assumes, of course, that one can support a family, say, on minimum wages.  Unless you don't care if people survive or not, of course.

And sure, there are people who misuse the social safety net.  The answer to that is to attack the misuse, not the safety net.

What else can we say about that little conversation?  Take the idea of shame.  The panel wants shame back, so that people "accepting handouts" will feel shame.

A great idea!  Let's make sure that this is also true for corporate welfare!  Let's publicly shame all those responsible for the collapse of the housing markets and the financial markets!  Let's publicly shame all those who give money to their friends from the government coffers and who try to bribe politicians into doing their private bidding for them in the public arenas.

If shame is good for one use then it must be good for other uses, too. 

Alice Munro, the 2013 Nobel Laureate in Literature

My congratulations to Munro.  As the linked piece notes, she is a master of the short-story form, and that is a difficult form.

I've read quite a bit of her work.  I'd say that it is about the decisions people make in their lives and the consequences of those decisions.  And it's indeed true that she can put as much into a short story as others cram into a novel, without making the story ungainly or bloated.

I find this news ironic, given my earlier post about the literature professor who refuses to teach either women or Canadians in his short-form writing course.

Limbaugh's Lies. Part 593854756

Rush Limbaugh tells us that the drop in poor white women's life expectancy figures in the United States is because they are now working outside the home:



This is the kind of thing which raises my wrath and then causes hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes in far-away places.  Because had Limbaugh not been so fucking lazy and gormless he would have read through a few of the studies.  Well, probably he is just lying because he knows he can get away with it.

The truth is the other way round:

In May, Jennifer Karas Montez, a social demographer who studies health inequalities, co-authored a study that was the first to investigate how quality of life might be playing a role in the early deaths of female high-school dropouts. Montez found that while smoking accounts for half of the decline in life expectancy among these women, whether or not a woman has a job is equally significant. “Women without a high-school degree have not made inroads in the labor force, especially in post-recession America,” Montez said in an interview. In fact, only one-third of women without a high-school diploma are employed, compared to half of their male counterparts, and nearly three-quarters of better-educated women. When they are employed, Montez said, it is usually in low-wage jobs that offer no benefits or flexibility. Smoking and other destructive behaviors, she added, may just be symptoms of the heightened stress and loneliness experienced by women who don’t graduate from high school.

Bolds are mine.  In short, the poor women who are in the labor force do better than the poor women who are not in the labor force.

On the topic itself, i.e., the question why certain groups of women (especially poor, white and uneducated women) seem to experience a drop in life expectancy, read this earlier post and especially the direct quote in this.

The Meritocracy of Twitter And The Top Layer of White Boyz

Via Amanda, I read this statement about the leadership of Twitter consisting mostly of white guys.  The lack of women has been a Twitter topic for some days, especially because women use Twitter a lot (not me).

As Amanda points out, the piece is a good example of How It Is Done in Anti-Feminism. 

My short summary of it: 

Life is fair but hard for all.  It's harder for women than men, of course,  and of course there are sexists and bigots everywhere, but life is still fair and competition in tech is totally fair and the women who are willing to pay the price men pay get there.  

Of course they have to ignore the sexism and the racism and so on and the fact that their pregnancies are a problem they have to take care of while working harder than everyone else.  But life is fair and the winners got there fairly, just like all other winners.  

That feminists dare to complain about the lack of women in Twitter's leadership just shows that they want something for nothing and really aren't good enough.  All one needs to do is work harder than anyone else, bulldoze through sexism and the assumption that every worker has a spouse at home taking care of children and giving birth to them.

The world of Twitter is a meritocracy and if the top is mostly white men, well, that shows that white men are more talented, work harder and deserve to be on top.

So stop your whining and actually do some work, feminazis.

Another way of looking at the very gist of the piece is that it is based on the assumption of general meritocracy and an accepted view of biological gender differences as something which can safely cost  in money, ambitions and emotional costs mostly to women. 

From these two assumptions it naturally follows that the status quo is the best possible of all status quos, that the women not on top are not as talented and hard-working as the men on top, and that the answer is to strap your baby on your back and your breast pump in your handbag, put on your stilettos and work harder and longer than all the white boyz while regarding any sexism or racism or both you meet en route as just so many gnats to ignore.

If I want a kinder reading of the piece it would be this one:  The author doesn't think she has faced any hindrances due to her gender and believes that she got where she is by her talents and hard work.  She was able to accept the rules of the game and won, and that's pretty rare for a woman!  So she is quite special, too.  And I have no doubts that she is good at her work and that she has the characteristics which let her succeed and that she has worked hard.

But none of that makes the wider questions about where all the women are irrelevant, and it's hard to see how one can make a polite nod to the sexism which enters the room but then pretend that it is powerless in affecting how high a woman climbs.  It also doesn't follow that those feminists who have questioned Twitter's lack of diversity (a word I dislike, as you know, preferring real fairness) are people who want something for nothing or that they wish to have empty tokens of womanhood on those boards. 

And yes, women are not fifty percent of all workers in high tech fields, so it would be unrealistic to expect them to be fifty percent of the top layers.  But surely some percentage higher than negligible would better reflect true talents?

On the Government Shutdown. Who Needs Governments, Anyway?

The government shutdown is a good time to think about the roles of governments.  We get far too many images of the government as a family, especially from the Republicans in the US but also sometimes from president Obama and other Democrats.  Thus, we are told that just like a family the government must live within its means, that there must be belt-tightening during bad times, that a balanced budget each and every year is the ideal for the government just as it is for families.

But of course families borrow money at certain times, for housing, for education and for larger purchases, and families accrue positive net savings at other times.

More importantly, a government is NOT like a family.  It's a government.  It controls military troops, it maintains law courts and police departments, it has an important role to play in coordinating the fight against epidemics and in guaranteeing clean water and safe infrastructure for all.  The environment and its protection need coordination and that coordination needs organizations which have the power to enforce the agreed-upon rules of cooperation.  Those are called governments.

And that paragraph is only about those parts of the government which even the conservatives support.  I'd argue that the role of the government in its insurance aspect (the safety net aspect) is much larger, because such safety nets are necessary under the trapeze artists we are forced to become in the free-market-experiment.  A great entrepreneur might not become an entrepreneur at all in a country where health insurance is tied to working for someone else, especially if she or he has a family and someone in the family is chronically ill.  Poorly fed and poorly educated people are not good workers, and neither are people who spend all their energy in struggling against abject poverty.  In the simplest of all senses, markets need buyers with money and the energy to use for buying.

Note how it's possible to defend the government from the side of the "free market" gods, too.  For markets themselves operate within structures and frameworks which are created by governments.  Even though firms complain about government oversight, in a more fundamental sense it is the government which provides the foundation for those markets to exist and also the rules which stop them from turning into pure anarchy. 

All these long and boring mutterings came about because I was thinking of the role of trust in social and economic interactions.  If you want to eat chicken tonight, you want to be reassured that the chicken won't give you salmonella.  And most of the time it is the role of the government to make sure of that.  Markets won't do it on their own, because fly-by-night firms have an incentive to unload their salmonella chickens on your plate, and because firms have the short-term incentive to cut costs wherever they can do so, and that includes quality control.

So one important government task is to uphold that trust we have, the belief that if I sign a contract to buy a house, on a mortgage, both the house will be turned over to me and the mortgage will be paid by me over time, according to the agreed-upon rules.   That's one narrow aspect of trust which the explosions in the housing and financial markets have reduced.  I now ogle all offers with great skepticism, and I no longer even know where my mortgage is held.  The people who hold it I might not have selected.  Thus, my trust is reduced, and that decreases my willingness to participate in the markets.

I'm sure you can think of other aspects of trust which have similar roots.  Those who believe that governments are so irrelevant that they can be drowned in bath-tubs should have a look at Somalia's recent trials and tribulations.  But there are examples closer to home, and I fear that we may learn more such examples if the government shutdown continues.

None of this means that governments can't be turned to evil or that any amount of government intervention is a good thing, of course.  But there are real and valid reasons for having a fairly large government section in modern societies.

And Another Religion On Women. This Gets Old.

This time it's the  Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints:

Also today, D. Todd Christofferson, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' Quorum of the Twelve, said in his speech that having women at home remains an essential part of society, and he cautioned against blurring feminine and masculine differences. His speech Saturday came during a two-day church conference in Salt Lake City.
Christofferson said women's "moral force" has kept societies on the righteous track for generations. He criticized feminist thinkers who view "homemaking with outright contempt."
He said overlooking the differences between men and women would lead to losing the complementary gifts of the two genders that work in harmony.
Also today, a group of about 200 feminist women were denied entrance to the all-male meeting of Mormon priesthood holders.
The Ordain Women group marched from a nearby park to a standby line at outside the meeting this evening to highlight what they perceive as gender inequality.

Where to begin?   The power is defined by the priesthood holders and they are all men.  The position of the church is defined by them, the terms used are defined by them, and the "proper role" of women is defined by them.  Thus, the idea that feminist thinkers (supposedly) view "homemaking with outright contempt" doesn't make Mr. Christofferson want to do any homemaking himself or to let any homemakers into the priesthood.

Neither does Mr. Christofferson want to let that presumed "moral force" of women have any real impact on his church or on the outside society.   Given that he argues it is women's "moral force" that has kept societies on the righteous track for generations, it is extremely weird that his church has an all-male leadership.

Then there's the fact that historically speaking the ideal that women are at home (not working at anything else but homemaking) and men in the public sector (doing all the work for income) is a fairly recent one.  The idea of one breadwinner per family has probably never been practical for the vast majority of people, and it's certainly not practical today.

But in a different sense Mr. Christofferson is naturally completely correct:  The all-male Mormon church leadership IS dependent on the willing (often unpaid) work of women, and the goodies the all-male church leadership receives in life is also dependent on a certain definition of what "complementary gifts" between the genders might mean.  Thus, women might be given the gift of "moral force" but they are not allowed to exert that, ultimately.

Reading for Oct 7, 2013. On the Affordable Care Act and Who Is Allowed To Judge The Game.

The government shutdown may have been months in planning.  The reason:  The desire to kill the Affordable Care Act (ACA).  The price of that killing is immaterial. 

I don't have any inside information on this, but it should be set against the very common "both sides do it" argument which I keep reading.

Speaking of the ACA, this story made me want to uninstall my brain.  An example:

Collett counts himself among the 29 percent of people who said in an NBCNews/Kaiser poll they are angry about the health reform law. “The issue for me is that it is not the proper role of government,” he said.
Collett, who is married and has 10 children, says the kids are covered by Medicaid, the joint state-federal health insurance plan for people with low income and children who are not covered.
But it’s “absolutely not okay,” that they are, Collett says quickly. “There are a lot of people out there that’ll cry foul."
Collett, whose children are home-schooled, likens taking Medicaid to sending children to public school. He also does not approve of government-funded public schools. “The government is taking your money. They are spending it on things they shouldn’t be,” he says. “Trying to get whatever you can back -- I have nothing against that. You have to at some point try and get your tax dollars back.”

Here's a fun piece of news for you:

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is expected to be one of nine people appointed to the College Football Playoff selection committee. Rice is pegged to join Archie Manning, former NCAA Executive Vice President Tom Jernstedt, former Big East Commissioner Mike Tranghese, and an athletic director from each of the five power conferences, a a person with knowledge of the selection process told USA TODAY Sports. The ESPN College GameDay crew discussed the selection committee this morning at Northwestern, where analyst David Pollack intimated that women are not qualified to be on the committee.


“Now I’m going to stick my foot in my mouth, probably,” Pollack said. “I want people on this committee that can watch tape, that have played football, that are around football, that can tell you different teams on tape, not on paper.” Host Chris Fowler asked Pollack if he was implying that no women should be allowed on the committee, and Pollack said “yeah,” as the rest of the crew disagreed.

Pollack would probably then agree that men shouldn't have anything to do with obstetrics or gynecology, right?