On Ebola And Panic

This is a good article on some of the reasons why our hind-brains take over when a new and poorly understood threat to our well-being or survival rears its ugly head (for comparison, check out my theory in the postscript of this post).

Fear of Ebola is almost as difficult to treat as Ebola right now, or so I suspect, based on reading the comments to various articles and the articles themselves.  Because we lack information (and because the CDC and the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital also seemed to lack information or used information incorrectly), no amount of precautions seems excessive to some.  Indeed, no amount of precautions seems sufficient to some because of the way our brains have been triggered.

I am not arguing that all those fears are groundless.  The problem is that we don't know which fears have grounds and which fears are just hovering around for company.  It is clearly the case that end-stage Ebola patients (and those recently deceased from it) are extremely infectious and that those who care for them (or handle the dead) are at great risk of infection if proper safeguards are not used.

But it's less clear how infectious a patient is earlier in the illness, even after the first symptoms have appeared.   For instance,  the individuals who shared an apartment with Thomas Eric Duncan, the first Ebola patient in Dallas, have not yet developed Ebola, despite sharing living space with him after he became symptomatic*.  The two more recent cases, Nina Pham and Amber Vinson,  are nurses who cared for Duncan when he was in a later stage of the illness.  It's also clear that they were not sufficiently trained or protected.

Thomas Eric Duncan himself caught Ebola from a patient who died on the same day.

The point I'm trying to make is that the degree of risk of infection might depend on the stage of an Ebola patient's disease.  Much of the spread of Ebola in West Africa is linked to funeral customs which encourage touching the corpse of a person who has died quite recently, and that's the time when the disease is most viral.

If this theory is correct, the risk for individuals who shared a plane flight  with Amber Vinson would be considerably lower than the risk she herself faced when caring for Mr. Duncan (not to mention the fact that Ebola is not an airborne disease but requires body fluid contact with either cuts/scratches/wounds or mucous membranes).

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*An alternative explanation is proposed here.

Added later:  Here's a list of more likely threats to agonize over if you are so inclined.

The Gamergate Gets Nastier

For those of you who are lucky enough not to know anything about Gamergate, these three articles  offer a comprehensive (though much-diluted and sterilized) version of what has been going on:    The Future of Culture Wars*,   Why everybody is fighting and Misogyny.  The most recent female developer getting online threats is Brianna Wu.  This article shows the sort of gentle messages she received for a mocking tweet and the consequences to her and her family.

It is hard to measure numbers on Twitter or social media in general.  This means that the number of truly hateful participants in the Gamergate cannot be easily estimated.  But it's not one or two, though neither is it anywhere close to the total number of people playing games.

Now at least one of the haters is  making threats against an institution, Utah State University where Anita Sarkeesian was scheduled to speak on Wednesday.  Sarkeesian is one of the targets of misogynistic wrath in Gamergate:

 Utah State University plans to move forward with an event featuring a prominent Canadian-American author, blogger and feminist, despite threats of terror, a spokesman said Tuesday evening.
The decision came after several staff members received an anonymous email terror threat on Tuesday morning from someone claiming to be a student proposing “the deadliest school shooting in American history” if it didn't cancel the Wednesday lecture.
The email author wrote that “feminists have ruined my life and I will have my revenge, for my sake and the sake of all the others they've wronged.“

Sarkeesian canceled the event because the Utah police could not guarantee her safety or the safety of her audience.  The university statement:

Anita Sarkeesian has canceled her scheduled speech for tomorrow following a discussion with Utah State University police regarding an email threat that was sent to Utah State University. During the discussion, Sarkeesian asked if weapons will be permitted at the speaking venue. Sarkeesian was informed that, in accordance with the State of Utah law regarding the carrying of firearms, if a person has a valid concealed firearm permit and is carrying a weapon, they are permitted to have it at the venue.

This particular case is an intersection of several different ideas (think of a Venn diagram):  The role of online misogyny (the attacks focus on the person's gender, threaten sexual violence, use the equivalence of "cunt" with an uppity woman and so on), the capture of the most visible part of the Gamergate movement by misogynists from various places on the net (4chan, some meninist sites?), the deeper philosophical questions about who owns games, who decides if presenting women as salivating tidbits and victims is AOK or not (entitlement, fear of losing what one enjoys) and so on, the anti-gun-control laws in Utah (guns in the audience!),  the lack of adequate diagnosis and treatment for mental illness and so on and so on.

On the latter, the author of the anonymous e-mail expresses admiration of Mark Lépine, the butcher of Montreal and presents a somewhat similar psychological profile of warped beliefs: a belief in the global rule of feminists, a belief in this imaginary group of powerful and evil feminists being the cause of all bad things that ever happened to that person and the belief that killing that group is the appropriate remedy.  Indeed, if we switch "women" for "feminists" we get the pattern of beliefs that Elliot Rodger, the butcher of Santa Barbara, demonstrated.

It's not possible to judge how realistic this most recent threat might be.  But it's worth noting that there are some sites which fall under the rubric of meninism or MRA/MRM (Men's Rights Activists/Men's Rights Movement) where the idea that feminists are demonic monsters who run this planet for the purposes of squashing all men under stiletto shoes is  accepted as a basic truth.

In reality, of course, feminists are not exactly running this world (in some places, such as the so-called Islamic State women are not running anything but perhaps away), feminists are all individual men and women with both good and bad sides, and the vast majority of feminists work to make the world a fairer place.  This reality correction doesn't reach the people it should reach, especially on certain misogynistic online sites and in several comments threads to anything which is about feminism.

Then the real question I have:  Was Sarkeesian's speech going to be on the topic of online harassment of female game developers?  If that is the case, how ironic that the event was canceled because of threats violence.

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*This article is especially good on Christina Hoff Sommers, the famous anti-feminist, carrying water for the gamers.  Her argument seems to be that the presentation of women in games as sexual objects or victims is perfectly understandable given the young-male-demographic of the market.

Hilarious Stuff: Ugly-As-Sin Woman Politicians and Ebola Muslim Arachnids

1.  Steve Vaillancourt, a Republican politician from the state of New Hampshire, shares with us his views on how important looks are for politicians:

A Republican state lawmaker wrote in a blog post last week that U.S. Rep. Ann McLane Kuster (D-N.H.) will likely lose her re-election race in November because she is "ugly as sin" and "looks matter in politics."
The New Hampshire blog Miscellany Blue first reported that New Hampshire state Rep. Steve Vaillancourt (R) compared Kuster to a "drag queen" in his lengthy post and said she will probably lose to Republican challenger Marilinda Garcia, who is "truly attractive." He writes that his blog post is politically relevant because he "seem[s] to recall" some new polling that shows "an attractive candidate can have as much as a seven to ten point advantage over a less attractive (or even an unattractive) candidate."

And here is a picture of Mr. Vaillancourt:

 I wish I had Mr. Vaillancourt's self-esteem but then he views the question of looks from a different angle altogether, as something that doesn't apply to him at all.  Though goddesses are naturally gorgeous in every possible way, with shining scales and very sharp fangs.

You might want to link the "ugly as sin" discussion here to my earlier post on women hating their bodies so that you can go "aha!"

2.  This pretend-front-page from a British comedy site hits the sore spot in our click-baiting media:

3.  For your palate cleaning final course in this meal, Eva Cassidy.  This is not hilarious.  It's beautiful.

Do You Hate Your Body? The Glamour Magazine Survey.

According to a new survey by Glamour magazine, women's body hating is more common now than it was thirty years ago.  I haven't tried to find this year's actual survey, to see how the respondents were selected and to judge whether they would look similar in relevant ways to the respondents of that older survey from 1984.

However boring all that might be, it matters.  If the two surveys didn't scoop up women from roughly the same age, ethnic, racial and income categories then the two cannot be directly used as telling us about what has changed in the society.  Because they might have scooped up a different mix of women then and now.

But let's assume that the work was done properly.  You can read the summary of the findings here*.

Tantalizingly, the summary hints that men were included in this year's respondent group but we are not told very much about how men hated or loved their bodies or what that emotion might depend on.

Instead, the summary focuses on increased focus on pictures via social media, the need to get a lot of "likes" on your selfie in Facebook and the fact that you now get daily reminders of how pretty (or carefully selected) the pictures of your friends or acquaintances are.

Guess what the recommendations at the bottom of the survey summary piece were when I read it?  The four included these two: The Look That Men Find Most Attractive and Celebrities Who Have Completely Transformed Their Bodies.  The tangled webs of what determines one's body image, who sells the need to fix that image and so on!

The fashion, cosmetic and dieting industries have a pretty big stake in keeping women unhappy with how they look without expensive help.

My apologies if my coverage of an important topic so far sounds flippant**.  That's because of the surreal framing of a survey carried out by a fashion magazine, utterly dependent on keeping women interested in physical and visual self-improvement.  It's great that Glamour dares to go there, of course, but the solutions the summary offers are all of the individualistic kind.

They are not without value, but they will not change the societal pressures for women to be pretty, for women to be judged as adequately feminine or sexually desirable and so on or the racial and ethnic models of what is beautiful.
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*I really would have liked to see the ranking of various items in the "what makes me happy" question, with percentages attached to each.  We are only told that men ranked doing well at work first and that women ranked losing weight first.

Indeed, I would have liked to see all the frequency distributions in that survey, including data on the average weights and job positions of the men and women in it, to see whether we are comparing apples with apples or with pinstriped bananas there.

**Poor body image can result in illness, it drains a person's energy from other uses, it locks people into vicious cycles of dieting and not-dieting, it offers a button for others to press and so on.

The Nobel Peace Prize 2014. For the Sake of Children.

Probably everybody knows who the recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize are this year:

Malala Yousafzai, who is seventeen years old, and Kailash Satyarthi, who is sixty, were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday morning—for, in the committee’s words, “their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education.”
Satyarthi, who is Indian, is a man who has fought for children for decades; Malala, who is Pakistani, is a child, and a fighter herself.

Both recipients are clearly worth the prize (though perhaps not all prior recipients look quite so worthy now coughObamacough), and I'm happy about this year's decision.  At the same time, this particular Prize always wears an activist or political dress.  This year:

The committee said, in its announcement, that it “regards it as an important point for a Hindu and a Muslim, an Indian and a Pakistani, to join in a common struggle for education and against extremism.” If the committee had bypassed Malala, as it did last year, one suspicion would have been that it was afraid of positioning the Nobel as a rebuke to the Islamic world alone. Perhaps some element of that was at work, but if so, the solution is a valuable one. Here, again, complexity adds strength to the committee’s message.

I'm not sure what the committee's views of the danger of bypassing Malala Yousafzai might have been, but she is not celebrated by all Pakistanis*.  Some regard her as playing the Western tune in the current dance macabre between "religious extremists" and "Western colonizers", to use the labels the opposition tags on each group,  and her focus on the education of girls matters in this context,  because the extreme Islamists are not at all keen on Western education or the education of girls.

I support education for everybody.  It just might be the secret weapon which will make this world better:  Empowering all individuals to read widely, to think widely and to develop the tools to affect their own lives.  It works, and that's why those in power so often wish either to steer education into purely crafts directions (cut here, screw there) for the benefit of corporations or ban certain groups from getting it altogether.
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*I should note that the article I link to doesn't give us any real ideas about how common those attitudes are.  They might be quite common are quite rare, based on a few tweets.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Gives Advice to Women. A Tragicomedy in Three Acts.

Here are the cheat notes for the tragicomedy:

Act I:  An event takes place to celebrate women in computing.  It's named after Grace Hopper who is pretty famous in that field.  Enter Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella with carefully considered advice for women:

He had been asked to give his advice to women who are uncomfortable requesting a raise. His response: "It's not really about asking for the raise, but knowing and having faith that the system will actually give you the right raises as you go along." Not asking for raise, he added, is "good karma" that would help a boss realize that the employee could be trusted and should have more responsibility.

The Greek Chorus:  But what about women not being assertive in salary negotiations as the cause for their lower earnings?  Chicks don't ask.  Chicks don't ask.  Chicks don't ask.  (In a sad and droning tone) .

Act II:  Enter Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella with a carefully considered apology for his lines in Act I:

But his comments caused an uproar online, and Microsoft posted a memo from him on its website. In it, Nadella said he answered the question "completely wrong" and that he thinks "men and women should get equal pay for equal work. And when it comes to career advice on getting a raise when you think it's deserved, Maria's advice was the right advice. If you think you deserve a raise, you should just ask."

The Greek Chorus:  You should just ask.  You should just ask. You should just ask.  Even though asking doesn't necessarily work for women.*

Act III: Ongoing ruminations from various actors, groups, while the Greek Chorus hums in the background.

Here are my ruminations:

1.  I want to get invited as a VIP in a conference for goats which teaches about some weird disease in them.   That's because I know nothing about goat health care and I could be ready to elaborate on that ignorance within five minutes!  Turpentine should work (at least it works in sheep in Terry Pratchett's Diskworld fantasy books).

The above paragraph is a joke, because this play is not all tragedy, right?  I'm not comparing women to goats (because there are also gentleman goats) and I'm not comparing getting paid less or being kept out of top jobs in an industry with some weird goat illness (and this has nothing to do with Ebola, either).

The joke is a vague attempt to capture that astonishing readiness to talk about stuff one hasn't studied.   I take my war helmet off for that!  If it wasn't CEO-splaining it would be very brave, even foolhardy.

2.  Then there are the interesting though very muted defenses:  For example, the argument that Mr. Nadella was talking about everybody, not just she-goats, in that statement.  Everybody should abstain from asking raises because that way your good karma will reward you!  Also, corporations would save lots of money if all workers agreed to meekly take whatever happens to be in their wage packets.

Or the idea that Microsoft already takes care of all that is needed to get deserving people promoted:

"I think as an executive he was trying to say, at Microsoft we have this whole team of people who handle compensation, and if you deserve a raise we will give it to you," Larssen added. "Obviously it came out very wrong, very sexist." 

3.  But I loved this bit:

Larssen thinks it's not only the tone but the timing that played a role: "At a time every big tech company in America is trying to get more women involved, [Nadella's comments] struck a really different chord than the rest of the conversation." 

It's exactly what would have happened if the goats had used me as their health expert.  The big difference is that Mr. Nadella is supposed to know this stuff before he speaks, what with being the CEO of Microsoft,  and I wouldn't have been in that goat scenario.  That he didn't do his homework tells us an enormous amount about the value rankings in the industry.

The Greek Chorus:  Hum. Hum. Hum.  (Out of key).


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*A Wall Street Journal blog suggesting that Mr. Nadella's comments were meant for everyone, not just for women, nevertheless notes that:

Asking for more money remains one of the riskiest things a worker can do, particularly for women. In her research on gender, negotiation and leadership, Hannah Riley Bowles, a senior lecturer at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, has found that women are perceived as less likeable or appealing to work with when asking for more money–unless they can frame their request as a strategic opportunity for the company.

What To Read On Gender 10/9/14: Online Harassment of Women, The Wifey State And Millennial Parenting Roles.

1.  This piece on online harassment of women by Catherine Bruni and Soraya Chemaly covers a lot of ground and focuses on what Facebook, Twitter and so on do about protecting their users or not protecting their users and why.  Though Bruni and Chemaly focus on women as the targets of harassment, their arguments would apply to any demographic group facing concerted campaigns of online violent threats.

2.  Rebecca Traister does an interesting reversal of the conservative argument that single women vote for the Democrats because they want a "hubby state."

3.  A new report on the millennial generation in the US makes for interesting reading, though I'm not sure that all the data quoted in it applies only to Millennials.  Still, this table is interesting(p.10):

Table 1
Average Number of Hours
Year	Fathers	Mothers
1965	2.5	10.2
1975	2.6	8.6
1985	2.6	8.4
1995	4.2	9.6
2000	6.8	12.6
2005	6.8	13.6
2010	7.3	13.5
2011	7.3	13.5
Source:AmericanTimeUse,PewResearch Center analysis, http://www.pewresearch.org/data- trend/society-and-demographics/parental- time-use/

It describes the average number of hours fathers and mothers spend on parenting.  Things have changed from the 1960s, though some changes can't be explained by greater equality in sex roles:

Ramey and Ramey (2010) show that these increases have been particularly pronounced among college-educated parents, with college-educated mothers increasing their childcare time since the mid-1990s by over 9 hours per week, while less educated mothers increased their childcare time by only over 4 hours per week.

The report doesn't tell us if similar differences apply to college-educated fathers when compared to less educated fathers.

What's Under The Surface? Thoughts On Social Justice Work.

That's a wussy headline if there ever was one, but the question about what might be under the surface is not at all wussy.  I follow various discussions on Twitter and on blogs etc., and the one thing I don't see which is needed is going under the surface of opinions, emotions, protests, discussions of white privilege, male privilege, all sorts of privilege concepts.

Think of this inadequate parable:  You are floating on the surface of a lake, with others, and then you decide to make waves.  You create enormous waves, the surface is moving, something is happening.  You affect other swimmers, you share ideas, you create a movement.

But because of the nature of water, the waves settle down, the surface returns to calmness and all the swimmers are exhausted.

That's a little of what I see online.  The conversations can be necessary and interesting about how we talk about things, how we feel about things, how we define the way others are.  And perhaps opinions are altered, new movements created.

But what I fear is that the stuff below the surface remains as it ever was, or almost as it ever was.

That's because we need to dive deeper.  The institutions and the economic frameworks are what maintains the current systems, and it is those institutions and frameworks that need remodeling.  The surface level of the water depends on how much water there is and what the shape of the lake's bottom is.

I'm not arguing that talking about the way we talk about things wouldn't be useful.  But it's not sufficient.

To take an example from gender, it can be eye-opening for some to learn what the average earnings of Latinas are in comparison to, say, the average earnings of white Anglo men in the US.  But knowing those figures is not telling us anything about the causes of the differences.  For that we need to analyze discrimination, education differences and barriers to education, rates at which people from the two groups are first generation immigrants (with possible language problems or educational mismatches caused by moving from one country to another), gender roles within the overall US, the white Anglo parts of it, the Latino part of it and so on.

Mostly what I see online stops at that first sentence of the above paragraph, and that is true of many, many other topics.  Now, that approach is not without value and just getting people informed about something is tremendously important (and this is happening with respect to police brutality and race right now).  But that should only be the first step in a long staircase we need to climb.  The other steps must be about practical politics, about institutions and how to change them, about creating changes under the surface waters.

Three Short And Scrumptious Economic Posts: On Income Inequality and Lack of Information

1.  This is a neat bar graph about how the big economic cake is sliced and divided between various groups in the American economy.  It shows what has happened to the extra cake (income increases) in various economic expansions.  The latest expansion is passing most of that extra cake to the top ten percent of earners:

That's about how income inequality grows, right?   But what do people believe about income inequality in this country?

2.  A recent survey asking questions about what people believe CEOs here earn tells us this:

...Americans told researchers they thought CEO pay at major corporations was approximately 30 times more than their own. Actually, CEO pay averages 354 times what a worker earns at the same company.
Americans also said they thought the pay gap between CEOs and workers should be approximately 7 to 1. To achieve that ratio, workers would have to make $1.8 million each year, a separate study concluded.

Boggles your mind, doesn't it?  These results support earlier ones which suggest that Americans think general income inequality is a lot less than it actually is and would prefer even lower levels of inequality.  The Scandinavian ones.

To return to those CEOs, in other countries the multipliers are smaller.  From 2013 but still much bigger than the idea that CEOs would earn roughly thirty times as much as the average worker in the same company:

The ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay in neighboring Canada is 204, in Germany it's 147, in the U.K. it's 84, and in Japan it's just 67.

The Huffington Post piece notes that perhaps income inequality doesn't energize US voters because of this lack of information about its true size.  That may well be the case.  But it's also true that many not-rich in this country see themselves as just temporarily hampered potential billionaires whose interests lie with the top one percent and that class-based segregation in most everything further helps to disguise the magnitude of the differences.

3.  Speaking of lack of information:  The practice of maintaining secrecy about earnings in general is one reason why it's difficult for someone who suspects they are being paid less for discriminatory reasons to verify or falsify that.  If you don't know what others doing the same job are earning, how do you know if your pay is fair?

To take an example from gender differences in earnings, a Washington Post primer notes this:

 The one employer with relatively fair pay between men and women, Maatz said, is the federal government. Why? Because salary scales are published and widely known — so women, who historically have not negotiated for higher salaries, or are punished when they do — have more information about where to start.

That kind of transparency, among other provisions, is exactly what the Paycheck Fairness Act calls for.

Why Domestic Violence Prevention Programs Don't Work. My Comments on Tony Dokoupil's Article With That Title.

NBC News website adds another opinion piece to the NFL domestic abuse debate.  This one is headlined:  Why Domestic Violence Prevention Programs Don't Work.

Now take a breather and imagine some other headlines in the same family:  Why Twelve Step Programs Don't Work for Alcoholism.  Why Most Diets Don't Work For Permanent Weight Loss.

And sending people to prison doesn't work terribly well in stopping recidivism.

I probably shouldn't focus on that headline, because those who write the headlines are not those who write the articles.  The writer of the article puts the clothes on the topic, the headline writer puts on the clickbait hat, and often the hat is screamingly inappropriate for the clothing.

It's somewhat inappropriate in this case, because Tony Dokoupil's article is about two different programs:  First, those which aim to change the behavior of someone who has been sentenced for domestic abuse, and, second, general attempts to prevent domestic abuse in the next generation of men.

Dokoupil argues that neither one of those works.  Indeed, he is skeptical about the idea that misogyny or sexism (the view that abuse is based on feelings of entitlement about women and women's obedience) has that much to do with heterosexual men's abuse of their intimate partners:

But although ending sexism is a welcome goal, there’s little evidence to suggest that it’s the root cause of domestic violence, or that combating it with slogans and applause lines will put abusive men on a gentler path.

In 2009 Oxford University Press addressed this evidence-hole in “Intimate Partner Violence,” a 572-page compendium of what we know and how. In the section on big picture theories, three prominent scholars, including one from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, called the lack of support for the sexism theory and other top-down notions of change “perhaps the biggest gap” in the field.

Even more troubling is what seems to happen when sexism is used as the basis for treatment. The short answer is nothing, according to Washington State’s Institute for Public Policy. The team of taxpayer-funded researchers recently reviewed all the literature on the sexism model. The impact on an abusers' likelihood of re-offending: “not significantly different from zero.”

Alex Campbell on Battered Women And The Failure To Protect Children

Alex Campbell has written a worthwhile article on the way laws in several US states can punish a battered woman when her child is murdered by the batterer (the article contents include descriptions of brutal violence aimed at children).  The objective behind the laws that sometimes achieve that result is a laudable one:  to make sure that parents protect their children:

At least 29 states have laws that explicitly criminalize parents’ failure to protect their children from abuse. In Texas, where Lindley lives, the crime is known as injury to a child “by omission.” In other states, it goes by “permitting child abuse” or “enabling child abuse.” In addition, prosecutors in at least 19 states can use other, more general laws against criminal negligence in the care of a child, or placing a child in a dangerous situation.
These laws make parents responsible for what they did not do. Typically, people cannot be prosecuted for failing to thwart a murder; they had to have actually helped carry it out. But child abuse is an exception, and the logic behind these laws is simple: Parents and caregivers bear a solemn duty to protect their children.

These laws are not all the same.  Some, such as the Texas law, allow extremely long sentences to be given to the parent who failed to protect.  Only a few state laws allow any consideration of the possibility that the parent accused of failure to protect might have been another victim of a domestic abuser.

And that is what most of Campbell's article addresses:  That battered women might be given prison sentences as long as forty-five years for failing to protect their children:

No one knows how many women have suffered a fate like Lindley’s, but looking back over the past decade, BuzzFeed News identified 28 mothers in 11 states sentenced to at least 10 years in prison for failing to prevent their partners from harming their children. In every one of these cases, there was evidence the mother herself had been battered by the man.
Almost half, 13 mothers, were given 20 years or more. In one case, the mother was given a life sentence for failing to protect her son, just like the man who murdered the infant boy. In another, the sentences were effectively the same: The killer got life, and the mother got 75 years, of which she must serve at least 63 years and nine months. In yet another, the mother got a longer sentence than the man who raped her son. In one more, a father fractured an infant girl’s toe, femur, and seven ribs and was sentenced to two years; for failing to intervene, the mother got 30.

These cases might not be a random pick from all cases where a child is killed by the father, stepfather or boyfriend of the mother.  But they do suggest that mothers are held to a very high standard of what it means not to protect a child.  More evidence on that comes when the reverse types of killings are analyzed:  where the mother (or the female partner of the father) is the killer:

The laws against failing to prevent child abuse are written to cover both fathers and mothers. And, in fact, women perpetrate 34% of serious or fatal cases of physical abuse of children, according to the latest congressionally mandated national study of child abuse. But interviews and BuzzFeed News’ analysis of cases show that fathers rarely face prosecution for failing to stop their partners from harming their children. Overwhelmingly, women bear the weight of these laws.
BuzzFeed News found a total of 73 cases of mothers who, regardless of whether they were battered, were sentenced to 10 years or more. For fathers, BuzzFeed News found only four cases.
White, Lindley’s prosecutor, couldn’t recall prosecuting any fathers for failure to protect from physical abuse.
“Mothers are held to a very different standard,” said Kris McDaniel-Miccio, a law professor at the University of Denver whose expertise is domestic violence. She said that the lopsided application of these laws reflects deeply ingrained social norms that women should sacrifice themselves for their children.

Some of that difference may be due to the fact that women are more likely to have custody than men when the birth parents of the child are not together.  But looking at those cases in some detail would be useful, to see whether mothers and fathers are treated as equally responsible to protect their children.

Be Very Very Afraid. The Reason, Right Now, Is Ebola.

It has taken me a few hours to recover from the mistake of trying to absorb today's news and tweets and soundbites, because the overall message I get (whether that is the message that's being sent) is to panic.  And today we are to panic about Ebola in the US.

Panicking is the mature and adult reaction, my friends*.  Or at least the headline writers believe that clicks will rise if a bit of panic is in the air.  Thus, even  sound and rational articles about the Dallas Ebola case have headlines which  ask whether we should all panic or at least describe people who are not sure if they should panic**.  And some articles can barely squeeze in a few facts about Ebola. 

Why not just give all the information about how one can catch Ebola and how one cannot catch it?  To their credit, most articles try to do some of that (though not all), but the information is often buried deep in the body of the article or qualified by terms such as "health authorities claim."

And few write-ups seem to understand the public health actions of tracking and containing.  For example, that Daily Male Mail's screaming headline "Up to 100 exposed already in Dallas Ebola shambles" is such utter rubbish.  The point is to create panic.  This is what that 100-people figure actually represents: 

The immediate priority of health officials is contacting all those who might have come into contact with Mr. Duncan after he became symptomatic, which is when the disease can spread.

Health officials said to think of the contact tracing as moving in concentric circles. Health officials focused first on those who had the closest and most intimate contact with Mr. Duncan after he became symptomatic because they are at the greatest risk of infection. That group includes at least four family members and three medics who are being isolated.

 The next group includes those who had more casual contact with Mr. Duncan after he grew sick. More than a dozen people in this category will monitored by the authorities for 21 days, which is the longest documented time it has taken for this strain of Ebola to begin to cause illness.

These people will have their temperatures checked daily but are free to go about their daily routines unless they begin to show symptoms.

 The final group includes the secondary contacts — those who came into contact with people who came into contact with Mr. Duncan. Since the risk of infection in this group is minimal, they are not monitored daily. But their names are put in a database in case any one of them unexpectedly becomes ill and so authorities know how to reach them quickly if needed.

All bolds are mine.  The point is that hundred people most likely have not been exposed.  The reason they are identified is for the public health authorities to define the largest possible circle within which any possible new cases could come from, so that action can be swift and future spread of the disease can be stopped. That's how epidemics are fought.

So.  Whatever the problems in the treatment of the first Ebola case in the US in Dallas (and there were problems), we are not all going to die of Ebola and we cannot get it from asymptomatic individuals who happened to have been in the same airplane with us.  Come to think of it, the ordinary flu is killing a lot more people right now in this country, I'd bet.

I understand that new threats trigger an odd primitive reaction of this type in us humans (remember SARS?)***, while we can comfortably live with pretty high risks of death from traffic accidents or the flu.  But we could override that primitive reaction by vaccinating ourselves with all the relevant facts.

On the other hand, things could be much, much worse.  For instance, libertarians could be in power in Texas.  Here's a libertarian opinion on the proper role of the government in controlling communicable diseases:

Carla Howell, National Libertarian Party Political Director, says “governmental bureaucracies” involved with epidemic control are ineffective compared to private and voluntary efforts, in addition to costing too much money and violating individual rights. 

"The sole purpose of government is to protect our life, liberty and property from harm caused by others in those few instances where the private sector cannot do a better job," Howell writes in an e-mail to Newsweek. “Containing Ebola in Africa is best left to private charities such as Doctors Without Borders rather than the NIH [National Institutes of Health] or the CDC. Screening is better handled by airlines and private hospitals that are both liable for damages and fully free of government red tape. (Sadly no such hospitals exist today in the United States).”

Mmm.   Bolds are mine.  The point Howell misses is that the control of epidemics is  one of those areas where everyone  agrees that we need the government.  Even arch-conservatives agree.

That Howell doesn't  suggests to me that she is unaware of the public goods/private goods dichotomy.  The private sector cannot do as well as the public sector in controlling epidemics, because of that public good aspect.  This is true of for-profit firms but it's also true of nonprofit organizations, because they lack the enforcement ability which is necessary when patients must be quarantined or areas closed off or entrants to a country checked.

Isn't it nice that the many panic topics for today don't include libertarians running the US public health system?

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*As that silly rhyme tells us:  "When in doubt or danger, run in circles, scream and shout. " It should really be "When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout."  Rhymes better.

**Inside this story, for example,  the relevant information can be found, but you have to search for it:

None of the children have symptoms, and the chances that they passed the virus to other people at the school are extremely low, health officials said. Even when people are infected with Ebola, they are not contagious until they get develop symptoms. And even then, the virus can be transmitted only through bodily fluids and close physical contact.

***It has several characteristics.  One is the fear caused by not-knowing, the fear of something new, a sinister monster rising from the fog, suddenly.   Another one is an odd insistence for zero risks as the only acceptable ones (when we accept positive risks in most areas of life), the refusal to be reassured by an expert stating that something has an almost-zero probability of occurring.  A third one is the near-total focus on the new threat.  All these are probably useful behavior patterns when a new wild predator, say, entered the area where prehuman humans (heh) lived, but is less beneficial when it is applied to ISIS, SARS, bird flu, Ebola and so on, especially by those who are far away from the actual threats and get the reaction triggered by news. 

Training To Be Batman's Wife. Gender Lessons From Children's Clothing.

Here are two t-shirt stories about gender.  They cropped up almost simultaneously.

 The first one, by Melissa at Shakesville, is about t-shirts licensed and approved by DC comics:

On the left, we've got a men's shirt that depicts a scene inspired by Superman/Wonder Woman, which, you'll remember, was a romance themed title developed last year to appeal to women since why would we ever want to read a comic book that's not about kissing? (edit: it's actually from a cover of Justice League 12, however, because DC does sure love their crossovers) The text reads "Score! Superman does it again!"...

Also, Wonder Woman's a lasso-less "it" now, we guess. Yeah, that's why her arm's all weird at the bottom of the shirt; she's supposed to be lassoing Superman in the picture. But why present a powerful female superhero using one of her trademark symbols as a marker of sexual agency when you can instead present her as a stiff, rigid board to be scored upon?

On the right is a shirt from the juniors department of Walmart, which says "Training to be Batman's," and then "wife" in a different more stereotypically feminine font. It's a little known fact, but you are not allowed to spell the word "wife" in any font other than cursive.

The second story, from Canada, is pretty similar.  It is about onesies for infants for sale at Target:

Baby onesies at a Target store that label little boys as future superheroes and little girls as their dating partners has sparked online outrage after two University of Waterloo professors called attention to their message. 
...

Target Canada responded to questions from CBC News about the pyjamas in an email on Tuesday.
Company spokeswoman Kalynn Crump replied: "Target strives to treat all our guests with respect, and it is never our intent to offend anyone. We appreciate the feedback we’ve received and will continue to listen to our guests to ensure we offer merchandise that appeals to, and reflects, our diverse guest population.”
When asked if Target would remove the onesies from the shelves, Crump said Target didn't "have any plans to make adjustments to our assortment at this time."

There's the Superman S-symbol in both, but the message is a bit different for boy and girl babies.

The topic isn't the most important in the world but worth thinking about.  For example, try to imagine what would happen if we did a gender-reversal on those messages.  I doubt a single t-shirt or onesie would be sold.  Second, note the way the female messages are preparation for the female sexual role, even though these pieces of clothing are meant for children.  

But I get that these are jokes intended for the people reading the messages in the clothes, and most of those are adults.  Even the different script for the word "wife" in the upper picture is because the idea is that the reader will get surprised by that addition:  "So she's in training to be Batman?  No, but Batman's wife!  Heh."

In a way t-shirts and onesies of this type are training tools. 

What's Fun To Watch Today

On the net, that is.  You might begin with this Republican voter ad aimed at women.  It's utterly hilarious:



Note the equation between picking a bridegroom (or a bridal dress!) and picking a candidate, the attempt to make the debate a mother-daughter one and the idea that political issues are like the cost of a wedding dress. I love it because it shows how very hard someone thought about how to interest women in the Republican Party, then the light bulb: weddings!

Besides, I thought that prospective brides are supposed to be Bridezillas who want to the most expensive wedding dress possible?  At least that's the danger with the stereotyping the Republican Party does here.

To balance out that one, Nadia Kamil does feminist burlesque

Girl Brains And Boy Brains, Take #456789. By Dr. Michael Mosley

The BBC Horizons had a program on this idea:

Do you have a "male" or "female" brain? Are there really significant brain differences between the sexes and if so, do these differences matter? BBC Horizon investigates.
When it comes to the tricky and explosive question of how much, if at all, male and female behaviour is driven by brain differences, Professor Alice Roberts and I sit on different sides of the fence.
I believe that our brains, like our bodies, are shaped by exposure to hormones in the womb and this may help explain why males tend to do better at some tasks (3D rotation), while women tend to do better at others (empathy skills), although there is, of course, an awful lot of overlap and social pressure involved.
Alice, on the other hand, thinks these differences are largely spurious, the result of how the tests are carried out. She worries that such claims may discourage girls from going into science.

The debate between Roberts and Mosley may have been quite good, even wonderful, but I'm not writing about that since I haven't watched it.  Instead, I want to write about this advertisement for it by Michael Mosley.  Or call it priming?

Yes, it's priming.  We are introduced to Mosley's arguments in great detail, from 3D rotation to empathy skills to, later, specific pieces of research.  We are not introduced to any of Roberts' arguments, except in the general sense that she believes the differences (all of them?) are largely spurious, based on how the tests are carried out, and worries about girls being discouraged from going into science.  Thus, we get one set of arguments in great detail and nothing but vague noises from the other set of arguments.  Perhaps this is understandable.  Mosley obviously wants to present his point of view as the correct one.  But it's important to note how the story is told.

This is particularly important, because the two pieces of research Mosley particularly mentions are pretty controversial ones!  He loves the work of Simon Baron-Cohen (the PS to this post is a good explanation why Baron-Cohen's basic theory about what distinguishes the female brain from the male brain is problematic) and he loves the Ingalhalikar et al. brain imaging study (which I covered in some detail here and its reception here and here).  To pick those two as examples of solid and sound research on biological sex differences in the brain is a bit shocking.

Mosley likes Baron-Cohen's idea of the female brain as mainly good at empathizing:  understanding the emotions of others and relating to them,  and the male brain as mainly good at systemizing:  the analysis, creation and understanding of systems.  If that sounds a bit like the old argument that women are emotional and men are rational, well, it is in the same family.  There's no earthly reason why a person cannot be both empathizing and systemizing or (almost) neither*, yet the basic theory  treats the two as competing and sex-linked characteristics.  And that's why men are more likely to be nerds:

One of the scientists who has most strongly influenced my beliefs is Professor Simon Baron-Cohen of Cambridge University.
He argues that, broadly speaking, there are two different "brain types". There are empathisers, who are good at identifying how other people are thinking or feeling, and there are systemisers, people who are more interested in trying to take apart and analyse systems i.e. people who are a bit nerdy.
We are all a mix of the two, but most of us are more one than the other. Men tend to sit more along the systemising end of the spectrum, women at the empathising end, though there are plenty of exceptions.

Got it?  If not, you should go back and re-read the end of this post.  Then notice that Mosley, too, interprets empathizing and systemizing as mostly mutually exclusive characteristics.

And created by biology, especially by the amount of testosterone a fetus may have experienced during pregnancy:

But is this simply the product of social conditioning? Professor Baron-Cohen thinks not, that exposure to different levels of hormones in the womb can influence the brain and subsequent behavour. Some of his most intriguing findings have come from on-going research into a large group of children who have been followed from before they were born.
At around 16 weeks gestation, the children's mothers had an amniocentesis test, which involves collecting samples of the fluid that bathes the womb. The researchers measured levels of testosterone in the fluid and have since discovered intriguing links between those levels and behaviour.
"The higher the child's pre-natal testosterone" Professor Baron-Cohen told me, "the slower they were to develop socially. They showed, for example, less eye contact at their first birthday". They also had a smaller vocabulary when they were toddlers and showed less empathy when they were primary school age.
On the other hand he found that being exposed to higher levels of testosterone in the womb seems to enhance some spatial abilities. "Children with higher levels of pre-natal testosterone were faster to find specific shapes hidden within an overall design."

On US Infant Mortality

Why is the US infant mortality rate so high?  The international rankings place US somewhere in the vicinity of Croatia, despite the US being about three times as wealthy.  A new study by Alice Chen, Emily Oster and Heidi Williams uses microdata to compare the US with Finland (picked for having very low infant mortality rates) and Austria (picked for both representing the average in Europe and for data comparability). 

The study suggests a greater role for post-neonatal mortality (deaths in months one to  twelve) than earlier studies which focused more on neonatal mortality rates.  It  concludes that the post-neonatal disadvantage of the US is driven:

almost exclusively by excess inequality in the US: infants born to white, college-educated, married US mothers have similar mortality to advantaged women in Europe. Our results suggest that high mortality in less advantaged groups in the postneonatal period is an important contributor to the US infant mortality disadvantage.

In other words, the fates of infants born to less advantaged women in Austria and Finland are better, on average, than the fates of infants born to similarly less advantaged women in the US. 

Why that is the case isn't completely clear from the study.  For example, identifying the causes of death after the neonatal period is helpful, but not completely so.  My guess is that part of the difference lies in the fact that the less advantaged groups in the US are less likely to have low-cost access to health care or a permanent relationship with a health care provider. 

The concrete recommendation the authors of the study make focus on the idea of home nurse visits for new parents:

Identifying particular policies which could be eff ective is beyond the scope of this paper and is an area that deserves more research attention. One policy worth mentioning is home nurse visits. Both Finland and Austria, along with much of the rest of Europe, have policies which bring nurses or other health professionals to visit parents and infants at home. These visits combine well-baby checkups with caregiver advice and support. While such small scale programs exist in the US, they are far from universal, although provisions of the A ffordable Care Act will expand them to some extent. 

Randomized evaluations of such programs in the US have shown evidence of mortality reductions, notably from causes of death we identify as important such as SIDS and accidents.

At least in Finland (I'm not sure about Austria) these operate in conjunction with the ante-natal clinics, as part of a process which begins before the woman gives birth and continues with checkups by specialized nurses, first at the home of the family and later at the same clinics that were used for ante-natal care.  Put in another way, all this is an example of accessible health care.  

Here Be Dragons. What US Conservatives Think About US Liberals.

"Here Be Dragons" is what was assumed to have been written on the old maps when the mapmaker didn't know anything about some far distant area.  I always loved that optimistic statement!  The dragons must be somewhere, after all.  But it looks as if the only place where that sentence truly was written was on one old globe.

I was reminded of those lovely dragons when I read this article about how American conservatives view American liberals.  Two snippets:

Here’s the view from the Heritage Foundation: Liberalism creates self-indulgent, licentious hedonists willing to cede every other kind of freedom to an increasingly authoritarian government.
“Give up your economic freedom, give up your political freedom, and you will be rewarded with license,” said Heritage’s David Azerrad, describing the reigning philosophy of the left. “It’s all sex all the time. It’s not just the sex itself—it’s the permission to indulge.”

And:

But liberalism isn’t just about pleasure-seeking and moral relativity: The oppressive nature of liberal government has crept into our popular culture as well, warns Voegeli, senior editor of the Claremont Review of Books. Coupled with the demand for tolerance and self-actualization is the growing tyranny of political correctness.
According to liberals’ worldview, “humans are too psychologically frail to maintain their self-esteem when faced with harsh criticism,” he said.
“Fairness then requires protection against not only sticks and stones, but against names, dirty looks, inappropriate laughter, white privilege, and ‘mansplaining’ that could generate a feeling of the inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect people’s hearts and minds in a way unlikely to ever be undone,” Voegeli concluded.
Nothing less than the future of freedom as we know it is at stake. “What will then be left of what Madison called ‘the vigilant and manly spirit which actuates the people of America, the spirit which nourishes freedom and in return is nourished by it’?” wondered Azerrad.

The emphasis is mine.

This is fascinating stuff.  I never realized that I'm fleeing freedom and have lost my manly and vigilant spirit or that I was getting so much hot sex that my ability to take any kind of criticism has been sucked out of me. 

Then, of course, my map would have the dragons in a completely different place, because freedom for Mr. Azerrad or Mr. Voegeli means something rather different than freedom for women or racial minorities or poor people etc.  Indeed, descriptions of the above type must imagine what dragons might look like, what they might eat, how they might fly, how they might procreate and so on.  When that information is lacking, make assumptions!

And the same could go in reverse.  Knowing that hampers my gleeful writing here.  But at least I have learned something about a few on the US right edge:  They think liberals are willing to give up everything for sex* (even though my following various events suggests that newsworthy sexual escapades and even sexual crimes are certainly at least as common among Republican politicians and clergy as they are among Democratic politicians and clergy, and probably more so) and they seem to have a very specific definition of "freedom."

I'm not  sure what "freedom" means in Republicanese,  but it might mean power in the hands of a particular group of people and not in the hands of other groups of people.  The latter groups are expected to meekly accept their places in the hierarchy, led by others and managed by conservative religions.

That came across all Marxist!  Gulp.  I'm not a Marxist, though he did ask some of the right questions.  In fact, I'm probably not even a liberal, what with a dearth of sexual escapades and no obvious desire to have the whole world run by governments (or the corporations or the various religious bosses).

The liberal dragons drawn on those conservative maps are weird stereotypes.  The same would be equally true of conservative dragons drawn on liberal maps, or at least somewhat true.  That is sad, because the lack of proper communication is one reason for the infected politics of this country today.

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*This one makes me a bit confused.  Notice that it's the political right which is the home of those who write diatribes (content warning for those two) about the need for women to take responsibility for becoming victims of sexual violence and notice that the concerns about sexual violence are portrayed as political correctness gone amok.  Then there's the idea that the alleged victims of sexual violence exaggerate, label bad sex as rape and so on.  As far as I can tell all this comes from rather righty places.

So the definition of who is entitled to licentiousness and/or safety might matter in understanding the concerns in the quote.

The Fox Guys Just Can't Help Themselves

Which this story shows about two Fox news male hosts on "The Five:"

Kimberly Guilfoyle took a moment to salute Major Mariam Al Mansouri, who reportedly led her country's airstrikes Monday against the Islamic State. Guilfoyle noted how rich it was that an Arab woman was leading the charge against the militant group, given that women aren't even allowed to drive in some countries in the region.
"The problem is after she bombed it she couldn't park it," co-host Greg Gutfield quipped. "I salute her."
"Would that be considered boobs on the ground or no?" Eric Bolling chimed in.

Miraculous comments!  To combine a situation where women aren't allowed to be in most societal roles with old stale sexist stereotypes and lewd comments...  I wonder how the brains of Eric and Greg actually operate, especially given that all this is about aerial attacks against a war-torn country and against a group which enslaves women, children and old people, after killing their prime age male relatives,  and which has recently put to death a female human rights lawyer.

This isn't even about inappropriateness or tone-deafness.  I truly can't imagine how someone would  come up with those particular jokes in that context. 

How does the internal conversation go:  "Well, those Muslim countries really are awful about the way they treat women.  But let's insert a few jokes about how even crack pilots can't park if they are female and about the fact that women have bigger breasts than men!  That way we show...what?  That Greg and Eric really do understand why the Saudis don't let women drive cars?"

The Answer to the Universe And Everything: Blackcurrant Juice

Is not 42.  It's blackcurrant juice.  Well, blackcurrant juice is as good an answer as any I can think of.  It also happens to be what I'm drinking right now.

That paragraph is offered as a humble parable of some of what's going on in our public conversations.

Take the Emma Watson post I wrote below.  I kept it back for a few days, I used multiple respectable sources and so on.  But then we learn that the site itself is a hoax site, except that it's a hoax site in a deeper sense than wanting to, say, cause havoc among the 4Chan lot.  It's a hoax about a hoax about a hoax?  And I'm not at all sure who it is intended to hurt or if that even matters.  It's so meta that there's nowhere further out to go, no way to wrap everything into an even larger cloak of opinions, emotions, static and clickbaits, no way to dance even faster on that narrow fence between reality and something with pink clowns and frilly monsters.

Now that I got that off my chest let's see if I can write anything real.

Emma Watson, the UN Speech And Nude Pictures. The Art of Silencing.

Lewis's Law:

The comments thread on any article about feminism justifies feminism

That's about right, based on my experience of too many hours spent on reading the comments threads.  Not all the comments are just plain misogynists but a very large percentage of them are.  Then there are the comments about feminism as a cancer on the body politics, something more dangerous than wars and epidemics and extreme Islamist takeover fears (though at least the feminazis get properly squashed by that last nightmare).

That's the background to the most recent story about Emma Watson who played Hermione in the Harry Potter movies.*  She gave a speech to the United Nations.  The speech is well worth reading in its entirety, because though it's not deep in research or in information it makes the case for more need for women's and men's rights in this world quite well.

What happened next?  This:  The merry boyz at the hacker site 4Chan decided to show Emma who really is the boss in this world by informing all of us* that nude pictures of her would soon be made available.  The justification seems to be in her daring to give that speech.  As a deleted comment at Gawker supposedly stated: 

“She makes stupid feminist speeches at UN, and now her nudes will be online,” one comment allegedly read, adding that the images are set to appear in under five days.

And 

The site threatening Watson was greeted with glee on 4chan and Reddit, where commenters explicitly stated their hope that the threats would force her to abandon her feminist campaigning. "If only her nudes got leaked and she had the load on her face. Her feminism kick would be over," a commenter wrote. "If this is true her recent feminism rally is going to be shutdown hard," wrote another. "Feminism," one 4chan user opined, "is a growing cancer."

There you have it.  Now the 4Chan and Reddit brigades are not representative of all mankind (used properly, for once!).  But we don't need very many people willing to smear someone's reputation on the Internet or to pass on false rumors about her death or to threaten her with death or rape to make public speaking on certain topics pretty expensive for women like Emma Watson.

Indeed, the only deeper motivation for all that I see is the idea of silencing such voices.  If they only were silent!  Mary Beard has written extensively on the possibility that the Internet harassment of women and of feminists is  about silencing people by making the costs of speaking very high.

A shallower analysis suggests that the idea of nude pictures of women is somehow the proper punishment to feminist speech.  A nude woman cannot be feminist, nudity is bad, it takes away a "good" woman's reputation.  But why would the boys (and girls?) at 4Chan think so?

My guess is that some of them do think so, because women are either whores or Madonnas and as we know Virgin Mary never said anything except "your will shall be done" and whores are raucous.  So silence is what good women should cover themselves with.

On the other hand, the move to publish nude pictures of Emma Watson (whether they exist or not) is also to declare public ownership of her sexuality.  Any man can ogle at her and she cannot stop them!

The private and public ownership models of women's sexuality are used side by side on this old earth.  Thus, we get the nude pictures of women who are deemed to be publicly owned and we get the color-coded burqas in Mosul under the Islamic State for married and unmarried women.  So that everyone knows which ones have not yet been doled out to their proper private owners and are therefore available?

I'm probably over-analyzing the reasons that makes a bunch of teenaged boyz feel powerful on the net.  But even if they are teenagers who haven't really thought all this through very carefully the outcomes are the same:  A breach in that public/private ownership wall, the hope that someone's reputation can be ground to shards under the big boots, the unthinking equation of equal gender rights with feminazi thuggery and so on.

For note that the response from those who seem to disagree with Watson's message is not to discuss the message, to debate it, to suggest alternatives or different angles.  It's just to punish Watson for speaking.  It also suggests a vast lack of information about how the majority of women on this earth live and how limited their rights are and how little they are respected as anything but fertility resources.  An American privileged point for misogyny.

This could be a storm in the teacup in the sense that we cannot tell how common the views and behaviors of the 4Chan people are.  But that's the general problem with Internet debates, with what is stressed and with what slides by almost unnoticed.

For different reactions to these events, check out here and here.
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*Added later:  Even if the website threatening to release the Emma Watson nude pictures is itself a hoax as this article argues, the  analysis in this post applies to public speech by women on the net.