Today's Cartoon

This is so very very true:

I could give you an example for each of my ten fingers in ten minutes, all from recent political events.  Even the New York Times can succumb to this!  Many things have multiple explanations, all true (perhaps in varying degrees of influence), and there is no real point in deciding that only one explanation is the correct one.

Indeed, simple and correct answers are very rare.  What we believe is the truth can also be provisional:  true today but perhaps not in light of future evidence.

More on Sexism in the Presidential Primaries: Trump, Cruz And A Few Voices From The Sludge

There's something deeply wrong inside Donald Trump.  In an 1994 interview Trump was asked about his daughter, Tiffany, who was just a baby then:

"Donald, what does Tiffany have of yours and what does she have of Marla's?" the show's host, Robin Leach, asked, referring to Trump's second wife Marla Maples.
Trump's answer to the "innocent question" left Noah speechless.
"I think she's got a lot of Marla, she's a beautiful baby. She's got beautiful legs. We don't know if she's got this part yet," Trump said, as he cupped his hands under his chest to signify breasts, "But time will tell."

He sexualizes everything female, including his own baby daughter, and then either approves of her tits or tells her that she is ugly.  That, my friends, is sick.

I don't want a man (for lack of a more appropriate term; worm? dandruff?) like that to possibly become the president of the United States.  He would never represent more than half of the citizens of this country, because he sees them as tit-stands or something akin to toilet paper:  Useful but disposable after use (heh). 

On the other hand, Ted Cruz smells like Torquemada, so I don't want him, either. While Trump would run this country as his very own pleasure palace and then run it down to ground, Cruz would run it as a torture chamber of infidels.  He has a lot in common with the radical mullahs, though of course who gets the infidel label stitched to their jackets would differ.

Neither is anything but bad news for women.  Cruz is even for the rapists' fatherhood rights.

I came to write this post after reading a Buzzfeed piece about Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton.  The piece is pro-Clinton, the comments mostly are not.  The most recently posted ones at the time of my reading were these:

These are quite gentlemanly comments when it comes to subtle sexism, actually.  They would be funnier if they were:

Go to jail, female dog

and

More of the sound a hen makes after laying an egg than a laugh.

That hen-thing is one actual definition of "cackle," though what people disliking Hillary Clinton mean by it is something different:  Perhaps that she is an old witch who cackles or that women are supposed to laugh in a ladylike manner and not have cankles (fat ankles), either.  Can men cackle?  

Why The Gross Gender Gap in Earnings Is Mostly A Useless Figure

Or today's statistical raised eyebrow from yours truly (why yours truly?).

I came across an article on Fortune.com about the gender wage gap between white men on the one hand and women in various ethnic and racial categories on the other*.  Now those are very important things to study, as are the gender wage gaps within each racial and ethnic group.  Or the racial or ethnic gaps within a gender category. Or doing the same analysis for women in all those categories vis-a-vis, say, Asian-American or African-American men's earnings.

But the gross wage gap doesn't really tell us anything but one thing:  The total difference in the amounts workers from two different categories earn over their working lives, and even this only if the total is properly calculated (which isn't as easy as it might look).  And it really cannot be interpreted the way a net gender gap in wages can be:  As possible evidence of labor market discrimination against one or more groups.  I feel that the Fortune.com article is slipping and sliding in that direction.

Are you still reading?  Probably not, if the weather is as nice there as here (white snow!).  Now how to make this more exciting?  Let's do awful pedagogy.

Suppose Mary has spent 20 dollars on apples, Anthony 50 dollars and Evelyn 40 dollars.  Who has purchased the most apples?

You can't get the answer because you don't know how much each of them paid per apple.  They might even all have paid different prices if they didn't shop in the same store.

The gross gender gap is like that example.  The net gender gap would be an example where you are told the price of apples for Mary, Anthony and Evelyn.  That example would let you conclude which of the three has the most apples or the least apples etc.

Or using econo-babble, what we ideally wish to compare are the lifetime earnings of two imaginary (average) individuals who differ in nothing but the characteristics we deem relevant.  In the Fortune.com article those characteristics would be gender, race and ethnicity and any significant interaction terms between them**.  Everything else should be exactly the same: age, length of working life, average working hours per week,  education levels, experience, local labor market conditions,  the industry where the individuals work and so on, possibly also the number of minor children the employees have and so on.

But the study the Fortune.com article describes doesn't standardize for those other things, or at least that is my reading.  Consider age. The average age of white men in the labor force is higher than the average age of Latinas.  The linked study computes lifetime earnings by assuming that the length of one's working life is 40 years and then multiplies the current median earnings of Latinas and white men by forty.  Thus, some part of the calculated lifetime earnings difference is because Latinas, on average, are relatively young workers in the US labor markets and young workers earn less than older workers.

There are also educational differences between the groups the study compares, though not between men and women overall, and those differences should also be controlled for.  The same goes for all the so-called non-discriminatory variables which affect earnings if we wish to compare the remaining wage gaps from the is-this-discrimination-? angle.***

All this is about The Proper Way of addressing the gender gap in earnings.  I cannot tell what the correctly calculated monetary lifetime differences between white men and the studied racial and ethnic groups of women might be, though I believe that the direction of the difference and the overall ranking of the sizes of the lifetime differences would not be affected.****

So why am I boring you with this?  I don't want to feed the rabid anti-feminists and other eager critics who insist on telling  me that there is no gender gap in wages, silly women, and if there is, then it is because those brave men work 24 hours per day fighting dangerous crocodiles, work that women just don't want (being most eager to be cleaning ladies, of course).  And focusing on just the gross gaps in earnings does leave the door open for that.



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*  In theory,  the gap between white men and white women could be calculated from the data, too, but I don't have the labor market percentages of the various female groups listed and am too tired to look them up. 

**  Economists have been doing intersectionality of a sort for ever!  The interaction terms allow for the possibility that race or ethnicity might affect the earnings of women and men differently or that gender might affect ethnic and racial differences.

***  Note that many of these corrections would reduce the calculated lifetime earnings differences, but not all of them.  The assumption that all workers can spend forty years in the labor force is less likely to be true for women than for men (those damn kids) and may differ between women of different ethnicity, and it's always possible that controlling for a specific non-discriminatory variable could increase the net differences over the working years.

To make things even more twisted together, some variables which I list here as non-discriminatory may themselves be a consequence of discrimination of a different sort.  This may apply to education if the school system funding and teaching quality is discriminatory on the basis of race/ethnicity/gender.  The industry in which someone works might not be a wholly free choice if young women are steered into traditionally female but poorly paid industries by cultural norms or their parents.   This steering could differ by race and/or ethnicity if cultural norms differ between those demographic groups.

****  With one possible exception:  The lifetime net earnings difference between white men and Asian-American women could be smaller than the life time net earnings difference between white men and white women.  See the last graph in this article which gets further into the interesting stuff but still not far enough.  Then read this.

This Is Just Too Funny

Donald Trump as a desperate student trying to make something up for an exam question he blanked out on:

Now I desperately want to know if he could place Syria on a world map.  Like pin the tail on the donkey game.

Just The Woman, Her Doctor And Some Catholic Bishops

Those are the people who are supposed to be involved in pregnant women's medical treatment in Catholic hospitals in the US. 

About one out of six hospital stays in the US takes place in a Catholic hospital, and those hospitals tend to follow the US Catholic Bishops' Ethical and Religious Directives.

What's fun about those directives, created by a bunch of presumably celibate guys, is their disproportionate impact on pregnant women.*  Now muse on that for a moment!

Anyway, those directives tell us this:

Abortion (that is, the directly intended termination of pregnancy before viability or the directly intended destruction of a viable fetus) is never permitted. Every procedure whose sole immediate effect is the termination of pregnancy before viability is an abortion, which, in its moral context, includes the interval between
conception and implantation of the embryo.

And:

In case of extrauterine pregnancy, no intervention is morally licit which constitutes a direct abortion.

Can you wrap your head around that latter case?  Ectopic pregnancies,  which in other places are called medical emergencies require a different approach in the minds of those kind and gentle Catholic bishops.  These types of pregnancies can never result in a living child but may very well result in a dead woman.  Yet there are specific ethical (!) rules not to intervene by anything that could be viewed as an abortion.

This does not mean that Catholic hospitals wouldn't try to save the life of a woman with an ectopic pregnancy, just that the directives are so harebrained** and wild and fanatic that they stipulate extra suffering, uncertainty and possibly medically inferior treatments for the woman, simply because, in theory, the embryo is still alive even though it will never ever be born.

The first quote above is of equal concern, because it rules out abortion even in the case of an ongoing miscarriage unless the woman's life is at risk.  Thus, something similar to this case could happen in one of those American Catholic hospitals, too:

The report found that the application of the ERDs by Mercy Health Partners, a Catholic hospital in Muskegon, subjected five pregnant women to prolonged miscarriages that could have been life-threatening, Becker's Hospital Review reports. The incidents occurred between August 2009 and December 2010.
The five women each experienced a pregnancy complication involving the premature rupture of membranes surrounding the fetus, a condition that can cause miscarriage when it occurs prior to fetal viability. All of the women were less than 20 weeks pregnant at the time they presented symptoms at the hospital (Becker's Hospital Review, 2/19).
The report stated that all five women presented with symptoms indicating immediate delivery would be the safest option (The Guardian, 2/18). Specifically, the report found that all of the women presented with symptoms of infection, including elevated temperature or heart rate. Guidelines from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) state that in such cases, most physicians would induce labor (Becker's Hospital Review, 2/19).
According to the report, the hospital did not tell the women that they could opt for immediate delivery rather than wait for a natural miscarriage, nor did it tell them that immediate delivery was the most appropriate medical care in instances of infection. One of the women included in the report said she asked the hospital for immediate delivery, but they denied her request.

An internal audit by a Mercy Health physician argued that only one of the women showed signs of infection, but even she wasn't moved to another facility where an immediate abortion would have been available.

Similar cases have cropped up in the past.

What I find utterly cruel are these cases where miscarriage is unavoidable, but where the women are not helped or treated because the fetus still has a heartbeat.

This is another case of fanatic and uncaring religious dogma***:  the privileging of a few days of life by a fetus which cannot live over the suffering of the pregnant woman and her partner and the willing acceptance of the risk that such waiting just might kill her, too.  And all this in the name of a divine power, as interpreted by the Catholic Bishops.

Catholic hospitals have increased their market share over the last decades, often by merging with secular hospitals.  That the hospital system created by that merger is quite likely to follow those (hilariously named) Ethical and Religious Directives is not something all people may know. And if the only hospital you can quickly reach while miscarrying is a Catholic hospital, well, be aware that the a Catholic bishop will stand behind your doctor's shoulder and determine what kind of care you should get.**** 

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* The directives also affect all patients, because Catholic hospitals may overrule end-of-life directives and because they will not carry out vasectomies or tubal ligation.  But the so-called "beginning of life" rules deserve special attention as they can endanger the health of a pregnant woman and require her to have additional pointless suffering.

**  With due apologies to all hares who would never invent anything  contrived to hurt hare-women while calling it ethical.

***  So very often about women, have you noticed?  The rules of the Catholic church, the Islamic sharia law and other similar structures hurt women much more than they hurt men.

****  The issues I have discussed here are not solely Catholic issues.  Any life-begins-at-birth group may create similar medical dangers for pregnant women.  See this recent case from Texas as an example.

Weekend Reading Suggestions

1.  This is a good read on Wall Street and parasitic economics.  An example:

So the issue is whether Goldman Sachs, Wall Street and predatory pharmaceutical firms, actually add “product” or whether they’re just exploiting other people. That’s why I used the word parasitism in my book’s title. People think of a parasite as simply taking money, taking blood out of a host or taking money out of the economy. But in nature it’s much more complicated. The parasite can’t simply come in and take something. First of all, it needs to numb the host. It has an enzyme so that the host doesn’t realize the parasite’s there. And then the parasites have another enzyme that takes over the host’s brain. It makes the host imagine that the parasite is part of its own body, actually part of itself and hence to be protected. That’s basically what Wall Street has done. It depicts itself as part of the economy. Not as a wrapping around it, not as external to it, but actually the part that’s helping the body grow, and that actually is responsible for most of the growth. But in fact it’s the parasite that is taking over the growth.

2.  Five female soccer players have filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against the US Soccer Federation.  According to the complaint, women get paid a lot less than men.  A snippet:

As ESPN reports about the players' complaint, "The filing, citing figures from the USSF's 2015 financial report, says that despite the women's team generating nearly $20 million more revenue last year than the U.S. men's team, the women are paid almost four times less."
Citing U.S. Soccer's annual financial reports, the complaint says that the group's initial budget had projected a financial loss for both the men's and women's teams — but that the women's national team's success "almost exclusively" brought a projected $17.7 million profit. For the 2017 financial year, the players say, the federation now "projects a net profit from the WNT of approximately $5 million, while projecting a net loss of nearly $1 million for the MNT."

3.   An excellent and nuanced take on last New Year's Eve sexual violence in Cologne, Germany by Jina Moore.  Among other aspects of the case she discusses the fact that the kind of harassment so many women suffered that night might not even be criminal in Germany.  This struck a bell with me, because I've recently learned that far too many convicted rapists in Finland don't even go to prison, because the laws have no teeth and nobody is getting them dentures.

On Contraception, The New Culture Wars Frontier

Contraception:  The new frontier in the culture wars!

Imagine!  To be able to write that in 2016.  But so it goes, and of course the contents of the battles are different from the past:  Sluttery is now in the forefront of the war and the preposterous idea that health insurance should pay for contraception as it pays for Viagra, say.

But so it goes.  An example:

Colorado House Democrats passed a bill Tuesday they say will clarify the Affordable Care Act and expand the kinds of birth control available to women without a co-pay.
The bill drew just one Republican vote, Kit Roupe of Colorado Springs, which gives it dim prospects as it moves from the Democratic-led House to the Senate, where the GOP holds a one-seat majority and the edge in committees to bottle it up.
…

Republicans argued that the bill might permit people to get abortifacients — drugs that cause an abortion instead of prevent a pregnancy — through Medicaid or employer-supported health plans.
Rep. Gordon Klingenschmitt, a Republican from Colorado Springs who is outspoken against abortion rights, said taxpayers and employers shouldn't have to pay for what they might find offensive.

Bolds are mine.

Mmm.  I find many things my taxes pay offensive.  Wars, for instance, and I'm glad that Rep. Klingenschmitt tells that I shouldn't pay for wars.  And about those employers paying for all that sluttery?  It's called gross remuneration, my friends, and employees have earned the money.  If we took that argument to its extreme, then wage-payers could determine what you spend your wages on, in general.

But all is not doom and gloom in this battle.  Irin Carmon writes about the happenings in the Supreme Court in the Little Sisters case.*  The Court has asked the two sides for more information on their positions.  In my opinion it is asking if there is anything, anything at all, that the Little Sisters would accept:

Tuesday’s order seems to follow up on a question Justice Elena Kagan asked at oral argument: ”Is there any accommodation that the government would offer that would in fact result in women employees of your clients, or students of your clients, getting health care as part of an employer-based plan or a student-based plan, getting contraceptive coverage? Is there any accommodation that would be acceptable?” 

 Or:  If filling in a form is too painful for you so that your employees can get contraceptive coverage in their health insurance, what might not be? 

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* I believe that this is part of the Zubik v. Burwell case?

Ian Millhiser summarizes the core issue as follows:

Like Hobby Lobby, Zubik concerns federal rules intended to expand women’s access to birth control. Under these rules, most employers must include a wide range of treatments, from childhood immunizations to cancer screenings to contraception, in the health plan they offer employees. Hobby Lobby held that employers who object to birth control on religious grounds may refuse to offer health plans that cover such treatment.
Yet Hobby Lobby also strongly implied that the government could use an alternative method to foster access to birth control. Under this alternative, religious objectors may either comply with the birth control rules or fill out a two-page form that exempts them from having to provide contraceptive coverage to their employees. In most cases, the objector’s insurance company will then work directly with the objector’s employees to provide them a separate, contraception-only health plan. This fill-out-the-form option is now being challenged in Zubik by religious employers who object to doing the small amount of paperwork they must complete in order to receive an exemption.
Thus, if the Zubik plaintiffs do not prevail, the overwhelming majority of women will receive birth control coverage — albeit through a fairly roundabout method. If these plaintiffs do prevail, on the other hand, that decision could have sweeping implications that stretch far beyond birth control.

See here how Ian views the recent asking for information in this context.

Why It Matters How Donald Trump Loves Women

A clarification to my post below.  Imagine this:

It is 2016 and the front-runner of the Republican presidential primary thinks women are cheese sandwiches.  It has taken until now for the media to fully address that fascinating aspect of the race.  How would president Trump's decisions affect more than half of the US population, given his opinions on women?  How many women would his cabinet have?  Would they be picked on the tits-waist-butt measurements (and for being yes-women for Trump in everything) or based on actual relevant ability?

None of this is new, of course.  Just watch the rules Fox News uses on how to select female talking heads for their programs.  It's obvious that  a beauty pageant is part of the entry requirement into those jobs, but only for women.  Men can look like a sheep's butt-hole as long as they otherwise make sense.

The point that escapes Trump and others who think like him is that those cheese sandwiches have votes.  Indeed, women don't like Trump very much:

Though Trump continues to outdistance Cruz in the delegates that will decide the GOP nomination, recent polls have shown the billionaire's favorability on the decline, particularly among women.
In a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, 70 percent of women had a negative opinion of Trump. Nearly three quarters of women overall, and 39 percent of Republican women, had an unfavorable view of him in a recent CNN poll.
"He already had a gender gap prior to all this," said Republican pollster David Winston. "The potential for that to be bigger now looms on the horizon."

But even that message doesn't hit home with him.  He just utters, once again, how much he loves and respects women, that weird species that's created to give him sex and adulation.  Not votes, I guess.

Now imagine a general election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton!  We are going to have such fun, us cheese sandwiches*.

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*  In terms of gender politics.  But Trump might keep his loud mouth closed about wimminz and we would still get gender politics.

One study of New Jersey voters suggests that men support Trump over Clinton much more strongly when primed with thoughts about who takes how much money home in their families.  A reverse, though much weaker, shift is seen among women who are primed the same way.  See here for the tables.  Note that the shift doesn't happen in the Sanders v. Trump comparison.  That supports the idea that this is about gender.



 

Donald Trump Loves Women!

That horrible, horrible media is pretending otherwise:

Where is the press uttering such awful lies?  Well, Anna Holmes started it in her 2011 Washington Post article, then Franklin Foer brought up the same issues a few days ago at Slate, and now Buzz Feed has joined in by quoting out of Donald Trump's own book about his views on women:

Later in the chapter, Trump discusses telling a friend who said his wife said he was “working too hard and too long and wasn’t devoting enough time or energy to her” to divorce his wife.
“If he doesn’t lose the ballbreaker, his career will go nowhere,” Trump wrote.

See how they do it?  That quote was clearly taken out of context!  The woman was a ball-breaker, walking around carrying a giant hammer, ready to smash the testicles of her husband into small grains and then feeding those to him in his breakfast porridge.  This is about proper masculinity, friends and admirers*, not about disliking women.  If a man can't expect an obedient wife at home, what can he expect? 

Duh.  Donald Trump loves women.  He loved them in 1991 when he told us:

“You know, it doesn’t really matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of [expletive],”...

And when

He told the journalist Timothy L. O’Brien, “My favorite part [of the movie Pulp Fiction] is when Sam has his gun out in the diner and he tells the guy to tell his girlfriend to shut up. Tell that bitch to be cool. Say: ‘Bitch be cool.’ I love those lines.” Or as he elegantly summed up his view to New York magazine in the early ’90s, “Women, you have to treat them like shit.”

Well, perhaps that last quote isn't strong support for my argument.  But mostly the Donald loves women. 

He loves them the way I love risotto with mushrooms and truffle oil:  Tasty, hot and ready to be eaten.

He loves them the way I love a beautiful painting or sculpture:  For their beauty, for their pristine appeal and for their availability to his gaze.

And of course if that is his love for women, ugly women hurt him viscerally, older women hurt him, women who are not tasty, hot, ready to be eaten (but never sampled before!) and beautiful:  all those hurt him.  That doesn't mean that he wouldn't love women!  Even I don't love stale risotto or risotto which suddenly walks away and has a vote.  Have some empathy, people!

Want more proof that the Donald adores women?  He's had three wives so far.  He can't get enough of women!  He thinks his daughter has a good figure and that he might date her if she wasn't his daughter.  Notice the eye of the connoisseur there?

Sure, there's a slight locker-room smell in some of his utterances, such as talking about how much pussy he has had.  But let's be honest:  Haven't we all been there when we were thirteen and sprouting the first inconvenient beard hairs and a few zits, while our voices went from soprano to baritone and back?**

No.  This guy loves women.  He wants many, many helpings of women, with cream sauce.  Isn't that real love?

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*  Admirers are added, because that's one thing I should learn from teh Donald:  Blow your own trumpet, whether between your legs and up on top, under that famous hair.

**  No, we haven't all been there.  But remember that I'm writing the way teh Donald would, and to the audience he visualizes.

Today's Hilarious Post: Hillary Clinton Is A Founding Member of ISIS

Rudy Giuliani came out with that assertion!  And in the Fox News bubble his statement was discussed,  with only one guest strongly disagreeing about president Obama and Hillary Clinton somehow creating the terrorism bubble in Iraq and Syria.  That guy called George W. Bush, he slipped down the memory hole with his Mission Accomplished statement.:

I'd love to have amnesia, too.

When Social Justice Goals Clash. The Case of the Annual Dinner of LSE's Islamic Society

This case from the London School of Economics (LSE) is worth a longer post, because it highlights the possible clashes between feminism and various other social justice concerns, in particular the avoidance of anti-Muslim bigotry, and what happens when such clashes do occur.  The case is this:

The Islamic Society of LSE, a religious student organization, organized its annual dinner as gender segregated, beginning with different contact telephone numbers for women and men who wanted to tell that they were coming.  The room with laid-out dinner tables was bisected by a seven-foot-tall screen, with women sitting on one side of the screen and men on the other side of the screen.

Several British newspapers then wrote about the event, some with pictures of it, all taken from the male side.  The head of the LSE Student Union, Nona Buckley-Irvine, a feminist,  attended the event and had no problem with the gender segregation.  This is what she said:

‘I had a lovely time at the dinner and barely noticed the separation between men and women,’ she told MailOnline.

She added: ‘Where groups would like to organise themselves in a way that fits with their religious, cultural and personal beliefs, both genders consent, and there is no issue I have no problem.
‘It is not for me to decide what is right or wrong with our Islamic society and they are one of the most inclusive societies I have ever worked with.’

It is that second paragraph that deserves strong scrutiny.   

First, how can one tell that both genders consent?  A "gender" cannot consent, only individuals can, and those individuals who do not consent probably didn't turn up at the dinner at all.  Indeed, they might have left the Islamic Society's activities earlier because of the segregation of men and women:*

However, other students were less positive about the segregation, one telling the MailOnline it had intimidated some Muslims who want to celebrate their faith without gender segregation.

‘It’s been going on for quite a while,’ the LSE undergraduate said.
‘I have a friend who says she’s really intimidated because she doesn’t believe in gender segregation at all so she stopped going.’

Muslim women are not a hive mind, all thinking alike, and opposing and supporting views can be found on this issue.  But the view of marginalized religious or ethnic communities far too often assigns one opinion to the whole community, thus marginalizing certain individuals inside those communities.

Second, why is it not for Nona Buckley-Irvine to have opinions about the Islamic Society's gender segregation practice?  I get that she doesn't have the power to do anything about those principles, but she certainly has opinions about related questions.  From her tweets:

In what sense are these tweets relevant here?  Because the American Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case essentially argued that "separate cannot be equal."  Race-segregated school systems in the US resulted not only in race segregation but also less resources and less power for the black schools.  Race segregation put an upper limit to what blacks in the United States could achieve.  The same consequences follow from gender segregated systems, even if those who support them don't explicitly strive for that outcome.

If I had to make a guess about her statement concerning the Islamic Society segregated dinner party, it would be that she doesn't want to fan the flames of anti-Muslim bigotry, of the kind the Daily Mail demonstrates in its take of the dinner where the same article discusses radicalized UK Muslim terrorists.

But there should be a difference between that honorable stance and the refusal to criticize cultural norms which have the vaguest of religious justifications**.

That's my opinion.  What are the views of the "other side?"

The statement from the LSE's Student Union states:

There has been significant media coverage of LSESU Islamic Society’s Annual Dinner which was held last Sunday. The event has been successfully held every year and celebrates the achievements of students as well as commemorating those who are graduating.
Media coverage has singled in on ‘segregation’. Voluntarily, the society had different seating areas for women and men in line with religious requirements. This falls in line with the Equality and Human Rights guidance on gender equality and we are confident that there has been no breach of the law.

What does "voluntarily" mean in this context?  The Islamic Society Facebook page conversations assert that there was an area where men and women could mingle, but it's unclear whether any tables were set up in that area.  Without equal integrated seating, the segregation cannot be viewed as "voluntary."  That would require a valid choice to exist, one which allows the person to participate in all the activities while seated and eating in the integrated area.

The Islamic Society itself has created an answer which addresses mostly the dreadful treatment of the event in the Daily Mail, in particular the way that newspaper's article seems to hint at gender segregation as the first step in how terrorists are created.  But it also says this:

The report in The Daily Mail spoke against the seating arrangement by suggesting that it may be in violation of the university’s policy on gender equality. As a society, we reject any suggestion that our Annual Dinner contravened the LSE’s Equality Policy. The guidelines explicitly state that segregation is permissible both in the event of religious ceremonies and when it is voluntarily chosen. The curtain was in fact set up at the request of our members and the layout of the room was necessary for the facilitation of three prayers, a spiritual sermon, and Quran recitation. Furthermore, the seating arrangement at the event was not mandatory, as there were numerous spaces around the venue that allowed men and women to mix freely. It is important to note that the coverage of the event was entirely false and written with an islamophobic agenda.

The question, then, is a) whether the occasion was religious and b) whether the gender segregation was voluntarily chosen.  I have already written about the latter question.  In terms of the former, I cannot quite see where there is space for the requisite kind of prayer, what with tables everywhere, but perhaps the pictures don't show those spaces.  But even if the occasion was religious and not an annual gala dinner, couldn't the screen have been removed after the prayers were over?  In any case, note my footnote * which shows that the segregation policy has not been applied as narrowly as the above quote suggests.


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*  While reading the Facebook site of the Islamic Society, I noticed this post from before the annual dinner gala:

Thus, the gender segregation is not something that was initiated at the time of the dinner party and may well have caused some women (and men) to leave the society.

**  The Koran references to gender segregation are to prophet Mohammad's wives, not to all Muslim women, and they specifically apply to a period when he and his family were staying in a military camp.  In other words, it would be completely reasonable to argue that gender segregation is not a required aspect of Islam.

 

Echidne Thoughts, 23 March 2016: On Terrorism, Group Guilt and Tosca Cakes

I have finally beaten the stomach flu which was especially bad because I had gastritis at the same time.  Let's hope that my writing is now clearer.

1.  The recent terrorist bombings, the last one in Brussels, are always an abundant source for despair about the human race.  I wish recovery for the wounded and peace to those who lost someone their lives meshed with in love and meaning.

The reactions to the events on the Internet are predictable.  Not much focus on the victims as real people, except for the obligatory nod from the politicians, and most political activists I read on Twitter and on political blogs  instantly started working to accommodate these events into the ready-made explanatory diagrams, the ones they already had, the ones which argue that the cause is either evil Islam or evil United States and Western colonialism.

What strikes me about that false dualism is that is impermeable to all evidence which doesn't fit it, that it seems to be unable to accept both-and explanations and also unable to replace appealing simplifications by nuanced analysis.  And both sides remove all agency from the culprits.  They are mere puppets with strings held by either evil mullahs or evil Western capitalists.

2.  The previous thought links to this one:  Sexism and racism and homophobia and other similar concepts owe something to the idea of false generalizations, of picking one experience with a person from the disliked group and then generalizing from that experience to the group, or of picking the worst caricatures of the group and then using those as the proper way to define the group.

Thus, because one woman treated some man very badly, that man now goes around hating all women and taking his revenge on them.  Because in that misogynist's mind all women are like the one woman who hurt him and, therefore, all women are responsible for that hurt.

I now see similar generalizations about all sorts of larger groups tossed about as so much candy to the children.  All Muslims are responsible for the Brussels massacre!  All white people are responsible for Western colonialism!  All men are responsible for rape!

It's important to note that men, as a class, do have power to talk to individual men and make sure that the culture doesn't giggle at rape or accept the idea that rape is somehow manly.   Men, as a class, also benefit from sexism which cuts back on competition in the labor markets and education. 

It's also important to note that Muslims, as a religious group, do have power, and the responsibility,  to ask how their religious leaders work to stop terrorism as a potentially religiously accepted alternative.

And it's important to note that white people who live in those countries who carried out Western colonialism will have benefited from the fruits of that colonialism, if only very indirectly.  Likewise, the institutional structures in the US have benefited white citizens over black citizens during long stretches of its history, and those benefits matter.

But all that is very different from this common spreading of genetic or group guilt.  I get that it makes writing easier and stronger, but when something is incorrect it's just more strongly and more easily incorrect.  Besides, yelling at large groups about their perfidy is just the most perfect psychological way to start a fruitful conversation on important topics!

Not.

And no, it's not really an excuse that some of those groups have much more power than other groups, that it's OK to apply the same tools which are used in sexism and racism if only those tools are used upwards in the social hierarchies.  It doesn't make it right.  Because then the misogynists on their sites will use that argument to bash women.  After all, they think women run the world so they have the right to bash upwards.

What is the solution to this problem?  Be precise.  If a particular person says something vile and disgusting, attribute it to that person, don't attribute it to all people who wear eyeglasses with similar shapes.  Assign guilt to decision-makers who make vile decisions, preachers who preach disgusting messages and those who pay for that preaching with the goal of getting those messages out.  Avoid over-generalizations about individuals.  That does not, however, mean that we shouldn't criticize ideas.  They don't have that kind of human rights protection.

3.  A recipe.  I add that because the whole post is so very miserable!
This is a recipe from my childhood.  It's really scrumptious, but you have to make sure there is not too much cake compared to the icing, so keep the cake surface low.  If you are like me (greedy) you might want to use less cake and more icing than this official recipe tells you.

Tosca Cakes

For the cake, buy:

150 grams of butter
150 grams (1.75 dls) sugar
2 eggs
200 grams (3 dls) flour
1.5 teaspoons of baking powder
0.5 dls milk

Beat the egg and the sugar until foamy.  Add eggs (shelled!), one by one, while beating.  Mix baking powder with flour in a separate container.  Add some milk to the butter-sugar-egg mixture, then some of the flour, and so on, until all is combined.  Mix until smooth.

Prepare a large oven tin.  Line it with baking paper and heat the oven to 200 centigrades.  Pour the batter into the tin.  Bake for 15-20 minutes.  Then add the icing (from below), return the tin to the oven and bake for a further 15-20 minutes.

Let cool to room temperature, then cut the cake into suitable one-person-sized pieces.

For the icing, buy:

150 grams of butter
100 grams of flaked almonds
100 grams (1 dl) of sugar
6 tablespoons of whipping cream
3 tablespoons of flour

Mix all the icing ingredients in a pot capable of going on top of your stove/cooker.   Heat the ingredients together to the point where it is ready to boil but do not let it boil.
Then add to the cake as described above.  You spread the stuff out evenly over the half-baked cake.

If you can't find flaked almonds you could use a spice mill or a food processor to make a rough blend of almonds.  I've done that and it worked fine.

From The "How Religion Keeps Women Subjugated" Files

You could skip this post if you don't want to get angry or despondent.  I'd much rather not write these posts but Echidne, whose avatar I am, insists.  So there you are.

1.  The Nigerian Senate has rejected a gender equality law.  Because it is against religions:

Women's rights activists condemned the Nigerian Senate on Thursday for rejecting a gender and equality law that pledged to eliminate discrimination in politics, education and employment, protect women's land rights and tackle violence against women.
The Gender and Equal Opportunity Bill was thrown out on Tuesday after several lawmakers opposed it on religious grounds.
Some quoted the Bible while others said the bill defied sharia, which is recognized by the constitution in Nigeria - home to the world's largest equal mix of Christians and Muslims.
Activists said the dismissal of the bill demonstrated that the government was ignoring the dangers facing Nigerian women, ranging from sexual assault and abduction to forced marriages.

Bolds are mine.

(Isn't it wonderful that the all-powerful creator of everything wants women to have the same rights as toasters or bicycles?)

2.   In Pakistan, a powerful religious body which advises the government on the compatibility of its laws with Islam last week declared a new Punjab law criminalizing violence against women as "un-Islamic."  Koran verses were cited to support that argument.

(How does one debate a book written over a thousand years ago, when those who quote it reject the possibility that its ideas were based on the norms of that era and instead insist that it is presenting the eternal, never-changing rules of the divine power?)

3. In some countries, religious family advice television shows teach about the Proper Control And Feeding of the Woman:

One can watch hours and hours of these shows, at all times of day from morning to evening prime time. For years, religious clerics have been the primary source of information on marital relationships, and at the core of their teaching is men’s superiority to women. One of the most popular hosts, with millions of viewers, is Mohammad Al Arifi. He presides over a salon format, talking to young men about various issues. In one segment, he explains to men the rules for beating their wives. “Just like you don’t beat a donkey or a camel from its face if you want to steer it in a certain direction, you should not beat a woman from her face,” he said. “There are other areas of her body where you are allowed to beat her from, such as her arms or her legs or back where it does not show to the public.”

Bolds are mine.

(Why avoid showing the bruises to the public?  If beating your wife is just following religious rules, shouldn't those bruises be proudly flaunted?)

These examples are mostly about the use of anti-woman interpretations of Islam (literal readings of extremely old texts by men,  reflecting the opinions of men living in a very different culture and era). 

That's not because Islam would be the only religion capable of being used as a tool to keeping women subjugated.  The religious justifications of forced-birthers in the US and the effects of the Hobby Lobby Supreme Court case remind us of the real danger to American women should the right-wing reading of Christianity become even more politically powerful in this country than it already is.  In short, Islam is over-represented in these examples because anti-woman versions of Islamic interpretations are more politically powerful than anti-woman interpretations of Christianity and Judaism.

This suggests to me that those who work for women's right to be viewed as fully human beings should also work for anything that would raise the profile and power of more liberal and egalitarian versions of all religions.

Trying To Crack The Old Puzzle: Do Women "Choose" Low-Paid Jobs Or Do Jobs Become Low-Paid Because Women "Choose" Them?

Content Warning:  I'm still sick.  Hence the longer words and bad framing and all other things not utterly divine.




A new New York Times article looks at the  findings of several recent studies on this puzzle:

A new study from researchers at Cornell University found that the difference between the occupations and industries in which men and women work has recently become the single largest cause of the gender pay gap, accounting for more than half of it. In fact, another study shows, when women enter fields in greater numbers, pay declines — for the very same jobs that more men were doing before.
Consider the discrepancies in jobs requiring similar education and responsibility, or similar skills, but divided by gender. The median earnings of information technology managers (mostly men) are 27 percent higher than human resources managers (mostly women), according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. At the other end of the wage spectrum, janitors (usually men) earn 22 percent more than maids and housecleaners (usually women).

Bolds are mine.
 
Occupational segregation (1) by sex has long been known to be one important reason why women, on average, earn less than men, on average:  Because many more women than men work in low-pay industries and occupations.  Almost all predominantly female industries and occupations pay less than almost all predominantly male industries, and job titles traditionally associated with women's jobs (say, secretary) pay less than job titles traditionally associated with men's jobs (say, administrative vice president for office work) (2).

Now tease apart that giant knot!  How much of this is because of direct sex discrimination?  How much because of indirect sex discrimination:  The steering of girls into certain fields, the pressures put on boys and girls to have jobs compatible with traditional gender roles at home?  So that boys expect to have to earn more than half of the family's income one day, while girls expect to have to do the bulk of child-care one day?

Or, as the gender essentialists argue, do men just happen to like and thrive in jobs which pay well, whereas women just happen to like and thrive in jobs which do not?   Are men better at asking raises and competing?  Would the same strategies even work for women?

Individuals might steer themselves, too, while not even thinking about it that much.  Young heterosexual men with traditional values or expectations might expect to have to earn enough to provide the bulk of income support for a family one day, with some "junior partner" type financial support from the wife who will do the bulk of childcare and cleaning etc.   Young heterosexual women with traditional values or expectations might expect to need extra flexibility one day, to do the hands-on caring for those future children, and that could lead them into picking flexible careers, even if they are not that well paid (3).

I can make dozens of those kinds of mini-theories, in various directions, but they are not statistical evidence.

One promising way to start teasing the knot apart is by asking what happens when an occupation turns from predominantly male to predominantly female or vice versa.

Why?  Consider this:  Say that an occupation is currently predominantly male and pays pretty well.  Then lots of women enter it.  They can't have entered it because it's one of those flexible-but-low-pay jobs which fit well with parenting:  It isn't one at that point.

But it can become one, at least a less well-paid one, and it looks like the cause is the influx of more female workers (4).  The New York Times article quotes the authors of one study on what happens when women start entering an occupation in larger numbers:

A striking example is to be found in the field of recreation — working in parks or leading camps — which went from predominantly male to female from 1950 to 2000. Median hourly wages in this field declined 57 percentage points, accounting for the change in the value of the dollar, according to Professor Levanon. The job of ticket agent also went from mainly male to female during this period, and wages dropped 43 percentage points.
The same thing happened when women in large numbers became designers (wages fell 34 percentage points), housekeepers (wages fell 21 percentage points) and biologists (wages fell 18 percentage points). The reverse was true when a job attracted more men. Computer programming, for instance, used to be a relatively menial role done by women. But when male programmers began to outnumber female ones, the job began paying more and gained prestige.

It would be fascinating if someone created a very detailed study of the changes in just one occupation over time.  Maybe such a study exists, but I haven't come across one.  I'd like to know the exact point in the tipping process at which average earnings start to drop, I'd like to know the exact point when men start avoiding the field that is turning female-dominated, I'd like to know everything about technological change  in the field during the process.

I'd also love to understand why some occupations  don't seem to result in sex segregation, and how those differ from the ones that are prone to tipping (moving from male-dominated to female-dominated or vice versa).

I hope this isn't quite the mess it looks to me.  To return to the title of the post: It was a sneaky one, because I forced you into accepting a false either-or set of choices.  Both could of course be true at the same time.  But if the New York Times summary of the studies is correct, we should seriously address why jobs become lower-paid when more women enter them (5).

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(1)  Occupational segregation by sex refers to the simple fact that some industries or occupations have mainly male workers, some industries or occupations have mainly female workers.  It says nothing about the reasons why the industries got that way, it says nothing about how voluntary or involuntary those gendered choices are and it says nothing about the reasons why female-dominated jobs pay less.  All that is a separate question.

(2)  I made up that second job title, but you get the point.  Which is that it's possible to pay someone less by just changing labels. 

(3)  The less-well-paid female dominated jobs are not necessarily more flexible or more compatible with major responsibilities for child-care; an important point which is often ignored by those who argue that women "choose" lower paying occupations for their greater flexibility.  Hospital nursing is not very flexible and neither are female dominated factory or sales jobs.  Teaching is the one exception to that rule.  It's also worth noting that studies suggest men are paid more, on average, even in female-dominated fields and women paid less, on average, even in male-dominated fields.

(4)  Or reverse the same example for an occupation that rapidly goes from at least mixed if not predominantly female to male.  The initial reason for the larger numbers of men entering the field cannot be higher earnings in that occupation in general, if the underlying theory is to hold.

(5)   The quotes around the verb to choose are explained in this post.

I'm too weak and feeble to read through the studies right now.  Want to do it for me? 

Primary Thoughts: Violence And Sexism

Contents Warning:  I'm unwell, feverish and possibly hallucinating.  Read at your own risk.

A couple of off-the-hip (Echidne pulls her guns out) comments on recent events in the US primaries, known now as the Clown Games by most of the sane world*.

First, the Donald.  Donald Trump has lived a protected life, a sheltered life, a life where what he does wrong has no real consequences.  But in the real life, the unprotected kind, bad deeds have consequences, some deserved, some undeserved but nevertheless consequences, too.  And now Donald, at the ripe age of almost-seventy, must learn about those consequences.

Because he had rich and powerful parents he never had to learn the first and basic test we all have to pass as children:  How to play well with others.  Because he got a pass on that, we now have the mature Donald, an arrogant, empty-headed believer in his own godlike status (and no, I didn't come to goddess-status that same way),  a man who believes he can say whatever he wants and that's the end of the story.  His henchmen and henchwomen have not fought back, because he fires (or divorces) the ones who do.  But nobody can control masses of people or public opinion that way.

One of those other life tests many of us have to take at some time teaches us that public statements matter. 

It matters if you tell your acolytes that you would like to punch the protesters in the face.  It matters if you call Latino immigrants rapists, especially without proof that rape rates by Latinos actually were much higher.  It matters if you propose barring all Muslims from entering the United States simply on the basis of faith, not actual plans of terrorism.  It matters if you send tweets like this:

It even matters if you turn the Republican presidential primaries into slug-fests, and that's because you are moving the goalposts on what is acceptable behavior in the public sphere.

Indeed, everything Trump has done has that very effect.  It is true that he is not out there punching protesters or getting punched by them, but he opened the floodgates.  And what flows through them has his name on it, whether he is legally culpable or not.**

Our social contract is a fragile web.  One arrogant rich guy has stuck his stubby fingers through it, and see what happens.

Second, the Hillary.  I saw this bumper sticker over the weekend, slapped on the butt of a plumbing van, next to some-naked-women picture:

My job, as I see it, is to point out sexism in these primaries.  I haven't been vigilant enough on that, partly because I'm sick and partly because the sample size of very powerful women in American politics is exactly one, and samples of size one are not good material for drawing conclusions about the population of all women***. 

But I'm pretty sure that whoever chose that bumper sticker would also have an "anyone but (Elizabeth) Warren" sticker if Warren was running.  The generalized anger at Hillary Clinton serves to let the misogynists join in without being called misogynists. 

Now, how much of that generalized anger**** at Hillary Clinton might be linked to our ideas about how good women act (they are not ambitious) is impossible to determine, and that is because of that sample size of one:  We have one powerful woman in the politics of a giant country.  

And that should cause some concern among feminists, at least.

This take on how critics view Hillary Clinton's use of voice shows another small brick in the way sexism, whether overt or covert, builds walls against women in politics.  Some people notice problems in women's speech when similar problems in men's speech go unnoticed.  Honestly, I had to listen to George W. Bush for eight years and never saw a piece about his talking through the nose.

-----

*  Which probably consists of my readers and a few other isolated individuals.

**  I am not taking away the agency of all those who are doing the menacing or the fighting.  They are naturally the ones directly responsible.  And as an aside, what I saw in videos suggests to me that the perpetrators are mostly if not totally men.

***  Another giant problem women's rarity in politics causes is that Hillary Clinton can now be treated as an avatar for "all women in power" or as a harbinger of the "petticoat rule."  This happens to some extent on both sides.  Misogynists hate her because she is a woman, many women identify with her because they have been treated in similar fashion.  The solution is naturally to have many more women in politics.

****  I get that primaries are heated, that it's perfectly acceptable to dislike Hillary Clinton's past politics or the policies she may have supported and I also get that it can be a rational choice to be opposed to her. 

This post is not about the Democratic primary of 2016.  It is about spotting sexism in that primary, and from that angle I'd argue that those whose hatred is most visceral might not feel the same gut-twisting hatred against an otherwise identical male politician.  And I'd call "anybody but Hillary" pretty visceral.

Friday Cats

Posting cat pictures on Fridays is an old Internet tradition on political blogs. 

Now spend some time thinking about the above sentence!  Humans are very very weird. 

Here are today's cats:

International Women's Day 2016

Happy International Women's Day!  I want all of you to have chocolate in its honor or whatever best fuels your engines, because a fairer world is ultimately better for everybody.

These types of "celebratory" days are funny.  Take Mothers' Day.  It was created as a political day, but fairly soon was emasculated (!!!) or tamed and turned into a celebration of the myth of motherhood and of traditional division of gender in child-rearing.

This is happening to the International Women's Day, too.  In some countries women now get flowers or chocolate on that day!  Like the Secretaries' Day.  And some stupid bloggers start their posts on that day by wishing their readers "Happy International Women's Day!"

But the day was originally meant to highlight all the different ways the world treats women and girls badly, just because they are women and girls.*

And that should still be its purpose:  to increase awareness of what still needs to be changed so that no family will sit silent and bitter after hearing that the new baby just born into it is a girl, so that no little girl is married off before she even menstruates because that's the best alternative in how to manage these unwanted types of children in the striving for a son*,  so that women are not put into boxes of social norms and rules so small that they cannot breathe, so that religions and customs are not allowed to treat women as utensils (forks, knives, spoons), of value only in how they can be used and manipulated by others.

So what are the news I should cover on this day?  There are many important topics:  The child brides of Africa, the treatment (and relative scarcity) of women among the refugees flowing to Europe, the American struggle to maintain reproductive choice in the face of Republican opposition, the ubiquity of sexual violence in many countries and so on.

But rather than address any of those (time and space are limited), I wish to offer you one single example, a very minor one, but one which for me crystallizes both the underlying nature of the struggle women face and the way that struggle is resisted and turned into something quite different.

It comes from Russia and has to do with the new Russian blasphemy law:

Viktor Krasnov, who wrote, "There is no God," on the social network VKontakte in 2014, is on trial in Stavropol, in southern Russia. He is being prosecuted under a controversial 2013 law, known as Article 148, that criminalizes acts that insult people's religious feelings and beliefs, his lawyer, Andrei Sabinin, told Agence France-Presse. If convicted, he faces up to a year in prison or a fine of 300,000 rubles ($4,065).
...

Krasnov told Svoboda he posted his Internet comments after Dmitry Burnyashev and Alexander Kravtsov suggested that women were inferior to men at home. 

Burnyashev and Kravtsov later reported Krasnov to the police, saying he "insulted their religious feelings," according to Radio Free Europe. The online discussion still exists on VKontakte but Krasnov's comments have been deleted.

Bolds are mine.

It's worth noting that the 2013 blasphemy law:

...was introduced after female band Pussy Riot performed a "punk prayer" in the main Russian Orthodox church in Moscow, calling on the Virgin Mary to "drive Putin away," in February 2012.

This case reflects the authoritarian aspect of Putin's administration and the power of the Orthodox Church in Russia.  But on a deeper level it shows how religion is used to keep women oppressed.

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* When I typed in these two sentences, the goddess stuck out her long fore-fingers and kept changing the "just" in the first sentence into lust, then must, then lust again.  Now let your inner Freudian out on that one!  Or on the fact that in the second sentence she insisted that "son" should be spelled as "sun!"

Trumpeting One's Own Horn. Where Echidne Explains US Republican Politics to An Alien.

As I mentioned below, it is tough to write about the US politics with sarcasm and irony, when politicians themselves go on dick measuring competitions in public debates.  After all, exaggeration is one of the tricks in the sarcasm-and-irony bag, and Donald Trump stole my thunder the other night when he assured the Murkan Peeple that he, indeed, is humongously endowed down there.

Imagine trying to explain what happened in that debate to an alien from outer space, one with great intelligence and understanding of interplanetary ethics differences, but who doesn't have much knowledge about our earthly cultures and customs.

It would go something like this.  Echidne The Professor in the process of explaining:

"Here is one representation of a male human naked.  What Trump talks about is the vertical tube between the legs of the statue, the bit that floats on top of the two spherical objects:

Mr. Trump wants to reassure his voters that his vertical tube is longer (and/or wider?) than some of his critics have argued*.  This makes him well qualified as a world leader."

The alien will then ask what the functions of that tube are:  "Is it used to think deep thoughts?  Can it toss out radiation or shoot nuclear bombs?  Can it smite the enemies?"

I answer:  "No.  It is used by male humans to release liquid waste matter from the body after the liquids have gone through the digestive process which extracts what the body needs from them. The tube is also used as an insemination device in two-sex reproduction.  The male seed comes out of that tube and enters the female human's reproductive channel."

The alien will turn thoughtful, think for several minutes, sigh deeply (I assume oxygen-use by this alien).  Then it will ask: " Is the amount of liquid waste matter proportional to the size of the tube?  Is it a flammable, acid or otherwise noxious substance which can be sprayed on potential foes?  Of military use in that sense?"

My answer:  "As far as I know, the size of the tube has no correlation with the functions it has.  Small tubes and large tubes work with the same efficacy.  Possessors of large tubes do not produce more liquid waste matter or more semen."

The alien throws up what goes for its arms and shakes what can be assumed to be its head.  It asks why the size of the tube would matter at all, given that it doesn't appear to be functionally related to the job of running a powerful country.

Here Echidne gives a longer speech which is deleted here.  But the gist of it is that the length and/or girth comparisons of the tubes among male humans are linked to their competitive drive**, and that the tube, in its more stiffened form when ready for insemination,  is a synecdoche for the whole man.  The bigger the tube, the bigger the man.

But, the alien notes:  "Isn't there a female human running for the leadership of your country?  She lacks a tube.  How will she compete?"

And there you have it.




------
*  I'm told by reputable sources that he uses a wheelbarrow to trundle it around.  Were he to win the presidency, the wheelbarrow would have this insignia on it:

**  An example from another large country and its gung-ho leader.  Note the Moby Dick part:

How Do You Write Political Sarcasm When Reality Is Like This?

CNN, about Thursday's Republican presidential primary debate:

Donald Trump assured American voters Thursday night that despite what Marco Rubio had suggested, there was "no problem" with the size of his hands -- or anything else.

"Look at those hands, are they small hands?" the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination said, raising them for viewers to see. "And, he referred to my hands -- 'if they're small, something else must be small.' I guarantee you there's no problem. I guarantee."

If you are as innocent as I sometimes am, Trump is referring to a hypothetical correlation between the size of a man's hands and his penis.

Yes, he went there.

The Republican primary debate is now about the size of the candidates' penes (most likely the correct plural, not that any one candidate would have more than one of those).

What am I to write about this?  That should there be another debate all the candidates should whip theirs out because the voters need to know?

This Is Beautiful, Just Beautiful. On The Women Of The Supreme Court And Whole Woman’s Health v Hellerstedt

The US Supreme Court is currently hearing oral arguments about Whole Woman's Health v Hellerstedt, a Texas abortion case.  Dahlia Lithwick at Slate has written an excellent piece about those arguments and, in particular, the role of the three female Justices in interrogating the arguments.

This is a case where gender matters, where life experiences matter, where the personal indeed IS political and also vice versa.*

The Texas abortion case is actually two cases:

The case involves a crucial constitutional challenge to two provisions in Texas’ HB 2, the state’s omnibus abortion bill from 2013. The first requires doctors to obtain admitting privileges from a hospital 30 miles from the clinic where they perform abortions; the second requires abortion clinics to be elaborately retrofitted to comply with building regulations that would make them “ambulatory surgical centers.” If these provisions go into full effect, Texas would see a 75 percent reduction in the number of clinics serving 5.4 million women of childbearing age.

Lithwick's Slate article revels in the questions of Justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Kagan, questions which really are about the medical risks of abortion, as compared to other medical treatments.  Do read the whole piece.  To whet your appetite, notice how the following exchange nails the party-political nature of these types of cases:

Then it’s Kagan who moves in. Calmly, poker-faced, she asks Keller: “You said that as the law is now … Texas is allowed to set much, much higher medical standards, whether it has to do with the personnel or procedures or the facilities themselves, higher medical standards … for abortion facilities than for facilities that do any other kind of medical work, even much more risky medical work? Am I right?” 

Keller agrees. Then Kagan asks: “And I guess I just want to know, why would Texas do that?” The room erupts. Keller says complications. Kagan says that liposuction actually has greater complications. Keller says Kermit Gosnell. Kagan says nothing that happened in the Gosnell case could have occurred under Texas’ pre-existing regulations. Sotomayor says colonoscopies have more complications. Finally, Keller says, “But legislatures react to topics that are of public concern.” And that is what matters. Not women’s health. Politics.

Bolds are mine.

The bolded concluding sentences may be obvious in this context.  But I've met similar political motivations in my extensive reading of women's health studies, parenting studies and evolutionary psychology explorations into gender and sexuality.  What gets studied, by whom, and what gets popularized, and by whom:  all those aspects appear strongly motivated by traditional gender views and gender politics.

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*  "Political is personal" follows if the Texas regulations remain in place.  The resulting unavailability of abortions in many parts of the state will directly impinge on the lives of poor women with unintended pregnancies.