Sex and Sermons: Fundamentalists and Women's Sexuality. A Re-Posting.

Originally posted here.


A delicious topic:  How fundamentalist religions cope with sexuality in general and with women's sexuality in particular?

The short answer is that all fundamentalist religions frown upon non-reproductive sex, including homosexuality.  They also wish to  take the ownership of a woman's sexuality away from her and assign it to her parents or her husband.  The deeper answer is that those religions want control of all fertility.  Those goals require that women should not be able to control their own reproduction. 

At this point in my writing I feel a strong pull towards discussing how getting more people-in-the-pews or on prayer mats keeps religions powerful and large, how that works against the whole idea of contraception or even non-reproductive sex,  and how it ultimately means that women must be assigned the role of producing babies for the common good but not the role of determining how many or at what intervals.

This time I won't go there.  Instead, I want to look at that fascinating storm of emotions which are revealed when, say, an Islamist preacher argues that the world will end if the sexes are allowed to intermingle at work or in the public sphere.  Why will the world end?  Because such intermingling will cause people to copulate like bunny rabbits, on the streets, in the stores and on the roofs!  Marriage will collapse!  Nobody knows what man sired what child!  Chaos ensues!

See what a frightening and powerful force sexuality is to such a preacher?  It's almost as if the only thing which stops him from participating in such orgies is that women are segregated from men and properly covered up.  One frail wall of fabric is all that keeps the flood of erotic tornadoes at bay.

And the maintenance of that wall of fabric is the duty of women.  Indeed, while all fundamentalist religions want to appropriate women's sexual agency, none of them wish to take any responsibility for the sexual attraction between heterosexual men and women.  That task they see as belonging to women alone.* 

Men are viewed as sexually liable to stray** and women are to stop that straying.  Hence the solution to the imaginary storm of random sex the fundamentalists so fear is to make women behave better, to make women the goalkeepers in the game of pre-marital sex (where heterosexual men are expected to try to get the puck in the net and heterosexual women are expected to try to avoid that outcome), to tell women to avoid places where rape and other sexual assault might happen (as John Kasich has just suggested), to tell women to cover up so that the weak men will not fall into sin (did she wear a mini-skirt?  was her hair showing?)

Thus, although the fundamentalists want to control all sexuality and rule out homosexuality altogether, much of their focus is on the control of female sexuality.   Customs such as female genital mutilation (FGM) are to make women less sexual, more faithful wives, less likely to take lovers***. Female masturbation is the most pleasant of roads to hell and dildoes the homes of Satan.

And then there is the novel idea of sado-masochistic sex as a road to heaven for women, a form of religious female submission turned into the language of pronography [sic], this being one depiction of the kind of sexuality that is seen as acceptable among some believing women of fundamentalism.

When I put all this together (whether it belongs together or not), I get an explanation of women's sexuality inside various fundamentalist movements:

Women should not be active agents in sex, they should be active agents in stopping the kind of sex the fundamentalist fathers don't want them to experience, but otherwise their role should be passive and subject to the control of their kin. 

The incentives for women not to have "improper" sex consist of largely punishments.  The US anti-feminist right and the home-grown misogynists argue that sexually active unmarried women become soiled toilet paper, will never be able to have a happy marriage, will end up alone and weeping over their cats, whereas nothing much is written about the destiny of sexually active unmarried men, as long as their partners are female.  That's because men cannot become soiled toilet paper.

Other types of desired punishments abound.  Some pro-life activists seem to regard unplanned pregnancies as the proper punishment for "sluts" and the resulting children as an appropriate life sentence.  Those who don't want to subsidize "sluts" having sex in their health insurance policies when contraception is also covered never to howl out in despair about how other people's Viagra prescriptions amounts to exactly the same kind of subsidies.

The differences are driven by the deeply hidden assumption that it is women who are responsible for not having sex of the wrong type.  On the whole, very few restrictions in that field apply to heterosexual men's erotic life.

Finally,  consider this form of punishment for women who report a rape or a sexual assault at the Brigham Young University:

Students say Honor Code involvement means a victim who reports an assault faces possible punishment if she or he was breaking curfew, violating the dress code, using drugs or alcohol or engaging in consensual sexual contact — all banned by the code of conduct — before an attack.
In a statement, BYU said a student "will never be referred to the Honor Code Office for being a victim of sexual assault," and that its Honor Code proceedings are "independent and separate" from Title IX investigations.
But multiple BYU students investigated by the school's Honor Code Office disagree, saying they were scrutinized as a result of reporting a sex crime. In some cases described by past and current students, Honor Code investigations were launched even when the accused assailants were not BYU students — the alleged victim being the sole possible target.

This smells to me like a (much) milder version of the difficulties of proving rape under the sharia law****.  If a woman fails to make her case she can then be punished for adultery.  In both of these cases,  the specter of punishment for consensual sex serves to make women less likely to report rape or sexual assault.
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*   From 2006, this story gives us the most explicit version of the belief:

In the religious address on adultery to about 500 worshippers in Sydney last month, Sheik Hilali said: "If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it ... whose fault is it, the cats or the uncovered meat?
"The uncovered meat is the problem."
The sheik then said: "If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have occurred."
He said women were "weapons" used by "Satan" to control men.
"It is said in the state of zina (adultery), the responsibility falls 90 per cent of the time on the woman. Why? Because she possesses the weapon of enticement (igraa)."

** An extremely sexist assumption, by the way, amounting to assuming that men have no self-control at all or even need it.

***  FGM is a cultural practice but appropriated by religions:

No religion promotes or condones FGM. Still, more than half of girls and women in four out of 14 countries where data is available saw FGM as a religious requirement. And although FGM is often perceived as being connected to Islam, perhaps because it is practiced among many Muslim groups, not all Islamic groups practice FGM, and many non-Islamic groups do, including some Christians, Ethiopian Jews, and followers of certain traditional African religions.

It has been justified as follows:

Psychosexual reasons: FGM is carried out as a way to control women’s sexuality, which is sometimes said to be insatiable if parts of the genitalia, especially the clitoris, are not removed. It is thought to ensure virginity before marriage and fidelity afterward, and to increase male sexual pleasure.

**** For an extreme example, see Saudi Arabia's practice.

Fractional Husbands. A Re-Posting.

This post* is from the imaginary series of what weird stuff Echidne's mind latched onto when it was supposed to do real work, and has to do with the way polygyny is traditionally defined:  One man with more than one wife, ranging from two to some very large number.

But suppose we flip that around, without changing the truth value of the definition at all:  One woman with a fraction of a husband, the size of the fraction depending on how many women have to share him.

Isn't that fun?  The first definition of polygyny sounds like a potentially good thing for the lucky husband**:  lots of sexual variation, lots of opportunity to make the wives compete with each other for attention, lots of power.

The second definition (mine) shows why polygyny may not be a good thing for any woman who would prefer at least one whole husband.

All that is simplified.  But the basic nature of polygyny is that the women are expected to share, and not only the one husband, but also his resources, including any inheritance he might one day leave behind.  And all the children must compete for the one man's attention.

Then there is the traditional division of power in polygyny:  The lion's share of it goes to the husband.  But even if that aspect was fixed the general sharing problem would remain.

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*  First published here.  For something similar, in that we tend to view some topics from a biased angle, see this post on mail-order husbands.

**  But not for all those heterosexual men who won't find even one wife because someone else is taking more than one.  That's a real problem, given the fairly equal sex ratios at birth, at least in the absence of enough warfare to kill lots of men.

Letters from the Ant-Hill. A Re-Posting.

This was first posted in 2010, but its concerns:  about the lack of proper vacation time in the United States,  are still with us.  If anything, they might be stronger today, because any hope of collective action by American workers might be waning with the waning of unions.  By the way, I find it deeply ironic that the so-called "family values" party doesn't want families to spend time together.  That's visible in all the policies the Republicans oppose: parental leave, proper vacations and so on.






Have a look at this list of statutory minimum employment leaves by country and then check out the attached map. Don't forget to scroll all the way down to United States. 

Now, I'd call that minimum requirement of zero days (and even the U.S. averages of actual leave taken) cruel, especially during times like this when a job is hard to get and difficult to hold onto. Who would ask for leave, however necessary it might be for health reasons, for reasons of relaxation and refueling and for reasons of spending time with one's children, work on one's relationships (or one's house or that great American novel) and so on?

And let's not forget that the forty-hour week is really just a pleasant pretense, these days, in many industries and especially in white-collar jobs with any income attached to them. Sure, you can argue that those "choosing" such jobs are picking the money over the time. But then they cannot really convert that money into time for themselves before retirement. If even then.

Could this be the reason for the fierce consumerism I sometimes lament here? If you are never going to have any real time for living, expensive toys are a good substitute?

Connect the rest of the dots in this story, by remembering the lack of proper maternity leave here, and you might start to see why this scarcity of proper and socially sanctioned time-off not only hurts all workers but also almost sanctions the traditional gendered division of labor:

The Designated Worker Ant is expected to be busy working, almost all the time. The other necessary tasks must either fit into the dwindling number of hours left over after work or they must be picked up by someone else: kids, laundry, those broken and tangled emotional connection threads. The latter work is unpaid but necessary, and the rigid labor market expectations may say that they honor those obligations from the Full-Time Worker Ants but that's just talk. In reality they'd prefer the workers to be robots which can be turned on and never turned off and all "negotiating" (to be discussed later) starts from that position.

The usual outcome is that women, the traditional providers of all those unpaid services, will be more affected by the myth of the Designated Worker Ant. It is women who are more likely to work two shifts: one at paid work and one at home, it is women who are usually in charge of finding and monitoring paid child-care arrangements, it is women who are more likely than men to not become the Designated Sole Worker Ant in ant families which pick this solution but to either work fewer hours for money or not at all, and therefore it is women who fall off the ant career paths more often than men.

But being the Designated Worker Ant is not all good for anyone. People are not ants and workworkwork with a few expensive toys thrown in is not a good prescription for a happy life. Not even for men, though the culture has managed to cast that fate as a form of winning for men though not for women. What it is one wins remains a mystery, however, given the losses of close family relationships, mind-expanding hobbies and time to work on that great American novel or that old family chair with the broken leg.

Why am I writing on this topic again? Probably because I just came back from a very long vacation (not all of it spent vacationing, though), and realized how life-saving it has been, how very necessary, how crucial for making me love writing again. Without the vacation I wouldn't have realized how dry I had squeezed my Inner Lemon, how tired I was, how hard I had worked. Even goddesses who love their work get tired!

So what about the rest of us ants in this anthill? Surely the same opportunity should be available for all of us? We are not robots. Maybe that should be tattooed on every forehead in this country, right next to "we demand better working conditions"?

Yes, something that extreme might be necessary, because the opposite messages keep playing in the media all the time: We Must Work Harder To Win The Globalization Wars! The Chinese Charge Less! The Indians Will Take Your Job You Lazy Ant! Europe Cannot Survive Its Long Vacations And Its Great Laziness!

And even the hesitant little stories questioning these rigid work rules frame the plot with questions such as "Why Do Americans Want To Work So Hard?" As if they were given any choices about it! But note that reading several such stories even I started believing that it's just something about the water here that makes Americans eager not to have vacations. Just the way it is.

But of course the real answer is much simpler: No country got nice vacations by gently asking for them politely, in private negotiations between one worker and one firm. The firm would just laugh at an applicant stating that he or she wanted four weeks off every year, because another sucker could easily be found who wouldn't make that demand. And if I'm applying for a job as a janitor at IBM or the local university I cannot make any kinds of demands at all.

No, all those great vacation rules were achieved through political action and trade unions, and collective action is the only way to get the counterveiling power which makes the corporations agree to more humane working conditions in general. Globalization has increased the power of the corporations to fight such actions, true. But without a renewed collective effort both here at home and internationally those conditions will never improve. Indeed, they will probably get worse.

For Your Toolkit 1.: Why HIre Any Men If Women Are Cheaper And Equally Productive Workers?

I'm offering you a hammer or a saw or a chisel in these toolkit posts, not to build furniture or a house with, but to equip you to argue with people who, say, don't believe in the existence of any gender gap (and/or racial gap) in wages.

This first post* in the series:


If you read the comments (yeah, I know) to this blog post about the Wal-Mart case, you will come across an old chestnut about sex discrimination in earnings. It goes like this:

If women were really as good workers as men but were paid less because of discrimination, why would Wal-Mart, or any other firm, hire men at all?

The implication is an obvious one: Wal-Mart does NOT discriminate against women. The reason women earn less is that they deserve less, being less capable workers. If this were not the case, wouldn't Wal-Mart just hire all women at those lower wages?

Or put in different terms, a firm run by someone who doesn't discriminate against women would use this information to hire an all-female labor force. Because women would cost less to employ for the same levels of productivity, that firm would have higher profits than the discriminating firms. Over time firms of the former kind would take over the industry, and -- presto! -- discrimination would die a natural and painless death.

This argument was initially made by Gary Becker, an economist, a very long time ago. It is not an uncommon argument from conservatives (or from certain types of anti-feminist sites.) That does not mean that it shouldn't be discussed. So let's do that by looking at what is unrealistic about the specific conclusions.

To do that, the model to begin with is Becker's basic model. He covered the concept of discrimination (whether based on race, gender or other group characteristics) as a dislike (or hatred) by either the owner/managers of the firm, by the co-workers or by the customers. AND he covered discrimination in an artificial model where all participants know all relevant information. That information includes the true productivity of every single worker.

Most of the time Becker treated the three possible discriminating identities separately. Thus, in the first model only owner/managers have a dislike towards workers from a particular group. That, my friends, is the model from which the above conclusion comes, though even then it would only work to eradicate discrimination from the whole industry if the industry was essentially a competitive one. If the industry is not sufficiently competitive, the bigoted owner/managers can hang on and practice discrimination.

Did that read as rather dry? I can't think of a juicier way of telling the story, but basically Becker argues that if the only problem we have consists of some bigoted owner/managers, while everyone else is just so sweet, sufficiently well-lubricated markets can get rid of those nasty bigots, always assuming that everybody knows everything relevant about everyone else.

There are no misconceptions in the model. Even the bigoted owner/managers of a pizza parlor, say, know that Joe and Jane are equally good pizza-bakers. They just hate Jane and are willing to hire her only if they can get her for less money.

This cannot last if we can find at least non-bigoted nice owner/manager.

That's the background of the old chestnut. Becker, having become immersed in the imaginary world of his simple model, concluded that competitive industries would never exhibit any long-run sex or race discrimination. Only oligopolies or monopolies could survive with at least some bigoted owner/managers.

But what happens if we let not only the owner/manager dislike poor Jane,  but also the customers she serves?

Suppose that some customers storm out when Jane serves them but none do when Joe serves them. In what sense are the two still equally productive? Now Jane won't bring as much revenue to the firm, despite being an equally good pizza-baker. In fact, from the firm's point of view she is a worse employee than Joe, because she will contribute less to the firm's profit. And this has nothing to do with her baking ability.

The situation has changed, has it not? Even a sweet non-discriminating pizza parlor owner might have to get rid of Jane now. Even if her baking skills exactly equaled Joe's baking skills.

The point of this sub-model may be the fact that perfect information about a worker's productivity, a completely unrealistic concept, still wouldn't be sufficient to keep the discrimination against Jane separate from her ultimate productivity. Jane would end up either fired or earning less than Joe.

Which sorta cracks the chestnut, at least in service occupations.

The various Becker models can be played with to produce differing predictions. But they all suffer from that perfect information assumption. Information about people's actual productivity is not freely available. If it was, no firm would ever hire someone unsuitable or subject new workers to trial periods and such. Indeed, if everybody knew everything else life would be very different from how it actually is.

More realistic models allow for missing information about the true productivity of workers, at least in the short-run. What takes its place? One possibility is statistical discrimination.

Suppose that Jane has applied for a job, gotten an interview, and now walks into the firm's human resources office, clad in a neat suit, carefully made-up and carrying her resume. How will the representative of the firm on the other side of the desk assess her likely productivity?

One possibility is that the interviewer will use both the information in Jane's resume, the information produced in the interview and the interviewer's own ideas about how people who "look like" Jane have fared in the past. Or how that person regards them in general. That Jane is female is part of that information.

This might mean that the way the interviewer sees women in general could affect the way Jane is viewed. If the company has never hired women before, Jane presents it with a risk. If the interviewer doesn't think much of women's abilities in the advertised job opening, Jane may be rated lower than an equally qualified applicant who just happens to be called Joe.

More realistically, bigoted views about a certain group of workers can seldom be fully separated from their assessed productivity. Someone who dislikes Jane because of her gender will find fault with her pizzas, too. There are few jobs where the measurement of productivity is easily disentangled from the overall impression a worker gives someone. And it's the latter which often determines pay raises and promotions.

Which is a long way to say that firms mostly cannot tell the true productivity of their workers. It's bound up in the same tight bundle with all sorts of views, including possibly discriminatory ones, as well as personal likes and dislikes. A Wal-Mart manager who expects women to quit to have children will promote fewer women to management, not because she or he hates women but because of the use of the class "women" in the evaluation of all individuals in it.

And yet the basic Becker model doesn't even allow for such motives!

Neither does it include social norms. Social norms matter. A lot. Yet they are absent in that old chestnut, as well as in Becker's general work.

To see why they matter, suppose that in a certain society the social norm states that women should not supervise men at work. Suppose, also, that there are quite a lot of trained women in that society who could do the job of supervision, defined in the technical sense. Borrowing from Becker's world, wouldn't an owner/manager who doesn't care about this social norm have a great opportunity there? Just hire all these women for management jobs! They will work for less, given the lack of opportunities the social norm causes, right?

To make things really simple, suppose, finally, that there are enough male workers who don't mind a female supervisor and enough nice customers to patronize this firm. I have set up the whole thing so that great profits are an obvious conclusion.

Until the firebombs and the broken windows and the death-threats, perhaps, to make things lively. If the rest of the society cares enough about the upholding of this particular social norm, the fact that all the direct players don't care about it is irrelevant. The firm which violates the social norm will be punished. Perhaps not with violence but economic boycotts would work, too.

The point of this example is that well-lubricated markets and non-bigoted direct participants may not be enough to end discrimination against women or minorities.

This post has gotten very long, for which I apologize. I could have written even more about the problems of taking simple economic models for reality and the mistakes that causes. And on empirical findings which contradict the conclusions of the old chestnut. And so on.

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* Originally from here.

Housekeeping Post

The next three weeks will see lots of re-posting on this blog, as well as stuff I have created for your enjoyment in the last two weeks.  I'm going to add fresh posts when/if I get the chance.  I wish you all a very good August!

The Kansas Republican Uprising Against Governor Brownback

The Christianist governor of Kansas, Sam Brownback, decided to run his state as a dystopian experiment on what happens when most firms are not expected to pay state taxes.  What naturally happened was this:  The state government couldn't collect enough revenues after those 2012 tax changes to balance its budget.

The reverse was supposed to happen, in Brownback's fevered mind:  Firms would thrive, new firms would enter Kansas, set up shop and hire zillions of workers.  Overall tax revenues would go up.

That this didn't happen made no difference for Brownback, because he is a minimal government Christianist who has faith in God and in tax cuts.  But he also has faith in balancing the state budget, so the next step was to start cutting state expenditures, including education spending.

Despite all this, the voters in Kansas re-elected Brownback in 2014.

That's the background to these more recent events inside the Republican Party of Kansas:

A top Senate leader and at least 10 other conservative Kansas legislators lost their seats as moderate Republicans made Tuesday’s primary election a referendum on the state’s budget problems and education funding.
Senate Majority Leader Terry Bruce, of Nickerson, fell in his south-central Kansas district to Ed Berger, former president of Hutchinson Community College. Bruce’s defeat came amid a backlash against Republican Gov. Sam Brownback and his allies that appeared to spell trouble for conservatives.

Emphasis is mine.

Could this be the beginning of a new trend inside the US Republican Party?  A return to greater moderation?

I can hardly believe I wrote that question in this era of Trumpism.  But we can always hope.

 

Short Posts 8/1/16: On Poking Trump, Voter Fraud and Blue Vs. Red States

1.  If someone pokes Donald Trump, he must poke back.  Must.  Even if ignoring that initial poke would be the rational thing to do.

Now that thin skin is a characteristic we really don't want to see in someone who wants to lead "the free world". 

What makes it even worse is the context of this most recent example of Trump's exaggerated self-defense:  His responses are to the father and mother of a slain American soldier. 

Trump's knee-jerk responses tell us not only that he would react like this to any needling by any foreign power but also that he lacks the ability to perceive nuances that most of us do perceive:  What is appropriate behavior if one absolutely insists on criticizing the parents of someone whose grave is in the Arlington National Cemetery, and what is not.

The sad thing from Trump's point of view is naturally that had he kept his mouth shut we would no longer talk about the Khans and the sacrifice they have made.  The sad thing more generally is that Trump is the Republican candidate for the presidency of the United States of America. 

2.  A federal court has struck down North Carolina's very strict voter-ID law.  On the surface that law was aimed at curbing "rampant" voter fraud, except that voter fraud is rare.  When we dig deeper into the reasons for the struck-down law, we find this:

In particular, the court found that North Carolina lawmakers requested data on racial differences in voting behaviors in the state. "This data showed that African Americans disproportionately lacked the most common kind of photo ID, those issued by the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV)," the judges wrote.
So the legislators made it so that the only acceptable forms of voter identification were the ones disproportionately used by white people. "With race data in hand, the legislature amended the bill to exclude many of the alternative photo IDs used by African Americans," the judges wrote. "The bill retained only the kinds of IDs that white North Carolinians were more likely to possess."

I'm very pleased to see that law struck down, and hope that this presages a trend of getting rid of other similarly biased laws.  If Republicans are so concerned about fraud in voting, perhaps they should focus on what might happen after a vote has been entered into the voting machine.

3.  This is an interesting opinion column on the economic differences between blue (Democratic leaning) and red (Republican leaning) states in the US.  As you probably know, the blue states are, on average, wealthier (though with higher income inequality) and have better educated populaces. Then there's this:

This red-blue divergence is all the more striking because red states still receive much more in federal spending relative to the federal taxes their residents pay. In other words, blue states are generally outperforming red states even while heavily subsidizing them.

An important plank in the Republican platform is, of course, to reduce the kind of federal spending which tends to benefit the red states.  That's as good a starting point as any for thinking about why people vote the way they do and to what extent their votes have something to do with their wallets.
  

Short Posts 7/27/16: On Nuns, D. Trump and H. Clinton

1.  Pope Francis has issued 

an “apostolic constitution,” a binding document with new rules. And to whom is the document addressed? Contemplative nuns!

These are the sisters we generally don’t see. They live in cloistered monasteries, away from daily contact with the world, focused on work and prayer. (We call them monasteries, not convents, because that’s the accurate term when referring to the residences of either nuns or priests who lead contemplative lives.)

You would think that the Pope would not have the time to worry about roughly 40,000 nuns whose main occupation is to pray for the rest of us.

What's worth our attention about this new apostolic constitution is this:

Interestingly, these directives to [sic] not apply to monks. Changes for the men, a Vatican official said, aren’t even being - uh - contemplated.

Nunz Gone Wild?  Or more control applied to nuns than monks?  You decide.

2.  Donald Trump's utterances have made sarcasm and irony impossible forms of political writing, because he makes reality more bizarre than anything mere writers could make up.

His recent quip is a good example of that:

The billionaire businessman then went even further, in remarks that left open the possibility that he would be open to Moscow staging a new hack against the United States to find the emails.

"Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press," Trump said during a news conference in Florida.

Trump's comments marked an unprecedented appeal to a foreign country to essentially launch an espionage operation against a political opponent. They come as Democrats gathering for their convention in Philadelphia are already grappling with a hack of emails at the Democratic National Committee, which were later posted on WikiLeaks.

Let's play the devil's advocate and assume that all this was just a joke*.  But what would that tell us about Trump's ability to carry out diplomatic conversations with foreign presidents, prime ministers and other dignitaries?  What kind of "jokes" might pass his apparently uncontrollable lips?

3. Suppose that Hillary Clinton had five children with three different husbands:

 Imagine the furor, and not only from the American right, if that indeed was the case.  Yet Donald Trump has five children with three different wives.  This is an interesting example of the (probably subconscious) way we judge women and men with several sexual partners differently.




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*  Should you wish to get really worried about possible Russian intervention in US elections, consider the vulnerability of electronic voting machines!  A nice by-product of securing them against tampering would be a greater general trust in the validity of election results. 

On Identity Politics. George Lakoff and Sean Duffy Opine. Echidne Responds.

Serendipity often plays a large role in what I end up writing.

As one example, I just read George Lakoff's  linguistic piece about how the Democrats should respond to Trump and other  right-wingers, and then, in that oddly serendipitous way, I read the identity politics opinion of one right-winger, Rep. Sean Duffy (R-WI).

The two gentlemen are light years apart in most of their politics, but what they have to say about identity politics* is weirdly similar.  Maybe that's because they belong to the same identity group (white guys)?

Let's start by looking at Rep. Duffy's statement:

During a CNN interview this morning, Rep. Sean Duffy (R-WI) acknowledged the Trump phenomenon for what it is — identity politics for white men.
While opining about Trump’s RNC-closing speech, Duffy said, “There’s a viewpoint that says, ‘I can fight for minorities, and I can fight for women,’ and if you get that, you make up a vast majority of the voting block and you win. And white males have been left aside a little bit in the politics of who speaks to them.”
Duffy’s implication is that in Trump, white guys have finally found a candidate who speaks to their concerns.

Whether or not they’re effectively communicating to white male voters, white men are certainly still well represented in Congress. When the 114th Congress was sworn in in January 2015, 80 percent of members were white males. By contrast, white guys only make up roughly 31 percent of the American population.

Bolds, they are mine.

White guys make up the American society's top layers in almost everything one can think of: politics, business, arts and literature, entertainment,  journalism, science, medicine, religious and sports organizations etc. etc.  White guys earn more, on average, than almost all other racial and gender groups.**

Being a white guy in the US doesn't automatically mean that one will be powerful, of course.  There are very poor white men, there are homeless white men, there are white men with horrible problems to cope with, and to the extent the problems of these individuals are amenable to political solutions politicians should try to solve them.

But the crucial point is that it's not being white-and-male which causes problems such as poverty.  Indeed, out of the many gender-race combinations the one that results in the least amount of unfair treatment is the combination of white and male.***

So much for Rep. Duffy's opinions.

Putin and Trump, Sitting In The Tree. K-i-s-s-i-n-g?

That's from a children's song.  It's a very clever headline, even if I say so myself, for a post which is about the possible debt Donald Trump owes Vladimir Putin.

Josh Marshall writes about evidence which just might suggest that Trump gets a lot of his funding from Russia in general and a few Russian oligarchs close to Putin in particular.  You should read Josh's post to judge for yourself, but here's where I get concerned:

That Trump owes a lot of money to Russian interests could be the reason why he has not released information on his taxes:

After his bankruptcy and business failures roughly a decade ago Trump has had an increasingly difficult time finding sources of capital for new investments. As I noted above, Trump has been blackballed by all major US banks with the exception of Deutschebank, which is of course a foreign bank with a major US presence. He has steadied and rebuilt his financial empire with a heavy reliance on capital from Russia. At a minimum the Trump organization is receiving lots of investment capital from people close to Vladimir Putin.
Trump's tax returns would likely clarify the depth of his connections to and dependence on Russian capital aligned with Putin. And in case you're keeping score at home: no, that's not reassuring.

It's a possible explanation for Trump's refusal to disclose his tax returns, and it could also explain why Trump hemmed and hawed about NATO coming to the aid of the Baltic states should Putin decide to re-annex them to Russia.

Maybe none of this is correct?  The real problem is, naturally, that the other Republican presidential candidates failed to start their smear machines against Trump early enough in the process, what with vastly over-estimating the smarts of American right-tilting voters.

Thus, it's only now in the general election stage that more facts and speculation surfaces about Trump, including the question whether he might, in fact, be kissing in a tree with the other wannabe rightist dictator of the somewhat modern world.

As Charlie Pearce writes:

This should be the only story about the Trump campaign until he comes clean. It should be the only question anybody asks him. Frankly, even beyond the threat to this election, it's a measure of the pure arrogance of He, Trump. And if Trump thinks his ability to game the American real-estate market, and his success at swindling the rubes who signed up for Trump University, makes him ready to deal with a guy who managed to survive a career at the top-level of the KGB only to make himself the presiding autocrat of the world's leading kleptocracy, I'd like to be there when he finds out how wrong he is.

Bolds are mine.


I'm not going to sleep well...

A Shorter Version of Trump's Acceptance Speech

Imagine this scenario:  You are in a physician's office, waiting to get the diagnosis for that nagging pain you've had for a while.  Your doctor steps out to get some of the test results, and you sit there, biting your nails.

Suddenly the door opens and in comes an orangey guy with a very weird hairdo, dressed in Speedos and carrying a hammer and a saw.  He takes your doctor's place behind the desk and tells you that he's your new surgeon, that you have a condition that will kill you, slowly and painfully, and that all there is between you and a miserable death is this man:  Your surgeon, a man who dares all, who can fix all, but only he can help you.  He knows how rotten the medical system is and that's why most of the time he works as junk bond trader.  And what you need is someone untainted by the system.

Everyone inside the medical system is an elitist money-grabber, only wanting to exploit you and responsible for your pain.  And you are gonna die!  Unless he is allowed to hit you with the hammer and then saw a couple of fingers off.

Well, he isn't going to tell you how that will cure you, and you mustn't ask any questions, either.  You must obey.  If you obey, he will save your life, and make sure that you can skip all waiting lines while other patients are left to suffer.  If you obey (and click your heels together and make the right gestures), then the gloom, the sinister gloom will be lifted, and you will be saved.

Otherwise you are gonna croak.

That's not as good as it sounded inside my head, but then neither is Trump's actual speech.  I can't be bothered with the fact-checking which you can get elsewhere.  But it's worth noting that the speech wasn't meant to be about facts: It was all about fear and an odd kind of careless fascism as the remedy for fear.

What makes that fascism careless is this:  If you read the speech carefully you will notice that Trump only mentions two actual policies he would carry out, and they are a) ban immigration from certain Muslim countries, and b) erect a giant wall between Mexico and the US.

He also vaguely promises to get rid of crime by 2017 or so (except that most crime is fought on the state and local level, not on the Federal level), to fix the labor markets, to pull the US out of most international trade agreements (which presumably would have no repercussions) and to simply wipe out all terrorism (which he wouldn't be able to do).

But none of that matters to the true believers.  For them the speech gave much:  Hillary Clinton is responsible for everything that has gone wrong in the world since 2009!  She is so powerful that some might then conclude she should be the president, or at least that no earthly power could keep her away, given her superpowers.

On the other hand, she is also a hybrid of Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Ivan the Terrible and every single woman who refused any Republican man the blowjob he felt entitled to.  That, my friends, is how the Trumpians* see Hillary Clinton, the unacceptable alternative to Donald Trump.

The true believers also heard Trump's law-and-order arguments.  To me they sounded fascist, but to the Trumpian believers they meant something different:

To regain control over the country and the globe, to restore the old racist and gender hierarchies, to remove all that fear Trump was fanning as the engine of his speech.  That Trump gave only two policies for achieving such a heaven (or hell, depending on which side of the various walls you might be) means that all the law-and-order talk was gesturing, intended to provoke the desired emotions and to provide some temporary relief from the gnawing anxiety and burning rage.

But only temporary relief, because the anger must not go away before the elections.  What happens after the elections is irrelevant to Donald Trump, though it's pretty clear to anyone who can put two thoughts together that he can't do what he promises in that speech, just as my trader-doctor cannot cure a patient with a hammer and a saw, and that those who adore him now would be discarded as no longer useful once Donald gets the crown.

Was there anything in the speech, anything at all,  that might be worth thinking about?

I believe that the effects of globalization on American working class people is the one serious part of the general Trumpian anger** that deserves attention from the Democrats.

The mainstream Republican Party is a lost cause when it comes to caring about jobs for the ordinary people, but the Democratic Party shouldn't be that.  Globalization has raised the incomes of the very rich in this world and may have helped certain groups of the poor, especially in China, but the earnings of the working class people in the industrialized West have stagnated.

But other than that the speech was almost exactly the equivalent of the little parable at the beginning of this post.  Frightening.


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* My term for the supporters of Donald Trump.
**  The part that comes from sexism, racism and other nasty -isms needs the attentions of a therapist, not the attentions of politicians, at least in the sense of re-creating a more unfair and unequal world.
***  Though I did find bits of it funny, such as the few paragraphs adding all the traditional Republican stuff about cutting taxes for the rich, to help the middle classes, killing the chances of any decent health care for lots of Americans and so on.  Those are probably the bits in the speech that Trump-the-president would actually try to carry out, or let Mike Pence do it for him while he takes care of America's greatness.      

Trump Thoughts. On the Republican National Conference.

- How did you react when you learned that Donald Trump, had said this?

Trump added that, if elected, the U.S. would not automatically guarantee security to the 28 members of NATO. Russia recently started a review of the terms of Baltic countries' independence from the former Soviet Union in 1991.
The GOP presidential candidate told the Times he would decide to go to the aid of small Baltic states only once he reviewed whether they had "fulfilled their obligations to us."
He added, "If they fulfill their obligations to us, the answer is yes."

My blood froze.  Honest.  That's because the man treats the large and complicated diplomatic pyramids as a toy from which he can pull out one of the bottom slabs and not have the pyramid collapse.  He believes the United States can simply disregard any contract it has entered, with no repercussions.

A "rookie mistake,' this was called.  But if you aim for the presidency of the most powerful country on earth you shouldn't be a rookie in understanding how NATO works, and you certainly shouldn't be forgiven for such a gross ignorance of the duties of the job you are applying for.

 - The whole RNC reminded me of a clown circus, to be honest.  There were the noisy clowns, in the pews, yelling "Lock Her Up", the grumpy clowns (Ted Cruz), the sinister clowns (Alt Right and Milo Yiannopoulos with their extreme bigotry,  racism and sexism).  And then there were the merely stupid clowns:

Susan, a single mother of three, said Trump has given her confidence to speak up about political issues. “I think that as a woman, I’ve always felt my First Amendment rights have been inhibited,” she said. “He’s made it OK for people like me, Middle America, single moms, to speak their minds. He’s done more for me personally than the feminist movement.”

 Mm.  Feminists got Susan the right to vote, better pay and all such trivial things.  --  As an aside, I find it hilarious when women such as Susan (and Margaret Thatcher) say they owe nothing to the feminist movement.  It's a bit like the anti-vaccination folks who don't see that it's vaccinations which have caused certain infectious diseases to have become rare enough so that people now believe they can experiment with their children's health.

 - Speaking of feminism, Trump's campaign chair lives the middle class Victorian life of 1880s America:

The permanent foot-in-the-mouth disease of the Republicans sadly has no preventative vaccinations.  Really, men like Paul Manafort should simply stay quiet.  Then we might suspect that he is a sexist.  Now we know for sure.

 - It's hard to enjoy this clown circus, given that it's also the gathering where the Republican candidate to destroy the world is nominated:

Trump’s nomination was inevitable, but it’s worth dwelling on for a moment. The Republican Party has nominated a man who is openly racist, sexist, and nativist and has normalized racist, sexist, and nativist political discourse, who has promised to order the military to commit war crimes, who knows nothing about domestic or foreign policy and has no political experience, who has promised to deport millions of people living in this country, who is, in short, totally unfit to be president of the United Sates.
While it should be noted that a number of party elites stayed home, Trump’s nomination is the result of the party’s voters, not its leadership: These voters, who have overwhelmingly chosen Trump as their nominee, will guide the party’s future, regardless of what happens in November. This is a historic and possibly cataclysmic moment for the Republican Party and for America.

When we add to that list of characteristics (openly racist, sexist and nativist) the possibility that he has the attention span of a teething eighteen-month-old, well, my blood runs cold again.

More On The Future of Women's Rights in Turkey

The first signs do not look good:

Reports of sexual harassment and violence against women have also increased since Friday. One woman tweeted that a man threatened her sexually while asking for a cigarette.
Another said that she was approached by a stranger in the subway who consecutively told her not to wear a dress. Yet another one was told to conceal her cleavage by a man who drove his car toward her at high speeds. A young woman tweeted that people celebrating the government’s survival after the overthrow attempt shouted at her as they drove by: "Bitches, you too will get what you deserve!"
“Conflicting environments, such as war or military coups, always increase violence and discrimination against women” says Selen Dogan, the chairman of the feminist group Uçan Supurge (Flying Broom). She explains that “these conflicts involve militarism, nationalism and religious motivations, all of which negate demands for freedom, equality and non-violence.”

Erdogan began as an Islamist, then appeared to have moderated his views, but now it just might be the case that he has returned to his radical roots (or never really left them but just bided his time).  He certainly appears to take advantage of the failed coup as an opportunity for a purge.  The vast numbers of people he has fired or arrested simply cannot all have been found to be guilty of plotting the coup in just a day or two or three.  Lists must have existed prior to the most recent events.

The purge could result in increasing Islamist power in the government, and that is very bad news for women's rights. 

A few earlier signs point in the same direction, such as the recent removal of the requirement that religious marriages only be conducted after a civil marriage has taken place.  This makes polygamous marriages, including child marriages with Syrian refugee children, less likely to be prosecuted, but also leaves second, third and fourth wives without any real financial security.

It's important that people outside Turkey protest any losses of women's rights in that country.  It may not matter to Erdogan, but it matters to the more secular women in Turkey, the ones who don't accept a presumed divine interpretation of them as an inferior species.

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I write on these topics not because I want to sow depression among my readers, but because it's important that someone does.

Lock Her Up. Hang Her From A Tree. Shoot Her For Treason.

Those are the sentiments of the crowds at the Republican National Convention ((RNC) (for locking her up), of a Republican Commissioner Duane Flowers in Licking County, Ohio (for hanging her) and of a Republican New Hampshire state Representative Al Baldasaro (for putting her against a wall and shooting her dead for treason).  The Secret Service is investigating Mr. Baldasaro, who has appeared with Donald Trump and advised him on veterans' issues.

I watched Chris Christie's mock trial of Hillary Clinton at the Republican National Convention, where he laid out a list of accusations (j'accuse!) against Clinton.  After each of them the crowd chanted "Guilty!"  And the refrain of  "Lock Her Up"  kept interrupting Christie's performance.  That almost all the accusations were about politics and policies and not about something for which a prison sentence can be imposed on someone* didn't matter to the crowd.  What mattered was the visceral hatred of Hillary Clinton.

Christie's list was interesting, because it implied that one Hillary Clinton had been responsible for everything bad that has happened in the last decade or so, including the kidnapping of schoolgirls by Boko Haram in Nigeria, an event which took place over a year after Clinton resigned from the position of a Secretary of State.

She has been incredibly powerful, Christie preached**.  She is the person responsible for creating ISIS.***  She has been more powerful than Barack Obama, who presumably is just a figure-head who left all practical politicking to Clinton.

Now what to make of that?  Christie ended his speech arguing that Trump, a man with no experience in the actual governing of a country, with very little knowledge about any other country, that this is the man the United States needs to lead it, with a careless (and small) hand on the nuclear button.

How much of this incoherent rage has to do with Hillary Clinton's own past history, her husband past presidency or her personality, and how much of it is thrown against her because she stands as a symbol of uppity womanhood?  As I've mentioned before a sample size of one when it comes to very powerful female politicians in this country makes any generalizations about that almost impossible.

Still, note the buttons which are being sold at the RNC.

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*  The exception to that rule is Hillary Clinton's use of a private e-mail server for State Department documents.  Some of the accusations made against her could have carried criminal penalties.  But the Justice Department won't prosecute her.  Still:

Comey said the Justice Department shouldn’t prosecute Clinton because there isn’t enough evidence that she intentionally mishandled classified information. FBI investigators didn’t find vast quantities of exposed classified material, and they also did not turn up evidence that Clinton intended to be disloyal to the United States or that she intended to obstruct justice.
However, he called Clinton’s email setup "extremely careless."

 Yup.

But then there's this.  And this.  And this.  That "others do it, too" is no excuse, but it sets what Hillary Clinton did into a wider framework.

**  Contrast that view to the one expressed in the Wiki evaluation of Clinton's performance as Secretary of State:

While Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State was popular at the time among the public and praised by President Obama, observers have noted that there was no signature diplomatic breakthrough during it nor any transformative domination of major issues in the nature of Dean Acheson, George Marshall, or Henry Kissinger.^[305][306] The intractable issues when she entered office, such as Iran, Pakistan, Arab-Israeli relations, and North Korea, were still that way when she left.^[305] Many of Clinton's initiatives in the "smart power" realm will take much more time to evaluate as to their effect.^[305] Aaron David Miller, a vice president at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, said that "She's coming away with a stellar reputation that seems to have put her almost above criticism. But you can't say that she's really led on any of the big issues for this administration or made a major mark on high strategy."^[305] Michael E. O'Hanlon, a Brookings Institution analyst, said that, "Even an admirer, such as myself, must acknowledge that few big problems were solved on her watch, few victories achieved. [She has been] more solid than spectacular."

It's worth pointing out that the issues mentioned in that quote are pretty intractable, in my view.  Many of them (including terrorism) seem to be of this Zeitgeist and amenable to change only funeral by funeral.

***   ISIS was created partly by George Walker Bush and his invasion of Iraq for the massacre of 911 (which had nothing to do with Iraq), partly by the Saudi exports of extremist Wahhabism all over the world,  partly by global climate change (the farmers' protests in Syria which began the Syrian unrest and civil war were clearly related to weather changes caused by climate change), and partly by age-old schisms between the Shias and the Sunnis in Iraq and elsewhere.  Even the availability of the Internet probably contributed to ISIS's ability to organize its troops. 

Short Posts 7/19/16: On Turkey's Coups, Melania Trump's Speech and Mike Pence As The Vice-Presidential Candidate of the Christianists

1.  The military coup attempt in Turkey failed. But what Erdogan appears to be doing in response looks ominous to me:

Turkey suspended more than 15,000 Education Ministry workers on Tuesday and demanded resignations from all university deans as authorities widened their far-reaching crackdowns in the wake of a failed coup attempt.
The 15,200 personnel were being investigated for links to the power grab launched last week, the ministry said in a statement. In addition, 1,577 university deans from Turkey's public and private universities were asked to hand in their notice. A further 492 staff were removed from duty at the country's top Islamic authority.

Earlier a similar large-scale cleansing was carried out among the Turkish judiciary:

The Turkish government has removed 2,745 judges from duty in the wake of a failed military coup in which over 161 people were killed.
The decision followed an emergency meeting of Turkey’s Judges and Prosecutors High Council which was called to discuss members’ links to US-based cleric Fethullah Gülen, the leader of a reformist Muslim movement.
The meeting saw the dismissal of 2,745 judges along with several members of the council itself, which is Turkey’s highest judiciary board.
 Turkey’s state-run news agency said authorities have detained 10 members of the council. 
The Anadolu Agency said arrest warrants have been issued for 48 administrative court members and 140 members of Turkey's appeals court.

If this indeed was a coup attempt by the military, what are the grounds for the above?  How does Turkey guarantee that these purges aren't used to get rid of all who oppose Erdogan's plans to be the tyrant of Turkey and who want to use the democratic system to express their opinions?

2.   From one end of real-world significance (the worry I have that Turkey is sliding toward extreme authoritarianism and possibly theocracy) to almost the other end:  Melania Trump's speech last night at the Republican National Convention and the astonishing similarities between her speech and that of Michelle Obama in 2012.

Rebecca Traister writes about the debacle and makes some good points.  As is my wont, I immediately focused on something peripheral in Traister's piece:

Melania’s task should have been to humanize her cartoonish thug of a mate, whether by offering a clear picture of herself, of him, or of their family life together.

Try to do a gender reversal on that.  It won't work, because the task of the candidate's wife in US politics is the one Nancy Reagan performed so well:  To look up to the candidate with adoring googly eyes, to soften the candidate by "humanizing" him, to play a supporting and acquiescent role behind the throne the candidate seeks.  Men aren't expected to do any of that, because the task has to do with the maintenance of the traditional woman-as-the-helpmate beliefs.

I don't have much to say on the specifics of the plagiarism accusations.  Directly stealing bits of language from someone else's well-known speech is a stupid thing to do in this Internet era, of course, because the chances of getting caught are very high.  That this was allowed to happen suggests that the Trump campaign is as chaotic as the Republican National Convention appears to be.

3. Mike Pence, the governor if Indiana, is Donald Trump's vice-presidential pick.  Pence is a Christianist and adamantly opposed to women's reproductive rights and same-sex marriage:

Like many young adults, Pence's views began to change during and just after college. He met his future wife, Karen, at a church in Indianapolis after he graduated from Hanover College. He later became a born-again Christian. Both remain deeply religious.

"I would say that my Christian faith and my relationship with Karen are the two most dominant influences in my life today," Pence told IndyStar in 2012.
Pence traces his views back to two historical documents: the Constitution and the Bible.
The first has shaped his passionate belief in limited government. The second has forged his strong beliefs on abortion and marriage.

In fact, the Bible says nothing against abortion.

In 1999 Pence wrote about the Disney movie Mulan as a liberal plot which tried to make little girls dream about combat roles in the military, even though Mulan was far too delicate to be able to match the performance of her "cloddish cohorts."  Pence was then opposed to military women in combat roles, and most likely opposed to women in the military altogether. 

And Pence believed that you get sex if you let women and men intermingle, and that Must.Not.Be:

You see, now stay with me on this, many young men find many young women to be attractive sexually. Many young women find many young men to be attractive sexually. Put them together, in close quarters, for long periods of time, and things will get interesting. Just like they eventually did for young Mulan. Moral of story: women in military, bad idea.

Women and men sorta intermingle in the Western societies anyway (colleges and schools, ahem, for the young ones), so the obvious corollary must be that the 1999 Pence was for gender segregation in almost all places. 

That's why I called him a Christianist, to echo the Islamist label for those who wish to re-engineer society to match their views of what might have been its form thousands of years ago in quite a different part of the world and in quite a different type of society.

Nobody knows if Pence still holds those views, but we do know that he loves nothing better than trying to remove reproductive choice from women.  The Periods for Pence -campaign grew out of that.

So that's who could be our Vice-President.  He's the pound of bloody (err) meat tossed to the fundamentalist wing of the Republican Party.  Trump needs the votes of that wing and the easiest way to get them is to let the fundies bash women's rights.  So Pence takes care of the religious oppression of American women, Trump takes care of women's  sexualizing oppression!

No wonder that most women in the US have a negative opinion about Trump's potential presidency:

A Washington Post-ABC News poll last month found that 77 percent of women had an unfavorable impression of Trump, including 65 percent who saw him in a “strongly unfavorable” light. Trump’s negative ratings among women are more than 20 percentage points higher than the ratings 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney received at any point in that campaign.  

 

And Here We Go. More About The Freedom FROM Religion.

What took place at the Republican National Convention on day one fits in so very well with my previous post about freedom from other religions.  Pastor Mark Burns,  leading the benediction at the closing of the afternoon session, making a special appeal to Jesus, singling Hillary Clinton out as an enemy and telling the hordes listening to him that Donald Trump believes in Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ.

Today's Wish: Freedom From Other People's Religions

That's what I desire right now: freedom from other people's religions.  I'm fed up with the anti-woman and anti-GLBT stances of the Islamists, the Catholic Church* and the fundamentalist Protestants in the US.

I'm also fed up with the way freedom of religion is interpreted as the right to constrain the lives of those who don't belong to the same faith, and with the way that same freedom for women to practice their religion (often an archaic patriarchal one) is defended by some on feminist principles (along the lines of I-choose-my-oppression).

How does one even begin to argue with religious extremists?  I don't see how it can be done, given that they refuse any arguments not based on literal readings of their own holy texts, written thousands of years ago.

Not that I desire to have a row with them; I just wish they'd stick to the more secular evidence in their arguments so that there would be some common ground.  But the only ground they wish to stand on is their own literal interpretations of ancient writings.  And guess what?  Women in those olden days had no rights to speak of, which, I'm told,  means that women today shouldn't have many rights, either.

This is one of my repeating grumbles.  You may wish to consider it in the light of the weather here:  Hot and muggy.  When I leave air-conditioned spaces I feel as if my brain is being stir-fried with garlic and ginger, and that reminds me of this and of similar examples where emotions (or appeals to something we are expected to take on faith) are used alone **, and of the great power of emotions in politics:  They seem impervious to any facts that clash with them.

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*  The current Pope has improved the church's policies, though more in the way the poor are viewed than in the way women are viewed.  Still, I see some slight changes in the church's prior obsessive focus on controlling women's fertility, though I doubt we shall see women get the power to participate in that policy-making any time soon.

* * Emotions are important, of course.  Otherwise we'd be machines.  But the proper role of emotions, in my opinion, is to fuel one's activism and the search for all evidence, to see to what extent they support our emotions.

What You Can Buy at The Republican National Convention in Cleveland, 2016: Sexism

These buttons, you can proudly wear on your lapel at this year's Republican National Convention:

The article I linked to also tells us that other alternatives include "Life’s a Bitch, Don’t Vote for One,” and “Hot Chicks for Trump.”



The sellers of such buttons probably have no official status, but it's still fun to point out that all three buttons mentioned above  refer to the wider animal kingdom when describing Hillary Clinton or women in general:  Chickens and dogs.

I naturally know the difference between self-identifying as a "hot chick" and being described as a dead chicken available at the Kentucky Fried Chicken chain.  The former is fuckable, the other not so much.

It's that KFC Hillary Special button (2 fat thighs, 2 small breasts -- left wing) which is both the most humorous (if one ignores its meaning) and the nastiest in terms of its meaning.

That's because it is not ultimately about one Hillary Clinton, but about the rating system sexists use for women, even for women in the public sector, even for women in power, even for women with many qualifications, lots of knowledge and skills,  and that rating system is the looks-index or the fuckability index.

All the button really says is that Hillary Clinton is not fuckable.  Why that would even be information in the race for the president of the United States I don't know.  She's not going to let any Tom, Dick or Harry from the streets to fuck her.

Well, I do know the reason for the popularity of such buttons.  The person wearing them can feel superior to Hillary Clinton on those old sexist grounds:  I wouldn't touch her with a barpole (?? is there such a word?)*, I'm more fuckable than she is, and so on.

That this brings us right back to the way Donald Trump speaks about women may not be an accident.  His utterances have lowered the bar for what can be said in public, and his utterances have also increased the freedom for the kind of sexism where women are equated with sex objects or the supply side of the sexual marketplace.

I'm not that bothered about those buttons, because they do the most damage to those who sell them or wear them:  It's a great thing to get sexists identified before we might have to interact with that person.  Still, it's 2016 and all that, and the best attack these buttons convey about  the first female Democratic nominee to be the president of the United States is that she has too fat thighs and too small breasts and, besides, she is a bitch.

Hmm.  Should I write a post about the looks and bitchiness of one Donald Trump?
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* Thanks, LR in the comments:  It's bargepole.
Added later:
And then there's this.

Dying For Honor

To some that title might evoke images of military heroes who sacrifice themselves for their country.  To others the images are worse:  Families calmly getting together, planning and then carrying out the killing of a family member, frequently a woman, for what is deemed the crime of besmirching the family's honor.

Honor killings have their origins in the area around the Mediterranean, but they are now found much more widely.  Still, certain countries and certain cultures have a much stronger inheritance of this custom.

Pakistan is one of them.  The very recent killing of a young Pakistani woman by her brother is an honor killing, though it's unclear if it is one planned by more than one individual:

Pakistani social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch has been killed by her brother in an apparent 'honour killing' in the province of Punjab, police say.
Ms Baloch, 26, recently caused controversy by posting controversial pictures of herself on social media, including one alongside a Muslim cleric.
Police say she was strangled to death.
Cases of women being killed for 'dishonouring' their family are commonplace in Pakistan.
Qandeel Baloch became a household name for posting bold, sometimes raunchy, photographs, video and comments.

Ms Baloch's parents told The Express Tribune that she was strangled to death on Friday night following an argument with her brother.
They said her body was not discovered until Saturday morning. Her parents have been taken into custody, the Tribune reported.
Ms Baloch had gone to Punjab from Karachi because of the threat to her security, police say.
"[Her] brothers had asked her to quit modelling," family sources quoted by the Tribune said.
Sources quoted by the newspaper said that Wasim was upset about her uploading controversial pictures online and had threatened her about it.
Police said he had not been arrested and was on the run.

Baloch had been called the Kim Kardashian of Pakistan, but more recently she had also begun writing about the oppressed role of women in her country:

She had nearly 750,000 followers on Facebook, where her videos went viral but were also the subject of much debate and discomfort. In recent weeks, several of her posts encouraged her audience to challenge old practices of Pakistani society. In a July 14 post, Baloch referred to herself as a "modern day feminist."
Hamna Zubair, the culture editor of Pakistani newspaper Dawn, told CNN that she had received much criticism for carrying pieces on Baloch. One commentator asked her if she would be "reporting from a brothel" next.
Baloch tightly controlled her narrative in the media. She shared little about her personal life and was something of an enigma; nobody really knew which city she was based in.
She found fame and slipped into the national consciousness after declaring that she would perform a live strip tease online if Pakistan won a cricket match against arch rival India.
As her media profile grew, Zubair said Baloch became aware "of her power to deliver a certain message about being female in Pakistan," and that she had become a "burgeoning activist for increasing women's visibility" in the country.

Honor killings should be of concern to feminists, over and above the obvious feminist concerns about domestic violence against women.  Honor killings exist in addition to the run-of-the-mill domestic violence, and they differ from that by frequently being planned by most of the family members together and carried out as a formal execution.

The basic concept of "honor" used in this context lodges the family's honor in women's vaginas:  What most frequently gets women "honor-killed" is any sign of independent sexuality, such as marrying or dating a man the family disapproves of.

Thus, in order to guard a family's honor, its female members must be controlled, monitored and their activities limited. Independence in women is seen as a risk, something to be attacked, because it could lead to the tainting of the family's honor.

That concept of family honor is convenient for the male members of a family whose independence is not subject to similar restrictions.  It also directly limits women's chances for self-determination.

The tradition of honor killings in terms of more recent history belongs to certain cultures and not others, but it can also be seen as an extreme manifestation of the fairly common tendency everywhere to regard women as responsible for all the goal-keeping in sexual interactions:  It is the women who are called sluts if they have many partners; men with many partners are called players.

This tradition, in all its forms,  belongs in the waste bin of history.

If Women Discriminate Against Women, Is It Still Discrimination? Evidence From Studies.

Here's something for you to chew on:

Several studies  I've written about here over the years show that it's quite possible for not only men but also women to discriminate against women in the sense of pure sex discrimination.

Examples of this can be found in studies about customer ratings of sale force, about student mentoring and selection, about the rating of plays by critics where the plays are the same but the presumed name of the author has been changed, and about how much a fictitious worker should be rewarded for some project when that worker's accomplishment remains the same but his or her sex is changed*.

If women do it, too, at least in some studies**, does this mean that what we are seeing shouldn't be called sex discrimination?  Even if it affects women negatively as a class?

Would your answer to that be different if I told you that I have found studies which show something comparable when it comes to ethnic or racial discrimination, where members of racial and/or ethnic minorities are as likely to discriminate against their own group as are whites***?

It's important to stress that I have picked these studies out of much larger fields, that other studies don't necessarily show being a discriminator as an equal opportunity role, and that I'm saying nothing about the relative prevalence of the above results, just that they exist.

How would we explain the phenomenon of women and/or members of racial or ethnic minorities treating "their own" with bias?

My preferred explanation is twofold:

First, we are all like the fish who swim in the water and cannot tell if it has a taste because they have never experienced the alternative.  This means that both women and men, say, have been largely exposed to the same gender stereotypes, that both women and men have seen more men in positions of leadership and, in general, have been told roughly the same stories about the proper roles of women and men in the culture.

Second, all that is hiding inside most of us, and may crop up in situations of the type the linked studies create.  I believe that the responses with bias are largely subconscious ones, not explicit choices where some kind of inner conversation goes on at the same time as the choice is made.

As an example, study subjects pretending to be the representatives of a firm might award a female employee a smaller bonus than an equally productive male employee  not because the subjects believe that women deserve smaller rewards for the work, but because women, on average, get smaller rewards and some women, at least, seem to accept them, and if you are playing the role of the employer, paying smaller bonuses whenever possible is a good thing.

And to answer my own headline:  Yes, it is still discrimination.  Who does the discriminating is irrelevant from that angle.  As long as the outcome is to treat equally productive/talented/etc. women and men differently, we are talking about sex discrimination.

Now to the question of how prevalent these attitudes might be.  I cannot answer that, because the studies that look at the sex, race or ethnic affiliations of those who do the discriminating are uncommon.  But I know that not all studies demonstrate such equal-opportunity discrimination.****



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*  I can't find the link to this study, even though I'm 90% certain that I covered it on this blog and 100% certain that it exists.  The study is an audit study where the study subjects are asked to tell how big a bonus a fictitious employee should get.  In some scenarios this employee is female, in other scenarios male, but in all cases the job achievement to be rewarded is the same.  Both female and male study subjects would have awarded the fictitious male worker higher bonuses.

It's also worth pointing out that the play review study doesn't show that female critics rated plays with a female author name as inferior in the sense that they themselves found them inferior, but only in the sense that they predicted those plays would do worse in the marketplace.  That's somewhat different from the knee-jerk type reactions the other studies seem to suggest.

**  A recent example where female study subjects were not biased against women whereas male study subjects were can be found here. Other studies also demonstrate different levels of bias against women by men and women.  A meta-study which found that men were rewarded more for equal performance evaluations found the only exception in the industries with a high number of female executives.

***  A quote from the Airbnb study on racial discrimination:

On the whole, we find that results are remarkably persistent. Both African-American and White hosts discriminate against African-American guests; both male and female hosts discriminate; both male and female African-American guests are discriminated against. 

A quote from the study on mentoring by faculty members prior to the student's enrollment:

We have reported two counterintuitive findings: 1) representation does not reduce bias and 2) there are no benefits to women of contacting female faculty nor to Black or Hispanic students of contacting same-race faculty. These results are consistent with past research showing that, counter to perceptions (Avery, McKay, & Wilson, 2008), stereotypes are potentially held even by members of the groups to which the stereotypes apply (Nosek, Banaji, & Greenwald, 2002) and that female scientists are just as biased against female job applicants as male scientists (Moss-Racusin et al., 2012).

****  I also think that experimental studies of various types might make the study subjects more careful about revealing the kind of sex or race discrimination that is based on much more overt dislike or antagonism, especially if the study gives hints about its purpose.  It's possible that such studies don't capture all aspects of real-world discrimination of the most overt kind.