When President Trump this week met human rights activist Nadia Murad, an Iraqi who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in
2018 for speaking out about her agonizing torture and rape while in
Islamic State captivity, he seemed unaware of her story and the plight
of her Yazidi ethnic minority.
Do read the whole story where you will find that Trump's ignorance is of the extreme sort.
Keep in mind that presidents are briefed right before such meetings, so either Trump wasn't listening to the briefing at all or he had already forgotten what he was told about the Yazidis* not very many minutes earlier. Both explanations are disconcerting. Or should be disconcerting if we lived in more ordinary times.
-----------
* To put Nadia Murad's experiences into context, read this post (trigger warning for extreme violence) I wrote in 2015 about the treatment of women and especially Yazidi women and girls by ISIS then.
It's not news that Trump has racist and sexist views. He ran on those views, after all. So I am not particularly interested in trying to saw open his skull to see what monsters there might tell us about why* he is tweet-attacking four progressive Democratic politicians, all of them women and all of them women of color.
A more interesting question than repeatedly asking if he might, after all, be a teeny weeny bit bigoted, is to ask why he chose to attack "the Squad" at this particular point in time.
Mr. Trump clearly sees a political
advantage in his targeting of the congresswomen, betting that by
focusing attention on them, he will be better able to paint all
Democrats with a broad brush of socialism and radical policies.
“The
Dems were trying to distance themselves from the four ‘progressives,’
but now they are forced to embrace them,” Mr. Trump gloated on Twitter
on Monday evening. “That means they are endorsing Socialism, hate of
Israel and the USA! Not good for the Democrats!”
Cornell
Belcher, a Democratic pollster and strategist, said Mr. Trump’s latest
remarks reflected a broader strategy to use the same kind of racial
animus that helped propel his 2016 presidential bid to bolster his base
for his 2020 re-election push.
And the timing may simply be because Maureen Dowd had just written a column (in her inimitable slap-the-bitches schoolyard style) which strongly suggests that Nancy Pelosi tries to distance the views of the Squad from the general messages of the Democratic Party.**
Thus, the situation was tailor-made for Trump to hop into the saddle and ride this particular pony of our political apocalypse. (I'm being taken captive by bad metaphors! Help! Send chocolate!)
But other tentative explanations exist. For instance, the Epstein case is very much in the news, and there may be good reasons why Trump might wish to make certain that there are competing baits for the journalist fishes out there.
And the man really is a master baiter.
--------
* In one sense his tweets are nothing more than the old "America. Love It Or Leave It" argument, which frames dissent as treason.
In another sense it's just his id speaking. He loves letting it off the leash because he knows that his base adores him for their chance of vicariously doing the same, and, as we all know, nothing bad ever happens to Trump when he does that.
But there are also political reasons for focusing the magnifying glass on the Democrats while the southern border continues as a pure hell on earth and so on. The media eagerly swallows his bait and then dangles off his fishing rod, helpless and dull-eyed. (I told you that I'm being kidnapped by bad metaphors today!)
** I have not tried to analyze that Dowd column and Pelosi's possible thought processes which led her to giving that interview to an opinion columnist who truly detests Democratic women and always analyzes them from the Mean Girls Angle.
Singer R. Kelly has been arrested in Chicago on federal sex crime charges, according to two law enforcement officials. The 52-year-old was arrested by NYPD detectives and Homeland Security Investigation agents on sex trafficking charges, officials tell News 4, and it is expected he will be brought to New York. …
The R&B star has been the subject of different sexual abuse allegations for nearly two decades, with some of the alleged acts dating back to 1998. Back in February, Kelly was charged with aggravated sexual abuse involving four women, three of whom were minors when the alleged abuse occurred. He pleaded not guilty and was released from Chicago's Cook County Jail after posting bail. ...
A jury in 2008 acquitted Kelly of child pornography charges stemming from a video showing him having sex with a girl as young as 13, prosecutors claimed at the time. Kelly faced 15 years in prison for that charge, but the young woman in that claim denied it was her and did not testify.
If you think there might be an echo in the room, you are correct. This case looks a lot like the Jeffrey Epstein case: Both men are rich and powerful and both have successfully slithered out of earlier sexual abuse allegations concerning minors, while apparently not changing their lives at all.
But there are differences, too. R. Kelly is black, Jeffrey Epstein is not, R. Kelly is a famous musician, Jeffrey Epstein is mostly famous for being close to famous people, and the two used different strategies in their (alleged) preying for victims:
R. Kelly has been accused of creating a cult* where women and girls were held hostage inside his properties, while Epstein seems to have kept his targets on longer leashes**, to be called back when required.
Still, the differences in those hunting styles disguise a deeper similarity, one which is an integral part of much sex trafficking:
The relationship between the sex trafficker and the
exploited minor is often "a mental tether and not a physical chain," she
said.
"Once manipulated" by the sex trafficker, "she
can be in any social space and still be exploited but not see herself as
a victim," she continued.
...
With
victims too young to understand that they're being manipulated and used,
they often tragically blame themselves or cover for their abuser.
Victims reported that Epstein paid them when they were hard up for
cash — and paid extra when they brought new girls. He offered them
affection, or promised to boost their future careers. That’s what kept
them coming back to his palatial Palm Beach estate for years.
That
line of thinking isn’t uncommon for victims of human trafficking rings,
experts say, and it can take years for survivors to realize they were
victimized twice: once sexually, and a second time through manipulation
with money, power, or praise.
“They’ll often talk about the
extent to which they have agency in their own decision, but they don’t
see themselves as being exploited,” said Rachel Lovell, sex trafficking
expert and assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University. “They
see themselves as being in love, as making the best decisions with the
limited circumstances that they have.”
--------
* This article, from 2017, gives some insights into how the process of —what? conversion? brain-washing? — slowly worked for one woman, Kitti Jones, who has since sued R. Kelly.
Note how familiar some aspects of that gradual tightening of the noose sound. Kelly used the kinds of devices domestic and intimate partner abusers routinely employ, only he did it to several girls and women at the same time. Another woman suing Kelly, Faith Rodgers, recounts similar incidents in 2018:
The allegations are similar to others made against Kelly recently, from women who allege he held them against his will in a “cult”,
where as well as being forced into sexual acts, the women had their
diet and even use of the bathroom controlled by Kelly. Rodgers’ lawsuit
describes her case as “run-of-the-mill R Kelly sexual abuse”.
President Trump’s golf resort in Doral, Fla., is scheduled to host a golf tournament Saturday put on by a Miami-area strip club, which will allow golfers to pay for a dancer to serve as their “caddy girl” while they play at the president’s club. The “Shadow All Star Tournament” is organized by the Shadow Cabaret, a strip club in Hialeah, Fla.
So it goes. I'm trying to imagine what the reactions of the public would be if, say, Hillary Clinton had done something similar. For instance, suppose that she had organized a fund-raising party where the guests could pay to have young male strippers sit at their tables during the dinner.*
----------
* To be clear she never did that. And to be even clearer, I wrote that paragraph to point out the gendered nature of the above arrangement. It's female dancers that the male golf-players pay for. And to be clearer than that, this is about sex, but it's really only about sex for the buyers, and not for the sellers. Still, most of Trump's base would like all of reality to work like this:
Mancuso said there would be no nudity at the resort. On the course,
he said, the caddies would wear pink miniskirts and what he called “a
sexy white polo.” Afterward, however, the golfers and the dancers would
return to another venue — the cabaret itself — for what he described as a
“very tasteful” burlesque show, which could involve nudity. “They’re going to be clothed the whole time” at the golf course, Mancuso said. “At the venue is different.”
The Trump administration is doing the bidding of Vlad "The Impaler" Putin and of the fanatic religious fundamentalists. We know that, of course, but that bidding is now going to affect the way the US foreign policy will interpret human rights. My guess is that the new definition of human rights will try to return that concept to the era of the American Founding Fathers when women, as a class, had very few rights and when blacks counted as fractional human beings.
The Trump administration said Monday that it will review the role of
human rights in American foreign policy, appointing a commission
expected to elevate concerns about religious freedom and abortion.
...
A group of Democratic senators said in a letter last month that they
were dismayed that the commission was being assembled without
congressional oversight. Several of the names of people reported to be
on it, they charged, support discriminatory policies against gays and
lesbians, “hold views hostile to women’s rights, and/or to support
positions at odds with U.S. treaty obligations.”
The hilarious aspect in this is that these changes are also very much desired by the groups the United States is currently fighting in Syria and in Afghanistan.
Fundamentalists are brothers under the skin, and it's pretty clear that the new "rights" would not affect the human rights of straight religious men. Everyone else, fasten your seat belts.
I am always uncomfortable when people use the term "religious freedom," unless carefully specified, because one person's religious freedom too often seems to mean that other people must lose their rights of being viewed as equally human beings. Besides, religious communities use that term to police the members of their own flock which can, ironically, strip those members of their human rights. There's an odd collective aspect to that term, which may be why organized religion likes it.
Whether this new commission ends up having any power or not, the very fact that it has been created makes me sad. It's an ominous sign of the end of that era when powerful Western powers paid at least lip service to general human rights, the fair treatment of women and of sexual minorities and so on. Unless we fight to preserve those basic rights, of course.
Epstein has been arrested for allegedly sex trafficking dozens of minors
between 2002 and 2005 while residing in New York and Florida, according to a story broken by The Daily Beastand confirmed by CNN.
The new indictment reportedly accuses Epstein of paying underage girls
in cash for "massages" in order to molest or otherwise sexually abuse
them at his residences in either the Upper East Side of Manhattan or in a
wealthy neighborhood of Palm Beach, Florida. The indictment will also
reportedly claim that some of Epstein's employees and associates helped
him recruit these girls for his abuse — and that many of the sex abuse
victims ultimately assisted him in recruiting his future victims.
Before the plea deal, Mr. Epstein, a
former hedge-fund manager, had been friendly with Donald J. Trump,
former President Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew, the Duke of York.
He
pleaded guilty to lesser state charges of soliciting prostitution,
served 13 months in a county lockup and registered as a sex offender.
His jail arrangement allowed him to get out of the Palm Beach County
Stockade six days a week to work out of his office.
Well, the deal may have been overly lenient, but it was also just shitty:
The
plea deal that protected Mr. Epstein from federal charges was signed by
the top federal prosecutor in Miami at the time, Alexander Acosta, who
is now President Trump’s labor secretary.
In February, a judge in Florida ruled
that the prosecutors led by Mr. Acosta violated federal law when they
failed to disclose Mr. Epstein’s nonprosecution agreement to his
victims.
The agreement was negotiated in secret while victims were told prosecutors were still pursuing a possible federal criminal case.
Scan through the last two quotes above, and you do get the feeling that the law for some people is, indeed, in a very concrete sense a private law, which is one of the original meanings of "privilege:"
The unwashed masses have one law, the rich and powerful and their tribal associates have a different one.
And why not, in their own minds? After all, they have the right to have the best cars, wines, houses and caviar. They get to fly in private jets. They never have to stand in line. Why shouldn't they have access to the bodies they most desire for sexual purposes, even if the law for the hoi polloi regards that access as illegal?
To be crystal-clear, the above paragraph is my attempt to enter the mind of someone like Jeffrey Epstein. It is NOT what I believe, of course. In particular, there's an enormous moral and ethical difference between cars, houses, wines and caviar on the one hand and the bodies of young and very vulnerable** girls and women on the other hand.
---------
* For even earlier hints about all this, see this article. Or Google Epstein's name and "parties." The problem, of course, is that until cases are brought to court (or good third-party evidenced is presented) all the hints must be treated as mere rumors by those of us who are on the outside of the judicial system.
One of the victims, Courtney Wild, now 31, was wearing braces when she
first met Mr. Epstein. “Jeffrey preyed on girls who were in a bad way,
girls who were basically homeless,” Ms. Wild told The Herald. “He went
after girls who he thought no one would listen to and he was right.”
Because this is a holiday week in the US, I feel free not to write about only politics and other stress-inducing topics. For a change of pace, I thought back to the misty past when I was a very small goddess, to figure out my first memory.
The one I'm surest about* is this:
I am upright in the hot sun. Outside.
Heat. Light. Light and heat. From above. Above exists. Cold below. Below exists. The stepping stone is cold and I stand on it. I exist.
I am not the heat, I am not the light, I am not the cold or the stone.
I AM, small, I end there and I end here, and I stand on this stepping stone and it is hot and it is glaring white above and my legs (I have legs) are bare and warm and I wear a ---- onesie? and a baby bonnet.
What's your first memory?
------------
* I have another one which is a little fuzzier and involves hearing people talk but not being able to understand a single word. Also, feeling like a turtle on its back, unable to move toward the light from the window. But the one I write about here is much stronger.
These allegations appeared in print at the Cut which published a short excerpt from Carroll's forthcoming book. Here's the central bit:
The
moment the dressing-room door is closed, he lunges at me, pushes me
against the wall, hitting my head quite badly, and puts his mouth
against my lips. I am so shocked I shove him back and start laughing
again. He seizes both my arms and pushes me up against the wall a second
time, and, as I become aware of how large he is, he holds me against
the wall with his shoulder and jams his hand under my coat dress and
pulls down my tights.
I
am astonished by what I’m about to write: I keep laughing. The next
moment, still wearing correct business attire, shirt, tie, suit jacket,
overcoat, he opens the overcoat, unzips his pants, and, forcing his
fingers around my private area, thrusts his penis halfway — or
completely, I’m not certain — inside me. It turns into a colossal
struggle. I am wearing a pair of sturdy black patent-leather four-inch
Barneys high heels, which puts my height around six-one, and I try to
stomp his foot. I try to push him off with my one free hand — for some
reason, I keep holding my purse with the other — and I finally get a
knee up high enough to push him out and off and I turn, open the door,
and run out of the dressing room.
Carroll wrote that she told two women about the event at the time, and two women have come forward to verify that. Trump's response was that Carroll is "totally lying" and that "she is not his type."
I find it hard to get over the idea that "she is not my type" would be a defense against sexual assault allegations. Indeed, I can't get my head around that. I wonder what his type for sexual assault purposes might be...
The longer the Trump era continues, the more I feel like Alice in Wonderland: (1)
"Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was
younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've
believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
President Trump held a lengthy news conference
Saturday in Osaka, Japan, during which he displayed his apparent
ignorance of some very basic political terms and historical concepts.
When asked about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s comments saying Western-style liberalism was “obsolete,” Trump apparently thought this term literally referred to the western United States and American liberals.
....
Democratic liberalism, of course, does not refer to the western United States, but rather the Western world
-- which generally includes the United States and much of Europe. And
liberalism is a political theory that values the freedom of the
individual. That term has come to be associated with left-leaning
American politicians and political activists, but some right-leaning
political thinkers still claim the term as their own.
Broadly
speaking, democratic liberalism has been the leading political ideology
across the western world since World War II. Of late, though, populist
movements across Europe have gained power, leading to questions about
how long liberal democracies can survive. Putin’s comments were clearly
about that, but Trump doesn’t appear to have processed this very
significant development on the world stage.
No. It's not funny. It's frightening, as if we live in a mirror world where the Russian dictator is pleased that the idea of democracy, freedom of the individuals and associated concepts such as human rights are now becoming obsolete, and the wannabe American dictator doesn't even understand what the fuck Vlad The Impaler is talking about.
The BBC has a more detailed take on both the meaning of liberal democracy in the Western world, and Putin's assertions:
"Putin's position is that Russia has a specific and different kind of
civilisation, where sovereignty trumps democracy, and national unity
and stability trumps rule of law and human rights," says Prof Cox. "Not
surprisingly, he's not keen on Western-style liberalism, which he'll
see as a fundamental challenge to his style of government.
Bolds are mine.
Putin's views remind me of how Mussolini, too, made the trains run on time...
Never mind. The point of this post is that while Putin's war-of-the-ideas uses sophisticated weapons in, say, cyber-warfare, Trump brings with him a toy train.
In Alabama, the state which takes The Handmaid's Tale not as dystopian fiction, but as an instruction manual about the proper care and management of those pesky females, this happened:
Marshae Jones was five months pregnant
when she was shot in the stomach. Her fetus did not survive the
shooting, which the authorities say happened during a dispute with
another woman.
But on Wednesday, it was Ms. Jones who was charged in the death.
Ms.
Jones, 28, was charged with manslaughter and booked into jail on a
$50,000 bond, according to the authorities in Jefferson County, Ala. The
police have said she was culpable because she started the fight that
led to the shooting and failed to remove herself from harm’s way.
“The
only true victim in this was the unborn baby,” Lt. Danny Reid of the
Pleasant Grove Police Department, said after the shooting in December, AL.com reported. “It was the mother of the child who initiated and continued the fight which resulted in the death of her own unborn baby.”
My dear readers, welcome to a taste of the wonderful world where egg-Americans have full human rights and therefore their carriers do not*.
To see how that will work in the glorious future, should the forced-birthers get their way, consider this manly opinion by Lt. Reid:
“When a five-month pregnant woman initiates a fight and attacks another
person, I believe some responsibility lies with her as to any injury to
her unborn child,” Lt. Reid said then. “That child is dependent on its
mother to try to keep it from harm, and she shouldn’t seek out
unnecessary physical altercations.”
She probably shouldn't drink alcohol, either, or smoke tobacco. She probably shouldn't go scuba diving or mountain climbing, she shouldn't travel to dangerous places, and she probably shouldn't be allowed to be in the military or the police or the fire brigade. What if she goes out alone, at night, in a potentially dangerous area? What if she eats too much tuna? Fails to take folic acid?
Duh, some of you might say. It's only for nine months per child. Isn't a healthy child worth a few restrictions on your life?
And most women do make those restrictive choices on their own. But this is not about their decisions. It's about the society decreeing that they cannot have the same rights as other adults do. In other words, human rights for egg-Americans will remove at least some rights from adult women that adult men get to keep.
It could get even worse:
Because any fertile woman is potentially pre-pregnant, and because pregnancy is invisible to outsiders in the early stages, this way of thinking can easily slide into the policing of all women between the ages of, say, ten and fifty, including keeping them away from dangerous occupations and hobbies and scrutinizing every miscarriage for possible evidence of a homicide.
That's the dystopia we might one day live in if the forced-birthers have their way. I don't think it will become reality, because most people don't want to see that world realized. But the doctrine of full personhood of egg-Americans will unavoidably lead us there.
I rarely write about certain topics*, even when they are of great importance, even when I worry about them every single day. That's because often I have nothing useful to contribute to what is already being said, or I have no special expertise in the area. Just joining in the general lamentations about the atrocities that the Trump administration perpetuates doesn't seem particularly worthwhile. The Greek chorus is loud enough, but the White House is sound-insulated.
What is taking place at the US southern border is one of those topics where my voice is unnecessary, in general, though I do worry about the lack of debate on the left side of the political aisle on what ideal immigration policies would look like, what the US should have done to prevent the current perfect storm from taking place to begin with,** and how to prepare better for similar future events.
Children in cages. People with any empathy are aghast at the news that some three hundred children were held in cages, many, if not most, separated from their parents or guardians at the border, left without proper basic care and adult supervision.
We can thank the Trump administration policies for a large part*** of that problem, and especially Stephen "Dead Eyes" Miller, the architect of the current immigration policies, the so-called "zero tolerance" among them. As McKay Coppins writes in an Atlantic Monthly article,
But while Miller’s influence on this issue is a matter of documented fact, his motives remain somewhat murkier. Why exactly is he using his perch to champion a measure that’s so unpopular
that it’s opposed by fully two-thirds of Americans? Theories abound, of
course—ranging from ideology to incompetence to xenophobia—but they are
almost all products of distant speculation.
Coppins believes that Miller wants to "agitate," to create "constructive controversies", because he trusts that they will ultimately resolve to Trump's advantage in the next elections:
But for Miller, it seems, all is going according to plan—another
“constructive controversy” unfolding with great potential for
enlightenment. His bet appears to be that voters will witness this
showdown between Trump and his angry antagonists, and ultimately side
with the president. It’s a theory that will be put to the test in
November. In the meantime, the heartrending orchestra on the border will play on.
But why would the voters side with the president here?
This is where the "feature, not a bug" arguments comes out to play: Miller wants the news about children in cages to leak out, because he wants those news to be seen and discussed in the source countries of the current migrants and asylum seekers.
It's as if he is whispering in the ears of those planning to come to the US about what might happen to their children if they do make the journey, suggesting that whatever the reasons they contemplate leaving might be, the likely treatment they would face at the US border is even worse. And for that approach to work (i.e. to noticeably reduce the number of migrants seeking entry into the US), the news must be cruel enough.
That all-whip-no-carrot approach is, of course, the way this administration carries out almost all its foreign policy, except toward countries led by strong-men dictators whom Trump admires.
----------
* Climate change is the most important one of those. I do what I can in my own life and try to be well-informed, but I'm not a scientist in that area.
** The reverse of what Trump did. Give more support to the source countries of the recent migrants in ways which would improve their security safety and economic position. People don't usually want to leave their countries if they have a safe choice to stay. And the US, for historical reasons, owes some real help to that area.
Such aid is not only good for people who live there but also for peace, the control of migration and even for creating new markets for US products, through greater affluence. And if properly thought out, it's also good for human rights.
Fighting climate change is another central part of the longer-run solution to global migrations and the problems they cause.
For more about some of the problems in the current asylum-based system, see this Timearticle from last November.
*** Though the sudden increase in the numbers of asylum-seekers and migrants and the lack of resources and preparedness at the border also contributed.
It does not mean that now patriarchy will be tipped on its head, even in Finland, and nobody will come around with gelding shears. Honest.
Rather, one day future governments, all over the world, will have women and men in percentages which over the long-run end up matching the percentages of women and men in the relevant populations. Some years there will be more men, some years there will be more women, and some years the numbers are roughly equal.
A goddess can dream, in any case.
(Now I suddenly imagine a cabinet created by all those people with Trump masks on. That's the kind of dream Trump dreams: Himself, eternally, in power. And fuck the rest of the humankind.)
3. Marin Alsop, the first woman to lead a major US orchestra, describes conducting-while-female as follows:
Despite the progress made in recent years, she said, female conductors were still judged differently from their male counterparts while on the podium. “The thing about conducting is it’s all body language,” she said, and “our society interprets gesture very differently from men or from women.”
A delicate touch from a woman, for example, is often seen as weakness, when the same gesture from a man is seen as sensitive, she said. Unlike men, women conductors are “required to think twice about gesture because it’s not just the gesture, it’s how the musicians interpret the gesture.”
I found that fascinating, because it's a concrete example of the frequent pattern many of us have observed: Women are held to different standards in, say, politics and business, because their behavior and statements are interpreted with added expectations about how women behave or should behave.
This phenomenon may well have to do with fields where women are a minority, and might fade away when women stop being minorities. On the other hand, I may be wrong about that.
4. The first rose opened in my garden. It's a David Austin one,
with a difficult metallic tone of soft orange (if that makes sense), and
tends to clash with the purple-pale-yellow-white-and-pink colors of the
June garden here. So I isolate it with lots of lady's mantles (visible
in the picture as the small yellow flowers).
A recent UK Guardian article, about even liberal and progressive men not sharing housework fairly, has a bizarre headline*:
Want to be a male ally? Start by cleaning the house.
It's bizarre, because it suggests that doing one's fair share of housecleaning is a way of being a political (?) ally, but to whom? The class of women? One's own female partner?
That headline is like asking the readers to go around several blocks and then to come into the (messy) house through the backdoor, while the front door (the simple explanation) is wide open and the shortest way in:
Sharing paid and unpaid work equally** is what fairness in a relationship requires.
Okay. So I am a curmudgeony goddess who has trouble accepting some of the jargon on both the right and left political extremes. This particular example is about the meaning of the term "ally" on the political left***.
It's not the same as the dictionary definition about alliances between nations or people, such as this one, even though it initially might look the same:
a person, group, or nation that is associated with another or others for some common cause or purpose: Canada and the United States were allies in World War II.
The difference is that the Guardian headline asks the reader (presumably a man) if he wants to be a male ally. In other words, it's closer to the following definition:
2 : one that is associated with another as a helper : a person or group that provides assistance and support in an ongoing effort, activity, or struggle a political ally ... —often now used specifically of a person who is not a member of a marginalized or mistreated group but who expresses or gives support to that group
Bolds are mine.
The two bolded sections explain why I disliked the Guardian headline: The male partner should not be viewed as a "helper" of the female partner when it comes to housecleaning or child-care or other chores. The male partner, in this context, is not someone outside the "marginalized or mistreated" group ( of women, here, or just his own female partner?) who is just expected to give support. He is inside the group "partnership" with his female partner, and his role is not that of a helper, but of an equal participant.
I wonder if that's clear...
----------
* Since most headlines are not written by the authors of the articles, this headline probably wasn't picked by Moira Donegan who wrote the article (which is worth reading, as is this one on house cleaning).
** Absent health problems etc. Note that there are different ways of sharing work and household chores fairly, but when both partners work equal hours, it's not fair to expect only one of them to take care of all unpaid work as well.
*** The list of the duties of a political ally can be psychologically very onerous.
There are good reasons for making sure that the eager allies won't
just take over and get the whole movement centered on their wants,
needs, and desires, which makes those lists understandable.
Still,
I am not sure that the allyship-concept in politics is ultimately a
productive one (in terms of gaining many supporters in various fights for justice) because it signals that different
demographic groups really are like different countries, and unless potential allies
can prove otherwise, they are assumed to be citizens of an enemy
country (from the angle of the oppressed group).
Granola posts are good for you! I'm the parent who is making you eat your granola, because it will help you grow big and strong and smart.
A British study examined why male faculty members in the UK tend to rise higher in the academic hierarchies than female faculty members. The study controlled for (1) variables which roughly measure the idea that women's advancement is hampered by the traditional gendered division of labor within households, and it also controlled for age (as it takes time to climb to the top) as well as research output (papers published in peer reviewed articles, grants obtained and conference papers presented, all in the last five years). The study abstract:
Alabama's extreme forced-birth bill is not the only Tealiban*-type move there against the awful possibility that women might have some rights. Alabama is also one of the two remaining states (Minnesota being the other) where rapists' fatherhood rights are strong.
She has stated that her mother's half-brother began climbing into her bed when she was twelve or thirteen**. By the age of eighteen or nineteen she had been pregnant four times and was the mother of two living children. Her family forced her to marry her "uncle Lennie." The marriage was later declared invalid because of the close familiar connection.
But now "uncle Lennie" has gone to court and won visitation rights to her two remaining children.
Because it's the time of this year's Women's World Cup*, several articles about women's soccer in more general terms have recently been published.
One, in today's Washington Post, has to do with the pay male and female soccer players in the US receive:
On International Women’s Day in March, all 28 members of the women’s
team filed a class-action gender discrimination lawsuit against the U.S.
Soccer Federation, alleging they do the same job as the men’s team in
exchange for lower wages and inferior working conditions. The men’s
national team has never won a world title and did not qualify for last
year’s World Cup. ...
Defenders of the pay gap pointed to the significantly higher revenue generated by the men’s World
Cup, compared with the women’s event. The 2010 men’s World Cup brought
in about $4 billion, CBS reported,
while the women’s World Cup in 2011 earned about $73 million. The men’s
players got 9 percent of their event’s total revenue, while the women’s
team got 13 percent of theirs, according to CBS.
About ten years ago I spent quite a bit time surfing some of the
nastiest male supremacy sites, and
became very troubled by the trends I saw taking shape:
These sites were (and are) bubbles of reinforcement for misogynist beliefs as the correct beliefs.*
The next step, advocating violence against women, seemed then quite predictable. It, too, got and gets reinforcement on those sites.
But
when I brought up the danger I saw developing, like a dark cloud moving
swiftly in from a distance, I was (in many different venues) viewed as a bit deranged myself. Mostly I was told that the men who hate
women on those sites are a tiny and deranged minority and better ignored
lest they get more prominence**.
That is the angle from which I read today's Washington Post article on Scott Paul Beierle, a man who shot at six women, killing two, on November 2, 2018 at a Tallahassee yoga studio. The headline of the piece is "He Always Hated Women."
It's not only Beierle's own history as a hater of women the article covers. It cites several other mass murders where the search for an explanation led pretty directly to the worst types of misogyny sites, and it highlights the way the misogyny and male supremacy sites are one of the channels into all the other beliefs of Alt Right***.
a) that women are genetically inferior, meant to be treated as such or as property or as domestic animals, and to be excluded from all public life,
b) that women, all billions of them, are inherently and biologically nothing but scheming whores and gold-digger,
and
c) that any man is entitled to have sex with any woman he desires who is not already the property of another man, which makes it unacceptable that women have any boundaries or any right of refusal.
These beliefs are reinforced on those sites, because anyone trying to introduce a bit more balanced ideas will be banned immediately.
As an aside, there is at least one male in academia who thinks of women as pecan pies or something similar in this context.
** I was also concerned over the fact that these sites are similar to those anorexia sites which encouraged starving and offered applause when someone had managed to go from 110 pounds to 90 pounds. In other words, the actual pain of the men commenting on those sites did not get the professional help it requires.
“Incels are full of rage, and it is trivial to turn these guys into
kike haters,” explained one of Anglin’s sidekicks, Andrew Auernheimer,
known online as Weev, in a Daily Stormer post. “Few people have ever
personally had their life harmed by a Jew (in a direct, personally
observable sense), but every single breathing man has had it f----- up
by multiple selfish, scheming hookers (likely starting with their own
mothers).”
The ugly rhetoric can lead to violence. The 19-year-old nursing
student alleged to have opened fire in a San Diego-area synagogue in
April cited, among a litany of anti-Semitic conspiracies, the role of
Jews in promoting feminism.
Incel adherents in particular — who dream of destroying the women they
long for, derisively nicknamed “Stacys,” and the attractive men,
“Chads,” who have better luck — have emerged as killers.
My own fiction reading for pleasure is rapidly sliding back in history. The further I am from the present era and its myriad problems, the more relaxed I become.
This trend began right around the Day of the Apocalypse in November of 2016 when my light reading turned into re-reading 1920s and 1930s novels and detective stories.
At some point I began reading all of the 19th century British novels (and reading some I hadn't read before): Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, Charles Dickens and many more.
My poetry reading has also crept backward in time so that I now mainly read Emily Dickinson, TS Eliot and Ezra Pound, as well as poets from much further in the past.
All those lists are only about those who wrote in English, of course. But Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Gogol, Camus and many other writers who did not write in English are also back in my daily reading schedule.
As my emotional agony grew with every new example of how terrible Trump, the right-wingers and also some left-wing circular firing squads are now, and how very little any kind of logic or facts matter in politics, my reading moved even further back in time: I am now re-reading Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote.
Very soon I will have to read The Tale of Genji again! Some consider it the first known novel. It was written in the 11th century in Japan by Murasaki Shikibu, a noblewoman and lady-in-waiting.
Reading very old books takes me away from the unreal reality we live in today. This is not something dystopian science-fiction novels would do, because they might now have to be reclassified as non-fiction.
But an added gift I receive from those old books is to be reminded that every place in every past time period thought that the values, biases, social hierarchies and sex roles which then prevailed were the obvious, natural and god-given ones*.
Some classics challenged the biases of the time when they written, true, but even then the challenges were partial. Dickens, for example, drew attention to the plight of the poor and the dangers of capitalistic greed, but at the same time was quite adamant that women belonged in the home (first mis-typed that as "hole") and that families should be patriarchal.
The other way that realization was a gift to me is this: We should take care that we don't repeat that same mistake today. It seems to be a human tendency, a widespread human arrogance, to view one's own era as the one in which all answers are going to be found, when every medical study is going to be the final word on how to cure some illness (only to be refuted in the next era), and so on.
We need more humility, skepticism and debates. Oh, and a lot more use of that thing which some assume to exist only to keep our ears apart and to give head hair a flat surface to grow on.
--------
* The Tale of Genji is such a good example of that. He is the hero of the book, even though his love life we would now call the life of a serial rapist. But in that time and place noblemen were allowed to have almost any woman they lusted for. That behavior does not count against Genji in the book. Indeed, in one story he is praised for the gentle way he extorted sex from a young woman.
The opening of the Amendment's text reads, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."
The passing of the Nineteenth Amendment did not initially mean a new-and-immediate franchise for all American women*, but it was a necessary stage in the very long, and still uncompleted, progress to more equality in the rights of men and women. Some of that equality is now endangered.
-----------
* This WaPo article discusses the history of African-American women's participation in the suffrage-movement and the racism within the movement.
It also covers the fact that many Native American women wielded political power long before the white settlers arrived to this continent:
“It didn’t start with white women; that’s not the point of entry into women having political voice,” said Sally Roesch Wagner,
who received one of the first doctorates in the country for women’s
studies, while at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
“Indigenous women have had a political voice in their nations long
before white settlers arrived.”
All of which is important to add to the American form of how-women-won-the-suffrage.
However, that article — and almost all the coverage of the Nineteenth Amendment I have skimmed today — ignores the fact that women already had the vote in many other countries with different histories.
The area that in 1809 became Finland was a group of integral provinces of the Kingdom of Sweden for over 600 years. Thus, women in Finland were allowed to vote during the Swedish Age of Liberty (1718–1772), during which conditional suffrage was granted to tax-paying female members of guilds.[113] However, this right was controversial. In Vaasa, there was opposition against women participating in the town hall discussing political issues, as this was not seen as their right place, and women's suffrage appears to have been opposed in practice in some parts of the realm: when Anna Elisabeth Baer and two other women petitioned to vote in Turku in 1771, they were not allowed to do so by town officials.[114] The predecessor state of modern Finland, the Grand Duchy of Finland, was part of the Russian Empire from 1809 to 1917 and enjoyed a high degree of autonomy. In 1863, taxpaying women were granted municipal suffrage in the country side, and in 1872, the same reform was given to the cities.[109] In 1906, it became the first country in the world to implement full universal suffrage, as women could also stand as candidates. It also elected the world's first female members of parliament the following year.[115][116]
My point is not to single out Finland for praise (well, not my only point...), but to remind you, my sweet and erudite readers (who would never be guilty of this), that the general thought frames used in analyzing US politics often simply ignore everything that happened or happens elsewhere as unimportant, because of the assumed special role and elevated place of the United States), or treat most other countries as if they had or have no agency at all (because of the immense power of American imperialism).
That just might be one of the few cases where it's true that "both sides do it," though for different reasons.
I learned about Pekka Streng, a Finnish musician, only yesterday. He died in 1975 at the age of twenty-six, of cancer. He knew that he was terminally ill when he began making songs and recording, and the lyrics show this. He seems to have reached a higher spiritual plane of existence, able to feel joy in circumstances where others would only find despair.
This is his song about reincarnation:
It's called Back In The Stream.
My translation of the lyrics:
Back in the stream,
to the dawn of my time.
My face turns into countless others.
My color changes, my race changes
When back in the stream I receive
ancient shapes*.
Back in the stream.
Back in the stream.
Back in the stream,
to the time of childhood.
I will be born and I will die
and again I shall be allowed to
live old age.
I am an Indian woman
or a tiny infant.
Centuries pass, all changes shape.
Back in the stream.
Back in the stream.
Back in the stream,
the dark bird of the night
rises on its wings,
flies into the past time,
into the colorful procession of days,
and there I see that the causes for my present time
are my choices.
Back in the stream.
Back in the stream.
To the dawn of humankind
Into the wordless pain of suffering eyes.
Now I know, now I know:
After this birth
when I return to the past
something wonderful
will follow.
Back in the stream.
Back in the stream.
I also like this piece by him:
It's called In the Garden
My translation:
Leafy trees and perennials,
vines, fruit, bleached bones.
Plants which during the day watch with gentle eyes
and which during the night sing a lament.
Plants which take years off our age when we watch them
and plants which deepen the grooves in our faces when they die.
Annabella dances in the garden
where she walks around,
watering the seedlings.
Robert the Hat** tells stories to the plants,
for flowers make excellent listeners.
Tree ferns and frogs
goblins, fairies and daisies.
From your heart flow many springs.
--------
* This is a really tough bit to translate. "Menneet hahmot saan." A literal translation is that he will be given shapes from the past or past shapes. I interpret this as meaning that when one dies one returns to the very beginning where all the possible shapes already exist. But other readings are possible and perhaps better.
** I have no idea who or what this is. So I translated the name from the Finnish Roope to the English Robert.
