Short Posts 2/7/20: Ripping Nancy Pelosi, International Day To End FGM And Funny Songs

1.  This is fun if you like making fun of song lyrics.

2.  Nancy the Ripper.  That's what I saw someone call Nancy Pelosi after she tore apart Trump's speech.  I have no idea if that ripping apart was a deliberate move or just one of those moments when the frustration boils over the edge of the political pressure-kettle.  What she said suggests the latter:

“It’s appalling the things that he says. And then you say to me: ‘Tearing up his falsehoods, isn’t that the wrong message?’ No, it isn’t,” she said, adding: “I feel very liberated. I feel that I’ve extended every possible courtesy. I’ve shown every level of respect.”

It's fascinating that some have attacked her for that move, given what Donald Trump has done to the rules of courtesy and comity:  They certainly have never been expected to apply to our Dear Leader!  But Pelosi shouldn't lower herself to his level, I hear.  That she tried the high road for such a long time makes me awed by her patience.  I would have eaten and digested someone many times during the last year, given that facts and such matter not at all.

3.   You probably didn't know that yesterday was the International Day Of Zero Tolerance For Female Genital Mutilation (FGM).  The tolerance is certainly not at zero level, though things are better than they were thirty years ago.  This article shows the three most common types of FGM:

The most extreme type, infibulation,  is getting rarer which makes me happy:

Women who have undergone infibulation – where the labia are cut and sewn together to drastically narrow the vaginal opening – have to be cut open again to enable sexual intercourse and childbirth. 

4.   I feel politically very alone.  Am I alone in this?  Heh.   

Recognizing Expertise Over Time. A Feminist Take.

I came across this picture somewhere online.  It's a joke about how the way we acknowledge expertise has changed over time:

The joke in the picture is a good one, suggesting that who qualifies as the expert on some issue has changed in undesirable ways over time.  In the 1990s the expert was a leading scientist, in the 1990s a PhD student, in the 2000s a media expert (whatever that means), and in the 2010s the expert is Karen on Facebook.

I agree on the punchline, of course I do!  Far too many people now get their news from the curated and biased smorgasbord Facebook algorithms and our friends and allies on social media offer us.  Though times were not necessarily that much greater in the past decades, it's certainly true that expertise now has much more to do with gut feelings than with actual demonstrated knowledge of a field.

But I can't avoid seeing cartoons such as the above from other angles, too.  For instance, it looks like everyone in the picture is white, though it's hard to tell with a cartoon, and of course acknowledged experts in the US mostly are white both for reasons of population numbers (whites are still the majority) and for reasons of racism (fewer people of color in the upper echelons of various fields and of those who are in the upper echelons,  fewer are seen as experts by others because of that race-tinted fog we all live in).

In fact, there are good reasons to keep all other things except for the punchline topic as constant as possible between the decades so as to drive the punchline home.  Those other things are not held constant, however.  The first three experts are clearly intended to be read as men, while the last one is intended to be read as a woman*.  If the name "Karen"** doesn't get you there, then the hairstyle should...

Would the story have been weaker if the last figure had been, say, Kevin, in a baseball cap, from Facebook?  Or is it the case that naming this Facebook friend "Karen" strengthens the case the cartoon is making?  After all, women are very rarely viewed as valid experts, even if the women in question wear lab coats and have PhDs.

This post is an example of those posts I write which are often deemed to be about nitpickery.  Or comma-fuckery, as Finns say. 

And the topic is trivial, of course, except in showing how diffuse and common those little reminders of sexist hierarchies are in our daily lives.  It also shows one of the reasons why it's so hard to get those real experts who just happen to be women the respect they deserve.


____

*  We have regressed so terribly when it comes to gender norms that one's hairstyle is now immediately coded as signifying gender or biological sex.  I have learned this in those parts of the social media young people use!

Boys have short hair and play football (and when they grow up they will wear lab coats and become experts or at least media experts).  Girls, on the other hand, have long hair and wear skirts and when they grow up they will become Karens on Facebook.   And yes, I know that this is an exaggerated take, but it's not as exaggerated as it should be.

**  I can't tell if the woman in the cartoon is called Karen because of the Karen meme.  That meme, in itself, probably partly operates so strongly because women are not supposed to complain and be vocal, so those who do tend to stand out in an unpleasant manner as strident and demanding.  I see this a lot in politics. 

And of course it's the case that women, too, from all demographic groups can be difficult and bossy and nasty people.   Karen in the meme is usually interpreted as a young-to-middle-aged white woman, often an ex-wife, who took custody of the kids.  That last interpretation adds a soupcon of open anger at women into the picture.

Even more generally, our unconscious sexism contributes to the success of memes such as the Karen one.  Because the rules for deciding when someone is strident and overly demanding vary by sex, a person like Karen looks so much worse than an otherwise identically behaving but male version of Karen.  Kevin, say.  We expect the Kevins of this world to be assertive, after all, so they have to break furniture while demanding service at some store before they are deemed entitled or strident or demanding.

Short Posts 2/3/20. On Impeachment, Nursing Salaries, Child Grooming Scandals, The New Inclusiveness, And Sudden Social Change

This post is a giant cupboard full of tiny snippet thoughts and links that I have gathered but have not had the energy (yet) to work into something bigger and more meaningful. 

1.  How best to view the impeachment process:  As kabuki theater?  Or as a game between two sports teams, each with acolytes who care about nothing but winning?  Or is it the case that one side cares about nothing but winning, even if that winning means beheading the umpires and scrapping all rules, while the other one wants to win only the "holier-than-thou-races?"

And how far have I fallen when I see the whole process from such a bitter and cynical angle?

Maybe the sanest approach to watching this while trying to predict the outcome of the next presidential elections is to return to seeing the importance of the material world:

Trump won't win if the economy goes bad enough rapidly enough to be seen as bad in the immediate environs of enough voters, but he might win if this doesn't happen, or if he starts yet another unnecessary war somewhere far enough not to matter a lot in those immediate environs of most voters (rah, rah, U.S. of A).

I sometimes think that many Trump voters don't actually like Trump's ethics and morals (or the lack of both, really), and view him as  a crook.  But he is their known-and-true crook, while the Democratic alternatives look filled with uncertainty.

Welcome to George Orwell's 1984. On The Politics Of Doublethink.

George Orwell, 1984:

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself--that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious to the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the world "doublethink" involved the use of doublethink.

The bolding of the last sentence is mine, and it is bolded, because doublethink is everywhere in today's political debates.

So it goes, as another writer (Kurt Vonnegut) used to sigh.

Dealing with nonstop doublethink necessitates mental health breaks.  Mine (I need more of them, these days, it seems) consist of lying in the darkened bedroom, with chocolate at hand, watching Nordic noir (1) or similar crime stories from other European countries.  I talk back to the television screen, extremely fluently in Finnish,  fairly fluently in Swedish, less so in German, and barely at all in French and Italian.  But my accent always sounds wonderful.  Bastardo!  Merde!  Kusimulkku perkele!  

Sometimes, when the plots become too predictable,  I watch all the episodes on full fast-forward.  A goddess can have her fill of existential Angst, fantastic ultra-modern architecture, and grey landscapes where dead-eyed people with never-closing inner wounds (and more expensive furniture than they could ever realistically afford) struggle, stumble and fall.  But she might still want to know who is left standing at the end of the series, if anyone.

But I also re-read classics, to recuperate, and that's why this post begins with a big mouthful from George Orwell.

My mental health breaks are a different reaction to the same Weltschmerz:  Why bother reading or engaging with people online (2) when fairly identical  parallel conversations can be had by yelling at the television screen?  At least the television isn't terribly good at gaslighting.  Nowhere near as good as even the most rudimentary Twitter users, at both ideological extremes, not to mention Our Dear Leader on Twitter.

The Pottery Barn Solution To Rape: You Break It, You Bought It.

Or put in politer language, an age-old solution to rape in many cultures has been to make the rapist marry his victim.  That way the cracks the rape caused in the local cultural networks are healed and both involved families can go on with their lives.  The psychological costs of this are, of course, for the rape victim to bear.  But the solution is a win-win for everybody else.

The reason for my harsh language is that Turkey, again (this was tried in 2016, too), considers the introduction of a marry-your-rapist law* which would allow men who are accused of having sex with a minor to avoid further prosecution by marrying that minor.  Its purpose, in this specific case,  may not be only the furthering of the rights of rapists but also the furthering of child marriage:

United Nations agencies warned the bill would generate a landscape of impunity for child abuse and leave victims vulnerable to experiencing additional mistreatment and distress from their assailants.

Marry-your-rapist” bills have been seen across the world and are pushed in the name of protecting and safeguarding family “honour”.

While the legal age of consent is 18 in Turkey, a 2018 government report on child marriage estimates a total of 482,908 girls were married in the last decade.

Bolds are mine and point to the Pottery Barn analogue.

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*   Specifically, the proposed law would:

...give men suspended sentences for child sex offences if the two parties get married and the age difference between them is less than 10 years.

There's a Wikipedia page about all the countries which currently have such laws or have had them in the past.  Many Middle East and Latin American countries have such laws, and certain US states have legal loopholes which allow the same outcome.  For a case study of one woman who was married to  her rapist in this country, see here.

The general worldwide trend has been toward the repeal of marry-your-rapist laws, not toward introducing them.  Turkey's Erdogan has chosen the latter path. Turkey's old marry-your-rapist law was abolished in 2005, only to resurface as a proposal in 2016 and again now.  The proposal was defeated in 2016.  Let's hope it can be defeated in 2020,  too.

On Sexism In How The Media Used To Covered Social Science Research

 
 I have been clearing out old archives and stuff, and came across my Book Project: How The Media Popularizes Sexism In Its Coverage Of Social Science Research. 
 
I set the project aside in a first-draft stage in 2015. That particular sexism problem in the media seemed to me to be waning by that time (so there was less need for the book), and for all sorts of reasons (some weird Echidne-type ones, some justifiable ones)  completing the manuscript no longer seemed worth the cost and effort. 

But now I think it would be a pity not to let anyone else see the work I have completed, so I here offer you (below the fold) the first chapter of the planned book. 

It's the only chapter which is fairly complete.  I think it can stand alone as a good summary of the basic issues in how the media has tended toward sexism in popularizing research.  If there is interest I can post the other draft chapters, too (there's four or five or six of them), but they don't have the footnotes inserted and have never been rewritten.  So that's the stage in which they would be published here. 

Note that the links in the footnotes may well have died of old age.  Sorry about that.  But I enjoyed the examples I use in that chapter, and I hope you might, too.

What Is Domestic Violence? The One Year Anniversary of the New Trump DOJ Definition

Yesterday I came across the one-year-old news that Trump's Department of Justice (DOJ) had changed its definition of domestic violence on the DOJ website.  Here are the old and new definitions:

Old definition:

A pattern of abusive behavior in any relationship that is used by one partner to gain or maintain power and control over another intimate partner. Domestic violence can be physical, sexual, emotional, economic, or psychological actions or threats of actions that influence another person. This includes any behaviors that intimidate, manipulate, humiliate, isolate, frighten, terrorize, coerce, threaten, blame, hurt, injure, or wound someone. 

New definition:

The term “domestic violence” includes felony or misdemeanor crimes of violence committed by a current or former spouse or intimate partner of the victim, by a person with whom the victim shares a child in common, by a person who is cohabitating with or has cohabitated with the victim as a spouse or intimate partner, by a person similarly situated to a spouse of the victim under the domestic or family violence laws of the jurisdiction receiving grant monies, or by any other person against an adult or youth victim who is protected from that person’s acts under the domestic or family violence laws of the jurisdiction.

The explanations for this change appear to be the need to use legal language in that definition.  Perhaps.

But as others have pointed out the change removed any language from that definition which referred to non-physical manipulation, coercion and the general kind of mind-fucking which creates a long-term basis for repeated domestic abuse.

To see what I mean by that, consider what one UK government website gives as legal guidance about understanding the nature and features of controlling and coercive behavior:

Domestic violence and abuse is defined as:
"Any incident or pattern of incidents of controlling, coercive or threatening behaviour, violence or abuse between those aged 16 or over who are or have been intimate partners or family members, regardless of gender or sexuality. This can encompass, but is not limited to, the following types of abuse: psychological, physical, sexual, financial and emotional." [Domestic abuse guidelines for prosecutors]

...

The Government definition also outlines the following:
    •    Coercive behaviour is an act or a pattern of acts of assault, threats, humiliation and intimidation or other abuse that is used to harm, punish, or frighten their victim
    •    Controlling behaviour is a range of acts designed to make a person subordinate and/or dependent by isolating them from sources of support, exploiting their resources and capacities for personal gain, depriving them of the means needed for independence, resistance and escape and regulating their everyday behaviour.

That last quote is not meant to be viewed as the legal equivalent of the DOJ definitions.  What it does, however, is demonstrate how coercion and control are both a form of domestic violence in themselves and how they create the overall framework within which long-term domestic violence can thrive.

The few cases of domestic violence I have witnessed or learned about in the real world all had that coercive and controlling aspect first*.

So why would Trump's DOJ website choose to remove any reference to it?  This could be just inadvertent, but it could also be because fundamentalist patriarchal families might not survive if the male leadership in them could be questioned as control or coercion by outsiders.  Many in Trump's base are members of various fundamentalist churches, and many of those churches preach male leadership and female submission in families.

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*  Controlling the victim's daily time-table to a minute, checking the victim's computer and cell phone daily, and gradually isolating the victim from all friends and family:  All these seem to start before (or at the same time as) physical violence. 

I believe that control and coercion is what is always present in the worst type of long-term domestic violence, the kind where the victim is not just physically  but also mentally assaulted and therefore finds it very hard to flee the abuser.

 

Short Posts On Defining Womanhood And Women's Proper Places

1.  There's going to be a real mansplaining conference! 

This conference is aimed at us ladies.  The audience is expected to be full of vagina-bearers!   But worry not, the speakers are all men from the misogynistic manosphere sites, and the speeches will tell women how to be great women again!  An important first step is to get rid of feminism, of course.  Then there will be speeches about how not to get fat (1), how to be an obedient wife, and so on.

In short, its a conference about the kinds of docile and well-trained wives alt right misogynists want to have (given that they don't see women as full human beings).   It's a bit as if someone created a conference for domestic dogs where humans explained to dogs why dogs shouldn't be free and why they should obey their masters and eat crappy dog food only and so on, all couched in terms of the "innate biological nature" of dogs.  And of women.

Sigh.  This shit happened when I began blogging, sixteen years ago, and it is still happening.  But fear not, things are in some ways even worse today, as the next piece explains (2).

Idle Thoughts, 1/11/20. On Humpty Dumpty And Reality Twisting In American Politics.

1.  This is the time to remember  Lewis Carroll's Through The Looking Glass:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

A perfect reminder of what is happening in much of American politics at the current time.  Debate has become something quite similar to Humpty Dumpty's opinions, and the bit about who the master might be at the end is crucial.

It also connects to the Power Of Naming.  Who is allowed to name and define me and my body?  Who is allowed to define democracy?  Freedom?  Markets?  Impeachable offenses?

That last sentence links to this:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is backing a resolution to change the Senate’s rules to allow for lawmakers to dismiss articles of impeachment against President Trump before the House sends them over.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) announced on Thursday that McConnell has signed on as a co-sponsor to the resolution, which he introduced earlier this week.

What do the Senate Rules about  impeachment mean, after all?  What matters is which is to be master, of course.

2.  Linked to the above, I found this news (not news?) most interesting:

A Justice Department inquiry launched more than two years ago to mollify conservatives clamoring for more investigations of Hillary Clinton has effectively ended with no tangible results, and current and former law enforcement officials said they never expected the effort to produce much of anything.

What matters is who is to be master,  not the likelihood of tangible results from an inquiry.





3.  Finally:

The surveillance video taken from outside Jeffrey Epstein's jail cell on the day of his first apparent suicide attempt has been permanently deleted, federal prosecutors said Thursday.

Epstein, the disgraced financier who was facing federal sex-trafficking charges, was found semiconscious in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, or MCC, in New York around 1:27 a.m. on July 23.

But that video is now gone because MCC officials mistakenly saved video from a different floor of the federal detention facility, prosecutors said in a court filing.

 Just a clerical error!  Anyone could have accidentally deleted an important video (or election results)!  Because what matters is which is to be master, or to remain one.

But be of cheerful heart, my sweet and erudite reader!  Humpty Dumpty did fall off the wall at the end and all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty Dumpty together again.

Some Advice For Political Readers In 2020. Or How To Be Informed.

This may be more of a rant than an advice column, because it is based on my recent deep immersion in all sorts of online worlds (1), almost all political, and because that immersion made me despair about the human race (and so very glad that I have now decided to apply for citizenship in the Elf World).  Still, there might be a few crumbs in the rant that are useful for others.

Here it goes:

1.  When you read about the weird conclusions of some study or about the outrageous sentencing in some court case which makes you believe people have utterly lost their minds, check the original sources before you retweet or join the approval cavalcade.  Do this even if the weird conclusions or findings support your worldview.

This is extremely useful, because the intermediaries who carry you their conclusions have already interpreted the data for you, and by accepting their conclusions you accept their interpretations as valid.  There are times, of course, when you trust the interpreter and save time by just accepting the condensed messages.  But more generally you should always double-check.

I have seen one evolutionary psychology study widely interpreted as being about something it was not, and this was done by People Who Should Have Known Better.  It also could have been easily avoided by just reading the study, or at least the conclusions of the study which do not mention the popularized applications at all. (2)

And once I saw a widely liked and retweeted Twitter post about a study on sexual violence discuss a PAGE NUMBER in the original pdf as meaning something.  It was a page number, for goddess' sake.

That extreme example should serve as a helpful reminder that we don't really know if those who pretend to be experts (or goddesses) online actually have any expertise.  Self-preservation requires a skeptical approach.

2.  Because of the powerful information bubbles we now inhabit online, it has become dangerous to believe that something you see widely cited as factual actually is widely accepted as factual.  If you are a lefty, say, your information bubble probably filters away all studies which don't support lefty views, and it's also likely to keep re-advertising those studies which do support lefty views.  The reverse applies on the right.

Under these circumstances "everybody accepts" or "everybody knows" or "scientists agree" don't mean what they used to mean (though of course tilting the findings and biasing the discussion always happened).

It's not pleasant to go and read stuff in the "other" bubble(s), but it's important to do so.  A bit like seeing the dentists. And by those visits you can learn that your arguments indeed don't have any holes or you get your cavities filled and strengthen your bite.

3.  Number-blindness is one of the worst information epidemics I come across online, from all sorts of people and supporting all sorts of political issues.  Too many people get qualitative arguments but fail in understanding the importance of quantitative arguments: 

It makes a huge difference if, for instance, a group consists of half men and half women or if a group consists of 96% men and 4% women (3)!  The two are not the same kind of "gender neutral" groups.

The meaning of a hundred percent increase in the incidence of an infectious disease should have different interpretations if the country-wide cases of that disease went up from 100 per year to 200 per year than if they went from 100,000 per year to 200,000 per year.  In other words, to properly understand the importance of percentage changes we need to know what the base figures are (4).

It matters if a particular political project would improve the lives of the numerical majority, or the lives of one percent of all people, and it also matters greatly where that one percent is initially located along some relevant measure (say wealth or health).   It matters, in electoral politics, how to get the majority (more than fifty percent of the electorate) to vote for your candidate, and to figure out how to get that overall majority you may need to appeal to many different minorities (5) at the same time, not just one group.  If you want to win the election, that is, rather than remain ideologically squeaky clean.

I'm going to start a file on all the terrible mistakes I see online when it comes to understanding statistical data and also on how very common quantitative ignorance is.

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(1)  Reddit.  There is a site called nofap, with hundreds of thousands of members, mostly men.  It's about stopping the use of online pron for masturbation.  Or really about stopping the use of pron as a better substitute for real-world sex, especially for men (given that most pron is created for heterosexual men's viewing desires).  That site made me read a lot on erectile dysfunction among young men, and the question whether increases in it might correlate with the consumption of certain kinds of pron.  The scientific jury seems still be out on that, but then the saturation of the online pron market is fairly recent and future studies will tell us more.

That wasn't the only sex- or gender-related finding I brought home from my travels.  I also realized, after various excursions to not only Reddit sites but to other places, too, that I have lived in an Echidne-bubble where women can actually have short hair and wear work boots and so on, while in quite a few of those places we are very firmly back in the 1950s gender values.  Even some of the Woke World sites tend to be pretty accepting of sexist stereotypes.  Or at least of gender stereotypes.

More generally, I found that many political sites tend to develop their own lists of Approved Study Findings and that debates about those findings are not encouraged but must be accepted without questions.

(2)  I have been too exhausted, after all that travel, to dig up the actual reference I talk about here (it was some years ago).  It had something to do with daughters, sons and divorce, I think.  If there are many demands for more information on this, I might look it up, provided I get donations first!

Just kidding on the donations.

(3)  That example was caused by one UK government authority arguing that penetrative offenses in sex crimes are gender-neutral, apparently because boys and men are among the victims.  This argument was then extended to the perpetrators being treated with gender-neutral terminology, too.

But the actual figures of men and women in the sexual crime perpetrator statistics are like the latter ones, not the former ones.  To me "gender neutral" means something much closer to that fifty-fifty case.

(4)  This is especially clear when a study finds, for instance, that the increase in one's chances of getting some kind of a rare cancer is fifty percent if one has certain risk factors.  That increase does not mean that the new cancer risk someone with those risk factors faces is fifty percent.  It's an increase of fifty percent in the initial (and very tiny risk, given that we are talking about a rare cancer) likelihood.

(5)  By "minorities" here I don't mean just racial or ethnic or religious minorities and so on, but any group with certain shared interests who tend to vote in a similar manner but are not large enough to be a numerical majority of voters on their own.

The Anal Analyst. On Teen Vogue.

The anal analyst would be me, because I will dedicate this post to the study and dissection of one particular piece published in Teen Vogue quite a few months ago (" Anal Sex: Safety, How tos, Tips, and More"), then re-published last November, and then re-advertised by someone working at Teen Vogue in social media on Christmas day.

Why is that particular piece one the editors at that magazine are so very excited about that it deserves reprinting (with a few tiny edits) and lots of advertising?  They must be very proud of a job well done.

In fact, the piece is utterly hilarious.  It would be completely and totally out-of-this-universe-hilarious if it wasn't aimed at very young readers (teens and pre-teens) who might just accept  the article as one having to do with general sexuality and sexual health, when it appears to have additional and rather disquieting and even sexist undertones.

The hilarity begins with the way human beings are classified for the purposes of this article: Into prostate-owners and non-prostate-owners.  Later in the piece the latter group is also (grudgingly?) allowed to have the ownership of only slightly used vaginas (1), but it's the initial juxtaposition of those who own something (prostates) and those who own nothing (non-prostates) but are still called "owners" which gave my brain that sudden little hurricane feeling (2).  I get that every time someone demands that I accept a totally idiotic thing Or Else.

But it's not only an idiotic thing.  It's also a sexist thing, because the two groups are defined by the presence or absence of a prostate.  Had the article used the terms "male" and "female" in its anatomical descriptions it would immediately have become clear that the choice of the term "prostate" to divide humans into two categories was a sexist one.  But because the terms "male" and "female" are now contested, problematized and interrogated (under harsh lights and with electric cattle prods), digging up the obvious sexism of that choice required some shovel-work.

The greatest hilarity in that piece is, however, yet to come.  It's about the helpful anatomical drawings which are used to show a view of the insides of the pelvic areas of prostate-owners and non-prostate-owners.  I reproduce one of these pictures from the November re-printing of the article here:

The left drawing is about a non-prostate-owner's pelvic anatomy.  Have a careful look at all the labels attached to it, and then ask which organ has been erased from the picture altogether.

The clitoris.  That's the only organ which appears to exist in non-prostate-owners' anatomy for the sole purpose of giving them sexual pleasure.  But it doesn't exist in the drawings attached to the Teen Vogue article.  It has been excised (3).

This, my friends, is extremely troubling.  The piece begins with this statement:

When it comes to your body, it’s important that you have the facts. Being in the dark is not doing your sexual health or self-understanding any favors. 

It then simply erases the most important female sexual organ from the drawings!  Given that the intended readership is very young and quite possibly uninformed (4), it's not too strong to call this omission misogyny.


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(1)  Sorry, I got carried away with all that "ownership" language which for some reason I keep connecting to buying a used car.

But why not call the two groups vagina-owners and penis-owners, you might wonder, if terms such as male and female are now unacceptable in certain circles?  Perhaps because penis-owners can enjoy anal sex in two ways, either penetrating or receiving,  while vagina-owners can only receive, so that penis-owners have twice the incentives to want anal sex?  Or because the penis is involved in anal sex but the vagina is not?

(2) And yes, I get the real meaning, but this is how I first read it.  To write about something as medically important as the safest way to do anal and then to use such fuzzy language is really bad.

(3)  The November reprinting of the article does include an added paragraph discussing the clitoris and suggesting that anal sex is enjoyable to non-prostate-owners because it can stimulate the back of the clitoris.

But the accompanying drawings were not corrected and, clearly, the writer and editors of the initial article saw nothing wrong in the original erasure of the clitoris.  The added paragraph in the November version was probably a response to criticisms such as my vicious ones here.

(4)  The piece is also deficient in some of the possible health consequences of anal sex.  For instance, it doesn't mention that the condom should be changed if one moves from anal sex to vaginal sex or vice versa, and it doesn't mention the possible correlation of anal sex practice with later anal cancer.

Merry Boxing Day. More on Gaslighting.

I wish you all a more clear-sighted, calm, rational and compassionate new year.  Also chocolate and love and all the other important things in your private lives.  Wonder if this is the year I get gifted a lighthouse on a solitary island far out in the sea?  (My dream house, that is, for reasons of being an introvert and divine).

Rather than writing on the many topics I have saved in my work files, I want to focus on Our Dear Supreme Leader.   

The Salon  published a piece a few days ago where several psychiatrists (or psychologists, not sure) wrote about what might be wrong with our Donald.  The experts were naturally not randomly picked; rather, they had all written anti-Trump books.  This means that you should have your seat belt on, as always, before you think about the quote below I picked from one of the experts in that story.  It's about Trump's recent letter to Nancy Pelosi:

 I have been following and interpreting Donald Trump’s tweets as a public service, since merely reading them “gaslights” you and reforms your thoughts in unhealthy ways. Without arming yourself with the right interpretation, you end up playing into the hands of pathology and helping it — even if you do not fully believe it. This is because of a common phenomenon that happens when you are continually exposed to a severely compromised person without appropriate intervention. You start taking on the person’s symptoms in a phenomenon called “shared psychosis.”
It happens often in households where a sick individual goes untreated, and I have seen some of the most intelligent and otherwise healthy persons succumb to the most bizarre delusions. It can also happen at national scale, as renowned mental health experts such as Erich Fromm have noted. Shared psychosis at large scale is also called “mass hysteria.”
The president is quite conscious of his ability to generate mass hysteria, which is the purpose of the letter.

That quote fascinated me because I chose the word "gaslighting" for the 2019 word in my previous post.  The above quote adds nuance to the reasons why spotting gaslighting is becoming increasingly more difficult, not only when interpreting the very erudite tweets of our Dear Leader, but even more generally in social media.

It's not quite the case that we all suffer from mass hysteria, but significant sub-groups (of various political types) do agree to treat certain beliefs as established facts.  When they clearly are not facts, any attempt to question them, however politely, tends to receive threats and insults and demands that one shuts up.

Gaslighting is impossible to point out if one is not allowed to speak.  And given the way women in the public sphere are often met with hostility and the demands that they be silent*, all these different strands nicely knitted together in my mind to better explain why I picked gaslighting as the Word Of 2019. 

And that word is one of the many not-so-nice parcels Trump helped to put under our Christmas trees these last few years.

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*  See Mary Beard on the ancient quality of such demands and how they are now appearing in the cyber world.

My Word For 2019

Would have to be "gaslighting."  The wild, wonderful and frightening world of online politics is full of gaslighting, and that's why we have so much trouble seeing clearly.

I keep catching myself being successfully gaslit ever so often, from misogyny (franchised, trademarked and sold as something seemingly reasonable) to economics to general politics and, in particular, Trumpian political arguments.

The difficulty with gaslighting, as with some other concepts one starts to come across frequently, is that because it has become so common the brain no longer gets that instantaneous red alert signal.  I thank all the divines that my brain is equipped with some creature with a tiny voice but an insistent knock at the doors of my awareness until I open the imaginary door and a notice is put through it saying "psst! you got taken there."  This helps me nine times out of ten, though usually a few hours or days after the event happened.

Given that it's now going to be the season of candles, I wish that those gas lights could be turned off.

The Global Gender Gap Report 2019

I have written about these annual global gender gap reports* before.  Here's the 2009 report, here's the 2015 report, and here are the 2016 and 2018 reports.  To explain what these reports are based on, I quote my 2018 post:**

The World Economic Forum has published an annual global gender gap report since 2006.  Four sub-indexes are aggregated to get an overall measure about average differences between men and women in four areas:  economic participation and opportunity, health and survival, educational attainment and political participation.

The index has its problems.  For example, the health sub-index does not measure reproductive choice.  But it also has certain advantages.  It compares countries with others of roughly the same income level, and because it has been published for over a decade, it lets us analyze progress (or lack of progress) over time.

The United States in the most recent report*** ranks 53rd among the included countries, two ranks below last year's placement.  According to the report, progress in the United States has stalled, and it has dropped two ranks in the overall results mostly due to a "small retraction in its Economic Participation and Opportunity performance, where the progress towards equal wages takes a step back and at the same time income (wages and non-wages) gaps remain large."

The ten highest ranking countries in gender equality are, from the first to the tenth:  Iceland, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Nicaragua, New Zealand, Ireland, Spain, Rwanda and Germany.  The Nordic countries always lead this particular pack (a partial explanation for why I turned out as irritating as I did...) and Rwanda has been in the top ten since 2015 at least****. 

The ten countries at the bottom of the ranking are, from the tenth from the bottom to the country ranked the worst in gender equality:  Oman, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Chad, Iran, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Syria, Pakistan, Iraq and Yemen. Though Iraq, Syria and Yemen are all war-torn countries, Yemen has been the lowest ranked country many years before the current hostilities.  As I wrote in my last year's post, the Muslim countries urgently need strong feminist movements.

As has been the case in the past, the report calculates how many years it would take to achieve gender parity (based on the definitions and data the report uses), assuming that progress (or its opposite) continues at the same pace in the future:

Projecting current trends into the future, the overall global gender gap will close in 99.5 years, on average, across the 107 countries covered continuously since the first edition of the report. 

Lack of progress in closing the Economic Participation and Opportunity gap leads to an extension of the time it will be needed to close this gap. At the slow speed experienced over the period 2006–2020, it will take 257 years to close this gap. 

The second area where gender gaps will take longest to close is Political Empowerment. This year’s evolution speeds up the pace of progress towards parity, yet it will still take 94.5 years—even at this faster rate—to close the gender gap.

Third, the Educational Attainment gender gap is on track to be closed over the next 12 years, mainly thanks to advancements in some developing countries. The Health and Survival gender gap remains virtually unchanged since last year. Globally, the time to fully close this gap remains undefined, while gender parity has been already fully achieved in 40 countries among the 153 covered by this edition of the report.

That 99.5 year figure looks quite depressing, though not as depressing as the 257 years estimated for the reaching of economic equality between men and women.  But it's probably even more depressing to contemplate the possibility that the recent slow-down in the reduction of the economic opportunity gap might be the first sign of a future reversal in that progress.

So let's not contemplate that.  Rather, let's take the justifiably optimistic view that so much progress in just a few hundred years is something to celebrate (with wine and chocolate), given that the system we are trying to dismantle here is thousands of years old. 




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* For some reason this year's report is called the report for 2020, but it's actually for 2019.  Note that "gender" in these reports is essentially the same as biological sex, so the reports measure the impact of being biologically female and viewed as one or at least the latter.

**  As I mention in the 2018 post, the health index used in creating the aggregate index does not include reproductive health measures.  Keep that in mind when you wonder why some unlikely countries seem to rank fairly high.

***  All the quotes in this post are from the downloaded report which you can access at this link.

****  You can read more about the ten top countries in the report itself, starting on page 27.  US is discussed in the section following that one.

The Funeral Of Feminist Blogs

The blog Feministing is ceasing its operations, New York Times tells us, while also telling us that the heyday of feminist blogs is over.  It does look like that, of course, given the long list of sites which have stopped operations (or changed, over time, into something rather different and not very feminist):  Feministing, the Establishment, Broadly, the Hairpin, Xo Jane and on and on and on.  And the sites which remain have often become corporate ones:

...Jezebel is under new management, part of a stable of publications run by the hedge fund-controlled ownership group, G/O Media, that recently set off a staff exodus at the sports site Deadspin. Feminist media has been especially hard hit by the financial turbulence in the news industry.

and

The Frisky is still around (sort of), but it has lost its old identity under its new owner, Nebojsa Vujinovic, a Serbian music producer. Recent headlines on the site include “Justin Bieber Has a New Tattoo!” and “Meghan Markle and Adele Had a Secret Meeting!” That’s a long way from the mix of political and sharp lifestyle coverage that filled the welcome page before the sale.

The linked article suggests that these funeral feasts are because success eats its own parents:  Many of the writers who began those blogs are now working in mainstream media and many of the issues those blogs advanced are now included in the mainstream media.

That could be the case, sure.  But then it would also be true that those pipelines the feminist blogs once created to feed talented women into mainstream media are now ceasing operations. 

Other explanations* for the graveyard of feminist blogs are possible:  Feminism can be co-opted to serve other purposes**, whether political or commercial, and watered-down or obfuscated takes on feminism are now pretty common.

Or so I think. But then I am a dinosaur, of course, outdated, fossilized and all that.

This is very freeing.  Because I never totally focused my feminist analysis on popular culture or the general (sexist) social norms affecting young women, the demise of feminist blogs which did just that doesn't affect me directly (though of course I grieve their passing).  Pseudoscience about sex differences, evolutionary psychology, and women's global issues have never been topics which attracted lots of feminist blogs.  Writing on them has always been a solitary activity, suitable for the last dinosaur standing.  Or  for weird snake goddesses***.




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*  Such as the difficulty of starting anything similar to a feminist blog today, what with a much more mature online environment where few niches are left unfilled. 

But mostly, and this is important, Twitter and Facebook have taken over from blogs in general, and from feminist blogs, in particular.  Blogs were used as places to chat with other people who shared similar interests (or who violently disagreed with those).  Today those chats can be had in many other places.

** Because feminist causes can still attract a fairly wide audience, commercial uses of feminism are not uncommon, and if other political causes can be linked to feminism that wide audience can be harnessed for all sorts of purposes having nothing to do with the goal of equal treatment and rights of men and women.

*** This doesn't mean that I will go on forever, especially in the current political and social climate where my type of feminist work is like fighting a simultaneous war on many fronts.

Outdated... On How Snopes Judged The Verity Of A Case About The Steubenville Rape.

The case was this one:

In late 2019, a years-old story about a hacker sentenced to prison in a case stemming from the infamous Steubenville High School rape in Ohio circulated on social media, even though the subject of the story had already been released from prison.
The story in question originated on the Russian government-funded network RT with the headline, “Hacker who helped expose Ohio rape case pleads guilty, faces more prison time than rapists.” It was published on Nov. 25, 2016, and reported on the indictment of Deric Lostutter.
Here are the facts: When Lostutter was indicted in July 2016, the then-29-year-old faced up to 16 years in prison. And when Trent Mays, 17, and Ma’lik Richmond, 16, both of whom were Steubenville High School football players, were convicted of raping a girl and distributing images of the assault on social media in 2013, Mays was sentenced to two years in juvenile detention while Richmond received a one-year sentence.

To complete that summary, note that Deric Lostutter's hacking was reported earlier by the Rolling Stone magazine in November of 2013:

On November 25th, the most notorious rape case in recent memory took yet another shocking twist. In Steubenville, Ohio, where a 16-year-old girl was raped by two high school football players in August 2012, a grand jury indicted the city’s School Superintendent, Michael McVey, on felony charges of tampering with evidence and obstructing justice. An elementary school principal and two coaches in the district were indicted as well, facing misdemeanor charges including failure to report child abuse and making false statements.
Shortly after the news hit that morning, Deric Lostutter, a skinny, scruffy 26-year-old programmer in Lexington, Kentucky, whipped out his cell phone and texted me a message. “We were called liars and more,” he wrote, but “we were right about it.” He had reason to feel vindicated. As one of the most notorious members of the hacker collective, Anonymous, Lostutter battled to bring justice to Steubenville, exposing secrets of a town that’s still reeling from the fallout today. He just never expected that he’d get raided by the FBI, and face more prison time than the rapists in the end.

Thus, it is not true that the original story came from RT, the Russian government-funded network, because it had already been reported in US media, though RT re-ignited the conversation.

Snopes' final assessment of the truth of all this is "outdated!"  The author of the Snopes post makes good comments about the difficulty of comparing federal and state sentences with each other and about the different age categories of the Steubenville rapists and the hacker (the latter was an adult in 2013, the former were not).  But "outdated?"

Here's the justification for that Snopes decision:

Because this story is years old at the time of this writing, and every person incarcerated has now served time and been released, we are rating this claim “Outdated.” We further note that because of the varying factors in each case, they make poor comparisons. Also, Lostutter did not serve more time in prison than one of the Steubenville rape defendants served in juvenile detention.

I disagree with that take on the story as outdated.   

Snopes tells us that they use "outdated" when "[the] rating applies to items for which subsequent events have rendered their original truth rating irrelevant (e.g., a condition that was the subject of protest has been rectified, or the passage of a controversial law has since been repealed)".

That the incarcerated have since been released does not make the original study irrelevant, because it never was about the individuals involved in the Steubenville horrors.   It was about the way culture often privileges accused rapists over their alleged victims and even over those who want to rectify that problematic situation.  To actually find this case "outdated" would require, for me at last, that the legal treatment of rape victims and those accused of rapes was made fairer so  that another Steubenville could not happen.

And sure, I understand that the RT had different goals in re-publicizing this case.  And I also get the other differences which affected the sentencing of Lostutter and the two convicted rapists.  But the issues raised by this debate are certainly not outdated.

The Brookings Study On Low-Wage Jobs. What To Know Before Interpreting The Numbers.

About a week ago I  read a summary of a new Brookings Institute study on the prevalence of low-wage jobs in the US.  The study looked interesting, so now that I have more time I dug into it a little. 

If you wish to do the same, please take careful note of what I say below about this quote concerning the study findings:

Even as the U.S. economy hums along at a favorable pace, there is a vast segment of workers today earning wages low enough to leave their livelihood and families extremely vulnerable. That’s one of the main takeaways from our new analysis, in which we found that 53 million Americans between the ages of 18 to 64—accounting for 44% of all workers—qualify as “low-wage.” Their median hourly wages are $10.22, and median annual earnings are about $18,000.

The bolds are mine.

To correctly interpret the figures of 44% of all workers and the median annual earnings of $18,000, note that the authors of this particular study made two choices which are not terribly common in the kinds of studies which end up reporting some measure of average (such as median) annual earnings:

1.  They chose to include in their study young people (from the age eighteen up) who have not yet completed their education (who are still in college, say).  Very few of these individuals would be regarded as full-time workers.

2.  They also chose to include all part-time or seasonal workers in the study.  This is the crucial point to keep in mind when considering that $18,000 annual median earnings figure*.  It is NOT a measure of what the annual average earnings of full-time workers (those who work forty hours per week year around) are.  The authors state:

Fifty-seven percent of low-wage workers work full time year-round, considerably lower than the share of mid/high-wage workers (81%). Among those working less than full time year-round, it is not clear if this is voluntary or involuntary, or if it reflects part-time work throughout the year or full-time work for part of the year. For some low-wage workers, such as students and caretakers, part-time work is probably desirable. But given the disproportionately high rates of churn in the low-wage labor market, it is likely that spells of involuntary non-employment play a significant role, suggesting a more tenuous connection to the labor force.

 Once you adjust your economic spectacles to that fact, the rest of the report makes for useful reading.

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* Data on the median annual earnings of full-time workers can be found here.

Nearly $2 Million In Corporate Consultation Earnings. Or The Hillarization Of Elizabeth Warren.

The Washington Post article on Elizabeth Warren's earnings from consulting for corporations has a great headline:

Sen. Elizabeth Warren earned nearly $2 million consulting for corporations and financial firms, records show
 

Many readers just scan headlines without actually reading the article.  If you had done that you might think that ohmygod Warren is a handmaiden for the capitalists, humongously rich, and altogether someone who deserves instant Hillarization by the upright media.*

The article is vague on the exact time span to which these earnings figures apply, only stating that most of the income was earned from 1995 onward. 

But let's assume that Warren made that money from 1995 to 2009. A person who earned $30,000 per year over that same time period would have earned a total of $720,000 from working, possibly for a rich capitalist!  Yet that latter person is clearly not at all wealthy,** which helps to put those "nearly two million dollars" into some perspective.

This particular article isn't good at explaining the meaning of numerical data about earnings which have accrued over a long period of time. 

But even if it had been, Warren's earnings (and her corporate clients) should be judged by comparing them to the earnings (and clients) of other lawyers with similar education and experience levels and living in the same geographic area.  If the point was to argue that she made unusually vast amounts of money from work which — as the WaPo article says — "doesn’t fit neatly with her current presidential campaign brand as a crusader against corporate interests," then that would be the relevant comparison group. 


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*  "Hillarization" is my term for the treatment Hillary Clinton got from the media over the last three decades.  This consisted of throwing everything at her, all the time, hoping that lots of stuff would stick.  And it did stick.

I believe that this process is used mainly against female politicians, especially in the sense that even extremely minor or nonexistent flaws are viewed through a magnifying glass and the magnified picture is then compared to the actual flaws of rival male politicians.  That's the way "Hillary's emails" somehow came to equal all Trump's misdeeds.

The roots of hillarization lie partly in unacknowledged sexism, i.e., the belief that women should be nicer, gentler, more submissive and more nurturing than men, and if they are not, then they are overly ambitious selfish monsters.  Also, women shouldn't earn lots, even if the amount they earn is less than the earnings of men doing similar work. 

But some of the roots also come from the media's desire to be seen as objective.  If one political candidate clearly has done truly terrible things (Trump), then false equivalence requires that journalists try to dig up lots of terrible things about the other candidate(s), even if those things aren't as terrible at all.  Not to do that opens the journalists to accusations of bias, but to do that opens them to accusations of erecting false equivalency.

** This doesn't mean that Warren isn't wealthy, of course, and these earnings from consultation are not all her earnings over that time period.  But then most politicians in the US Congress are very wealthy, because the financing of political campaigns is rigged so that wealth has become one of the necessities for running.

And this shouldn't have to be said, but I say it anyway:  Criticizing Warren consulting for corporate interests is a perfectly fair thing for journalists to do.  I just want the rules of such criticisms to be equally fair, so that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for instance, is not criticized for owning nice suits when no other politicians are.

A Blast From The Past: The Extreme Male Brain

I recently came across that old argument that the existence of an "extreme male brain" is the real explanation for autism.  Given this, it might be worth my while to review here some of the results from research I did earlier on the work of Simon Baron-Cohen, the creator of that concept.  In particular, I want to explain how he tested the existence of supposed male and female brains and what is veryvery wrong with those tests:

Democratic Socialism and Happiness. The Nordic Model?

A Current Affairs article provides lots of interesting graphs about democratic socialism and its possible relationship to being able to have a contended life.

I like the article quite a bit, but I would like to see what happens if the five Nordic countries (Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland) are removed from the graphs. 

It looks to me like the positive correlation the graphs suggest might be much reduced if we did that.  And that, in turn, suggests that perhaps the Nordic type of democratic socialism has something the other types do not have, or at least not to the same extent.  More equality between men and women, say?

Or it could just be that a cold environment makes people's brains work better when it comes to creating fair societies.  (Just kidding).