OMG!

The funniest thing I've seen all month.

(Via Antigone at Punkass Blog.)

And BTW

Stuff like this is really getting on my last nerve.

(Not the LGM response, but Megan's spew that prompted it.)

Anti-Choice Wingers love to compare the battle over the right to choice to slavery, which, you know, it sort of it, but not the way they think.  They've got some weird knot in their head where the fetuses are slaves in this analogy (how? What? whose selling those fetus down what river and exploiting them where, now?) and what they never do seem to see is the real exploitation and enslavement: the woman, whose body gets owned, if they have their way, not just for nine months, but often for the rest of her life.

Clearly, though, for that nine months: if the right-wing forced birthers have their way, the woman is enslaved, by them and the state: forced, by the state, to bear a child for the state.

I believe this is both immoral and illegal, under our laws.

I believe even a right-wing Christian could see that, if he or she could first see a woman as a human being: which, of course, he (and she) never actually can.

That's the root of the problem. I guess you know who I blame.

They're not Haters...

...they're just Pro-Life, Pro-American, Good Christian, down-home Folks.

And two weeks ago, one of them shot George Tiller, and yesterday one of them (a known anti-Semite who posted on the Freeper site, among others) shot up the Holocaust Museum and killed a guard, and over the past month, their organizations have been racheting up the violence against women's clinics, and more and more they (not the Left, for all they like to believe) have been controlling the main-stream media, as well as the public discourse, and their wailing about how they're persecuted endangers our safety, and this is not terrorism?

And we're supposed to give them a pass because they say they believe in something they call Jesus? This Jesus who favors hate, and war, and torture, and forced pregancy?

Maybe it's time to just say no.

Those Women!

The NYTimes published many annoying bits today, including one I nearly blogged about, a crap front page piece above the fold in which they let the Credit Card companies make entirely unveiled threats about creating new interest rates on those who are paying off their entire balances each month if Congress dares to pass any legislation limiting their right to rape consumers just as much as they like -- and there was David Brooks' usual idiocy, of course.  Gack.

But this one won.

Oh my, the Times notes: the CDC says those wommins are having babies and they aren't locked into wedlock and some of those wommins are BROWN wommins!  Ooo civilization is failin! What's we gonna do?

Some observations: Poorer states have higher rates of unwed motherhood.  The rate did increase recently -- but we're talking, if you look at the actual numbers, at not that large an increase.  And someone might look at the economy, dude.  People might not be marrying for what looks to them like good reasons. (I know, I know, imagine that, wommins acting rationally?  How could that be?)  

(Update: The increase is less than half a million babies; by contrast, you might look at this link, which shows we have 16 million Southern Baptists in the country, not to mention nearly five million Evangelicals.  Now just who do you think is doing more damage?)

The CDC notes, also, that lots of these women are cohabiting with the guys, they just aren't marrying them.  Well, dude, not everyone wants to marry.  What is that to you?  Have a look at the people who do marry -- yeah, not all of them.  I'm married myself and I kind of like it.  But I don't insist everyone like it. And I'l admit the attitudes of the Family Values people kinda put me off occasionally.

Also, importantly, teen pregnancy has dropped, and is at its lowest rate since 1970.  That's good news.  So why's the Times not fucking well leading with that?  Instead of OOOO the (brown) wommins are destroying our country?

That's my question for you.

Being the Village

Tonks blogs here about a problem many of us have encountered, one I've never found a solution for, not a solution I'm happy with:

My turn to go around the car came just in time to see him jump in, scream in her ear, and backhand her across the face.

Guys hitting women, adults hitting kids, cops very possibly violating civil rights -- you witness it.  What do you do?  I keep looking for the perfect answer.  

Zelda told me and mr. delagar a story the other day about some students in the dining area of our student center: a couple three boys, some girls, and one of the guys was, well, not abusing his woman, but shoving her a little, mocking her every time she spoke, and, when he dropped something and she bent to pick it up for him, putting his hand on her head, holding it down, not letting her straighten up again, laughing jeeringly when she tried.  Zelda said it was obvious the other guys and the women at the table were made uncomfortable by this, as was the woman who was being shoved around; but no one called him on it.  Zelda said she thought about it -- and Zelda usually does by the way, she is fierce and fearless in these matters -- but reckoned the woman would not listen in this case.  (Correct me, Zelda, if I'm getting details wrong!)

And more than once I have seen kids getting yelled at or smacked in Wal-Mart or in public parks -- sometimes I speak up, trying to make it a friendly intervention ("Do you need some help?  Can I hold him for you while you unload the groceries?") -- and sometimes I don't.

As Tonks rightly points out in her post, although calling it in seems like the right thing to do, what happens then?  Often not good things.  

Wish for a better world, maybe.  Spit in one hand and wish with the other, as the saying goes.

What's that Word Again? Part Whatever

In case you haven't seen it yet, here's that Male Privilege checklist. It's sort of upsetting, though it won't upset fellas in the same way it upsets women. (Fellas frequently deny they have the privilege.) Here's the bits that most get to me:

32. I can be confident that the ordinary language of day-to-day existence will always include my sex. “All men are created equal,” mailman, chairman, freshman, he.

38. If I have a wife or live-in girlfriend, chances are we’ll divide up household chores so that she does most of the labor, and in particular the most repetitive and unrewarding tasks. (More).

39. If I have children with a wife or girlfriend, chances are she’ll do most of the childrearing, and in particular the most dirty, repetitive and unrewarding parts of childrearing.

40. If I have children with a wife or girlfriend, and it turns out that one of us needs to make career sacrifices to raise the kids, chances are we’ll both assume the career sacrificed should be hers.

41. Magazines, billboards, television, movies, pornography, and virtually all of media is filled with images of scantily-clad women intended to appeal to me sexually. Such images of men exist, but are rarer.

42. In general, I am under much less pressure to be thin than my female counterparts are. (More). If I am fat, I probably suffer fewer social and economic consequences for being fat than fat women do. (More).

Twisty has more.

He-Men Women-Haters

So over in China, as you know, they've been sex-selecting for boy-babies for the past generation (mainly by either aborting the girl-babies or by abandoning the girls or by giving them to Americans to raise): now what?

Now they've got a generation rising with a sex-ratio all whacked, is what.

After almost 30 years of the policy, China now has the largest gender imbalance in the world, with 37 million more men than women and almost 20 percent more newborn boys than girls nationwide.

Which policy is beginning to have its effect on the society, as anyone might have guessed:

In the 2020s, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences researcher Zheng Zhenzhen, estimates in a People's Daily interview that 10 percent of Chinese men will be unable to find wives, which could have a huge impact on Chinese society. Historian David Courtwright suggests in Violent Land that sexually segregated societies in the United States--frontier towns flush with unmarried men, immigrant ghettos in early twentieth-century cities, mining camps--are behind our propensity toward violence.

The response of some folk (here and in China) is to do away with the One-Child policy, except, of course, things aren't that simple: as most of us know, once you educate women (and women in cities in China have been given educations, though not so much in the rural areas) they stop having so many babies.

...As Chinese couples make more money, fertility is naturally declining-- meaning that today's bachelors will form an even larger proportion of China's future population than officials expect. Wang Feng, a sociologist at the University of California-Irvine who's part of a group of scholars advocating phasing out the one-child policy, says the outlook is grim: "Each successive birth cohort is going to be smaller. When younger cohorts get smaller, you have fewer females. It's a double whammy."

See, here's the thing: forced birth control, forced abortions, or its obverse -- restricting access to birth control or abortion -- neither of those are good. Both are going to lead to bad outcomes, because both are going to lead to desperate people doing desperate things. Recognize that a woman owns her body, educate her so that she is wise enough to make good choices, and keep out of her way -- oh, and here's a notion: arrange the world so that she can make good choices. What about that plan? Then you won't have this world:

Two years ago in Nanjing, Jiangsu's capital, businessman Wu Gang opened the Rising Sun Anger Release Bar in a cheap hotel near the bank of the Yangtze River. The bar featured staples of Chinese entertainment like big-screen karaoke and plates of sunflower seeds but also a central catwalk where, for 100 yuan ($15) per minute, customers paid to assault the waiters, single young migrants from poorer cities to the north. If a customer preferred, his victim would dress in drag.

This is Funny!

You'll remember that when I took the test to discover what sort of a 30's wife I was, I failed horrifically (I scored a 21, making me a Terrible Failure): well! Acting on a tip from my cool nephew, I gender bent and took the test as a fella, and it turns out I am a Terrific Success as a 30's Husband! I score 106! I'm freaking Top Notch!

I've got a word for you and I reckon you can guess what it is.

(Update: I don't outscore mr. delagar though: he scored 109.)

Um, What?

One of my students called me "hon" today.

He's an older guy (I've got half a class full of TAA students, as I've said) and I'm finding it hard to be really upset about it, and I'm certainly not going to give him a hard time over it, given that I don't actually think he meant any harm by it -- I was helping him sort his TAA paperwork out, and he just said, "Thanks, hon," on his way out, but, well.

Really. Is that something that would get said to a male professor? Ever?

Or anything equivalent?

"Thanks, sport?"

I'm thinking not.

Dealing

I've been back from the conference for days now; just haven't had a chance to breathe. Catching up with teaching, with students' assignments, with prep, with my own paperwork, I have been back four days and I am still a week behind. How is this possible? I have not even caught up on the blogs yet.

The conference went well enough: my paper went well, as did mr. delagar's. On the way to and from the conference, we listened to True Grit, which was what I gave my paper on, and which both mr. delagar and I are teaching this semester in our freshman comp classes. Did you know you can download novels directly to your iPod Touch? It's very cool.

Anyway, in St. Louis, where I did not get a chance to visit Sugared Harpy (rats!), it rained and rained, and we drank and drank. No! Kidding! Worked and worked! Really!

But here's what I wanted to tell you about. One evening, mr. delagar and I were lying about in the hotel room, and I was trying to write my shitting paper, which I had to present the next day, and which I had not yet written (yep, that's the sort of scholar I am), and mr. delagar, helpful fella that he is, was channel surfing, and he stops on this bint on some news network, Faux News or CNN, who knows which, she's some famous bint, I could not tell you which, she had done something remarkable, sold a record or written a book or saved a baby from a dingo, who knows, anyway, what is she talking about?

You guessed it! Her weight!

How much she weighs! Her diet! How she regulates her daily intake of food so that she won't look like an utter cow! How she does this so that she will be healthy and FEEL GOOD ABOUT HERSELF and NOT because she is oppressed by the patriarchy!

No, she didn't say the last bit. The last bit never enters her sweet little radar.

"Will you turn this shit off?" I demanded of mr. delagar. "Now? Seriously?"

"I didn't book her," he said, changing the channel.

"That's all women are taught to do," I spat, "think about their bodies. That's all we are. Bodies. You want to know why we can't do science and math? That right there. Do you know how many calories are in an Oreo?"

"What?"

"Do you?"

"Uh...no...thirty?"

"Fifty-five. Do you know how many are in a carrot?"

He gaped at me.

"Twenty. How many are in a hot dog bun?"

"What in--"

"A hundred and fifty. How many in a pound of fat?"

"What's your--"

"Thirty-five hundred. I know all this and I couldn't do a quadratic equation with a gun to my head. Why is that? Why?" I snarled and turn over a page in my notebook. "I got one word for you, buddy."

He knew what it was, too.

Grading Students

My Victorian Literature students are doing their presentations this week -- this week and last week -- which is a useful part of the semester, as it allows the class, most of whom know very little about Victorian culture (and what little they think they know is usually wrong). This being so, it's rough for them to read George Eliot, or even Dickens: what's a Whig? Is it anything like a wig? Why do these people get upset about rick-burning? Going in for Chartism -- that's a health-craze, right?

So I assign topics, as I call them, and one student looks into who Charles Lyell was, and what he has to do with anything; and another looks into what Higher Criticism of the Bible is, and why it matters; and another investigates Malthus; and another Chartism; and so on; and each day five or six present to the class what they have learned, and I tell them if they can show how it effects literature of the period they will make me a very happy professor.

Which they do -- some of these presentations are really excellent. I have told them not to get hysterical, because this is only worth five percent of their grade, but we have got some fine students right now, and all they know how to do is run top speed. So I'm getting these Power Point presentations that explain things I never knew about how Darwin is connected to Lyell is connected to this guy over here and how the Royal Society started it all, complete with links and photographs and bits of poetry and music, and the writers all this influenced, and I'm meant to grade this.

Because they all want grades.

That's the bit that bothers me.

Grading students.

Here's my confession: I never have liked grading students.

I like teaching them. I like working with them. I like sitting down with them and saying, right then, look here, you see why this part of your paper really isn't working? See how if you do this, it will? I don't even mind marking things wrong on their exams, because, you know, if things are wrong, then they are wrong, and students need to know what they've gotten wrong, obviously, so they can go and find out what the right thing is.

But why grades? Grades, unless they're all A's, feel like punishment. And punishing people, well, how does that ever help anyone?

In my comp classes, that's how I do it, at least for as long as I can. I won't grade the essay until it's an A essay -- that's what I tell the students. I say they have to write it and rewrite it and keep rewriting it until it's an A. (Or, I tell them, they are welcome to give up. I tell them if they ever want to quit, they can put it in their grading folder and give it to me and I'll grade it at the level where they quit. Oddly, none of them take that option.) I say they can keep writing it until it's an A or until they run out of semester. About half the class reaches A papers this way -- the others, I'll admit, just stop revising and turn in the unrevised or barely revised work at the end of the semester. But they, at least, meant to try for the A, obviously.

Grades strike me as such a bad idea. They put me in an adversarial position with the students, for one thing. I'm not there to help the student; I'm there to judge the student. And the student is there to get past me -- to sneak, to con me, to try to wrangle an A out of me against my will. Instead of this, obviously, the student and I should be working together: we should be here to learn. Instead of the student trying to hide her ignorance from me, we should be working together to find the best way to mend that ignorance. Instead of me trying to punish the student for the high crime of not-knowing, I should be trying to help the student know.

Also, it pits the students against one another. They vie for the best grades, to win in the classroom; they worry about being caugh cheating; they want to be the smartest. It becomes about the grade, not about the knowledge.

(Here's a story: when I was in graduate school, studying Greek, there would always be some male graduate student in the class who, when I turned out to be the smartest one in the class, would be first astonished, and then furious: because that could not be right. (a) He had always been the smartest and (b) I did not have a penis. How could a non-tool bearing student be smartest? Not possible! I remember one fella, after I finished first on the first exam, coming up to me in the hallway when we got the exams back. "How did you do?" he asked, ever so casually. I showed him the exam. I don't remember what I got, but it would have been a 98 or a 99 -- Dr. Levine, whose class this would have been, never gave 100s. He said there was no such thing as a perfect exam. I remember his grade, though also an A, was lower. He scowled at me, and then attempted a smile. "This won't do," he said, and he tried to pretend he was kidding. But he wasn't. He spend the next five or six weeks trying to out-study me -- studying as hard as he could, so that he could finish faster than me on the quizzes, score higher than me on the tests -- and? When he couldn't? -- he dropped the class.)

My point, and I do have one, is why must we grade students at all? What does it help? Feedback, yes. Advice, yes. Helpful criticism, by all means. But grades? I can think of only one grade that did me any good, the C- that was given me by Raeburn Miller when I was 19 years old, and really, the note he wrote on the bottom of the paper did much more good: he told me that no matter how well I wrote, if I did not learn to spell and proofread, no one would ever care what I said. All the rest of all the dreadful grades all my teachers gave me all the years of my life just made me angry and resentful, just like all the smacks in the head I got growing up did. None of them taught me anything.

My point, well, what is my point.

(1) I am not convinced grading does much good.

(2) I am half-convinced it can do active harm.

(3) It takes up inordinate scads of time.

(4) Who thought it up, anyway. (Cough patriarchy cough)

(5) Can't we do something else? What's up with this?

So that's my rant for today.

Women In Charge

It's hard to know where to stand on this one.

A former professor at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary has sued the institution and its president, L. Paige Patterson, contending she was fired because of her gender. She is seeking damages for breach of contract, fraud, and defamation.

Ms. Klouda was appointed an assistant professor of Old Testament languages at Southwestern's School of Theology in the spring of 2002. At that time, the suit says, she was the only female member of the School of Theology's 40-member faculty. When Mr. Patterson took over as the seminary's president in the summer of 2003, the complaint adds, he "personally assured her that the administration change -- his appointment -- would not jeopardize her appointment."

But in April 2006, according to the lawsuit, she learned that her contract would not be renewed. "Dr. Klouda was told that she was 'a mistake that the trustees needed to fix,'" the lawsuit asserts. She is now an assistant professor of Old Testament studies at Taylor University, in Upland, Ind.

Not that I am without sympathy for Ms. Klouda...well, okay. I have a little trouble finding sympathy for Ms. Klouda, who is not just an innocent beleagured academic, after all, but a determined and dedicated hardshelled Baptist who lay down with this pack with her eyes open. She knew who these dogs were before she decided to run with them, is my point. Now they have bit her on the ass, I'm a bit lacking in tears for her. Did she not ever notice previous to this occasion that she was surrounded by misogynist tools? Was this her first hint that her culture was a poisonous, filthy, hate-ridden one?

I mean, d'oh!

Okay, okay. As Twisty tells us, we cannot blame the oppressed for their oppression. Truly, Ms. Klouda has been oppressed. It can't be her fault that she suffers from that oppression, and is warped by it, and can utter such things as this:

Ms. Klouda said she "firmly believed that excellent work both in the classroom and the academy would define me, and that I would be evaluated fairly in light of my scholarly accomplishments and congeniality."

And, apparently, believe them -- in a culture where this is, apparently, the commonly held worldview:

In his post, Mr. Burleson discussed the debate over a passage of Scripture, I Timothy 2:12, that some interpreters have taken to mean that women should not minister to men. He raised the question of whether such an interpretation might have been a motivation for Ms. Klouda's dismissal, even though she was not teaching theology, but Old Testament languages.

"What bothers me is the extraordinarily restrictive views of certain leaders in our convention regarding women," Mr. Burleson commented. "This is not about 'being a pastor' of a church. ... This is all about the belief among some that women should not have authority over men, whether it be in the home, the church, a business, or society in general."

Which, as I have found, from hanging out at Worldview and WordNutDaily, that absolutely is the worldview.

Bad Women! Bad!

Here's another of those articles from the New York Magazine where the writers pretend that because a few of their high-strung girlfriends from the top edge of society decide something is so, it must be so.

It opens like one of those magazine ads from the 50s:

After dropping off their children at their East Side private school one morning, Betsy and another mother shared a secret.

And what is this horrible secret?

Why (gasp!): Betsy makes the money in her family!

Betsy earns the living and her husband stays home with the kids!

No! Say it isn't so!

But! This is a BAD thing! Because! Women (the one Ralph Gardner Jr., writer of this article, knows, anyway) don't actually respect or want to fuck men who make less money than they do.

They might think they would respect men whom they out-earned, but no! No! This is a feminist lie! In actual fact, as Ralph's incisive journalistic skills have led him to deduce, secretly, women want the traditional patriarchal guy, the big tough daddy that will take charge -- but, rats, feminism has ruined this for us!

When Emily comes home, she doesn’t always want to be the boss. But she says her husband no longer has the authority to take over. “I want somebody to take that power role away from me,” she explains. “Ultimately, it gets down to pretty basic stuff. It’s hard to be the power broker every day and then be the femme fatale. I’m not going to pay the bills—I feel like his mother—and then come home and suck his dick.”

Well! Obviously then, if we want happy marriages and lives, we should quit all this school and career silliness and get back in the kitchen where we belong! Um. Back on our knees where we belong!

That's certainly worked for my students in Arkansas.

Can I just mention, by the way, how none of this matches my own experience? I know two marriages up close (mine and The Other Liberal Professor's) where the women outearn the men, and the men are the primary caregivers for the children -- the SAHDs. The women do not feel contempt for the men; the marriages work not just fine but quite well; nor do either of us harbor secret* fantasies for someone like Fred Thompson to sweep in and take charge.

What I am suggesting, in fact, is that this bit of nonsense, like the previous efforts to come from this same general direction (I'm thinking of that article insisting portentously that huge floods of young highly educated women were "opting out" of their five-figure jobs to stay home with their young children, abandoning feminism, in other words, because they prefered the traditional patriarchal-approved role of mommy-hood), is nonsense, and based on a very small sample-size -- if Ralph had looked beyond the borders of his East Side Private school, maybe he might have found some women and men and marriages and relationships for whom this arrangment works.

Also, maybe he could have looked for people who weren't self-centered tools?

I'm just suggesting. You put fuckwits into a marriage, don't expect to get anything but a fuckwit marriage out at the other end.


(Via Ezra Klein)






*Well, I don't. Maybe TOLP does? And keeps them secret from me?

Men Made The World

Over here, Roy F. Baumeister tells us, with what he no doubt considers gracious, wry humor, that despite what the feminists would have you believe it wasn't any evil conspiracy (strawfeminist much?), really, that resulted in millenia of women being oppressed by the menfolk -- why, it wasn't even any oppression! Still isn't! Women was just doing their thing! Having those babies! Cooking those dinners! Weaving those social webs! Like god, er, evolutionary psychology meant them to!

And men? Why, all this time, little did we notice, it was the men being exploited!

This is what Baumeister claims his careful studies have shown him. Men are the ones being oppressed, see.

The mistake in that way of thinking is to look only at the top. If one were to look downward to the bottom of society instead, one finds mostly men there too. Who’s in prison, all over the world, as criminals or political prisoners? The population on Death Row has never approached 51% female. Who’s homeless? Again, mostly men. Whom does society use for bad or dangerous jobs? US Department of Labor statistics report that 93% of the people killed on the job are men. Likewise, who gets killed in battle? Even in today’s American army, which has made much of integrating the sexes and putting women into combat, the risks aren’t equal. This year we passed the milestone of 3,000 deaths in Iraq, and of those, 2,938 were men, 62 were women.

One can imagine an ancient battle in which the enemy was driven off and the city saved, and the returning soldiers are showered with gold coins. An early feminist might protest that hey, all those men are getting gold coins, half of those coins should go to women. In principle, I agree. But remember, while the men you see are getting gold coins, there are other men you don’t see, who are still bleeding to death on the battlefield from spear wounds.


OO! OOO! OOO! I know this one, Mr. Baumeister!

What about the women in the city the men sacked? What happened to them?

What about the -- um, how many Jewish women and children was it that were killed in the Holocaust? Three million?

What about the women who have been slaughtered in Iraq, how many is that so far?

What about the suffering and the death of the women whose children die in those stinking wars? I give you Medea, who says in Euripides, "I would rather stand three times in the front line of battle than bear one child, Baumeister, you fucking tool," (my translation).


Baumeister goes on to say --

Well, he goes on to say many lame things. Let's just take this one: he claims men created culture. Men created culture, he claims, because they evolved to take chances (otherwise they could not breed -- women get to breed no matter what, obviously, we just to get hang about and some guy will come along and fuck us, and voila! Babies!): this inclines guys to want to get out there and create! To think up new things to do! To be pirates! To be individuals! To write opera! And So on!

Whereas women, well, we want to mop floors and clean toilets and gossip. And make babies. And be raped.

Baumeister knows this because his extensive studies of musical history have shown him that, all through the 19th century, white middle class women studied piano, but never wrote any music, whereas black men, who unlike those white women were actually oppressed, created amazing works of musical genius.

We know from the classical music scene that women can play instruments beautifully, superbly, proficiently — essentially just as well as men. They can and many do. Yet in jazz, where the performer has to be creative while playing, there is a stunning imbalance: hardly any women improvise. Why? The ability is there but perhaps the motivation is less. They don’t feel driven to do it.

I suppose the stock explanation for any such difference is that women were not encouraged, or were not appreciated, or were discouraged from being creative. But I don’t think this stock explanation fits the facts very well. In the 19th century in America, middle-class girls and women played piano far more than men. Yet all that piano playing failed to result in any creative output. There were no great women composers, no new directions in style of music or how to play, or anything like that. All those female pianists entertained their families and their dinner guests but did not seem motivated to create anything new.

Meanwhile, at about the same time, black men in America created blues and then jazz, both of which changed the way the world experiences music. By any measure, those black men, mostly just emerging from slavery, were far more disadvantaged than the middle-class white women. Even getting their hands on a musical instrument must have been considerably harder. And remember, I’m saying that the creative abilities are probably about equal. But somehow the men were driven to create something new, more than the women.

So put that in your pipe and smoke it, you sulky feminists with your conspiracy theories. (I leave the problem with this here example as an exercise for the blogosphere.)

Baumeister goes on to claim that, because women are, apparently, unable to innovate or create, men must have been responsible for all of culture. Women sat about nurturing children and dealing with "intimate care." Men created "religion, literature, art, science, technology, military action, trade and economic marketplaces, political organization, medicine." The woman's sphere, he claims, did not produce these things. (What evidence does he have to support this claim? The evidence he pulls from his ass, apparently.)

Baumeister adds:

Note that all those things I listed — literature, art, science, etc — are optional. Women were doing what was vital for the survival of the species. Without intimate care and nurturance, children won’t survive, and the group will die out. Women contributed the necessities of life. Men’s contributions were more optional, luxuries perhaps. But culture is a powerful engine of making life better. Across many generations, culture can create large amounts of wealth, knowledge, and power. Culture did this — but mainly in the men’s sphere.

So -- women, you're necessary, as servants to the race. Pat, pat. Nice women. But men, clearly, are doing all the really important work.

And? In case we missed it?

Thus, the reason for the emergence of gender inequality may have little to do with men pushing women down in some dubious patriarchal conspiracy. Rather, it came from the fact that wealth, knowledge, and power were created in the men’s sphere. This is what pushed the men’s sphere ahead. Not oppression.

Giving birth is a revealing example. What could be more feminine than giving birth? Throughout most of history and prehistory, giving birth was at the center of the women’s sphere, and men were totally excluded. Men were rarely or never present at childbirth, nor was the knowledge about birthing even shared with them. But not very long ago, men were finally allowed to get involved, and the men were able to figure out ways to make childbirth safer for both mother and baby. Think of it: the most quintessentially female activity, and yet the men were able to improve on it in ways the women had not discovered for thousands and thousands of years.

And this example is so stupid I can't leave it as an exercise to the blogosphere.

Yes, indeed, "not very long ago" men finally got involved! And fucked it up! You tool! What history of medicine is this idiot reading? Men got involved and the survival rates went down! Men got involved and did not wash their hands! Men took over and kicked the midwives out, under the belief that their superior male skills had to be better than any women's knowledge, and not until women got involved again did things really change much for the better.
Here's one source on that process; here's another, with Baumeister's early male medical OB's detailed; Finally, here's this:

Obstetricians like [Joseph] DeLee and others who followed him helped reduce use of midwives by arguing that midwives were untrained and incompetent, that pregnancy is a dangerous condition requiring care available only from highly trained medical specialists, and that midwives’ clients—mainly poor women—were needed to provide the clinical experience for training doctors in obstetrics. Midwives attended approximately half of all births in 1900, but less than 15 percent by 1935. By the early 1930s most practicing midwives were black or poor-white granny midwives working in the rural south. Where midwifery declined, the incidence of mother and infant deaths from childbearing or birth injuries generally increased. A scholar who conducted an intensive study concluded that the 41 percent increase in infant mortality due to birth injuries between 1915 and 1929 was due to obstetrical interference in birth. (Emphasis mine)


The rest of Baumeister's essay is equally ill-considered and ill-researched. I urge you to have a read only so that you can see what passes for thought among the intellectuals on the other side of the ditch, and among those who think evolutionary psychology is kool.

What I would like to know, though, seriously, is how tripe like this sees print.

Update: Another take on this pile of steaming nonsense.

And see this, just because real science/evidence always cheers me up, after I have been forced to deal with right wing crap.

EWF

Well, I haven't blogged on Craig. I was at the clinic with the kid when the story broke, trying to coax her into drinking about a quart of barium shake, and I confess I did giggle with wicked glee, because I did my time in Idaho under Mr. Craig's smug rule, his family values stick, um, schtick, I mean, and you know, isn't it droll how all these tools who give us Others their sermons about the holiness of the hearth and the sacredness of the Family and how Women Must Stay Home with the Kiddies so that the Family Can Be Kept Safe, how Essential that is, turn out to be hunting the boys (or, you know, Whatever) on the side?

But this is not what I want to get into today.

What I wanted to get into today is how really odd it is that we as a culture go after guys like Craig so violently.

I mean, what is his crime? He wanted some sex with another adult male. Blow me down (pardon the pun) but so what?

True, in a bathroom is not where I would seek that sort of sex, but to each his own.

On other blogs, I've heard the arrest justified b/c "I don't want my eleven year old propositioned when he goes into pee!" except Craig did not approach an eleven year old, obviously. This was an adult, and clearly an adult, and apparently Craig made certain it was an adult. Whatever else he might be (cough hypocrite cough) he's no pedophile.

Nor did he sexually harass this dude. He approached him with such trepidation that it's barely an approach at all, folks. Good heavens.

As other (feminist) blogs have pointed out, try being a woman for a time, deal with how we get approached, all the time, for sex from men, from random strangers. A waggle under a bathroom stall? Jeez Louise. That's nothing.

Starting when I was eleven, I'd say, guys at school regularly began calling me "bitch" and "slut" and asking me if I gave blow jobs for money, asking if I was a virgin. I wasn't sure what a blow job was at eleven, mind you. This continued until high school, when our schools stopped being co-ed.

Starting when I was about eleven, and continuing all the rest of my life, whenever I walked or jogged or rode my bike on any public street, any guy or group of guys that passed me felt free to shout sexual comments at me, proposition me, pull his or their vehicle over and offer to "give me a ride, baby" anywhere I wanted to go. I literally cannot count the number of times this happened. I can think of twice, specifically, when men offered me money to get in their cars with them -- both times I was under sixteen.

I've had guys grab my breasts in crowds. (Yes, guys I do not know. Guys I had never seen in my life.)

I've had a guy yell, "Hey, c*nt, want to f*ck?" at me out of a car window. (This was while I was walking down a street at three in the afternoon, wearing not especially tight jeans and a regular teeshirt. My crime? Existing While Female.)

I've had a guy grab my crotch from behind -- again, this is not in a Girls Gone Wild setting, but in a regular party, among guys I thought I knew, guys I thought were my friends. And then they laughed like this was cute.

I had another guy slip me a drink spiked with too much tequila, back before I knew how to handle liquor, so that I got so drunk I nearly passed out. When I asked him, later, why he had done it, he told me, as though this were absolutely a fine thing to say, "I wanted to get some pussy."

I've had a guy I had been dating for nearly a year trying to force me into sex in his car -- well, that's a story we can all tell, isn't it? He stopped when I said no. Lucky me. Lots of times they don't.

So, you know, tapping some guy's foot? Waggling fingers? They're arresting fellas for this?

The fuck?

Update: See also this, over at Pandagon.

Little Mermaid

The kid is having *issues* with The Little Mermaid.

You'll recall we've been working on fairy tales, while we write a revision for that contest.

Well!

She is deeply upset at the utter travesty Disney perpetuated on HCA's "Little Mermaid." Not, mind you, that we wholly approve of HCA's original (cough*patriarchy*oppressed*cough) version of the story -- but DISNEY's abortion of a version!!

The kid is deeply upset. Nor do the cute songs and Sebsation the Sea Crab make up for the appalling revision. Not in her strict accounting, anyway. She demands to know why Disney would do such a thing.

I tell her I have one word for her.

She replies that Disney had better NEVER make a version of Romeo and Juliet. (Her favorite story, ever since she saw Shakespeare in Love with her daddy.)

The Patriarchy Again

An interesting comment by Amanda over at Pandagon -- this is just part of it; it's in a discussion of this post here.


Our behavior makes more sense if you look as us as individuals trying to negotiate our survival and that of our children with the knowledge that we’re interdependent. With that in mind, it appears the patriarchy is a social system that developed when human males realized what female bonobos already know; if you band together you can dominate the other sex. Dominant females don’t have much reason to dominate too cruelly, though; they mostly seem interested in using their power to set up matrilineage and to keep males from harassing females. But dominate males want a lot more from females than just decent behavior; since females have wombs and males don’t, there’s a heightened interest in controlling females from cradle to grave. Thus, the patriarchy, which is a subtle alliance between men throughout history to keep women maintained as a sex-and-breeding class, utterly dependent on men for their economic survival.

Chimpanzees would like to dominate females this way, but they don’t control the females’ economic resources, so they’re sort of stuck.


The patriarchy is crumbling, by the way, because women have learned what our bonobo sisters already know; you band together and you have more power.

It occurs to me that this is why the Wingers hate women who work, and women who won't marry, and women who don't want kids, and women who "act like men," as they put it, meaning women who talk back and don't submit, and any woman who they see as escaping their spiky iron fists -- because it's not just a choice, for them, as it is for us.

For me, that's what it always was, and for me, therefore, their anger was a bit bewildering. Why would they get so bent about women who wore pants, and wanted a college degree, and didn't want kids, or didn't want to get married, or didn't want to take her husband's name? What was that to them? Surely this didn't have anything to do with their lives, did it? Why should they care if I said fuck, or I prefered the study of Greek to having six kids? That's my choice, isn't it? I don't care if they choose to go to church and have twins, do I?

But this makes their temper clearer: because they do care what I do, because to them it isn't just choice. What they see is that feminism lets women be free. And that means that that some women have escaped the cage. (The love of a good man, James over there on WorldNut put it, but it does start to look oddly like cage, when you examine their premises: women who have jobs leave it more often, women with educations leave it more often, women with access to birth control reject it in droves...hmmm...why does this not sound like something women are choosing because they feel loved and cherished? Why does it sound like oppression?)

Who will stay a slave when the door is open? Not too many.



[Now to be clear, I do not believe all relationships are oppressed relationships: people can partner up and work out decent relationships. It can be done. (At least, I'm hoping it can.) It can't be done, though, on the basis of one of those people exploiting the other.]

Now What Now?

Y'all know I like to lurk about on the Winger blogs, just to keep my eye on what the other side is doing these days. Well, a few days ago I had the notion I might start bringing home some pelts for you, as it were. Why not share? That's what I thought. (Or: why I should suffer? Why not y'all, too?)

So I've been collecting! Here's some snippets, just for you!

These two are comments, off that blog run by the Christian Magazine, World Magazine. Not everyone over there is a rabid loon, but yikes, enough are. This is the lot that got all fretful b/c one of their crew posted an ancient essay by R.A. Heinlein (a sappy one) all about how Americans!were!GREAT!because we're so true and good by nature, always willing to help a fella out. Why did this upset them? Why, it was blaspheme, of course! Americans, like every other human in God's creation, are not good by nature: we're evil. Original sin, duh.

Anyway, here are two comments I collected for you:

This first is from a discussion about whether a H. Clinton/Obama ticket would succeed:


That ticket would have all the gravitas of a carnival side show.
Step right up and see the amazing "Tatooed Woman" and her perfoming midget, "Obama Man."
There are many who love to see such shows. We had an eight year run of one in the 90's. It also turned out to be an X-rated "peep show" in the Oval Office with the "Tatooed Lady" looking on. What gravitas the libs brought to us with that act!
Would Hillabama be a sequal? They are usually never as good as the original, but it is not for lack of trying. If the American public gives this freak show a second chance, we will deserve whatever is behind the curtain.

Posted by: Michael Martin at July 17, 2007 01:49 PM

And this second is from a discussion of that report that showed that teens today were both having less sex and tending to use birth control when they did have sex:

This is the whole program of radical feminism: hate men, use them, and of course, BE like the worst of them.

Radical feminism's design is to get girls to disdain men, all the while trying to turn into men themselves. Be promiscuous! Marriage is a chattel contract! A baby is like an alien taking over your body! Abort it! Abort it again! A women should never face a consequence for promiscuous sex! It's totally insane, but hey - that ideology has infiltrated every university campus for the last 30 years - and swept millions of young women (I mean womYN) into it.
Of course, the ultimate in radical feminism is to become a lesbian! Don't shave your legs or your armpits; dress like an Arkansas hunter; grow facial hair, and only have sex with other womYN and plastic devices.

Or, a young woman could opt for becoming a lady, and finding a man to truly love her for all her life.

So many choices...

James


Lots of these comments are going to be about feminism -- this is not because I'm self-selecting the ones about feminists; it's because, no matter what the topic is, wingers keep bringing it back to feminism. Re James above -- that topic had nothing to do with feminism. And yet! Why do you suppose the Right is so obsessed with those evil, hairy-legged feminists? Why do you suppose the hair on our legs obsesses them so? Why do you think they're so worried about us escaping the control of some "good" man?

Hmm. Could that answer start with a P?

Here's our third example. It's from the Althouse's site:

A comment on, you guessed it, the Clinton question (the only thing the Right is more obsessed about than feminists is Clinton).

PatCA said...
One reason I'm glad Hillary is running is precisely because it will bring out all these inconsistencies and incoherence in gender politics and identity politics in general. And I predict the one who panders to women the most will lose the biggest.

Someone once told me I write like a man. I took it as a compliment.

Commentors at that post are of the opinion that Clinton should not run because (a) she's a woman (b) she's ugly (c) ugly women are bad women (d) she's only running because she's a woman -- that's identity politics! which is bad! (e) she's only running because she was married to Bill (f) she's a cunning evil politician and they don't trust her, and her recent crafty campaign moves just go to show this (h) she's a woman (i) and ugly too.

Obama, on the other hand, should not run because his middle name is Hussein.

Over here, on Dr. Helen's site, Rusty explains to us about marriage:

Marriage is a social and legal construct, and in my opinion it is intended for the protection of children. I believe it was created because of the high likelihood that a heterosexual couple will naturally produce offspring, whether they plan to or not. So given that gay relationships do not naturally produce offspring, I see no need to extend marital legal rights to gays. Further, I would find it frightening to say that if a gay couple became parents, they could marry, because there will be some that will seek parenthood just to justify this arrangement.

So I don't see any reason to extend the definition of marriage to include anything other than one man and one woman. There are other means of creating a legal bond between any two people, something I realized when my wife and I bought our first house, because we closed on the house and became homeowners one month prior to our wedding.I view the gay marriage thing as just another push by gay rights activists to be in my face and force their lifestyle into the accepted main stream.

However, I do not regard gay marriage as the biggest threat to marriage. Far and away the biggest threat to marriage is the radical feminist initiatives that have invaded our legal system and gone so far as to make marriage unbearable for men in that they risk the loss of everything just by saying "I do."

Included in this is the notion of reproductive choice. Men have no choice. Even if they use birth control themselves, their wives can go out and get themselves pregnant and stick the husband with the economic burden. This imbalance is a gross contradiction to the notion of gender equality.

But then equality isn't what the feminists have in mind.

Rusty

Here, Neocon explains why we invaded Iraq. Something to do with seatbelts, apparently. Who knew!

One of the things he mentioned was that the cars he rode in invariably lacked seat belts. No, it wasn’t because the automobiles were old. According to Totten, it’s because the Iraqis had purposely ripped out the seat belts. Why?

Apparently it’s a point of honor (as in honor/shame culture; see this and this) in many Arab countries to do away with the protection afforded by seat belts. In their eyes, this shows bravery.

According to Totten, some taxis still sport seat belts. But they are somewhat like vestigial organs; the drivers take it as a personal insult if you put them on or even indicate a desire to wear them. “What’s the matter,” they say, “don’t you trust my driving?”


And finally this, which I submit without commentary:

Good Guy Death Star. No Girls Allowed.

I tell The Boy two stories each night. The content varies with my level of inspiration and alertness, but occasionally I will hit upon a subject that The Boy will insist on revisiting and embellishing.

And that's how The Boy's Good Guy Death Star Adventure Series began.

The Boy, or Master of the Galaxy, as he prefers to be known in his adventures, asked me to tell him a story wherein he saves the day. So I invented a story about The Emperor and Darth Vader bringing the Death Star to earth, and The Boy being the only thing that could stop them.

This proved a popular tale. So on subsequent evenings The Boy ended up defeating the bad guys and taking over their Death Star.

"Only, pretend that it's a Good Guy Death Star now," said The Boy.

"Okay."

"And, I live there with all my buddies and star wars good guys," he added.

"Okay."

"And pretend that it's only for boys, except you can live there too, mommy."

"Okay."

Then he thought for a minute.

"But everyone needs to know that it's a good guy death star, so we'll put a sign on it."

"What will it say?"

"Good Guy Death Star. Oh, and Boys Only. No Girls Allowed."

"So you're orbiting earth in a death star with a sign on it?"

"Yeah. And it's just a plain gray death star."

"How about some red racing stripes?"

"Okay. And on the back, a picture of me beating up the Emperor with my light saber, so everyone knows it's okay because it's just me."

"Sounds good, son."

Later versions of the tale had The Boy's death star being pursued by a sparkly pink death star full of girls who wanted to play with The Boy's transformer toys. Fortunately a detente was reached before the galaxy was destroyed.

It's times like these that I wish I had some artistic ability - the mental image of The Boy's Death Star--with sign, poster and racing stripes--being pursued by another, pink and sparkly death star - is too good not to share.

Fairy Tales

So over at Shady Glade, Alyssa is holding a contest: rewrite a fairy tale! Any fairy tale! Since the kid is so into fairy tales right now she is about to pop, and since the conservative/patriarchal nature of most of these tales has been about to make me pop, yay, we say!

We're entering the contest together.

(Here are the rules here, in case any of y'all want to join us.)

So all weekend we have been researching fairy tales (because you know that is what English professors do first, research) -- or rather, I assigned my tiny research assistant to do the research, while I worked on the current short story. I told her to find the top five she thought we should revise, and get back to me. So she scoured her texts -- she owns about fifteen collections, and we had gone to the downtown Fort Smith library and taken out ten or eleven more, ones she had already long since read, to refer back to -- and then, Saturday evening, while we took our walk, we discussed our options.

She told me there were a few tales she liked but did not understand, and some she liked but wasn't sure we could use.

"Fr'instance," she said, "The Happy Prince."

This is the story of a thrush who is flying with his friends to the coast for a vacation. He stops to rest in the town square in a famous city, on a famous statue, of a famous prince, known as the Happy Prince. It is a beautiful statue, made of lead covered thickly with gold, with sapphire eyes and pearl teeth, a ruby study in the sword at his hip, amythest buttons, etc, etc. The thrush sits admiring the statue in the sunlight, thinking how lovely it is, how happy the prince looks. Then he hears the statue weeping.

"Why, what is wrong?" the thrush asks. "You look so happy. You're so beautiful. You can't be sad."

"I am sad," the Happy Prince says. "I wasn't at first, when the people stood me up. They cheered and they sang and there was music, and little children came to picnic at my feet. Men made speeches. Everyone said I represented brotherhood and goodness, and I was happy then. But I stand in this Square all day and see nothing but grief around me. How can I help but be sad?"

The thrush fluttered his wings, looking around the square. Things didn't look so bad to him. Markets, tradesmen, children, a few soldiers. What was the Happy Prince on about?

"Please," said the Happy Prince. "Would you -- could you perhaps help me?"

"Help you?"

"Please. I'm only a statue. I can't do anything. They said I meant something. But I don't. If you would help..."

"I'm only a thrush," the thrush pointed out.

"But you can act. Please!"

"And I'm on my way to the coast. See? The flock is leaving."

Which was true. They were.

"You can catch up," the Happy Prince said. "Please. This won't take long. There's a little girl. Do you see here? By the church steps. Crying."

The thrush looked. She was small, and dark-haired, and dirty, huddled by the steps, watching those browsing the market stalls with hopelessness on her small face.

"Her father needs money," the Happy Prince said, "or he will be conscripted into the army. He has sent her out to get some. He doesn't care how, he told her. Just get it. She's afraid to steal. He beat her last night when she didn't bring any home. I'm afraid for her. Please. If you will only take her the ruby off my sword."

Well, clearly that would not take long.

"And go with her?" the Happy Prince wheedled. "Follow her? To be certain she has no trouble getting it home?"

"All right, all right!"

The thrush pried the ruby loose and flew off toward the girl.

When he got back, he had the story for the Prince -- how happy the father had been, how wretched the room they lived in, how the father had pawned the ruby and packed and taken passage on a ship and he and the girl had set out for the mountains, where the girl's grandmother lived. The joy on the girl's face, the bare hope on the father's.

The Happy Prince sighed. "This is -- could you? One more thing?"

The thrush fluttered, annoyed. "You said one thing. You said --"

"Just one more! In that room, above the inn? See the window? It's a poet. He's been working on a play. I suppose it's an opera, really. He comes out here, early mornings, and sits under me, singing bits of it. It's so nice. Well, I think it's nice. About a prince, who wants to save his kingdom, and loves this girl down at the end of the valley...she's a farmer's daughter...well, he can't finish the play, he's been out of money for a month, he's had to take work at the docks, it makes him too tired to write or even think, and it doesn't pay him enough to get enough to eat, even. He sat here on his afternoon off, trying to write, but he was so tired he couldn't stay awake. Take a sapphire from my eye, put it on his table, by his candle."

"Your eye?"

"Please."

"Your eye? How will you see?"

"I'll still have one."

Well, you see how this tale goes. The thrush stays, he dismantles the Prince bit by bit, taking pieces of him to this needy case and that one, until finally the Happy Prince is left blind, shoeless, indeed skinless, nothing but a lump of lead in the town square, and along come the town council and say, hey, what is this thing, what's it doing here? And melt it down to make bullets for it for an up-coming war. As they are doing so, they kick aside the thrush, worn out from flying through the town, mending the world.

"I don't know if I like that story," the kid told me.

"Ha," I said. "I do. I think I do."

"But the Prince dies. The Thrush dies."

"But look how they die," I point out. "When the Prince was alive, what was he?"

She considered.

"A big lie," I said. "He was a symbol of happiness, but was he happy? Only by dying did he become happy -- by acting, by giving himself to mend the world. And the thrush -- what was he intent on before?"

"Going on vacation."

"And once he leagues up with the Happy Prince, he's got something real to do. He has a purpose."

"But at the end..."

I agreed. The end. "They didn't mend the world," I said. "Did they? What's that mean, do you suppose?"

We're not doing the Happy Prince, because we don't think that one need revision.

There's the Boy and the Pearl, where the boy is working in a rice field and finds a pearl, and takes it home to give to his mama, and she hides it in a basket with a little rice at the bottom , and the next morning the basket is full of rice; so she hides it, the next day, in a jar with a few coins, and the next morning...

Or there's the tale of the girl with the wicked stepmother, who says come over here so I can comb your long blond hair, only the wicked stepmother actually combs her hair with an AXE...

"Why are all the stepmothers in fairytakes evil?" the kid asks.

"I've got one word for you," I say. "Which it starts with a P."

She rolls her eyes.

"Here's a better question for you," I say. "Why do none of the fathers in fairytales ever protect the children?"

She frowned.

"And why didn't it occur to you to ask that question?" I added.

"And the answer to both of those questions," I added, after a few seconds, "also starts with a P."

"You blame everything on the patriarchy," she said, annoyed.

"Not everything," I said sweetly. "The patriarchy is absolutely not to blame for the second law of thermodynamics, for instance."

In America

Steinhem slices and dices.