From The I've-Been-Doing-This-For-Years Archives

Gender reversals, that is.  Now there's a new Tumblr focusing on that:

A new Tumblr aims to expose how gender roles are upheld in the news—simply by putting them through a simple rewrite. Flip the News takes articles and changes subjects’ names, gender, or race to make readers more cognizant of potential unbalance.

That's great news!

The Austerians vs. Anti-Austerians: The Saga Continues

You may have read my earlier take on it.  If not, do read it, because it matters for understanding the newest stage of the saga:  Michael Kinsley's response to various critics.

Let's face it.  He doesn't talk to me there because I'm a very tiny (though divine) blogger.  So it may be understandable that his answer isn't about any of the invisible and inaudible points I made, such as the obvious one:  The correct policy depends on what works.  Or the other pretty obvious one:  Generalized demands of suffering do not change the moral incentives of those who, in fact, caused the suffering and have the power of causing more suffering in the future, and generalized suffering of that kind also punishes the innocent.

But whatever, as wiser people in the media say.  We talk about what we talk about.  And Kinsley talks about the bad press his earlier piece received:

The other article was the latest chapter in my ongoing discussion with Paul Krugman and his disciples about the economy and what we now call “austerity.” I hoped this article would be regarded as a useful contribution to the debate, but I had no great aspirations for it beyond that. It’s this one, though, that has produced one of those flattering but scary web hailstorms. People I don’t know are calling me things I don’t know either.
There are two possible explanations. First, it might be that I am not just wrong (in saying that the national debt remains a serious problem and we’d be well advised to worry about it) but just so spectacularly and obviously wrong that there is no point in further discussion. Or second, to bring up the national debt at all in such discussions has become politically incorrect. To disagree is not just wrong but offensive. Such views do exist. Racism for example. I just didn’t realize that the national debt was one of them.
I assume from the way he writes that Krugman is out there most Sunday mornings painting poor people’s houses
I’ve always been dubious of people claiming to be victims of political correctness. They generally exaggerate, and I don’t care for the self-congratulatory element. It requires no courage to say almost anything in this country. But the reaction to my piece—or really to my side of the whole debate—has that “how dare you” element that is associated with political correctness. Never mind the argument—this is something you just don’t say. Instead, let’s go straight to the impugning of motives

That ancient term "political correctness"  was always misused, by the way.  What was (and is)  politically correct are the opinions which the political powers-that-be support.  But the term wasn't used thataway.  It was used to imply stuff such as that the oppressors are oppressed by not being allowed to oppress without push-back and so on.

Well, that's an extreme example.  Others are similar, however, with the implication that vast masses of powerful people stop the real truth-tellers in the guise of political correctness.  And of course there were silly statements from the other side, too.  But mostly seeing a sentence begin with "this is not politically correct but" gave me warning to put my hazmat suit on in case I was next told that people like me are stupid, fickle,  lazy, greedy and intended only for sexual use.

This history may make me biased about the way Kinsley uses the term.  I thought his initial piece suffered from any lack of economic proof that austerity is at least as likely to lead to a quicker end of a recession than alternative policies.   Without such a proof discussing the importance of generalized suffering is  pointless.

Both Kinsley's earlier post and this new post do ask questions about the federal debt.  He wants to know how Krugman would pay for it if not through austerity politics during a recession.

I cannot speak for Krugman, but the usual economic thinking is to pay off debt during good times.  That's when the government can more easily afford it and that's also the time when tax revenues naturally rise, given rising unemployment and incomes. 

And of course the government must use federal debt properly.  To use personal life analogies (with great care, as governments do not have the same tasks as families do), it's not a good idea to permanently live above your means by using credit cards without ever paying the debts off.  Anyone who does that should try to increase income and/or cut expenses.

But it's also not a good idea to decide to pay off all  credit card debts  during an exceptionally bad year when the breadwinners in the family lose their jobs or get very sick.  This is the case whether those debts are justifiable by the family's long-term budget or not.

The Facebook Campaign

This campaign, now in its third day, contacts advertisers in an attempt to change Facebook policies about misogyny:

Or put in another way, Facebook's rules about what gets you banned or censored are oddly tilted:

The trolls will always be with us, but corporations have an obligation to set the tone. Free speech isn’t hate speech. Free speech doesn’t look like a group called Violently Raping Your Friend Just for Laughs. And a hostile, violent environment makes the concept of a place built around the word “friend” just a cruel, stupid joke. Or, as one of the letter’s commenters noted Tuesday, “On Facebook, hating a religious or ethnic minority gets you banned, but hating half of humanity gets you Likes.”

If you wish to join in the campaign, you can thank advertisers who have reacted positively here and ask other advertisers to reconsider how they spend their funds here.

Meanwhile*, in Afghanistan

Women's rights are not at all secure:

Afghan lawmakers on Saturday rejected the Law on Elimination of Violence Against Women, which would criminalize child marriage, forced marriage, domestic violence and the exchange of girls and women to settle arguments, among other things. The law would also make it illegal for women to face criminal charges for adultery for being raped. (You heard that right.)
Conservative religious lawmakers argue that the law encourages “disobedience,” and says the law goes against Islamic principles (the familiar blame-God-for-the-freedoms-we-take-from-you argument). Mandavi Abdul Rahmani, one of the conservative lawmakers who opposes the law, said the Koran makes it clear that a man can beat his wife if she does not obey him, as long as she isn’t permanently harmed. (Hey, bruises go away! Even broken bones heal!) He added, “Adultery itself is a crime in Islam, whether it is by force or not.”

...

Human Rights Watch is urging international donors to pressure Afghanistan’s government to improve women’s rights in the country. The critical date for activists is April 2014, when Afghanistan elects a new president who will have the power to eliminate the Law on Elimination of Violence Against Women.

More on this all here.
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*The meanwhile-series is about bad stuff happening to women because of governments, cultures or religions, with not much commenting by me.

Reading For Today

Content warning:  Rape


This story about cicada courting rituals is fun on its own, but it has a deeper importance for the study of what might be wrong in the academia and its research incentives.

We may not know all the facts about why these cicada researchers are still adjuncts.  But it's certainly true that the increasingly common "profit" model of universities rewards research with big overhead payments for the institution.

A horrible story about the consequences of cutting back on funding for the police:

Last August, a woman in Josephine County called 911 and pleaded with dispatchers to send police — “my ex-boyfriend is trying to break into my house. I’m not letting him in but he’s like, tried to break down the door and he’s tried to break into one of the windows.” The woman had good reason to be afraid of this man, as she told the dispatcher on the other side of the phone, this same abusive ex had put her in the hospital just a few weeks before. But the dispatcher has no one to send. Because the local sheriff’s department recently lost millions in federal funds, it laid off 23 of its 29 deputies and limited their availability to eight hours on Mondays through Fridays. The woman’s call to 911 took place on a Saturday.
With no deputies available, the 911 dispatcher transferred the woman to the state police — but they would not come rescue the woman either. In the words of the state police dispatcher, “I don’t have anybody to send out there. You know, obviously, if he comes inside the residence and assaults you, can you ask him to go away? Do you know if he’s intoxicated or anything?”
Eventually, the ex-boyfriend, a man named Michael Bellah, pried open the woman’s front door. Choked her. And raped her. After he was caught, he plead guilty to kidnapping, assault, and sex abuse.

....

But despite these dire circumstances, yesterday Josephine County voted 51 to 49 percent against a public safety levy for more law enforcement. The levy would have raised county property taxes from 59 cents per $1,000 of property value, the lowest in Oregon, to $1.48 for the next three years. It rejected a similar property tax levy increasing the rate to $1.99 per $1,000 shortly before the initial cuts 57 to 43 percent.

Josephine County might be a fiscally conservative place.  But I thought fiscal conservatives still fund the police.  This looks more like an obstinate belief that if the locals do nothing someone else will open a wallet.

Finally, Rush Limbaugh, slowly paddling his boat towards historical oblivion, has an interesting rant about the perfidy that is Liberals.  If it is worth listening (not quite sure), it is as a pattern of how a group is made into "the other" (and yes, the other side does it, too), but mostly for the way he sees powerful women as frightening, permanently filled with rage, always wanting more.  That bit begins at about 2:52 in the audio.  And yes, he turns Lois Lerner into a sexual character.

Remember Girls Gone Wild?

That was a big thing around the time I became a goddess and took up this blogging bidness.  Opinions varied, but I think us feminazis were blamed for being humorless about the whole thing, for pointing out that the pictures on the net were forever and that the blame assigned to such parties was not meted out equally to all.  Though I don't think I wrote much about it.  The Blogger doesn't let me search for posts before 2008 so I could be wrong.

In any case, the man who created the phenomenon  was found guilty of falsely imprisoning women a few weeks ago.  Sic transit gloria mundi.

The Floating Dream

These are supposed to be common:  Dreams in which you float in the air like a feather.  But I never had one before.

Here's the dream, in summary:  I was comfortably reclining on my back about five feet up in the air, somewhere inside a very large and noisy railway station.  Suddenly I noticed that people were looking at me funny, so I sat up, grabbed some pretend oars and started rowing, to look more natural.

This blog has really gone downhill!

Thank You And More Procrastination

I sent thank you letters to all who donated money for chocolate and other blogging expenses.  This is for those whose e-mail addresses failed:  Thank you!

In other news, I have now polished all my stainless steel cutlery with baking soda to avoid working on that dratted book chapter.  Next project:  Toothpicks to clean all the crevices in the stove and toaster and coffee-maker!

Cheating the Government

An interesting bit of news about the Apple company:

Senate investigators accuse Apple of wiring together a complicated system to shield billions of dollars in international profits from both U.S. and foreign tax collectors.
A report released ahead of Apple CEO Tim Cook’s inaugural Capitol Hill appearance Tuesday alleges the tech giant took advantage of numerous U.S. tax loopholes and avoided U.S. taxes on $44 billion in offshore, taxable income between 2009 and 2012 — a characterization Apple flatly rejects.

That's like a whole lot of food stamp fraud, right?  It might even link to the conservative idea that far too many Americans aren't pulling their own weight but latching onto the teats of the government sow?  At least Apple has taken advantage of all the infrastructure of the various governments while attempting to avoid paying for any of it.

The Oklahoma Twister

You can help through the American Red Cross.  For other possibilities, check here.

For stories about the bravery of teachers, the scorned group in today's fashion, go here and here.

The Oklahoma Republican Senators:

Oklahoma’s two Republican senators are pledging any assistance needed for areas devastated by the tornado that ripped through Moore, Okla., on Monday, but they’re maintaining their conservative views on federal spending.
Sen. James M. Inhofe is warning against a supplemental spending bill that balloons with money to assist other areas. Asked by MSNBC about his opposition to the aid package for recovery from Superstorm Sandy on the East Coast, he called the situation in Moore “totally different” because of extraneous provisions.
“They were getting things, for instance, that was supposed to be in New Jersey. They were getting things in the Virgin Islands. They were fixing roads there. They were putting roofs on houses in Washington, D.C., everybody was getting in and exploiting the tragedy that took place,” Inhofe said. “That won’t happen in Oklahoma.”

In a statement issued Tuesday morning, Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs ranking member Tom Coburn said he had already spoken with the top Homeland Security official about the need for aid.
“I spoke with Department of Homeland Secretary Janet Napolitano last night about FEMA’s response. We still don’t know the scope of devastation and won’t for some time. But, as the ranking member of [the] Senate committee that oversees FEMA, I can assure Oklahomans that any and all available aid will be delivered without delay,” Coburn said.
Coburn’s statement Tuesday followed comments Monday first reported by CQ Roll Call that emergency supplemental money for tornado recovery would need offsets, maintaining his long-held view on that issue.

The offsets are an interesting argument.  What should be cut to offset federal tornado help?  Subsidies to the oil industry?  Military spending?  Care of the poor?  Care of the elderly?

Once we go that offset route, different groups in the society are in some sense asked to pay for the disaster relief, and the identity and income and health and the ability to pay of those groups does matter.

Good News

For those of you who have been made despondent by being told too often that wimminz are meant for the kitchen and the bedroom:

The first Saudi woman has climbed Mount Everest.  Whether climbing it is a good idea, from other points of view, should be set aside to celebrate  Raha Moharrak's achievement.  She climbed more mountains than one.

And this from the annals of no-girl-can-do-science:

An 18-year-old science student has made an astonishing breakthrough that will enable mobile phones and other batteries to be charged within seconds rather than the hours it takes today’s devices to power back up.
Saratoga, Calif. resident Eesha Khare made the breakthrough by creating a small supercapacitor that can fit inside a cell phone battery and enable ultra-fast electricity transfer and storage, delivering a full charge in 20-30 seconds instead of several hours.
The nano-tech device Khare created can supposedly withstand up to 100,000 charges, a 100-fold increase over current technology, and it’s flexible enough to be used in clothing or displays on any non-flat surface.

Khare tied for the second place in the competition.

Read This Article: A Word From Our Sponsor.

Yes, I know it is long even though it is well-written.  But it is important reading:  A case-study of the reasons why the concentration of all media in just a few diamond-ringed paws is a Disastrous Thing For Democracy.

That would be true even if the paws had callouses from ditch-digging and irrespective of the color or gender of the owner of those paws.  Democracy has certain basic requirements for it to go on breathing and having all information filtered by one viewpoint means turning off its oxygen supply.

Yet this is the trend I see in all media:  The very rich individuals, a handful of them, are buying it all up and that's who will give us masses most of the information, pretty soon.  The Koch brothers are contemplating buying up a large number of newspapers, right now.  If the deal goes through, those newspapers will not criticize the Koch brothers or perhaps even their values.

The political games about the media and its concentration are weird stuff:  The Republicans don't want the government to subsidize any media, because once that is removed only the moneyed ones will own the media outlets.  And what those outlets will cover tends to take the viewpoint of their owners. 

The weirdness in that is naturally the support of millions of not-wealthy people for those viewpoints.  My guess is that the support is based on short-sightedness (get glasses!), not realizing how news are selected and covered, or perhaps the need for only our daily circuses:  sports, naked women and celebrity news.

That we could get the Soviet-style Pravda and Izvestia not because of the government but because of the billionaires is something that either doesn't occur to those supporters or something they don't think matters in their own lives.

But accurate information matters.  It matters in deciding whether a country should go to war, it matters in how many victims cigarette industry manages to produce, it matters in deciding whether to import products from China or from India or from Pakistan or from some other country.  Yet those with power and money have certain incentives not to give the rest of us accurate information.

And so does almost every individual.  That's why we need a real marketplace of ideas!  I bet you never thought I'd use that wingnut term!  But I mean something different by it.

A functioning marketplace has many, many firms and many, many customers.  The firms which wish to enter can borrow funds to do so, and the funding is available not just to a very select few but to all who otherwise have the necessary training and experience and know-how.  This marketplace is not a totally chaotic one.  It has some way of organizing to allow interested consumers to find the various sellers of information, and the market adheres to certain basic rules of honesty.  Those rules of honesty are monitored.

To see what I mean by the honesty rules, think of an ideal farmers' market.  The rules are that the products must be what they are advertised to be, that the scales are not fixed so as to cheat the consumers, that basic hygiene is followed, that there is a complaints procedure unhappy customers and sellers can use, and that some organization checks all that stuff out and makes sure all is going well.

Markets for information and opinions are trickier to monitor and what to include in the rules would certainly be debated.  But under no conditions are we going to have a well-functioning marketplace for ideas if all the stalls at the idea-farmers' market are owned by the Koch brothers, for example.

Funniest Quote of the Day

From this article about why feminism is still needed:

Because it’s assumed that if you are nice to a girl, she owes you sex — therefore, if she turns you down, she’s a bitch who’s put you in the “friend zone.” Sorry, bro, women are not machines you put kindness coins into until sex falls out.

For Alas, We Have Sinned. On Michael KInsley's Defense of the Austerians.

Here's a fascinating story for you:  First the New York Times publishes an op-ed piece stating that economic austerity kills.  Then Michael Kinsley writes a piece partly seeded by that but mostly aimed at Paul Krugman's arguments about austerity as a misplaced policy during economic depressions of the type we have been (or still are) experiencing.

What's fun about Kinsley's arguments is that they have nothing to do with economic theory debates about what works or what doesn't work in squashing depressions in the bud.   Nothing.

Instead, Kinsley wants to talk about morality and sin and its just desserts:

Krugman sometimes writes as if, right or wrong, his view is the courageous one, held by folks willing to stand up to the plutocrats and their lackies. But his message to all classes is: party on. It’s your patriotic duty. How much courage does that take? The really tough message—once again, right or wrong—is the one the austerians have to deliver, which is that the party is over. And this leads to a question that Krugman finally addressed in a recent column: What’s in all this for the austerians? If Krugman is right that the results of austerity are harmful and potentially catastrophic, why should the elites who he says have the real power be pushing it so hard? No one on either side of this debate actually wants the economy to tank, surely. But before you can have an ulterior motive, you’ve got to have a motive. What is the austerians’ motive?
Krugman’s answer isn’t bad. He writes:
Some [powerful people] have a visceral sense that suffering is good, that we must pay a price for past sins (even if the sinners then and the sufferers now are very different groups of people). Some of them see the crisis as an opportunity to dismantle the social safety net. And just about everyone in the policy elite takes cues from a wealthy minority that isn’t actually feeling much pain.
There’s something to this, though not enough. There may be a Snidely Whiplash out there somewhere who is willing to take a recession if that’s what is required to rip apart the social safety net. But surely the Obama administration is not filled with people secretly trying to repeal the New Deal, although it’s the Obama administration whose policies Krugman finds so disturbing.
Krugman also is on to something when he talks about paying a price for past sins. I don’t think suffering is good, but I do believe that we have to pay a price for past sins, and the longer we put it off, the higher the price will be. And future sufferers are not necessarily different people than the past and present sinners. That’s too easy. Sure let’s raise taxes on the rich. But that’s not going to solve the problem. The problem is the great, deluded middle class—subsidized by government and coddled by politicians. In other words, they are you and me. If you make less than $250,000 a year, Obama has assured us, you are officially entitled to feel put-upon and resentful. And to be immune from further imposition.
Austerians don’t get off on other people’s suffering. They, for the most part, honestly believe that theirs is the quickest way through the suffering. They may be right or they may be wrong. When Krugman says he’s only worried about “premature” fiscal discipline, it becomes largely a question of emphasis anyway. But the austerians deserve credit: They at least are talking about the spinach, while the Krugmanites are only talking about dessert.

Mmm.  I love that!  But the reason for my love is an awful one:  It's so bad that it's good for me because now I can tear it apart.  So I sin.

Let's begin that tearing-apart by noticing that mumbly-mouthed muzziness.  It is the first alarm bell here:  Everybody sins!  Everybody deserves to be whipped!  Nobody is at any special fault.

The sinners in Kinsley's morality tale are everyone and no-one, though he singles out the middle-classes as deluded, subsidized and coddled by the government.  Perhaps there should be no middle classes in this country, if they are so very subsidized and coddled?  Only the rich and then the vast hordes of the poor?  But I digress.

So everybody sins.  Yet the people who sinned particularly, in the sense of causing the system collapses we have observed, are not defined or named or discussed.  The sin is a general one, hovering above all humans everywhere.

We have all lived beyond our means, we have all partied all night through and then slept through the productive part of the day and thus we all need to be punished.  And because nothing and nobody is actually at fault here, everything and everybody must suffer!  No specific punishments are needed for those who did more than just breathe during the relevant period of sinning.  We are all miserable sinners and must suffer.  Except for the top one percent.

That's what I mean by the mumbly-mouthed muzziness (probably not a real term but should be).

Kinsley's article is also unhelpful by asking us to relate to economics as if it was a religion (perhaps the other guys are right, perhaps not, but they believe fervently in their cause), rather than an imperfect research tool used to find out what works and what does not work.  It is even more unhelpful in not being interested in the answer to that.  For under any and all morality scenarios, putting suffering people through more austerity if it doesn't help at all is immoral.  Right?

What's odd about much of the morality writing I go through is how bad it is, in the sense of not diving through the surface of some sort of inherited masochistic-flavored relief, of not asking what kind of morality it is we are talking about or what religious system defines the sins we discuss or whether intent matters at all here. 

The common consequence of all that is to assign sinning to everybody but preferably to "others" and to argue that we are all belt-tightening equally if a poor person loses a job and health insurance and a rich person must postpone that new yacht.  From that muzziness come false equalities and also false prescriptions, I believe.

The Echidne rules about economic crimes is first to try to prevent them.  In the case of the financial and housing market crashes, find out why they happened and change the laws so that they cannot happen again.  Give regulators of the markets new and sharp dentures (their teeth have all been pulled out) and give them real power to punish the criminals they find.  Don't put the criminals back in the economic saddles as is happening.

In the case of Greece and other similar cases, make stupid gambling with countries much more difficult.  If you find that one country exploits the EU by having certain individuals get all sorts of benefits (retiring at fifty without any health problems, say). throw the book at that country and stop the undesirable practices early.

The second rule is to find out the culprits and punish them.  General self-flagellation appeals to some people, but economic systems work much better if a person contemplating an economic crime also contemplates the consequences of getting caught.  That so much of the morality tale writing talks about our general sinfulness helps the real criminals and also makes similar crimes in the future much more likely to happen.  Systems provide us with incentives.  If the incentives are bad, bad outcomes are more likely.

I'm tempted to have a third rule about such crimes which would be to avoid that overall muzziness, not only because it's utterly useless but also because it can be used for any type of sin, to justify any sort of vileness, and also because it ignores the reality where some people have much more power to "sin" in economic terms and other people have very little power  not to "sin" in those terms if pushed towards an immoral move by the more powerful.  Think of the nineties games between those selling mortgages to uninformed buyers who didn't actually qualify but were told that they did by the sellers.  The former knew the game, the latter did not, in many cases.  The sins were not equal, but it is the latter who got punished.

Procrastination

I have mad skills in that!  I cleaned the fridge to avoid editing that chapter which lurks like some monster on my to-do-list.  And now I write this completely unnecessary blog post for the same reason!

Astonishing how good I am at finding excuses for not doing the editing (which I hate):  Better to start in the morning when the whole day is empty of other stuff!  Better to work at it at the end of the day when the energy is calm!  Better to make sure all bills are paid first!  That window is dusty!  Perhaps I should book the dental checkup?  (No.  Not going that far.)

Then the deeper level procrastinator steps in and gives logical-sounding theories to prop up the delays:  Time may not be ripe for this editing.  Your brain is still digesting, working on the best phrases, analyzing the right tone of voice (snarky, snarky or snarky). 

Even those work who procrastinate!  Just as the tulips slumber under the snow-cover in the winter so do your thoughts need that slumber before being torn to pieces by the Fierce Editor.

These pains of procrastination are part of the creative process!  They make it better, the outcome more nuanced!

If none of that works, the Cynic steps in:  What does any of this mean in a hundred years time?

And what's on the other side of this battle?  Only the Kick-In-The-Pants Echidne.  She's losing right now.

115 Pounds of Pure Grit

Zoe Saldana plays Uhura in the newer Star Trek film.  She was interviewed on the Today Show, but about something a bit different than her acting:  This cover of the Allure magazine:

The relevant bit on the right says:  Zoe Saldana.  115 Pounds of Grit And Heartache.

I watched the video at the linked site and started feeling the way I always feel when trying to consume popular culture:  As if I had eaten too many Danish pastries on one sitting.  Bloated and weak.  (So I'm a culture snob.  Which you already knew, right?  Though I do love really bad martial arts movies.)*

So why write about any of this?  Because:

Saldana's sexuality might seem to be the most interesting revelation from her Allure coverage, but for many, it was the cover editor's decision to print her weight that caused controversy.
"Every time we seem to be making progress in the way women are portrayed in magazines, somehow we take a step back," wrote Raechal Leone Shewfelt at Yahoo! "Whomever is responsible, the decision to showcase Saldana's digits seems so … unnecessary." Yahoo! was told that Allure would have no comment on the decision.
"Did we really need to know how much she weighs?" wrote Cheryl Phillips at Examiner.com. "Would the popular women's magazine put a plus-size model on their cover and headline it "250 pounds and rocking the world"?

And because this offers a wonderful opportunity to talk about the backgrounds of phenomena.  The meaning of all sorts of tiny things depends on that background, the history of a word determines if it can be used, the history of one particular cross (the swastika) makes it impossible to use it for house decoration.  And so on.

This particular case is nowhere near as strong as the history we are talking about is only now being questioned and debated, and that is the history of fat-shaming, I think, or the idea that the value of a woman (and to a lesser extent, of a man)  is inversely correlated with her (or his) weight.

But there's also a longer history at work here.  The idea that one can be small-and-peppery, for example, and that's the way this particular cover seems to be defended.  Saldana herself states in that interview that the point is that someone "so light-weight" could have grit.  That's really close to the old idea of small-but-peppery.

What makes that not work is the fact that Saldana is not short.  She's above the average height of US women.  So the real message seems to be that someone very slender has both grit and heartache.  But did we ever doubt that?  Or would the magazine have done the same with her height?  Zoe Saldana.  5ft 7in of Grit And Heartache?


No.  The reason for putting Saldana's weight on the cover is that it is sorta regarded as the ideal weight for women now, the weight one should strive for, perhaps. 

This is not Saldana's fault, of course.  It's an editorial decision and probably one that increases sales of the magazine.  I write about this because this is one of those tiny, tiny mosquito bites which on its own means nothing but which also, when it is one of millions of such bites, creates the culture about women and weight.
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*My dislike of much of popular culture aimed at women probably deserves a post of its own.  But as the shortest summary possible, I dislike it because it is about how well famous women perform as women, not at whatever their job is, and because the rules about how women should perform are not analyzed much. 

Thanks, Merci, Spasiba, Danke, Tack, Kiitos etc.

To all you lovely, kind, intelligent and discerning people who gave me money for this blog.  That money means that I can get hold of stuff quickly, that I can go to the primary sources and that I can get enough chocolate to keep the engines running.  It's a win-win, right?

My deepest thanks to all of you who read here and who talk to me and who are part of this big movement to make the world a better place.  That sounds a bit exaggerated but I hope you get the point.

The Stoopid, It Burns

Even though these news are a few days old they are still a beautiful sign of human stupidity.  From North Carolina:

The House Health and Human Services Committee approved a bill earlier this month that would require teenagers to present a notarized parental consent form in order to access sexually transmitted disease testing and treatment, mental health counseling, pregnancy care or substance abuse treatment.

What on earth could go wrong with that? 

It would have little but bureaucratic impact on teenagers who have good relationships with their parents.  On the other hand, it would give teenagers not in those happy circumstances a great incentive to keep any sexually transmitted disease untreated, possibly leading to serious future complications (and ready to be passed on!).

And if there is, say, abuse within the family, the teenager suffering from that cannot get mental health counseling without the express permission from the person who might be the abuser. 

Human Parthenogenesis. That's how Sluts Get Pregnant!

Going round a full circle:  When I first got acquainted with the US abortion debate I thought it was extremely weird how getting pregnant was interpreted as something that just happens to women, especially women who don't cross their legs.  My friendly alien from outer space might imagine all "good" women hopping around with crossed legs lest that pollen somehow gets into them and causes conception.

Well, after a few years of practical education I forgot all about that and the invisible sperm-providing partner in any conception.  Until today, when I was reading this piece at al-Jazeera and then the comments.  Here's the comment worthy of our notice:

By the way the time to think about whether a baby will get in the way of your selfish pursuits is not after but rather before you spread open your legs.

What do you think our friendly alien (say, Allie or Al) would think about that?  Probably that the avoid-the-pollen-theory is correct.  If only women weren't spreading their legs everywhere, there would be no unwanted pregnancies!

More seriously, that spreading-the-legs argument is a very common one among forced-birthers.  But the equivalent argument for men (perhaps to put a knot on it?) is essentially nonexistent.  Those people assume that it's natural for men to seek sex wherever they can find it, natural for them not to consider whether a baby might get in the way of their selfish pursuits.  And the wider culture pretty much agrees, though not all parts of it.

I'm now wondering what the maker of that comment I copied would say about the role of men in all this. 

Would he (the handle is a male one)  simply think that the game is a form of sexual football where the role of men is to try to kick the ball in the goal and then disappear, and the role of women is to guard the goal and get properly punished if they fail in that?  What is selfish behavior in each gender?  What behaviors are rewarded by the wider society for each gender?