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T.R. Reid's Case for an Authentically Pro-Life Case for Healthcare Reform

Tue, 2010-03-16 12:06 — figleaf

Ezra Klein correctly channels T.R. Reid.

“To oppose expanded coverage in the name of restricting abortion gets things exactly backward,” writes T.R. Reid. “It’s like saying you won’t fix the broken furnace in a schoolhouse because you’re against pneumonia.” Here’s his argument:

Read the quote in context here.

In a nutshell Reid says part A would be…

In Britain, only 8 percent of the population is Catholic (compared with 25 percent in the United States). Abortion there is legal. Abortion is free. And yet British women have fewer abortions than Americans do. I asked Cardinal Hume why that is.

The cardinal said that there were several reasons but that one important explanation was Britain’s universal health-care system. “If that frightened, unemployed 19-year-old knows that she and her child will have access to medical care whenever it’s needed,” Hume explained, “she’s more likely to carry the baby to term. Isn’t it obvious?”

A legitimately life-affirmative position that, for instance, the Nebraska Right to Life PAC appears to also endorse. (If one was actually “pro-life” as opposed to merely anti-sex or anti-women’s-autonomy, supporting women who choose to keep an unplanned pregnancy… as opposed to, say, relishing pregnancy in particular and children in general as women’s ordained punishment for “original sin.”)

Reid’s Part B goes like this

A young woman I knew in Britain added another explanation. “If you’re [sexually] active,” she said, “the way to avoid abortion is to avoid pregnancy. Most of us do that with an IUD or a diaphragm. It means going to the doctor. But that’s easy here, because anybody can go to the doctor free.”

Another excellent point, obviously.

If one really wanted to reduce abortion, as opposed to, say, using the threat of pregnancy to hammer women into submission, one would enthusiastically embrace both parts A and B, and one would tend to view extending coverage to the most economically vulnerable population as an excellent step in the right direction. If one actually didn’t give a flying fig about abortion except as a way to enforce, say, Rule of Desire #1 you’d expect them to oppose healthcare reform.

Ayn Rand: Wretched Philospher, Lousy Pornographer, Even Worse Sex Educator

Wed, 2010-03-10 20:25 — figleaf

Amanda Hess of Washington City Paper points out an interesting side effect of Ayn Rand’s highly-influential fiction: it’s a platform for forced-sex fantasies.

[Rand-oriented dating-site founder Joshua] Zader says that many Randians experience their first contact with her books between the ages of 14 and 21. “Her books appeal to youthful idealism, to people who are at the point in their lives where they’re trying to figure out what’s important,” Zader says.

It’s also when they’re trying to figure out sex. Rand’s influence on young people can’t be overstated—her fans have described her books as “life-changing,” “my Bible,” and “hot.” “I know that your sexual inclinations can be kind of stamped into you when you’re going through puberty,” says Kate. “So it’s a little disconcerting that at 12, 13 years old, I was stamping myself with this complete and total interest in submission, when I didn’t have any experience with sex at all,” she says. “It’s an interesting seed to plant in a teenager’s mind that that’s how sex operates.”

She said it here.

Actually based on my (limited, repulsed) reading of Rand I got the impression she deeply believed that sex is ordinarily cooperative and mutual the only possible way to have sex with any integrity at all is to force yourself on someone who, whether she’s “secretly” interested or not, is resisting by all means at her disposal. Anything less would be corporeal compromise with another human being, and that appears to be a fate far worse than death for Rand. (For someone who claimed to be such an iconoclast she sure was into making the bogus Two Rules of Desire a central feature of her sex scenes!)

Far be it from me to suggest that between competent, consenting adults that kind of kink should be denied or resisted.

I will say, though, that unless a middle-schooler has received a solid, comprehensive sex education that includes sections on autonomy and negotiation I’d probably steer them towards works with more neutral sexual content. Indoctrinating children to specific types of kink before they’ve begun to develop sexual expression on their own is as likely to limit their development as thoroughly as advocating the lights-off, man-on-top, only-to-ejaculation, only-for-reproduction kink the Victorian missionaries were so enamored of.

The No-Sex Class and Differential Sexual Satisfaction For Elderly Men vs. Elderly Women

Wed, 2010-03-10 18:57 — figleaf

Echidne of the Snakes had to dig, and dig, and dig through pop reports all talking about the “biological” inevitability behind a new study that suggests elderly men are more interested in sex than elderly women.

One complicating factor that’s mentioned by the lead investigator but not so much by the breathlessly gender-confident reporting?

One reason why older women are less sexually active than men may be because they don’t have a partner, or because their partner is no longer healthy enough to have sex. “Women outlive their marriages and their relationships,” Dr. Lindau says.

She and her colleagues found that as women aged, they were far less likely than men to be married or living with a partner. In one of the surveys the authors used, just 58% of the women ages 65 to 74 had a partner, compared to 79% of men in the same age bracket. Among 75- to 85-year-olds, 72% of men still had a partner, compared to just 39% of women.

Lindau said it here.

If you’re a woman between maybe 40 and 50, with a male partner over maybe 45-55, raise your hand if your partner’s health, his libido, or both allows him to keep up with your libido? (I’m not saying everybody’s in that boat but… it’s a fairly common lament of partners of older men.)

What makes this particularly funny, in a not-so-funny way, is all the “happy tradeoff” lead sentences Echidne tracks down where in reporters smirk stuff like “Women may live longer, but it appears men are more likely to go out with a smile” and “Men have shorter life spans than women on average, but when it comes to sexual life expectancy, the guys have the advantage.” (Um, “advantage?” fuck you, dudes?!?!)

Oh wait, and look, here’s a nifty, but related “advantage” that’s not going to show up so often in the popular press, again from Dr. Lindau.

When women did have a partner, they were almost as likely as their male counterparts to be sexually active, although they tended to give their sex lives lower marks than men did. In every age group included in the surveys, a smaller percentage of women than men described their sex life as “good” overall.

Read the quote in context here.

As Echidne says “Women tend to have older husbands and the ill health of their husbands could well be one of the reasons for not much sex even in intact relationships.” Yup. Funny how blood-pressure medications, prostate problems, and even bad backs, hips, and knees can take the, um, wind of of a fella’s sails. And, again, funny how demoralized even the most enthusiastically consenting adult can become when sex requires not only candle light and slow dancing but also… repeat trips to the bathroom, penis-pumps, and other erectile interventions.

If you or your partner still have it — and not all men lose it — that’s great. But with even the most attentive partner in the world the disappointment levels are likely to be lower. And while I’m not positive, it might be particularly wearing on both older women and older men if they grew up back when heteros expected that men would take the lead in sex, and do nearly all the work as well.

Another little tidbit Echidne mentions:

I should also tell you that this study defined sex as heterosexual activity with someone else. People not engaged in heterosexual activity were not included (which the researcher would have liked to have changed) and neither was masturbation counted. Only heterosexual activity with someone else. That’s worth repeating, because the quality of that sex does also depend on that “someone else.”

Echidne says it here.

One final thing, something Echidne doesn’t mention but I’ve noticed that pulls the above snippets into a common thread. Even today, but certainly in the past, “interest in sex” was men’s domain. Consequently, as I mentioned in my first real post about the no-sex class paradigm (The limits of “no means no”), men grow up expecting to be interested in sex when they’re interested in sex, with the happy (for them) consequence that when we’re not interested in sex we… pretty much don’t notice. Whereas if our partner isn’t interested in sex we do. Meanwhile women are expected to notice when their partners are interested in sex, yes, but… that pesky no-sex class paradigm, with it’s bogus Two Rules of Desire, leads men to imaging women don’t notice when their partner’s aren’t interested.

See the trick? A man can be interested in sex only once a year. But! If he has sex once a year then… he’s going to mark his sex life as “satisfactory.” Even if his partner mentions it he’s still go the weight of the two rules on his side. Meanwhile his female partner? If he wants sex more often than he she’s going to mark down “dissatisfied.” But! If he wants (or is capable of having) sex less often than she does she’s also going to mark down “dissatisfied.”

Advantage? Men. All over. Although that advantage might be one hidden reason men’s shorter lifespans.

Just a though.

Goldberg Gets it Backwards: Free Women Don't Make Men Civilization, Owning Women Makes Men Uncivilized

Tue, 2010-03-09 15:21 — figleaf

Quick follow up on that post about Jonah Goldberg, who wishes (coughthirdworldcough) women could have a little more power so they could “civilize” their men.

Goldberg actually has it exactly backwards. It’s not that women civilize men, it’s that oppressing women uncivilizes us.

When men have the idea that we automatically have dominion over half of humanity an obvious question becomes “why not have dominion over the rest?” And when men believe we can automatically ignore the agency of half of humanity, rob them of their power, and use them as objects of our own convenience or gratification it’s a quick leap to “why not make similar use of all of humanity?”

Where Goldberg goes wrong is he thinks that just giving women enough power to better withhold sex creates civilization. Instead it’s that taking away any power from women as a class makes us all uncivilized.

And once you get that it’s easy to see how, in this case, his plea to give women a little bit of power so that they can trade sex instead of just having it taken from them, is completely anti-feminist. And uncivilized.

Jonah Goldberg Wishes *All* Women, and Not Just White Ones, Had Enough Power To Withhold Sex From Unworthy Men

Tue, 2010-03-09 13:24 — figleaf

Hugo Schwyzer takes conservative nepotism beneficiary Jonah Goldberg to task for arguing that women should be given a little more power in “backwards” cultures. You’d think that would be a good thing but Goldberg’s arguing only that women should have only enough power to be more effective “gatekeepers.” (Emphasis mine.)

Jonah concludes his piece … with this gem:

“Women civilize men. As a general rule, men will only be as civilized as female expectations and demands will allow. “Liberate” men from those expectations, and “Lord of the Flies” logic kicks in. Liberate women from this barbarism, and male decency will soon follow.”

Give Jonah credit. He’s not blaming women directly for their failure to civilize men. Rather, he’s blaming certain cultures that fail to give women sufficient authority with which to do their civilizing. But that doesn’t change the basic problem in his argument, based as it is on pseudo-science, Victorian sentimentality about women’s “nature”, and a William Golding novel about pre-pubescent boys.

Read the quote and Schwyzer’s analysis in context here.

Goldberg says “Women civilize men. As a general rule, men will only be as civilized as female expectations and demands will allow.”

Which would be… Goldberg, a man, setting expectations for male behavior. Very low expectations, sure, but not ones set by women.

Which is, of course, the nice little trap men like Goldberg want to set for us: expect to be able to indulge your more infantile and/or animal impulses; then either blame women letting us live up to the expectations we ourselves set, or else resenting women for using sexual access (the only leverage we permit them to have) in order to get us to act like actual adult men. The minor “upside” for anti-feminists like Goldberg is that men are absolved of all responsibility for, well, responsibility. The infinitely larger downside is that women are expected to have all the responsibility but none of the authority (we just call them “bitches” when they try to make us do the task Goldberg assigns them.) The end result isn’t even zero sum, it’s negative sum: grown men and women are reduced to Cathi Hanauer’s acute phrases The Bitch in the House and The Bastard on the Couch

Quick question for Goldberg: what does he imagine, say, Aristotle, or Augustine, or, Confucius or, I dunno, Maimonides, or even Tolstoy would think of his assertion that women are a civilizing influence on men? I happen to think all those gentlemen were dead wrong to believe men are uniquely moral and civilizing compared to women. But Goldberg and his desperately anti-feminist ilk just as wrong to imagine their fantasy of essential gendered women’s morality is any more real.

Another quick question: Goldberg, like Satoshi Kanazawa and millions of other anti-feminists, believes women’s magic lady part… and their “power” to withhold it... are the only thing that civilizes men. To which I’ll just rephrase Holly’s observation: Does that all those gay artists and writers and politicians and freakin’ gay fry cooks for that matter never get around to contributing to society because they’re way too busy not withholding sex from each other?

In fact we men set expectations all the time. In fact the whole idea that women don’t have anything better to do with their own sexuality than to use it to manipulate men’s behavior (coughno-sex classcough) is a completely male expectation.

Screw Goldberg and the coin-operated horsie he rode up on. I expect better of him.

Anti-Feminism and Misandry: More Reasons Why Real Men Should Never Feel Threatened by Feminism

Mon, 2010-03-08 15:59 — figleaf

fMhLisa of Feminist Mormon Housewives stands up for feminism and men (I’ve mildly reformatted her post)

So there’s this one debate, you may be familiar with it . . .

One side of this debate says stuff like:

  • Feminists hate men.
  • Feminists attack men.
  • Feminists want to weaken men.

And I hear many of these same people saying:

  • Men only think (or care) about one thing.
  • Men  don’t have a strong moral compass and need women to (gently) guide them to do the right thing.
  • A man’s pride controls him, so don’t bruise it by being bossy.  It’s okay to get your way, just so long as he thinks it’s his idea and feels strong and manly about it.
  • Men are visual, they can’t help it, so cover up because he can’t control himself.
  • Men are simple creatures who need food, sex, sports, money, and fast cars.  Don’t expect him to have (or express!) a complicated inner life with emotions and crap.
  • Men are naturally less righteous than women, so they need this here God-powered crutch gift to raise them up (nearly) to our level.
  • Men have to think they’re in charge, or they quit trying. So we’ll just tell’em they preside (even if we really are equal partners), and let’em assign someone to say the prayer.
  • You also gotta let men have all the leadership positions, cause otherwise they’ll stay home and watch football.
  • If we don’t let men have the priesthood (and make the money, and protect us from spiders ‘n rapists), then women wouldn’t really need men. (Since other than that all they’re good for is sperm donors?)

So wait . . .

Who is it that attacks, weakens, and hates men?

I nicked her whole post from here.

An even better question? Who created the stereotype of men that feminists are supposed to hate so much? Anti-feminists hate, fear, and are strongly disgusted by men. Feminists? Exasperated sometimes, when we men mistake anti-feminist stereotypes for compliments maybe. But hate? Not so much. Certainly not the way anti-feminists hate us.

Feminists Calling Out Misandry When They See It

Thu, 2010-03-04 11:22 — figleaf

Kudos to Jessica Fischer at The Sexademic, Shelby Knox at Misogyny Watch, Jos at Feministing, and other feminist and feminist-leaning bloggers for calling out that stupid (and potentially triggering if you’ve got issues) Sex Really “men are assholes so make sure you use condoms” public service announcement.

If you’re having sex with the kind of men represented in that stupid PSA, and there’s not even anything wrong if that’s your decision, then yeah, you should probably insist on condoms. Just for starters. But you of all people probably know that.

But the implication that all men are like that is…

Well, it’s reinforcing the dominant “no-sex” class paradigm wherein not only are women disinterested in sex, at least for its own sake*, which I usually talk about more, but also the equally dominant notion that men are obligately, reflexively, thoughtlessly, incontinently, perpetually… and possibly exclusively sexual.

Actual feminists get that there’s more to men that that. Anti-feminist rape apologists and slut-shamers like Laura Sessions Stepp, who was involved with this PSA, don’t.

Inside the dominant paradigm all men must be that way — snakes, snails, and out of control giant hairless indiscriminately-wagging dog tails. Just as all women must be like the “girlfriend” character on the phone in the PSA — too wrapped up in wanting a baby to notice to care what her boyfriend thinks about sex. And, not to beat a dead horse, but if the thesis of the ad is “all men are irresponsible, inconsiderate sex-hungry assholes” then the message of the ad is that’s just what all women have to put up with, with all men… in which case using condoms is at best irrelevant and at worst counterproductive to the message that…

a) all men are obligate, reflexive, and sexual
b) all women don’t care because they just want babies and therefore
c) contrary to the surface “warning” to women the underlying message sent to both women and men don’t bother with condoms after all because men don’t like them and it just prolongs how often women have to have to endure icky old sex to get that baby.

Which, d) is pretty much the dominant paradigm folks like Stepp earnestly reinforce.

Never mind that even when men talk that way they tend to be considerably more attentive with their partners one-on-one. And never mind that women are directly interested in sex and not just its “innocent byproducts.”

Pay attention, instead, to the fact that the ad viciously stereotypes men and women, that it instructs men’s and women’s behavior by setting expectations for it. It’s instructing women that the only good thing they’ll ever get out of sex is babies. It instructs men that women really secretly do want unprotected sex, or at least don’t care if they do.

But anyway, why is it people keep getting away with saying it’s feminists that hate men?

Irony of Economics Universities That Hire Evolutionary Psychologists

Tue, 2010-03-02 13:25 — figleaf

I love me some Echidne of the Snakes, who has the chops to thoroughly and repeatedly discredit the two or three standard tropes of evolutionary psychology that are all we ever hear of it.

But when it came to dismantling the serially disgraceful Satoshi Kanazawa could have stopped right here

Ten thousand years ago, when humans were hunter-gatherers, we mated, tended to our kin and fled when danger was in the air – activities that did not require much intelligence.

Read the quote in context here.

10,000 years is as little as 1% of the estimated age of homo sapiens. And at most a quarter of the age of what at least used to be called our subspecies, homo sapiens s.

For most of that time our sizes, shapes, and colors may have varied but our brains? Probably not so much.

Which means we might not have needed much intelligence 10,000 years ago. (coughbullshitcough!) But we had the intelligence anyway!

It’s not even an insult to Kanazawa that a child born 40,000, or 500,000, or possible even a million years ago but educated today would stand the same chance as Kanazawa of landing a professorship in economics and political science at the London School of Economics. (The insult would be to say anyone, from any era, with more intelligence than he would have chosen a less disreputable line of work.)

At any rate, the fact that, need it or not, we have the same size brains today that we had 10,000 years ago and beyond… but didn’t need them until recently undercuts rather then reinforces Kanazawa’s fantasies about the evolution of human behavior. That a professor at a fucking school of economics would overlook, oh, say, theories of rational, enlightened self-interest in favor of biologically determined behavioral “central planning” says pretty much all you need to know about the professor and… the institution that chooses to retain him.

Why the Standard "Women In Prisons" Story Needs a New Script

Tue, 2010-03-02 11:46 — figleaf

Bridget Crawford of Feminist Law Professors expresses uncharacteristic suprise at findings about women in a recent report on sexual abuse in the criminal justice system.

The statistics are staggering.  Kaiser and Sannow explain the importance and implication of the studies, as well as their deficiencies and strengths.  In describing one of the findings of the Bureau of Justice Statistics report (available here) the authors note:

Nearly 62 percent of all reported incidents of staff sexual misconduct involved female staff and male inmates. Female staff were involved in 48 percent of staff-on-inmate abuse in which the inmates were unwilling participants. The rates at which female staff seem to abuse male inmates, in jails and in juvenile detention, clearly warrant further study. Of the women in jail, 3.7 percent reported inmate-on-inmate sexual abuse; 1.3 percent of men did. Does this mean that women are more likely to abuse each other behind bars than men, or that they’re more willing to admit abuse? We don’t know—but if they’re simply more willing to admit abuse, then the BJS findings on men may have to be multiplied dramatically.

I was astounded at the rate of reported sexual abuse of male inmates by female staff members.  It illustrates that in some circumstances, women use sexual violence as a form of domination and power over men in a way that is not so different from what men do to women.  The authors point out that it is difficult to know why female inmates are more likely than their male counterparts to be sexually abused by another inmate of the same sex.  It may be that women are more abusive of each other than men are. 

She said it here.

I’m not at all sure why anyone should be surprised. Here are three reasons that skip off the top of my head:

1) Sexual abuse and sexual assault are excitations of power, not of sex… or gender. Yes, historically we see far, far more sexual abuse and assault by men but I believe historically power has been also see far, far more likely to accrue to men. As we make progress towards parity of power it’s inevitable that we’re going to see more parity in its abuse.

2) The standard gender assumptions about women as vaguely and passively “sugar and spice and everything nice” make the standard gendered scripts for behavior for women in dominant, potentially sexual situations, let alone scripts for men in sexually dominated-by-women ones, are inadequate. Both narrative and scripting need to adjust to the reality of women as autonomous human beings who’s moral compasses are neither more nor less flawed than anyone else’s. (I ought to add that because we do have a lot of scripting about men and abuse of sexual power there may also be better developed policies for managing or deterring it.)

3) Both of the bogus Two Rules of Desire make it more difficult to confront or transcend our (mis)understanding of sexual (mis)use of power. When society believes to its core that it’s not only intolerable and inconceivable for women to manifest sexual desire, and equally intolerable and inconceivable for men to be sexually desired, you’re just going to find women poorly prepared to forgo opportunities to exploit sexual vulnerability, you’re going to find men, and women, poorly prepared to resist such exploitation, and you’re going to find social and prison policies ill equipped to police it.

So. You wanna know just how entrenched our gender narratives about sexual abuse really are? All this seems to be seriously old news, at least among rape-crisis community professionals. I’ve mentioned several times in this blog an interview I had back in the very early 1980s with the director of a rape-relief and domestic violence shelter. I mentioned my ignorant impression that men can’t be raped, not by women, and she said no, that it was actually relatively common. The common denominator, she told me nearly 30 years ago, was that perpetrators were very likely to have custodial power over their smaller (i.e. children), or weaker (i.e. elderly, disabled) victims. Given that prisoners, and particularly juvenile ones, are in custodial power and there should be no surprise nor shock at all that they would be just as subject to sexual abuse by women as by men.

That it wouldn’t have soaked in to general awareness even 30 years after I first heard about it is the only really shocking thing about the whole story.

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