Webb Skepticism

Alex Massie makes the case for Webb as VP, and it’s one that’s been made many times before and remains quite convincing. Webb, after all, is the white working class incarnate. He’s a former Republican, he has credibility on the war that matches or surpasses McCain, his proposed veteran legislation would funnel a lot of money to those areas where Obama is doing poorly, he can’t be portrayed as weak, etc etc etc. But his tremendous upside also entails some downside: nominating Webb could easily be viewed as a slap in the face to female and minority voters.

Real quick: Webb has a ton of sympathy for the Confederacy. Sure, he doesn’t support slaveholding and isn’t a modern-day segregationist like Trent Lott, but one aspect of his academic/cultural project of defending the legacy and history of the Scotch-Irish (or, in American, rednecks and white trash) is coming to grips with the fact that these people made up the bulk of the Confederate military. Here’s what Webb said at an address at the Confederate Memorial:

I am not here to apologize for why they fought, although modern historians might contemplate that there truly were different perceptions in the North and South about those reasons, and that most Southern soldiers viewed the driving issue to be sovereignty rather than slavery. In 1860 fewer than five percent of the people in the South owned slaves, and fewer than twenty percent were involved with slavery in any capacity. Love of the Union was palpably stronger in the South than in the North before the war — just as overt patriotism is today — but it was tempered by a strong belief that state sovereignty existed prior to the Constitution, and that it had never been surrendered. Nor had Abraham Lincoln ended slavery in Kentucky and Missouri when those border states did not secede. Perhaps all of us might reread the writings of Alexander Stephens, a brilliant attorney who opposed secession but then became Vice President of the Confederacy, making a convincing legal argument that the constitutional compact was terminable. And who wryly commented at the outset of the war that “the North today presents the spectacle of a free people having gone to war to make freemen of slaves, while all they have as yet attained is to make slaves of themselves.”

Make of that what you will, but considering that leading lights in the liberal blogsophere delight in going after those that who celebrate “Treason in Defense of Slavery Month Heritage Month,” it’s unclear how Webb’s sympathy for the Confederate cause, or at least those who fought for it, would go over with black voters. But that isn’t all that big a worry considering that Barack Obama is at the top of the ticket. A bigger concern is how female voters and activists would respond to a Webb nomination. Webb, in 1979, published an article entitled “Women Can’t Fight” in defense of his position that women should not be allowed in combat positions in the Navy. If activists like Emily’s List’s Ellen Malcom are still smarting over an Obama victory, then putting Webb on the ticket could be seen as throwing women under the bus. For them, the Party would have gone from being very close to nominating the first female presidential candidate, to having a gender reactionary nominated as Vice President.

Another argument against Webb is that instead of acting as “insurance” that Obama would be able to compete for working class white votes and not have McCain get away with questioning his patriotism,
he would instead accentuate that Obama is perceived to be everything that Webb is not. If the purpose of putting Webb on the ticket is, as Massie and others say, to project strength on foreign policy, military issues, patriotism, being a badass, getting white working class support, then that very action implies that Obama is weak on all those fronts. And when a candidate essentailly cops to weakness in certain areas, the media and the other party will just eat it up. Neil Sinhababu made this point very well a few months ago:

when a presidential candidate chooses a VP to cover a weakness, it’s considered an acknowledgement by the campaign that their presidential candidate has a weakness. Thereafter, the media is officially licensed to harp on that weakness.  So now you reinforce the storyline: “Ordinary white folks don’t and shouldn’t like Obama!” or “John Kerry is a New England aristocrat with no ties to the common man!”  Given the fact that the presidential candidate is more significant, a balancing strategy might actually end up moving perceptions of the ticket in the opposite direction.

I’m not saying that Webb would be a bad choice - I think ultimately that the veepstakes doesn’t really matter that much - it’s just that he isn’t necessarily the best choice.

Can I Call It Ambivalence About Fair Pay Day?

Via Feministing, I see that today is Blog For Fair Pay Day. And since I haven’t written about Fair Pay in a while, I feel now is a good time to rehash my thoughts at some length.

The first question of Fair Pay is what does it mean. At its most basic, it means equal pay for equal work. In simple terms, the implication is that a man and a woman, doing the same job, should get roughly equal compensation. And so discriminating hiring practices, discriminating promotion practices, firing women because they’re pregnant and so and so forth are violations of this principle. And, fortunately, this principle is enshrined in the law. This doesn’t mean that it isn’t under fire. The Supreme Court, in Ledbetter v Goodyear, made it much more difficult for women to file pay-discrimination suits. The Court did, however, open the door to Congress making the statute more amenable to women suing under it. So despite the Court’s horribly reactionary decision, Title VII and the Equal Pay Act, which protect women from pay discrimination for the same work, are still on the books and can be strengthened by Congress, and probably will be if a Democratic president is elected.

But the principle of Equal Pay, notwithstanding the Court, is not what today is all about. Instead, it’s about Fair Pay. What Fair Pay aims at is not explicit pay discrimination, but the actual pay gap between men and women. And the pay gap is real. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2006, women earned 81 cents for every dollar men earned. To give some historical perspective, in 1979, women were earning 63 cents on the male dollar. So the question becomes, is this gender gap ipso facto unfair, and if so, what are we to do about it?

Most advocates for Fair Pay say that the gap is the result of two trends. One is that women are paid less because of their tendency to drop out the workforce due to pregnancy and motherhood. This means that more women drop out of the labor force in their most productive years or go to part time, which drives their hourly and total wages down. Because women tend to flock to careers that allow them to have more flexible schedules - teaching and nursing are good examples - the wages in those jobs tend to be low. There’s also the fact that women “pick” certain career paths. For example, men make up a huge majority of the highest paying college majors, while women are predominate in the liberal arts. Adding up these three factors – fewer hours, fewer years in the work force and different career paths - June O’Neil found that 97.5% of the wage gap could be attributed to their aggregate effect.

The second factor that Fair Pay advocates point to is systemic sexism in how society values certain occupations. They see the fact that nurses, teachers and receptionists get paid less not as evidence that, due to the productivity of their work as well as the supply and demand of labor, they get paid less than plumbers, but instead of a deep institutional injustice directed against women. The principle is no longer “equal pay for the same work” but “equal pay for equivalent work.” They remedy for this in the 1970s, when the concept of fair pay first emerged, was that the government would measure the “worth” of each profession, and declare which ones would be equal. So if nurses and plumbers in a hospital were doing “equivalent” work, then they would have to be paid the same. Only this way could we correct the societal prejudice that makes women financially inferior to men.

The problems with this old-school, Comparable Worth approach are obvious. We know from Hayek, as well as from the historical failure of central planning, that government is not very good at determining market imputs, to make them fair or to achieve any other goal. There is simply too much that goes into a payment decision, that the government couldn’t possibly say what’s fair for a specific job. This bureaucratization of the labor market would inevitably distort it, making it harder for women to get jobs in specifically female professions like teaching and nursing because the wages were at above a market equilibrium level. When wages are artificially forced too high, employers hire fewer people. There could also be the problem of the wages for certain productive or societally useful work getting “equalized down” so that its wages could be “fair” compared to “equivalent” woman’s work. If doctors were mandated to get paid less, or oil rig workers, we would have fewer people entering these professions. It’s been very rare where the market hasn’t, on average, done the best at determining aggregate utility.

Because of the myriad practical and political problems with Comparable Worth proposals, as they were called, Fair Pay advocates have come up with new ideas. The most widely supported Fair Pay proposal these days is the Fair Pay Act. The Act, which was co-sponsored by Barack Obama, would be based around class action suits which would claim that women were getting underpaid for equivalent work, within the same company. For example, under the Fair Pay Act, social workers could sue to get equal pay with Parole Officers, or nursing assistants would be equal pay with plumbers in a hospital. The Act would ask courts to evaluate whether jobs’ “composite of skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions are equivalent in value” and then rule that a company would be engaging in sex discrimination by paying the majority female workers less. The Act also would prohibit lowering the pay of one class of workers to make the pay equal.

But while the content of the Fair Pay Act is quite different from past comparable worth proposals, it still rests on the same assumption - that gaps in pay are not the result of the free functioning of the labor market, but instead is the result of the variety of sexist factors. For example, the concept of a “family wage”, whereby women in traditionally female jobs are paid less because it’s assumed they have husbands who are also working. The Act’s advocates also claim that women are steered into lower paying jobs because women are more likely to take time off for pregnancy and childrearing.

There are certain pay-gap facts that are undeniable, the most obvious being the existence of it. So what are we to do? The Fair Pay Act, despite its vast improvements over Comparable Worth, still retains some basic flaws. If the pay patterns that result in women earning less are the results of society wide problems such as women being more likely to take responsibility for raising children, then intervening at such a late stage is probably only going to distort the labor market. If employers are worried that if they hire nurses, they will have to pay them at an above market wage, they’ll hire fewer nurses. And if the factors that drive women into nursing are still present, then Fair Pay won’t accomplish much at all.

But the wage gap is still a problem, so what are we to do? In my view, we keep doing the same things that we have been trying to do for decades. The first thing we must do is eliminate, or alleviate, the motherhood penalty. Since much of the gap can be attributed to fewer hours, fewer years in the work force and different job choices among women, it’s unclear if trying to intervene so late in the game will do much, especially considering the distortions it brings. But what all those three factors have in common is motherhood. So we ought to be doing all we can to make it so mothers can participate in the work force. This means more paid maternity leave, more paternity leave, more child care, more pre-K and doing the slow, hard work of trying to change social norms so that more men will stay at home. This also means that, a la Linda Hirshman, more women ought to work full-time and insist that society and family life adjust to their preferences. As far as getting more women into higher paying jobs goes, there need to be more grassroots efforts for woman to get interested in the sciences and math. The evidence that inherit aptitude is responsible for the dearth of female engineering majors is weak, especially compared to the role that assumptions about women’s ability and the intimidating atmosphere that competitive, functionally all-male academic programs can provide.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that Fair Pay isn’t easy, and that no one-off law or amendment will ensure that they pay gap goes away. But that doesn’t mean we should stop trying.

How Can I Say This?

Rebecca Traister’s  most recent Salon essay very artfully engages with a tricky topic. That topic is the feeling that many young, progressive women get that the young, progressive guys that support Obama so fervently, and are thus so dismissive and disdainful of Clinton, may have a little sexism lurking within their politics. Traister is right recognize that this is subtle - there aren’t very many liberal guys who are publicly going after Clinton for being a woman, but there is still something to be said about the tone of much of the criticism aimed at Clinton. That being said, it’s ultimately an unfalsifiable hypothesis.

Traister empathizes that much of the frustration with Clinton among young liberals is based mostly around their adoration of Obama, and now with Clinton in a seemingly impossibly position, that frustration has been amplified by her refusal to get out of the race. She implies that if another candidate were in Clinton’s position, he wouldn’t get the same opprobrium, and she may be right, but there’s no way to know. All we do know is that Clinton is currently acting in what I, and many others, view as not conducive to the sucess of Democrats in the general election or American liberalism. And I think that commentators should be unafraid to make this point, strongly even, without fear of being tarred as sexists. Unless there’s obvious sexism in language or a special virulence towards Clinton, it’s an imposition of bad faith to say that those who think Clinton should step-down is just promoting the idea that aging women should leave public life, or some other sexist shibboleth.

Traister seems to confirm this suspicion when she gives other examples of sexism within Democratic politics:

These women –- and the movement whence they sprang -– have never been the most popular girls in the Democratic Party, even if the party’s male elders have grown up enough to know that they’re not supposed to say so out loud anymore. At least not until they find themselves pinching Clinton’s cheek like Chris Matthews, or accusing her of destroying the party by staying in a race in which she is still competitive. It’s like how Democrats love women, just not those goddamned women with their single-issue reproductive rights obsession that sticks us with Lincoln Chafee and Joe Lieberman.

I don’t understand. There are plenty of women from the Second Wave generation that are very popular within the party. Kate Michelman, Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer are just three examples of very progressive, avowedly feminist Democrats who are recognized as party luminaries and leaders. Traister also is being exceedingly charitable to Clinton - it’s not as all clear that she’s still competitive. Under basically all foreseeable circumstances, she will be behind in popular votes and pledged delegates by the time the primary is over, and most observers put her chances of winning at around 10%. Now whether she should still stay in is one question, but Traister is making the race seem much closer than it actually is - all to advance the point that we Democrats who think that Clinton is doing the party a disservice by staying in are just another example of faux-progressives who can’t handle powerful women.

Which leads in to the next problem with this paragraph. NARAL was being both selfish and stupid when they endorsed Lincoln Chafee in 2006. Not only because the marginal victory for reproductive rights would have been far outweighed by the awfulness of a GOP senate majority, but also because endorsing individual Republican lawmakers doesn’t make sense on its own merits. That’s because even if pro choice Republicans are reliable votes on individual pieces of legislation, they still vote for Republican committee chairs and what not, meaning that they enable the passage of anti-choice legislation and the confirmation of anti-choice judges. In the case of cloture for Alito, who could very well be the key vote to overturning Roe or at least weakening it, these pro-choice Republicans all voted for cloture. And it wasn’t like Chafee and Lieberman were running against Bob Casey, but instead they were running against Sheldon Whitehouse and Ned Lamont, two liberal pro-choicers. Were the causes of abortion rights or the Democratic party, which are really inextricably connected, advanced by either endorsement? No, and there’s nothing sexist about saying so.

What Happens When Every Movement is a Social Justice Movement?

Since I’m not an active participant in the feminist movement, or any of the other movements Jessica Hoffman mentions in her polemic “letter to white feminists,” maybe it’s not really my place to comment on her piece, but much of it seems off base in a pretty fundamental fashion. Her basic point is that many “feminists” - by which she means those (typically but not always) white women we associate with NOW or Feminist Majority or any other feminist organization - are oftentimes ignorant of the struggles faced by many women, not to mention men, who are abused by the criminalization of borders and the criminal-justice/prison system more broadly. It’s the basic message that many feminist and social justice advocates of color have been pushing since at least the late 1970s, that many white feminists are mostly concerned with the issues facing, well, white women. Hoffman’s critique is by no means new, and she appears to be doing a paint-by-numbers critique of mainstream feminism.

Her critique seems especially misguided in a world where, to me at least, those white feminists who she seems to be critiquing (rarely by name) are more cognizant than ever of challenges - especially those faced by people of color, immigrants, transmen and women - that have not traditionally been the purview of mainstream feminism. If you look at the three largest feminist blogs (Pandagon, feministing, feministe), all headed by liberal white women, you see plenty of discussion of racism or of borders or of prison reform. And even more importantly, Jill Filipovic, Amanda Marcotte and Jessica Valenti are in many ways similar to Hoffman insomuch as they are not only aware of this type of criticism, but are also very much part of the reaction to same type of 70s era, white liberal feminism that Hoffman criticizes.

Hoffman’s idea, that everyone who is part of any social movement - whether it be anti-racism, feminism, immigrants rights, gay rights, prison abolition - should be aware and always talking about the issues that are important to those of every other movement seems misguided. In Hoffman’s view, there are really two issues that matter. The prison-industrial complex and borders.

She castigates white feminists for not paying off attention to the Jena 6, Newark 4, the abuses of the immigration system and whole host of other issues, that she, Jessica Hoffman, considers very important. And while I tend to agree with Hoffman that the two biggest “social justice” issues are how we lock up so many (especially young black men) and how we don’t let enough immigrants live where they chose to in dignity, not everyone shares that view. Ultimately, it’s pointless to tell people that the work they’re doing, which they’re passionate about, which they see as important and for a good cause is not “intersectional” enough and that they should instead just be paying attention to your issues.

Many of Hoffman’s examples of how white feminism marginalizes and actually hurts other social justice movements are really not indicative of anything. She doesn’t like that one email list didn’t talk about the horrific story of a transwoman who died in a male immigration detention center after being denied AIDS treatment and instead was discussing the demise of Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem’s GreenStone Media.

And Hoffman may be “objectively” right, the abuse of gender nonconformists in both our immigration and criminal justice systems is absolutely horrific, but not every feminist activist is particularly focused on that issue, and they don’t all have to be. Would it be better if everyone was talking about prisons and borders, even if it wasn’t an issue that especially excited them (for whatever reason) or that they didn’t have much expertise in? I don’t think so. People who specialize in immigration issues should be the ones talking about immigration issues. After all, someone needs to talk about those supposedly antiquated “white feminist” issues like the pay gap, lack of family medical or paternal leave, depictions of women in the media and culture, the prevalence of rape etc etc etc. And if Hoffman doesn’t want to be that person, that’s fine for her, but the cause of feminism or of social justice more broadly isn’t advanced much by this type of self-righteous sniping. It isn’t particularly productive.

Girls who are boys Who like boys to be girls

Alissa Quart’s New York Times Magazine feature on the challenges facing transmen and genderqueers in women’s colleges is exceptional for mainstream journalism about the gender nonconforming community.  For one, Quart is clearly familiar with the community itself as well as with the theory that goes behind these identities.  Also, Quart is sympathetic with the people she’s writing about and presents their stories and opinions in a highly non-judgmental manner.  But the heart of the article - the story of a female-to-male Barnard student named Rey - raises some incredibly interesting questions about the place of transgendered people in educational environments and the purpose of women’s colleges.  It’s both odd that gender nonconformists and women’s colleges seem to mesh so well together, and also perfectly natural. 

On one hand, the women’s college is a conservative, gender essentialist institution.  Many women’s colleges - Barnard, Smith, Wellesley - were originally started as something approximating finishing schools, but also educated the most accomplished and progressive women because paucity of elite, coed higher education opportunities.   Today, however, they appear to be increasingly outdated.  After all, in the undergraduate environment, women outperform men in nearly all metrics, both in admission and in academic performance. And so these colleges are in a weird place.  Some, like Vassar and Goucher, just abandoned single sex education entirely. 

But they’ve also become destinations for people who grow up as female and then slide into gender nonconformity.  That’s because they’re safehavens from male sexual and emotional violence.  But there’s an obvious conflict here.  How are schools whose core identity and value is exclusively derived from their adherence to essentialist notions of what it means to be a woman supposed to deal with students who have very little interest in those basic definitions?  For Rey, at least, it wasn’t easy:

But as a transmale student in a sea of women at Barnard, he felt alone. He longed to be with his girlfriend, Melissa, and with transmale friends, some of whom, like Rey, were attending women’s colleges. Even as he sought to adopt a more conventionally male appearance, he wanted to maintain his ties with his former self. “I am all for not rubbing out my past as female,” he told me.

…

In the first week of September, he found out that his roommates had complained to the college’s freshman housing director about being asked to share their rooms with a man. They wanted Rey to find somewhere else to live. According to Dorothy Denburg, the dean who spoke to Rey about the situation, these young women were disturbed when Rey told them on the first day “that he was a transboy and wanted to be referred to by male pronouns.” Rey’s roommates had, after all, chosen to attend a women’s college in order to live and be educated in the company of other women.

Rey ultimately transferred to Columbia proper, but the questions his experience raises are difficult.  Should women’s colleges be expected to greet with open arms those students who don’t want to be “female?”  And is Rey right to criticize Barnard students for not accepting him fully when he clearly didn’t want to buy into the most basic principle the school is based around?

It’s certainly a tough issue, because gender and sexuality are fluid, continuous phenomena.  You’d hardly want a women’s college to not be accepting of a students who don’t present in a stereotypically feminine way, but there seems to be a difference when those who wholeheartedly reject the biological, cultural and social place of womanhood want a place in a woman’s institution.  You can’t help but smell a whiff of opportunism, as Phoebe Maltz put it, “Rey… want[s] approval, to count as …female…when it suits him, while simultaneously declaring those who believe that rules restrict who can call themselves female to be parochial, backward-minded rubes.”

So I think that the onus rests on co-ed universities to make themselves safe, welcome environments to those who have little interest in conforming to gender roles or identities.  Because otherwise, we’re in this weird situation where people want to join institutions (women’s colleges) that derive their unique value from a basic essentialism and exclusion, and yet also criticize those same institutions for not being open to people who reject what makes these places distinct.

Bhutto Was Prime Minister, Pakistan Isn’t A Feminist Utopia

Kerry Howley links to this Bhutto interview with New York in which Bhutto kinda-sorta makes the argument that I made a few months ago, namely that just because she inherited the leadership of her party and became Prime Minister in a country that has high illiteracy and poor democratic institutions, doesn’t exactly mean that Pakistan is particularly far ahead as women’s rights/representation goes:

Q: Why do you think that the U.S. seems to have a harder time with women at the highest level of power than other countries?

A: In a country like Pakistan or India, when a charismatic leader dies, people are not sure that the traditions he symbolized will continue—there’s a lot of illiteracy and there isn’t the same access to information. So they tend to transfer allegiance from a male leader to a female descendant, in the hope that his policies will be continued. But in Westernized societies, it’s a little different, because people have greater education and greater access to information—they don’t have the same need to be sure of the message of the leader.

Howley argues that “electing a woman to the most visible high status position in a patriarchal society is a kind of social progress distinct from any particular policy she might support.”  I think that Pakistan is just about perfect proof that this argument isn’t true. Pakistan is weird because there’s a large section of the population that is (relatively) progressive gender-wise and highly educated, and thus had no problem supporting Bhutto.  On the other hand, in Pakistan, women can be sentenced to gang rape by a court of law. Pakistan is the best example to show that using the presence of a woman in the highest state office as a metric for women’s equality is misguided.

Testing…Testing

Vanessa at Feministing comments on New Jersey’s proposed law to make HIV testing of pregnant women and their children mandatory with an opt-out provision. She points to a horror story of someone’s baby being taken away and mentions that these opt-out provisions are rarely used, and ends the post with a pertinent question, “It’s a complex issue and obviously prevention should be the priority, but do women’s private medical decisions need to be sacrificed in the process?”

While I’m generally sensitive to this class of concerns, the issue of there being a child involved complicates matters. What distinguishes HIV is that A. there is a high risk of mother-to-child transmission if the mother is HIV+ and B. there are perinatal treatments that significantly reduce the risk of transmission. For example, there can be a c-section delivery, or while in labor, the mother can be treated with nevirapine. In the early 1990s, AZT treatment for the mother was recommended, and since then there has been a 2/3s decrease in mother-to-infant treatment in the US. The CDC estimates that with treatment, the risk of transmission drops from 25% to 2%.

Since there is no one to speak for the baby in the case of mother-to-infant transmission, it seems reasonable to enact policy that will increase testing for HIV and thus increase treatment for infants. While there is a good case to be made that women shouldn’t be compelled to get HIV tests (even though I’m of the opinion that there should be opt-out mandatory testing for a wide range of infectious diseases), the case of pregnancy changes things. It would be almost negligent for someone who had a high risk of being HIV+ to not get tested, and while one hopes that mothers would get tested in the best interest of themselves and their children, that can’t be guaranteed.

One final note — there are very few cases of mother-to-infant transmission in New Jersey, or even the United States for that matter.  UCSF Center for Aids Prevention Studies estimates that there are 300-400 cases of MICT in the United States, while New Jersey state health officials reported seven infants born with HIV in 2005.

Crossposted on campusprogress.org/blog 

Barack and the Ladies

Dana Goldstein’s TNR piece excoriating Barack Obama for his ill-fated, silly and sometimes condescending effort to peel off some of Clinton’s female support is pretty excellent stuff.  Obama, who on foreign policy, is much closer in tone and substance to the median female Democratic primary voter than Clinton, has been trying to appeal to women insomuch as they are different, using tired stereotypes of women as deliberative peacemakers and mothers, while Clinton can make a strong implicit argument for representing equality:

A few weeks before Oprah Tour ‘07, the Obama campaign rolled out a 19-minute web documentary on “why women across the nation are supporting Barack Obama for president.” It features a bevy of babies gurgling happily to the strains of folk rock. And with babies, of course, come mommies. Mommies supervising in the park, cutting their children’s food up into tiny squares, and generally worrying about stuff…

 Lord help us if the right wing decides to use this video–it’s almost a parody of Democrats as the Mommy Party. We meet Obama campaign COO Betsy Myers as she prepares dinner for her little girl. After all, there’s lots of time for those home-cooked meals on the trail! … the video serves up a primer on “difference feminism,” which holds that women deserve to be involved in politics less because they are inherently equal to men than because they’re different–more nurturing, less warlike, and more intuitive, in the ways mothers are supposed to be.

“Women will often prioritize issues differently,” says Illinois Representative Jan Schakowsky in the video. Schakowsky, who has endorsed Obama, represents Chicago’s affluent suburbs–neighborhoods filled with the type of women the campaign needs to reach. Call it the Whole Foods vote: the half of all college-educated Democratic women, most of them liberal and upper-middle-class, who are skeptical of Hillary Clinton, in large part due to her late arrival on the antiwar bandwagon…

In such a climate, does Barack Obama’s message of feminine difference make sense? The campaign, of course, is desperate to connect the strong antiwar views of grassroots Democrats to their candidate’s long history of opposition to the war. Clinton has been able to neutralize that threat in part by promising to withdraw the troops, but also, when it comes to women, by becoming a vessel for lifetimes of frustration with male-dominated politics.

Goldstein gets to the heart of why Obama is having so much trouble trying to attract female voters.  Obama should be, by virtue of his consistent anti-war stance, getting more female support.  Of course, he just so happens to be running against the first viable female candidate ever.  And so Obama is stuck resorting to these ineffective, patronizing pitches to women.  But while Obama’s appeal to women-as-mommy-peacemakers kinda sucks, it’s worth remembering that Clinton is able to make a similar identity based pitch without having to do any of this lame signaling.  Just by being a pantsuit among suits, so to speak, she appeals to women qua women in a way that Obama will never be able to.  In this environment, Obama should realize that there will always be a gender gap and just campaign on the stuff that works: anti war, Clintons are lying triangulators, Mark Penn is evil and I am the Messiah.

Well, In This Case, the Hijab Is Oppressive

Tracy Clark Flory’s video, defending her recent post taking a “maybe it’s oppressive, maybe it isn’t” line on the alleged hijab-inspired honor killing in Canada is fairly weak.  Her argument is, on some level, almost obviously true.  The hijab can be oppressive, and it could not be oppressive, and she would rather not make a judgment in this particular case because she’s a “shades of gray” type of girl.

But let’s take it as a given that this 16 year old was killed because she refused to wear a hijab, and more generally, refused to follow her families cultural strictures on proper dress and behavior for a young woman.  Then, we could perfectly confident in making the argument that the hijab is oppressive, as is the whole host of cultural mores that deem women to be the property of their family, and that their sexuality is dangerous.  I don’t really see why we need to recognize any shades of gray or why we need to hold out the possibility that the hijab could be empowering in some instances.  In instances where not wearing it leads to murder at the hands of one’s own father, it’s pretty unambiguous that, indeed, clothing mandates with the purpose of expressing ownership over women’s sexuality are, in fact, horribly oppressive.

Marriage and Poverty

Walter Williams (yes I know this is a Townhall column and that he insists that poverty is “self inflicted” but these stats I’m about to quote seem legit) cites some very interesting data concerning poverty:

There’s one segment of the black population that suffers only a 9.9 percent poverty rate, and only 13.7 percent of their under-5-year-olds are poor. There’s another segment of the black population that suffers a 39.5 percent poverty rate, and 58.1 percent of its under-5-year-olds are poor.

Among whites, one population segment suffers a 6 percent poverty rate, and only 9.9 percent of its under-5-year-olds are poor. Another segment of the white population suffers a 26.4 percent poverty rate, and 52 percent of its under-5-year-olds are poor.

What do you think distinguishes the high and low poverty populations? The only statistical distinction between both the black and white populations is marriage. There is far less poverty in married-couple families, where presumably at least one of the spouses is employed. Fully 85 percent of black children living in poverty reside in a female-headed household.

Of course, there’s a chicken and egg factor to be dealt with here. It’s probably true that those born into poverty are less likely to get married, and that those born into rich families are much more likely to do. If someone is born into poverty, however, having kids while not being married, or raising kids on one’s own, or even going into a long term relationship but forgoing marriage, isn’t the best idea. Kay Hymowitz’s research, which I’ve written about extensively, seems to indicate that marriage has some wealth producing effects, and that income disparities between upper and lower middle classes can partially be explained by differential marriage rates, or that those disparities can be solidified by low marriage rates and single parenthood.

The whole point of this exercise is to express my uneasiness about certain corners of the blogosphere embracing Louise Sloan’s Knock Yourself Up, a how-to guide for intentional single motherhood. While those who deliberately pursue single motherhood a la Sloan are probably upper middle class already and thus won’t themselves will be fine for it, it’s worrying that a blog that prides itself on having a very inclusive feminist perspective would take a position on marriage that is so callous towards the needs of lower income and, more so than not, black women. Family breakdown buffeted by low marriage rates affects women disproportionally. It’s unfortunate that those who are “pro marriage” are aligned with those who really don’t care about the lower classes and those who are just bigoted. If liberals and progressives could take up the pro marriage banner, as part of a broader anti-poverty message, we could rescue a good cause from the unhelpful demagogues.

via

How Success Can Kill A Movement

Kay Steiger’s reaction to Ricardo Hausman’s post showing encouraging data of how women worldwide are reversing the education gap (inadvertently) demonstrates how success can potentially become an anathema to those movements pushing for change

I’m highly skeptical about this post (via Ezra) that claims women seem to be reversing the gender gap worldwide. Good news! All those feminists can pack up their bags and go home! Inequality doesn’t exist anymore!

Steiger is definitely correct in saying that just because women are becoming more educated, gender inequality isn’t going to become a thing of the past. But Steiger’s (snarky, not totally serious) response is illustrative. Let’s propose for a moment that gender inequality in education, earnings and opportunity totally disappeared. A whole lot of organizations and activists would suddenly become purposeless. Their first response would be to deny that gender inequality had in fact disappeared, and then move on to other, more marginal struggles. This is because those organizations and activists raison d’etre was agitating against gender inequality, and thus they would be incentived to perpetuate the notion that there was a problem, in order to survive.

Let me be very clear, I am not saying that Steiger is exhibiting this tendency, or that feminism or the women’s movement has outlived its uselessness. A better example of this phenomenon is an organization like the Anti Defamation League. When it was founded in 1913 to fight Antisemitism, it made sense. America was rife with Antisemitism, popular anti-Semites like Henry Ford and Father Coughlin were still on the horizon. In short, the ADL had a good reason to exist.

These days, with widespread, damaging anti-Semitism largely a thing of the past, the ADL can’t just pat itself on the back and ride off into the sunset. So while they should be reflecting on how amazing it is that the western world has done a remarkable job in the last 50 years curing itself of one of its most long-lasting and potent afflictions, the ADL has turned into an extension of the Likudnik wing of American politics. It now polices critics of Israeli policy and influence, namely Walt and Mearsheimer, using their (declining) moral authority to label their political enemies as anti-Semites. They also manage to find time to push for genocide denial on Israel’s behalf. For the ADL, antisemitism in America will always be a huge problem. It’s simply impossible for them to conceptualize the world in any other way.

Do any activist groups or movements ever just ride off into the sunset after they accomplish their goals? It’s hard to see a scenario where the incentives would line up to encourage that.

 

Deep in the Heart of Texas

Dallas, specifically - that’s where I’ll be until Sunday, getting my debate on.

Oh yeah, read this feministe post entitled “OMG Teh Hysterical Feminists Are Coming Again” - though it doesn’t concern me until the end, I do get associated with the new wave of male progressives anti-feminist blogging. It’s not very complementary, but I like being associated with a whole new movement. Needless to say, I don’t agree with the whole post, especially the contention at the end. But alas, I’m about to be late for class and won’t really be able to respond to it. Am I part of the anti-feminist progressive reaction? I sure hope not!

UPDATE: Everyone would do well to read Jill’s update of her the post.  I agree with much of it…except the part where she refers to me and Mike as “highly intelligent men who are passionate about politics.”  While this description is perfect for Mike, it isn’t so for me.  Unless we’re going by Judaic law, I’m definitely a boy, you know, being 17 and all.  While Jill’s honorific is certainly complementary, I don’t want her to mislead her readers
Also, read Mike’s post concerning this entire kerfuffle.  These issues of identity politics and what not are quite thorny and tend to get heated pretty quickly, but there’s good stuff in this entire exchange.

Defining Feminism Down

Dana Goldstein has a good post outlining a strategy to convince a well meaning guy to become a feminist — or at least recognize that feminist grievances are legitimate. Her ideas are all very good — waiting times for abortions, the pay gap and the social undervaluation of domestic work all point toward societal oppression, or at least obstacles, the prevent women from living the Good Life. But would just saying that restrictions on abortion are bad, the pay gap is unfair and that women being socially coerced into undervalued domestic work is unjust be enough? Well, for some, recognition of this would make a guy a feminist, or at least a feminist ally. But in many feminist circles, that basic recognition would be necessary, but not sufficient. There would have to be not only a recognition of male privilege, but also an overarching, unceasing effort to minimize and understand the impact of that privilege.

There’s also the sticky issue of what the “patriarchy” is. Except for perhaps the Roberts Court, there isn’t some nefarious group of men that plans how to best oppress women. For a man who isn’t obviously affected patriarchal or misogynistic norms and expectations, talk of the “patriarchy” can seem conspiratorial or overblown.

Dana’s post recalls the infamous discussion at Feministe over whether men could be feminists at all. To say the least, many commenters put forward a very stringent definition of what feminism means. As Julian Sanchez put it:

The definition some of the commenters are employing seems quite stringent—so much so that I expect very many progressive-leaning women wouldn’t pass muster either. Being formally in favor of gender equality is not enough by a longshot: You have to “get it,” which means not only understanding and embracing, but internalizing in a fairly deep way a sophisticated analysis of how male privilege operates.

So there seems to be a choice - define feminism as an opposition to legal and social norms and expectations that disadvantage women and a general commitment to gender egalitarianism –and attract a wide ranging coalition of people that think institutionalized misogyny, sexism and gendered double standards are wrong. Or you can make “internalizing…a fairly deep…sophisticated analysis of how male privilege operates” or “getting it” a requirement to call oneself a feminist and alienate many men and women. You can’t have it both ways. Want more people to identify with feminism? Make identifying as a feminist simple and intuitive. Dana seems to imply the former option, and it’s certainly the better one — especially if you want to convert skeptics.

PS - This 2004 BLS report states that the male-female pay gap is 80 cents to the dollar, not 70, which Dana asserts.

Why Do Men Hate Identity Crusades?

I try to answer this question, in about 1460 words. This will sound self serving, but I’d really like if other bloggers read this post — especially my fellow liberals. I think about this topic quite a bit and I feel it should be discussed openly and honestly. My thoughts here are provisional and I really just want to talk about this entire issue, so please comment and blog away in response. Check it out after the flip.

Manilow’s View

Ann Friedman celebrates that Barry Manilow refused to be interviewed on The View by conservative host Elisabeth Hasselbeck because “I cannot compromise my beliefs.” I’m usually not one to bemoan “polarization” in this country, but Manilow is being so cravenly opportunistic as to conspicuously refuse to be interviewed about his album by a conservative, that’s just petty and lame. Really, Barry, pro-lifers are just totally off limits to you? Are you gonna start having loyalty oaths for people going to your shows? Wouldn’t it “compromise” your beliefs to accept dirty conservative/pro-life money? How does Barry’s strong conscience explain his $2300 contribution to Ron “Abortion on demand is the ultimate State tyranny” Paul’s campaign? I guess the usual refrain would be for Manilow to “shut up and sing,” but I feel I speak for most of my generation in requesting that he stick to the former and avoid the latter.

Democracies and Dictatorships and Women in Government

Garance Franke-Ruta snarkily digests this Reuters article lamenting the lack of women in Chinese government. While it is a little funny that Reuters would represent 20% female representation in parliament as some kind of great problem afflicting a non democracy, while the US can’t get 20% in our own congress, Garance’s commentary also shows the downside of a too intense focus on the number of women in power.

One large difference between China’s parliament and our Congress is that, well, our Congress is elected by people and has real powers. Our congress also allows multiple parties. So while we may have proportionally fewer parliamentary women, they actually have power vis a vis the executive branch (hypothetically anyway). It’s also possible to gain real power (for men and women) in the United States through paths that don’t go through the legally mandated, single Communist party.

This also brings up one of the least enlightening statistics or examples about women in government people bandy around. Oftentimes it’s pointed out that so and so country has had a female head of government or state while the backwards United States has not. And while I think that we ought to have more women in government, if for no other reason than that political talent and intelligence is probably distributed roughly equally among the sexes and so smart women aren’t in government while some dumb men are, I don’t think it is very indicative of anything that Pakistan has had a female Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto, and we haven’t had a female president. Is Pakistan better off than us, in any way? It’s worth pointing off that in parts of Pakistan, women are sentenced to gang rape by tribal courts. And while rape and the legal system in America is hardly perfect, it sure isn’t as bad as in Pakistan. The question we should really be asking is whether or not women, as a class, can pursue careers in government and elected service without debilitating personal and societal constraints. The US hardly passes with flying colors in this respect, but it’s still a better evaluative criterion than gross numbers of women in power.

The problem with a democracy is that it will only be able to accept as many women in power as the people and society are willing to support freely.  This means that legal equality and “representative” equality (a dodgy category on its own) will not always be in perfect accordance with each other.   China doesn’t have these same fetters of people picking their own leaders, and it’s not better off for it, for women or anyone.

The Feminist Marriage

Discussion of the “traditionalizing” effect has percolated throughout the blogosphere, with Michelle Cottle, Jon Cohn and Matthew Yglesias making very similar points to mine.  The weakest part of the study, which was even flagged by the researchers themselves, was whether the shift in housework towards women and getting married was causal, and not simply selective bias due to those with more traditional gender notions being more likely to get married or how children can change the previous spousal balance.  They even said “when it comes to the issue of causality–whether cohabitors are more egalitarian because they are cohabiting–the data here cannot provide a clear-cut answer.”

The implication that there was some sort of mechanistic effect of crossing the altar seemed weak because it essentially drained agency from the two parties.  Were we to believe that all notions of balance, even the ones that held out before, were just going to magically change with marriage? Especially when better explanatory mechanisms were out there — men making more money and the presence of children are just two of the highly plausible alternate explanations. Well, one person was willing to drink the kool aid and take the research to mean that marriage has a brainwashing effect — Jessica Valenti.

Valenti, reacting to the research, wrote a post  implying that this research would deter her form getting married, because she “hates to do dishes.”  This could very well be tongue and cheek, but the symbolism and implications of these types of remarks regarding marriage are very important.  As a peremptory note, I really like feministing and Valenti’s entire project.  I have no problem with about 95 percent of their posts, but because of the nature of how I blog, I generally write about bloggers and writers when I disagree with them.

Thougts on Pink

Amanda Marcotte blasts a study showing that “women really do prefer pink”

I think the logic goes something like this: Armchair evolutionary psychologists are always trying to argue that women were born to wear aprons and abhor shoes and book-learning. Which we all know is silly. But if they can establish in people’s minds the idea that women are born preferring pink, then it’s easy to start convincing people that other, less arbitrary and more oppressive markers of femininity are also innate.

While I don’t agree that there’s some secretive cabal of “armchair”(by which Amanda must mean the researchers and scientists with PhDs and MDs who do these studies) evolutionary psychologists, this is not the point I want to argue.  One thing that is lost in the latent social construction vs inborn traits/evolutionary debate is that just because scientists can do a study showing women are, on average, more attracted to  pink doesn’t mean its an inborn or an evolutionarily defined trait.  Even if it holds true for a large number of women and there’s a scenario for it being genetic or inborn, it could still easily be “socially constructed”(or at least not genetically determined).  A lot of time is wasted whenever a study showing some sort of persistent gender difference and some feminists have a knee jerk reaction that implies that whoever doing said study is some sort of misogynistic tool.

It should be noted that I like pink because I (think that I) look fantastic in it.

The Mike Meginnis Project

Great name for a band, an even better name for his blog/movement:

. I want to start a men’s issues group blog from a pro-feminist standpoint. I’ve looked for other people writing from this perspective and while individuals exist who might well fit this description — a number of them being people I read or speak to on a regular basis — there isn’t a single blog I can find devoted to looking at gender issues from a man’s perspective that isn’t either strictly about feminism or strictly about rolling feminism back. This concerns me because of the very ugly ideas about men that have been perpetuated for time immemorial, or which have gained new life under the unfortunate but convenient dovetailing of excessively simplistic feminist empowerment narratives and old gender-essentialist stereotypes about men

…

Male privilege will be understood for the purposes of this blog to be a form of damage done to men by what feminists call the patriarchy. It will work to counter narratives and ideologies that are damaging to male interests and male morality, with the ultimate if entirely unlikely goal of creating a sense of fraternity and using that sense to extract men from the battlefields, where they belong no more or less than women. It will be the stance of this blog that selective service registration should be ended, and people should be careful or perpetuating understandings of men as violent, rapacious, crude, stupid, or otherwise stereotypically undesirable. We are not pigs, we are not weapons, and we can transcend our culture’s expectations and narratives to avoid damaging women from our position of privilege, but also to avoid hurting ourselves and each other.

This blog will not reproduce the unfortunate reactionary strains of the so-called masculist movement, and will not attempt to roll back the accomplishments of feminism — which has done more for men than any masculist movement thus far — though it will not hesitate to push back when feminist writers unthinkingly perpetuate unfair understandings of men as necessarily bad, hateful, violent, or anti-feminist.

Sounds pretty cool to me. Anyone who’s interested should drop Mike a line and tell him. Mike’s a cool dude and very smart, underrated blogger. Of course, I’m a little biased, he’s been linking to me from the beginning, but still, check his stuff out, this project certainly looks interesting.

Andy Samberg Must Be Some Kind of God

He’s managed to date Natalie Portman and get the feministing crowd in a collective swoon over him because he wore a NOW shirt. This dude has his shit together. He’s also a Bay Area native which is not a coincidence, not a coincidence at all.