Sigh

I’m sorry Vanessa Valenti, but despite the clumsy use of the “mommy daddy” vs “daddy party” schema to describe Democrats and Republicans, Larry Sabato is not some horrible sexist, or a “douchebag.” Instead, he’s one of the foremost political scientists in the country, and is a real asset in discussions of how to reform our political institutions to make them more progressive. And if you really think that using the “mommy vs daddy” party dicotomy is sexist, go after everyone who uses the term “nanny state.” And if you really want to go after someone for using gendered language to describe the parties, then call George Lakoff a douchebag.

And I’ll be honest, the “mommy party” descriptor isn’t the best one out there, but can you really say it’s so awful when Nancy Pelosi called up all those little children to the Speaker’s podium when she opened this most recent Congressional session by saying it was “for the children”?

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   Today, however, they appear to be increasingly outdated.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.

Bad Arguments For Criminializing Prostitution

According to Melissa Farley and Victor Malarek, because I support legalized prostitution, I must be a john, because only they could ever be so blind to the coercion and exploitation present in sex work. Their NY Times op-ed, The Myth of the Victimless Crime, is one of the most tendentious and uncharitable contributions to the prostitution legalization discussion that I’ve ever seen.  This, my friends, is a direct quote:

Whose theory is it that prostitution is victimless? It’s the men who buy prostitutes who spew the myths that women choose prostitution, that they get rich, that it’s glamorous and that it turns women on.

So I guess Matt Yglesias, Brad Plumer, Megan McArdle, Kerry Howley, Julian Sanchez and the legislators of the Netherlands and Nevada spend most of their time with hookers.  But how do they have time to blog?  But seriously, does anyone really think that prostitution leads to glamor and riches?  I, a legalization supporter who has never bought sex from a hooker (honest!), sure don’t think this, and I imagine that most of those who share my views don’t.

Instead of showing, say, real evidence that criminalization, with all of it’s lack of enforcement, encouragement of unsafe sex, forcing prostitutes to seek the protection of violent pimps, breeding disrespect for the law, is actually better than the alternatives, all Farley and Malarek can muster is that “But most women in prostitution, including those working for escort services, have been sexually abused as children, studies show. Incest sets young women up for prostitution — by letting them know what they’re worth and what’s expected of them. Other forces that channel women into escort prostitution are economic hardship and racism.”

There’s a lot to unpack here.  If women have been sexually abused as children, should they be disallowed to have sex, to enter into relationships - I mean, after all, they’re likely to hurt themselves because of their past abuse.  Let’s expand this further.  Plenty of evidence shows that murderers and sexual abusers are likely to have been abused themselves.  Does this mean that we should prohibit victims of sexual abuse form doing anything?  Should we keep them in group homes?  I mean, seriously, we should by as benevolent and sympathetic as a society to victims of sexual abuse and should help them as much as possible, but at a certain point, we need to recognize their autonomy and agency.

They also say that “economic hardship and racism” channel women into prostitution.  This is undoubtedly true, women with better opportunities don’t generally become prostitutes.  But the same could be said about black women in the Jim Crow South working as maids for white families.  Economic hardship and racism “channeled” women into jobs as domestics, should we have banned black women from working as maids?  No, that would have been absurd.  You don’t address issues of economic hardship by restricting economic opportunity!  You instead work on the root causes - the racism and lack of economic opportunity - instead of criminalizing women doing the best they can and restricting liberty in a horribly ineffective manner.

The last paragraph of the piece is especially disturbing

Whether the woman is in a hotel room or on a side street in someone’s car, whether she’s trafficked from New York to Washington or from Mexico to Florida or from the city to the suburbs, the experience of being prostituted causes her immense psychological and physical harm. And it all starts with the buyer.”

I love how they depict sex workers as helpless objects with no agency and who don’t make any active decisions.  Isn’t it possible that for some women, they judge prostitution as the best thing they could do?  It’s not pretty, it’s not a choice I would like to see someone make, but I don’t see why we have to assume that people engaging in behavior we need unseemly are necessarily being exploited or have no other choice.

Once again, I encourage you all to read Kerry Howley’s interview with Laura Maria Agustin, who actually works with migrant sex workers.  Here’s a taste:

People may feel under the gun, but people who end up leaving home to work abroad have mixed motives. They may be poor and without many choices. But they also are normal human beings who have desires and fantasies. They daydream about all the same pleasurable things that richer people do. The human ability to imagine that things can be better, that getting ahead is possible, is in play. These motivations mix together in the project of leaving home—legally or not—to go somewhere else.

A Freaky Look at Prostitution

Like everything Steven Levitt writes, his new paper (warning PDF) on the economics of prostitution in Chicago is fascinating. The paper was co-written by none other than the other bad boy of the social sciences, Sudhir Venkatesh, who we all know as that crazy Indian graduate student who basically embedded himself with a Chicago crack gang for six years so he could do ethnographic research.

The little tidbits strewn throughout are interesting if not just for how understated Levitt is about the data he uncovers or the methods used to procure it. For instance, when he describes the research methodology, he almost off handedly says, “The bulk of these data were collected by our trackers who stood on street corners or sat in brothels with prostitutes, recording the information immediately after the customer departed.” Also, did you know that prostitution in a certain area is inversely correlated with a high concentration of female-headed households?

While you should just read the paper if you want to know all the details, I’ll just summarize some bits I found particularly interesting. Levitt and Venkatesh conclude that prostitution pays $27 an hour, 20,000 dollars per year, and for that money, a prostitute has unprotected sex 300 times in a year and is the victim of 12 incidents of violence. Condoms are used 25% of the time, and on July 4th weekend, “total quantity increases by 60 percent” while the price goes up 30%. Black johns systematically pay less than whites or Hispanics, even after correcting for different distribution of sex acts among the races. Also, repeat customers, if they are black, get lower prices, 10-30 percent less, while whites and Hispanics have no such discount.

Pimps, because they can set-up tricks, don’t need to have prostitutes solicit on street corners, thus decreasing the chance of arrest. Working with a pimp also allows prostitutes to earn higher wages per trick, despite the fact that they must fork over 25% of all revenue — even from trick arranged without the pimp’s assistance — the their pimp. And so, prostitutes are “eager to work with pimps.”

The part of the paper most likely to make you think about prostitution in its broader legal context is the section on how prostitutes interact with police officers. Levitt and Venkatesh estimate that a prostitute is only arrested once every 450 tricks, and only 1 in 10 arrests leads to a jail sentences. More surprising than the low rate of enforcement is the high rate of police officers having sex with prostitutes in exchange for protection; about 1 in 20 tricks, five percent, are freebies for protection from either gang members or police. Of the total tricks, three percent are for police officers. Thus “a prostitute is more likely to have sex with a police officer than to get officially arrested by one.”

Despite prostitution being illegal in Chicago, the law is rarely enforced and doesn’t hamper demand unless there’s a big enforcement push. While having “on the book” laws that are spottily enforced may not seem particularly negative, it breeds a disrespect for both laws that ought to be enforced consistently as well as for law enforcement in general. And when prostitutes can essentially purchase protection from the police, the corruption compromises the police’s relationship with both those prostitutes and the community as a whole. For example, if a cop who has freebie sex with a prostitute were to beat her, she could not report him. And if the community views the policy as easily corruptible, they are less likely to cooperate with them or trust them to stop violent and more deleterious crime. In view of the enforcement (or lack thereof) of prostituion laws, some sort of legalization seems like a reasonable step.

While there are good arguments for why prostitution, whatever its legal status, is coercive, exploitative and immoral, it seems like the demand, and thus the supply, for prostitution, will always exist - it is, after all, the world’s oldest profession. In a regulated, legalized system, the government could mandate condom use, disease testing and more easily crack down on abuses because prostitutes wouldn’t be afraid to go the police. In Nevada counties where prostitution is legal, condom use is 100%, there hasn’t been a case of HIV since 1988 and prostitutes don’t have to give “freebies” to gang members or police officers (via). Although there may be black market in condom free sex, enforcement of prostitution laws would increase from the status quo’s pitiful low level if prostitution were legalized and regulated.

But whatever your views on prostitution, read the paper!

cross-posted at campusprogress.org/blog 

Bhutto and Nepotism

Apropos of the discussion Kerry Howley and I had about how nepotism is important for getting women into high office, it’s worth noting that nepotism is now hitting closer to home — namely at how it can get teenagers to be in charge of political parties.  Specifically, Benazir Bhutto’s 19 year-old son Bilawal will become the leader of the PPP.  A great sign for teenage equality?  Is Pakistan more progressive for the young than America?  The Time article discusses Bilawal’s qualification for being head of the party - not only is only 1.5 years older than me, but he also “attended the Rashid School for Boys, serving as Vice President of the school’s student council.”  Now that’s some experience.

Levels of Responsibility

While Atrios is showing the correct instincts in criticizing the implicit slut shaming reaction much of the media is having to Jamie Lynn Spears’ pregnancy, I think he wrong in saying that just because teenage sex is perfectly normal behavior that we shouldn’t condemn, it’s wrong to describe teen pregnancy as irresponsible. I simply can not believe that a wealthy 16 year old girl working is Los Angeles is ignorant of contraception or the morning after pill. Same goes for her 19 year old boyfriend, surely he could have been more responsible. Bottom line: teenage sex is fine and shouldn’t be condemned, getting inadvertently pregnant at 16 certainly raises questions about the responsibility and maturity of Jamie Lynn and her baby daddy.

Annika at Campus Progress also has a good post about the Jamie Lynn affair.

Boys, Girls and Math

Scientific American has what appears to be the definitive article on gender differences in mathematical ability and pursuing science careers. It’s full of interesting data, one of which is a confirmation of a suspicion I and many others had about male and female math ability: that boys aren’t necssarily better at math, it’s just that their ability is more spread out (has a greater standard deviation). This means that there are more boys are the best at math, while there are more girls in the pretty good to very-but-not-amazingly good range. Another way of saying this is that the boys who are best, among boys, at math are better than the top girls (and that the boys who are worst at math are worse than the worst girls). There’s no need to despair, or to think that these differences in the distributions are necessarily fixed. In fact, the number of girl “math wizards” has been going up a lot in the past 20 years:

Although it has drawn little media coverage, dramatic changes have been occurring among these junior math wizards: the relative number of girls among them has been soaring. The ratio of boys to girls, first observed at 13 to 1 in the 1980s, has been dropping steadily and is now only about 3 to 1. During the same period the number of women in a few other scientific fields has surged. In the U.S., women now make up half of new medical school graduates and 75 percent of recent veterinary school graduates. We cannot identify any single cause for the increase in the number of women entering these formerly male-dominated fields, because multiple changes have occurred in society over the past several decades.

This period coincides with a trend of special programs and mentoring to encourage girls to take higher-level math and science courses. And direct evidence exists that specifically targeted training could boost female performance even further. A special course created by engineering professor Sheryl A. Sorby and mathematics education specialist Beverly J. Baartmans at Michigan Technological University, for example, targeted improvement in visuospatial skills. All first-year engineering students with low scores on a test of this ability were encouraged to enroll in the course. This enrollment resulted in improved performance in subsequent graphics courses by these students and better retention in engineering programs, which suggests that the effects persisted over time and were of at least some practical significance for both women and men.

Y’all should read the whole thing. Like so much research about genetic bases for sex differences, there’s a lot we don’t know and it’s nearly impossible to figure out what extent these differences are the result of a variety of social factors and to what extend they can be explained by genetic/physiological dimorphism. What we do know, however, is that the current gender disparities in science careers can not be fully explained by innate differences, but instead reflects some open discrimination, the challenges of having a family, subconscious discrimination against women and a variety of remediable factors.

Cross-posted on campusprogress.org/blog

Which Bigotry?

Andrew Sullivan notes the encouraging news that John Kerry and Gordon Smith are pushing a resolution to remove the HIV travel ban on foreigners, a policy shared by Libya, Sudan and Saudi Arabia.  He claims that Smith is ” a Republican who has long since shown that conservatism and bigotry are not one and the same.”  I know Sullivan reads Yglesias  everyday, so maybe he should read up on Smith’s praising Trent Lott’s nostalgic recalling of Strom Thurmond’s segregationist presidential campaign.  Because, you know, it’s impossible for someone to be progressive on gay rights and not really care all that much about being insensitive towards black people

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.

The Terror Dream And Counterfactuals

First of all, whatever the merits of The Terror Dream and Michicko Kakatuni’s scathing review, would it hurt TPM Cafe so much to invite someone to the bookclub who doesn’t write a post saying, essentially “Oh, Faludi, you’re just so right, allow me to go on for the next 1000 words celebrating your rightness”?  That’s just boring for us readers.  But let’s get on to the substance.  It’s all below the fold.

What Kind Of Hillary Hater Are You?

Adele Stan has a piece in TAP that’s either quite banal or extremely insulting, depending on how you read it.  She breaks down “Hillary Haters” into five categories of people who oppose a Clinton nomination/presidency — all for reasons that reflect on these imagined people themselves rather than for any reason why Hillary might not be the best nominee or president.

I guess my question for Stan is what constitutes a “Hillary Hater” — as opposed to someone, like me, who thinks that Clinton simply isn’t the best or most electable nominee that the Democrats have to offer.  I think that Obama’s foreign policy is substantially different from Clinton’s — especially when comparing their adivisors — thus I’m leaning towards him.  Does this make me one of the “Hippies Betrayed”?

Or perhaps since I worry about her high negatives (whose impact I think are overstated, but it’s certainly a problem Obama doesn’t have) I am one of those awful passive agressive folks in the “Electability Crowd” who, according to Stan, are just vaguely alluding to a “woman”, generally defined, not being able to get elected president.  Of course, us electability folks point to why Clinton particularly isn’t liked, not evasive crap about why women in general can’t get elected.

Stan to have written the piece from the perspective that Clinton should be elected and then went on to show why all those who oppose her are doing so because of their own personal issues. By casting the entire Clinton campaign and opposition to it as all on the level of symbolism as opposed to substance, she does a massive disservice to all of us who, after checking for those biases she describes, just don’t think Clinton is the best nominee.

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.

More Than A Symbol

Piny of Feministe has a long, thorough and convincing response to my argument that dropping transgendered from ENDA is an acceptable, ultimately beneficial compromise. His main point - that excluding transgendered is betrayal seems to be contradictory. If gays and the transgendered were such close allies, why would they splinter so easily? This is also an argument for why Frank’s abandonment of the transgendered — who have been strong allies of the gay rights movement since day one, is all the more painful. The crux of our disagreement, however, is whether this bill is mostly symbolic or whether in its circumscribed form, it has a real chance of passing.

If it has zero chance of being signed, than excluding the transgendered is clearly an offensive betrayal. If, however, it does have a real shot of passing, then pragmatism may be the order of the day. Pelosi and Frank clearly think the bill in it’s amended form has a shot of passing and being signed — 56 percent of American support full employment opportunities for gays and lesbians — or else they wouldn’t make this compromise. As Minipunditpoints out, ENDA could be attached to an appropriations bill the president has to sign anyway, thus challenging him to provoke a veto fight. If that course of action isn’t as much a possibility if ENDA is in its full form, that’s a reason why the amended version is preferable.

It’s unfortunate that we are even having this discussion, but pushing for LGBT rights never won any elections, so incrementalism will always be a large component of any legislative or political LGBT struggle. Of course, I should recognize that as a straight born-male, I will not be personally affected by how ENDA is amended or whether it is passed at all. Piny, being a transguy himself, clearly comes at this issue from a radically different perspective, so I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Arguing Against Myself

Yes, I said before that passing an ENDA without explicit protections for the transgendered is a good idea.  But here’s a good argument as to why it isn’t.

The Democrats passing — and getting signed — any ENDA is going to be tough. The reason that transgendered are being dropped from the bill is because it would be controversial with a public that is broadly sympathetic to gay rights.  This means that ENDA would have to be changed, specifically and explicitly, to include the transgendered at some time in the future.  When that future is — if we can convince enough moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats — is unclear.  Even with a Democratic president and Democratic majorities, it would difficult to pass a single bill to amend already socially liberal legislation to make it even further to the left.  So maybe transgendered employment protections need to piggyback on more popular and broadly acceptable ones.

So, there is a good argument for trying to get it all done at once.  I still come out on the incrementalist side, because as Mike points out, “A compromise here would actually speed the process anyway for everyone concerned; once everybody sees the world won’t end if gays are treated like people, that makes it that much easier to do the same for transgendered persons.”

Nondiscrimination for Some, For Now

Jill at Feministe explores the divisions in the progressive community over the Employee Non Discrimination Act and whether it should be supported despite the fact that transgender individuals have been removed from the bill’s protection:

There’s an ongoing debate in progressive and LGBT communities about whether or not Congress should pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), a bill that would make it illegal for employers to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.
Yes, that’s right: Unless you live in a state with very good anti-discrimination legislation, your employer can terminate you for the sole offense of being gay, lesbian or transgender. And there’s no federal law against it.
Bush will likely veto the bill, but it’s nonetheless an important step. Progressives, though, are divided over a revised version of the bill that omits gender identity from the protected classes. So, should ENDA pass, you can no longer be terminated from your job because you’re gay. But you can be terminated for being transgender, or for not conforming to a traditionally gendered appearance.
…
Pragmatism matters. But throwing an entire group of people under the bus because it’s politically expedient is not an option. And as Pam emphasizes, this bill is largely symbolic. If Democrats can’t even get it together for a bill that has no chance of becoming law, how are they going to get the job done when they actually have power?

I’ll associate myself with Minipundit’s thoughts on this issue:

Adding transgendered persons to the ENDA is obviously a good idea on policy grounds. But the plain fact of the matter is that acceptance of gays and lesbians has come much further than the acceptance of transgendered persons. It’s awful, but it’s true. Tacking on transgendered rights could alienate conservative Democrats and center-right Republicans who might vote for a sexual orientation-only ENDA, and would give Bush more of a leg to stand on in the public eye if he picked a fight over the matter. Again, it’s disgusting, but it’s something we have to deal with, and for the time being non-discimination rights for gays, lesbians, and bisexuals is better than nothing. Far from perfect, but better than nothing.

I think a little historical perspective is necessary here. When Loving vs Virginia was decided in 1969, did it “throw gays under the bus” when it only established protections for interracial marriages? No, it instead was a huge step forward for equality and laid the groundwork for the push for gay marriage, which came more than 30 years later. Hopefully, employment protections for the transgendered won’t come around in 30 years, but ENDA — in its current form — is still a large step forward that should be supported by all of those who care about equality and substantive rights for sexual minorities.

UPDATE:  Welcome femniste readers.  I really liked piny’s post and I have my own rebuttal here.  I also outlined some arguments why keeping ENDA intact and not dropping the transgendered is a good idea here.

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.

Fall Fecundity

One of the great things about Facebook is that it tells you when a friend’s birthday is coming up.  My informal observations have shown that there’s a big spike in mid to late September.  I’m used to having 1 or 2 birthdays everyday among my friends, but in the past weeks I’ve seen many more 4,5 or 6 person birthdays.  It turns out that September and August really are the most fecund months.  My own naive hypothesis is that the influx of births has something to do with the Christmas-New Years run 9 months before…

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.

How Much Time Should She Do?

A question that has long riled pro-choicers like myself - if abortion really is the equivalent of murder, then how much time should the woman who gets the abortion do? - has finally been dragged into the spotlight by Anna Quindlen. And the National Review has put together a symposium of pro-lifers to explain their positions. It should be noted that NRO deserves some props for putting this together - these debates are always better when the positions of both sides are actually recorded.

My quick reading of the symposium indicates that none of the people really grapple with the question to its logical extreme. Instead, the symposium is a combination of history on why women traditionally haven’t been considered perpetrators, haranguing about the evils of the “for profit” “abortion industry, and pragmatic concerns about why making women serve time wouldn’t be popular or advance the ends of the pro-life movement. I’m not going to comb through every entry and argue with it - just note that many of the entries directly traffic in the infantilizing rhetoric that so irritates feminists - that the women are the “second victim” of the abortion.

The problem of this entire exercise for us pro choicers, with all the self congratulation of catching pro-lifers at their nadir of illogic and misogyny, is that it’s totally futile. The only people who look at women as being fully culpable in getting an abortion are pro-choice anyway, so being able to go “hah! you’re infantilizing women!” isn’t going to embarrass pro-lifers very much or get them to reconsider their views. Moreover, if they all take the perspective that women are always pressured into abortion by the “abortion industry” and evil doctors, then the argument that women are the “second victim” will not seem at all inconsistent with calling abortion murder. If we could just accept that pro lifers think that abortion is murder, like real murder of people AND many have infantilizing views of the women who actually get abortion - and they don’t view this as inconsistent or illogical, the choice movement would be much better off.

So great, we caught the pro-lifers caught up in their own bullshit, now what?

PS - Tom McCluskey, the PR man for the Family Research Council, clearly doesn’t know his anecdotes:

Anna Quindlen’s smug musings remind me of the befuddled New York socialite who, after Ronald Reagan’s win in 1980 said, “But I don’t know anyone who voted for him!”

I doubt McCluskey actually ever spoke to anyone who meets that profile and said anything like that - so he’s clearly referring to the apocryphal quote traditionally attributed to film critic Pauline Kael after Nixon’s reelection in 1972:

“I can’t understand how Nixon could have won: no one I know voted for him.”

Of course, there’s no record of Kael - or Susan Sontag or Joan Didion or Katherine Graham - ever actually saying this. The closest to the quote was this by Kael, “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”

Dana Goldstein…

speaks the truth.   Some days I dream about a Democratic president giving a fiery speech about how bad the Hyde amendment is - something that will never happen if the entire abortion issue is “de-politicized” It should be noted that “de-politicization” is basically a strategy that protects abortion rights for those who need them least - wealthy, older women - while leaving younger, poor women out to dry.