Fiat Lux

I was going to put an even nastier title to this post but I don't want this blog to get into any smut filters. In short, the wackoes in Berkeley are at it again - they want to decriminalize prostitution.

I consider myself to be a feminist, but I cannot understand how this is a "woman's issue". It seems to me that the people who are going to benefit most by the decriminalization of prostitution are the pimps, who will not have to worry about their 'stable' getting busted and therefore be able to make more money for them, and of course the customers, who will be able to buy as much sex as they want without having to worry about police sting operations.

Backers of the measure insist that prostitution is a societal mainstay, a commodity in perennial demand. Therefore, it should be treated like any other job and have unions, government workplace protections, fair wages, insurance and legal recourse for workers who face abuse or civil rights violations

What planet are these people on? Women who go into the sex trade don't do it becuse it's a 'good job' or has the potential to be one. They do it because for whatever combination of reasons (poor self-esteem, bad coping skills, lack of education, drug addiction, etc) they can't do anything else. What we should be doing is helping prosititues get the skills and self-confidence they need to stop being prostitiutes, not helping them stay in the sex trade.

A friend of mine recently pointed out that abortion is all-but unavailable already in large portions of America; not due to anti-abortion laws, but because nobody is choosing to provice that service. Is birth control next?

It's a long article and one that does not lend itself to easy pulling of quotes. Here's the gist, though:

Some pharmacists, however, disagree and refuse on moral grounds to fill prescriptions for contraceptives. And states from Rhode Island to Washington have proposed laws that would protect such decisions.

Mississippi enacted a sweeping statute that went into effect in July that allows health care providers, including pharmacists, to not participate in procedures that go against their conscience. South Dakota and Arkansas already had laws that protect a pharmacist's right to refuse to dispense medicines. Ten other states considered similar bills this year.

The American Pharmacists Association, with 50,000 members, has a policy that says druggists can refuse to fill prescriptions if they object on moral grounds, but they must make arrangements so a patient can still get the pills. Yet some pharmacists have refused to hand the prescription to another druggist to fill.

No need to change any laws - just get enough phramacists to refuse to fill perscirtions, and poof! Away goes the ability of women to get access to one of the easiest and most effective methods of birth control.

I'm over the initial wave of reaction from Election Day, but this is the kind of news that makes me think the apocalyptic fears of those first 48 hours are not, in fact, so far off base. It's bad enough that Roe v Wade is under attack, but if we have to fight for Griswold too, it's really, really bad.

Apropos of yesterday's post on access to birth control pills, Atrios chimes in with some very good points about why the Democratic party should have no problem finding common ground with many anti-abortion folks:

Look, if you have a problem with abortion and want to find ways to reduce them rather than outlaw them, come on board. I for one don't much care about reducing abortions as a policy goal in and of itself, but I do care about reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies. And, as long as the pro-life right is also battling contraceptive availability, fighting against OTC access to the "morning after" pill, which really isn't an abortaficient (or, to the extent than it is, should be much less offensive than the consequences of IVF procedures), fighting for laws allowing pharmacists to refuse to prescribe the pill (which is also prescribed for legitimate medical reasons other than to stop pregnancy), destroying sex education, and supporting economic policies which increase poverty, then it seems like supporting Democrats are the way to go.

If your pro-lifeness is wrapped up in a general anti-sex religious agenda, then stick with the Republicans.

The problem, of course, is that this is way too common-sense an approach and thus will get totally overlooked.

I started reading another excellent Digby post on the Bill of Rights but before I could finish it I got so pissed off I had to stop and say something. I've seen this meme (that Roe v Wade getting overturned would somehow be a good thing) a few times on blogs and have even heard it from friends whose opinion I respect, but the more I see it the more I think we need to smack some sense into the people saying it.

If Roe v Wade goes down it is not in any way, shape, or form a good thing. Yes, I am aware of the arguments that it is bad law. Well, I am not a lawyer, so I don't care. It's what we've got and given the tenor of the times right now it is all we're likely to get for quite some time.

The general argument for Roe v Wade to go down, is:

You and I realize that it just hurts the masses to not have access [to abortion], but the masses apparently don't appreciate this. So jolt them out of their apathy! I'M not going to die in a back alley abortion. But maybe if the daughters of some of these self-righteous bastards who want to impose their morality on the rest of the work DIE in back alley abortions, they'll change their tunes! Because if they criminalize them, women will die.

But here's the thing -- abortion is already virtually unavailable through large stretches of red America, and even in the more rural sections of Blue states. (87% of counties in America do not have even one abortion provider.) So for us to sit here in the 'safe' zones and talk as if abortion rights will suddenly be taken away is just short-sighted. Abortion is virtually gone in much of America unless you're geographically lucky or have the cash to travel. The overturn of Roe v Wade will not significantly affect large chunks of America's access to abortion. We already lost that battle. What it will do is open the door for other, more insidious, types of legislation.

I've talked previously about issues like pharmacists who refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control pills because they believe they can be abortifacents. If Roe v Wade goes down, what is there to stop legislation from criminalizing birth control pills in some states, or god forbid, even Federal legislation?

In short, how far into the pit do we need to go before it starts to really hurt privileged liberal self-interest?

Oh, and by the way, lack of access to abortion and birth control is a much bigger issue than "just" the rights of women (seeing as snot-nosed kids like Matt Yglesias seem to think it's OK to let those slide). If you're young and pregnant and can't get an abortion, the chance you have of getting ahead and finding well-paid work is pretty much shot to hell. It's possible to get the education and skills necessary for well-paying jobs when you're raising one or more kids on little money and probably without a spouse. But the vast majority of people in that situation are going to be so busy, tired, strapped for cash, and stressed that they will not get out of the low income trap they are stuck in. Ever.

That doesn't bode well for either their future, or for America's.

So please, stop thinking that Roe v Wade is something we can afford to give up in our fight to "reclaim" America. It isn't.

When I first heard about this I thought it was a hoax, but it seems to be true. Apparently forced prostitution is not just for third-world countries.

A 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing "sexual services'' at a brothel in Berlin faces possible cuts to her unemployment benefit under laws introduced this year.

Prostitution was legalised in Germany just over two years ago and brothel owners � who must pay tax and employee health insurance � were granted access to official databases of jobseekers.

The waitress, an unemployed information technology professional, had said that she was willing to work in a bar at night and had worked in a cafe.

She received a letter from the job centre telling her that an employer was interested in her "profile'' and that she should ring them. Only on doing so did the woman, who has not been identified for legal reasons, realise that she was calling a brothel.

Under Germany's welfare reforms, any woman under 55 who has been out of work for more than a year can be forced to take an available job � including in the sex industry � or lose her unemployment benefit. Last month German unemployment rose for the 11th consecutive month to 4.5 million, taking the number out of work to its highest since reunification in 1990.

The government had considered making brothels an exception on moral grounds, but decided that it would be too difficult to distinguish them from bars. As a result, job centres must treat employers looking for a prostitute in the same way as those looking for a dental nurse.

In short, if you're unemployed, female and under 55, you too can be forced into prostitution in Germany! I wonder, if you were married, would your husband have the right to object?

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SIDE NOTE: This thread is likely going to get comments and track-backs locked within 72 hours to prevent it from being flooded by comment spammers.

There's another flurry in the recurring cycle of "where are all the female political bloggers" going on this week, fed by a couple of posts at Kevin Drum's site.

I don't think there's some sort of deliberate conspiracy on the part of Kevin Drum and his pals to keep female bloggers out of their blogrolls. But I do think there's a particular blindness that left-leaning men enagage in. I believe they generally do care about womens' issues and want to see women playing a more active and vocal role in the general discourse. But simultaneously, they don't realize that their inaction is not helping that day come to pass.

Despite decades having passed since "the feminist revovlution", this is still much more of a man's world than it is an egalitarian one. Men in positions of authority, like the top bloggers, need to realize that they have to actually do something to help change the status quo.

I just posted a suggestion on Ezra Klein's site to this end, and I'm going to repost it here:

How about creating a new mini-blogroll on your front page. Update it regularly. In it, you link to bloggers who ought to have better recognition but for whatever reason, don't get it. And make a point of being diverse in your linking. To make the workload manageable, I'd suggest updates every 4 to 6 weeks and no more than 5 to 7 blogs listed in the blogroll.

Even better, try to get one or two of the other big-name Lefty bloggers to do the same thing.

I'm not the only person to make this suggestion. Several people said more or less the same thing in the comments to Kevin Drum's post. Ultimately, actions speak louder than words. Maybe the guys will take some steps to show they do walk the walk when it comes to advancing women. Or maybe deep down they really are a bunch of sexist pigs. Let's see what happens.

Andrea Dworkin, dead at age 58.

I can't say that I agree with some of her more extreme positions on the relationships between men and women, but she made some highly valid points about how pornography dehumanizes women in the eyes of men. And I have a lot of respect for the courage it took for her to step up and talk about these issues, despite decades of being decried as a man-hating lesbian and worse.

A number of female bloggers have rolled up their sleeves, dug in, and done the hard work necessary to get a conference off the ground. BlogHer will be held in nearby Santa Clara in late July of this year. Kudos to them for doing the work, but I won't be there.

It's a curious place to be for someone who considers herself a feminist. Part of me feels that I ought to go to show support for fellow women bloggers, but I can't summon any enthusiasm at all for the event. Perhaps it is because after having spent the better part of a decade working in the technology world, the concept of "wow, let's have an event where all the techie women can get together" has lost its freshness for me.

But even more than that, I think it is because I resist being labeled as a "woman blogger". I am a woman, and I have a blog. But Fiat Lux is not a "woman's blog" any more than it is a "Jewish blog" or even a "political blog". It's just MY blog.

I write about some women's issues, and some Jewish issues, and some political issues, because all of those things interest me. But I strongly resent being pigeon-holed into a specific category of blog based on my gender, religion, or choice of subject matter. Above all else, this is a personal blog. As Walt Whitman said,

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then. I contradict myself.
I am large. I contain multitudes.

Still, I wish the BlogHer women good luck.

Kevin Drum blogs today about being invited to attend BlogHer, and Chris Nolan encourages him to attend. So far so good. But then Chris veers off the deep end and I have to ask, what was she thinking?

If you are a man who like code and software and things that plug in, and is perhaps having trouble finding a girl who likes Java (and knows it's not just a coffee) and undersands your inner Geek, this might be the PERFECT place for you to spend a summer afternoon.

The ratio at most tech conferences is hugely biased toward men that will assuredly not be the case here.

I'm not planning on going to BlogHer (my reasons why are here), but I find that approach rather demeaning. Not "come to BlogHer to learn more about technology, politics, developing a niche blog, blogging for business and woman's issues, among other things, and have fun too!" Nope, it's flat out, "Come to BlogHer to try and get a date." And then the official BlogHer weblog posted her comments, in an approving manner.

You'd think after all this time that we could do better.

All that said, knowing that Kevin is going does tempt me somewhat to go despite my previous post. I'd like to meet him. And looking over the evolving agenda, I see they've toned the mommy focus down somewhat (a plus for those of us who are childfree). And as a student, I can get in for a nice low price. So call me on the fence, but still inclined towards "no".

Apparently this has just fallen off the Yahoo 'Most Emailed" list , so by now the story of the Duggler family and their 16 children has already made the rounds. I couldn't resist crunching the numbers on Michelle Duggar, though.

According to the AP report, she is 39, just gave birth to her 16th child, and had her first child when she was 21. Two pregnancies resulted in twins.

So over the course of 18 years, she's had 14 pregnancies. Assuming each pregnancy ran the full 40-week term, she's spent 560 of the last 936 weeks pregnant. That's 59.8% of her adult life.

In other words, she's spent more of her adult life pregnant than not.

Wow.

Scary.

"Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?" - best. response. ever.

The Goddess Echinde points this out:

Gilead, the wingnut world of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, is also the name of a company which owns the rights to Tamiflu.

I read that book back in college & have no idea where my copy went. Might be worth re-reading again.

The Goddess Echinde has been on a roll lately despite having had Internet access issues. I found this segment particularly funny:

The third paradox I want to write about is the all-powerfulness and insignificance of feminism. Feminists, those evil, hairy and manless shrews. They are all-powerful. They have destroyed everything that we hold dear: the family, the military, the labor markets, the Western civilization. Their power is felt everywhere, though hidden from sight. Even when conservatives run this country they are really just abject slaves of feminists. Pick any crime you can think of, and feminists are the guilty party. They are even to blame for blow jobs! Scary, scary feminists! Tremble, you poor wingnuts.

But at the same time feminists are nothing! Nobody takes them seriously! They are a sorry lot, manless and ugly and nobody invited them to the prom. And they haven't gotten laid for centuries.

Besides all that, feminism is deader than the doornail. NO! It's all over the place, swarming upon us, drowning out the the strong voices of masculinity, weakening and corrupting the culture! Making Men into Mice! NO! Feminists are the laughing-stock everywhere. Nobody takes them seriously. Nature is not a feminist and nature can't be denied! God is not a feminist and God can't be denied! The feminist experiment is therefore doomed to failure but never stop fighting it, because if you do they might win!

The memory of the righteous is a blessing.

RIP Betty Friedan.

In the racial, political and sexual conflicts of the 1960s and '70s, Friedan's was one of the most commanding voices and recognizable presences in the women's movement.

As a founder and first president of the National Organization for Women in 1966, she staked out positions that seemed extreme at the time on such issues as abortion, sex-neutral help-wanted ads, equal pay, promotion opportunities and maternity leave.

My copy of The Feminine Mystique is about 20 years old now. Its pages are getting discolored and the spine is bent and cracked. And what bothers me most is, when you pick it up and read it some 40+ years after it was written, how little some things have changed since then.

We've made tremendous strides in women's rights since 1963, but there is still a long, long way to go. I'm very grateful to Friedan for the work she did in laying out the path.

UPDATE 2/5: Curious as to what I mean when I talk about how little has changed? Go read chapter 9 of The Feminine Mystique, 'The Sexual Sell'.

Three states have ruled that a Federal law banning late-term abortions is unconstitutional, but SCOTUS has decided they need to look at the case as well. Uh oh. That doesn't bode well.

And Shakes delivers a nice smackdown in response:

The big question, of course, is what is the point of ramming through this legislation [that restricts abortion] without a provision that allows it in cases where the mother�s life it as risk? And the obvious answer is that anti-choicers don�t trust women and their doctors to make that decision honestly�a position which pulls back the curtain on their �pro-life� Emerald City and reveals the contempt for life they actually have, in spite of their claims to the contrary. Only a person who has no respect whatsoever for human life could assume that women would invoke this rationale to terminate a pregnancy for no good reason, that expectant mothers who carry a pregnancy nearly to term would suddenly and randomly change their minds, with as much forethought as one might give to rearranging the living room furniture.

I might suggest that perhaps it's a specific contempt for women's rights and autonomy rather than a lack of respect for life in general, but she could be right. Either way, who cares? The net result is no good at all for women, regardless of the motivation.

Echinde (and Digby) are right on the spot with this. It all gets back to the idea that for so many of these "pro-life" agitators, abortion is not really about pregnancy, it's about punishing women for having sex.

That's made very clear by douchebags like Bill Napoli, a Republican State Senator in South Dakota, who thinks that issues like whether or not you were a virgin when you got raped should even remotely matter as to whether you should be allowed to have an abortion.

This is his idea of reality, by the way. How inconvenient that reality doesn't match up with his foggy memories of past times:

When I was growing up here in the wild west, if a young man got a girl pregnant out of wedlock, they got married, and the whole darned neighborhood was involved in that wedding. I mean, you just didn't allow that sort of thing to happen, you know? I mean, they wanted that child to be brought up in a home with two parents, you know, that whole story. And so I happen to believe that can happen again.....I don't think we're so far beyond that, that we can't go back to that.

Each game of chess means there's one less Variation left to be played Each day got through means one or two Less mistakes remain to be made...

Chess (Anderson, Ulvaeus, Rice)

Today's actions were just one early move in the bigger chess match that is abortion rights in America today. I'm not surprised at the latest burst of outrage around the blogs, but remember the big picture here, gang. South Dakota Governor Mike Rounds' signing the bill was a forgone conclusion. It doesn't start to get interesting until someone -- presumably Planned Parenthood -- files their challenge to the law and the courts get into gear.

This is chess -- think a few moves ahead. Not only is this law on the fast track to SCOTUS, but in addition, it's also nicely timed for the 2006 congressional election cycle. You can bet your bootie that congressional candidates all across the country are going to be asked to weigh in on their beliefs about women's reproductive rights by way of their comments on this case.

So, vent your spleen all you like, but save some energy for the battles to come, becasue come they will. And if you can, consider tossing some $ to Planned Parenthood; they're going to need it.

Time, by the way, has an interesting look at this issue. It's worth a read, here's a snippet:

In a country where two thirds of the public does not want to see Roe vs. Wade overturned, but nearly as many favor stricter limits on abortion, pragmatic abortion opponents have pushed for parental notification laws, waiting periods, restrictions on late-term abortions: The strategy was to chip away at Roe to try to shrink it, change its shape, and over time promote a �culture of life� that would view abortion less as a right than a tragedy, perhaps eventually a crime. That gradual approach requires a certain level of hypocrisy�or at least a willing suspension of moral belief�because if you truly equate abortion with murder, it�s hard to settle for slowing it down rather than stopping it altogether, right away: the Purist approach.

Nice to see an article that take a real look at this issue outside of the typical platitudes.

I've said this before, but something in a comment thread over at Shakes' place got me going enough to want to say it again.

Thread commenter Eric said:

once Roe is overturned, you are going to see a profound shift in the political landscape as women realize that their own civil, and reproductive, rights are being supressed by male legislatures. The Democrats will then have a strong rallying cry, and perhaps an infusion of support by women as they realize the difficulties, hardships, and dangers of back ally abortions.

Overturning Roe will be the turning point in the destruction of the religious wing-nut's power over the Republican Party.

This attitude infuriates me. It is just as odious an argument for progressives to make as it is for the wingnuts who sit safely behind their keyboards, cheering on the Iraq war. The bottom line for both types is: It's all good as long as someone else does the dying.

Progressive who argue this line of reasoning are generally sitting safely in deep-blue states or are financially well-off in red states. The only reason they consider the overturn of Roe to be an acceptable turn of events is because they assume that they will be able to insulate themselves from the casualties.

My question to them is: How many deaths do you consider to be "acceptable losses" before it happens?

And a few follow-ups: What if it was not some anonymous women in Red states who had to do the dying for Roe? Are you willing to let your wife / daughters / sisters / cousins / friends be the ones who have to bleed out on their kitchen floors or die from massive infections? And if you're not, then why are those other women's lives expendable?

In short, isn't that the exact thing we're fighting against?

Scott and I were chatting tonight, and he must have noticed the distinct lack of happiness in my voice, because he asked me what was wrong.

"This", I said.

"I can't believe we have to do this all over again. It's one thing to fight for rights you don't already have, but I hate it that now we have to go out and fight for rights we've already got," I said.

"They don't consider it over until they've won, honey," he said. "They started fighting with Roe and they've kept on fighting, and they're going to keep it up until they've gotten rid of Roe."

"Yeah," I sighed. "You're right. But I still hate it."

Digby is of a similar mind.

They really mean it. This is no bullshit. There is no downside to overturning Roe for them --- and if there is, they don't care. If they want to overturn Griswald, they'll do that too. They fought the gun control fight when people were freaking out over crime in the streets and political assassinations. Conservative absolutists don't give up just because liberals get up-in-arms.

[snip]

But more than anything else we must accept the fact that these people are serious. They want to outlaw abortion and they want to curtail people's access to birth control. They aren't lying. And as they've shown with gun rights, they are in it for the long haul. We must be just a stubborn as they are and seek to wear them down rather than let them wear us down.

Digby and Scott are right. We need to fight. The Right is smelling blood in the water on all aspects of women's reproductive self-determination, and they think they are closing in for the kill. We cannot let that happen.

Still, I want to note how much it completely sucks that we have to go back and fight this battle All. Over. Again.

Once should have been enough.

By way of World of Crap. The 'best' stuff is the second part of the piece, where WoC stops going into the shenanigans of Randall Terry and examines the latest sexist nuttery to come out of Wingnut World: sexual purity lockets.

"This locket and what it stands for is the sentinel of your heart. Here's why: from this day forward you will wear this locket as often as you wish. It will send the statement that you are waiting for your husband. It is more than that though, Sue. It has a lock on it. It can only be opened with this key. I will guard the key until your wedding. On that day, I will present the key to my little girl's heart to your husband. He will take the key and open the locket, the only one ever to do so."

As WoC says, nothing Freudian going on here, move right along...

Digby and Echinde have already weighed in on this, but I'd just like to add my sense of how uttery sick and creepy I find this overwhelming paternal interest in a daughter's sexuality. It takes the normal parental impulse to protect their child and pole-vaults right over into the land of obsession and even incest.

And, of course, there's who whole "why only girls?" angle. It's not news that many religious zealots are obsessively focused on women's sexual purity. As Echinde put it:

The only difference from the past is that the wingnuts can't possess their daughters in the same legal sense, so they have whittled the process down to the essentials: the sexuality of the woman is not hers but belongs to the male members of her family. This may also be linked to the idea of honor killings and other ways in which women's sexual behavior is interpreted as affecting the esteem of the whole family while men can run loose.

I do not have kids of my own, but I have a number of young female nieces and cousins. I've worried about their possible misadventures, but the thought that they should be literally or symbolically locked up and forbidden to act like people with their own autonomy is revolting.

It's difficult to begin expressing my outrage that our Federal government has issued a new set of guidelines that basically assumes that a woman is nothing more than a walking uterus for more than half of her life.

I took the trouble of reading through not just the WaPo article, but also the actual guidelines. They're infuriating on a lot of levels. For example, take this nice lapse in logic. Even though the report makes a point of stating that: "The risk and the burden of disease is unequally distributed, and a small number of women experience the majority of the pregnancy-related morbidity and mortality (emphasis added)", the guidelines also state that "the target population for preconception health promotion is women, from menarche to menopause, who are capable of having children". So -- which is it? Target at-risk women (which would not be a bad idea, by the way, if it actually included a real plan for those women to get free or low-cost health care, something most of them lack due to the fucked-up health care system in this country) or just assume everyone with a uterus has no clue on how to take care of herself and therefore needs to be told how to stay healthy for the sake of her future children.

Menarch, by the way, occurs around age 12 or 13. So according to these guideline, a 14-year old girl should (among other things):

1) Take folic acid supplements
2) Have a "reproductive life plan"
3) Avoid all hazardous chemicals, lead-based paints, alcohol, caffeine, Accutane, anti-epileptic drugs (tough luck, you female epileptics!), and cat feces
4) Consider herself to be in a state of "preconception" at all times and act accordingly

What's particularly infuriating is not the actual health guidelines. They're standard stuff, really -- excercise, eat right, avoid smoking, etc -- but what pisses me off is that the report believes that the reason women should be enouraged to do these things is not for themselves, but because they MIGHT get pregnant one day and if they did, how terrible it would be for the child if they were not in a perfect state of readiness.

"Why is this such a big deal?" you might ask. "Most women have kids sooner or later, all this is doing is trying to raise awareness about how to do it right." That's true, most women do have kids sooner or later. But why are men almost completely invisible in this equation? To read the report, you'd think that women just wake up one morning and magically find themselves pregnant. It does take two to tango, last I checked. And yet, as Echinde so aptly put it:

Men are never asked to consider themselves as the potential purveyors of healthy goldfish for women's aquaria. Even though medical evidence shows that sperm quality can be affected by workplace exposure to toxins and by smoking and drinking.

And a second pet peeve of mine also gets raised here. This plays perfectly into not only the sexist presumption that women are no more than fragile walking uteruses, but it also ties into the whole Culture of Fear. "Ohmygod! I had a sip of caffeinated coffee! My Baby! Will! Not! Be! Perfect!!!!1!!1!"

Here's a tip, folks: If it were that easy to screw up gestation, the human race would never have gotten this far. Yes, not every baby is perfect. Bad things can happen. But you can do everything perfectly, and still have a problem, and you can do a ton of stuff wrong, and end up with a healthy baby.

But that's a secondary issue next to the larger one, which is (not surprisingly) completely absent from the report. Birth control. You'd think that amidst all this great advice about how to be a perfect incubator, the CDC might say something about educating women on proper uses of contraception, so that those unplanned pregnancies they're so worried about might instead be planned ones, right? Nope. The only mention of contraception happens in the section devoted to "high risk" behaviors, such as the consumption of alcohol and drugs. Brilliant.

I could rant on some more, but this is long and disjointed enough for one night.

On a lighter note, I tried the bit about "Honey, the CDC says I shouldn't be cleaning the cat's litter box becasuse I'm in a state of preconception," on Scott tonight. It didn't work.

Before the topic of BJ's completely falls off the radar, I'd like to note that the whole kerfluffle over what goes on in the bedroom of two consenting adults generated orders of magnitude more heat and light this weekend than the fact that Louisiana now has an anti-abortion law that's nearly as stringent as the one in South Dakota. And I didn't post about it either, which makes me just as bad, I know. But then, I've never set up to be an officially 'feminist' weblog.

And as I was mulling over what I might say in a post about why, 20 years after first enthusiastically reading Betty Friedan and Adrienne Rich I don't always feel comfortable calling myself a feminist, Echinde put up a long post about the Working Mommy Wars and related issues. It gave me some clarity.

It's been 40+ years since the First Wave and we're still stuck on basic issues like the right of a woman to decide her own path in life without being shamed? Women still struggle with discrimination in the workplace, don't get paid as much as men do, and generally have a much harder time achieving economic security. Why are we worrying about who does what to whom in the bedroom when these much more important issues are still nowhere close to being resolved?

Why do I consider economic issues to be a primary focus for feminism? Because as so many women have discovered, if you don't have the ability to earn wages sufficient to keep a roof over your head and food on your table, then you don't have the autonomy to make your own life choices. And to me, that is the essence of feminism -- the belief that women should be just as able to set and steer their own life's course as men are. Without that freedom, the rest is meaningless.

If the Great BJ War has taught us anything, it's that even the most intelligent and self-aware women are not going to make the same choices in their lives. The problem lies when people, for whatever reason, think that not only are they are better able to decide what another person should or should not do, but that they have a better understanding of the underlying emotions and motivations that go into the choice. And what's worse is that much of the shaming comes not from "The Patriarchy" but from other women.

I won't argue with the fact that it's possible for a disinterested party to make a 'better' decision than someone caught up in the middle of a given situation, but when you start saying that a person is not feeling what they say they are feeling, then I draw a line. When last I checked, telepathy didn't work very well. Even psychotherapy isn't totally effective. To assert that an outsider better knows what is going on in a person's mind from a cursory examination of their words or actions goes directly against my belief that personal autonomy is what feminism is about.

To get around this little issue, some feminists have employed Engels' concept of "false consciousness," whereby the person is told that she is unaware of her real motives and is therefore incapable of correctly understanding the situation. (Many of them, I suspect, are not aware of the Marxist roots of this concept.) It's a great tool when you're trying to impose your beliefs onto someone else, because it creates a no-win situation for the person being accused of false consciousness.

I've wandered a bit far afield from my original topic, which was supposed to be about why I'm not comfortable calling myself a feminist these days. Perhaps it's more accurate to say that I don't feel very simpatico with many of today's feminist bloggers. I'm a happily married heterosexual with a ketubah hanging over my bed, after all. True, I didn't change my name when I married and I don't have children, but overall I've made pretty conventional life choices, and I don't regret having done so. I care more about the problems that women as a whole face than I do about the possible impact of patriarchy on my own life.

Call it false consciousness or tell me I'm a tool of the patriarchy for not thinking radically enough, and I and say with all due respect, piss off.

Peru. Here's why:

More than half of all Peruvian women over the age of 15 say they have suffered sexual or physical violence by men during their lifetime -- one of the world's highest rates.

....

Some 51 percent of women in Lima and 69 percent of women in the southern Andean city of Cuzco said they have been victims of sexual or physical violence, [a study by Amnesty International and Peruvian organization Flora Tristan]added.

Indeed, the level of violence surges dramatically in Peru's impoverished rural areas.

In the southern Huancavelica province where 90 percent of the population lives in extreme poverty, the rate of sexual and physical violence against women is ranked as one of the world's worst in a recent study by the World Health Organization.

The good news is that Peru's President-elect Alan Garcia has made it one of his stated goals to try to combat this pervasive violence against women, but it remains to be seen exactly what that will entail and whether it will actually help matters.

This is what we went to war for?

Nearly five years after the ouster of the fundamentalist Taliban regime, President Hamid Karzai plans to breathe new life into a strict Islamic institution that many Afghans were happy to see die: the Amr Bilmaruf va Nahi az Mankar, or literally, "Do the good, don't do the bad."

Last month, Karzai's Cabinet approved a proposal to re-establish the agency also known as the Department for the Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue, whose police under the Taliban beat and imprisoned Afghans for violating Shariah law. For many, the revival of religious cops raises painful memories of ruffians zipping around Kabul in Datsun pickups mainly in search of women and girls who refused to wear the head-to-toe burqa, donned high heels, wore nail polish or walked down city streets without a male relative. Men were cited for sporting short beards, drinking alcohol, working during prayer time, playing chess or listening to nonreligious music.

Update 6:55PM:

Lest it be thought that I am suggesting that idiocy is confined to just one part of the world, how's this for stupid?

British holidaymakers staged an unprecedented mutiny - refusing to allow their flight to take off until two men they feared were terrorists were forcibly removed.

The extraordinary scenes happened after some of the 150 passengers on a Malaga-Manchester flight overheard two men of Asian appearance apparently talking Arabic.

Passengers told cabin crew they feared for their safety and demanded police action.

It's bad enough that we're all treated like potential terrorists every time we get onto an airplane, but now racist passengers also get a say in who gets to fly?

Grrr. First, Forbes.com posts a massively sexist article about how men should steer clear of marrying "career women", but I was at work & couldn't blog about it.

Then I get home & found that Forbes.com had gotten smart (or perhaps their female staff members & subscribers objected loudly enough) and pulled the article offline. I started to blog about it alyway, but somehow Movable Type ate my first version of this blog entry.

So just go read Echinde's summary and takedown.

UPDATE: this Opinionistas piece is really good too.

This isn't totally new news, but it's worth noting:

Madrid's fashion week has turned away underweight models after protests that girls and young women were trying to copy their rail-thin looks and developing eating disorders.

[snip]

The Madrid show is using the body mass index or BMI -- based on weight and height -- to measure models. It has turned away 30 percent of women who took part in the previous event. Medics will be on hand at the September 18-22 show to check models.

And a good thing too.

I've never been a big fan of "holier than thou" doctrinaire types, whether they call themselves Greens, vegans, or feminists.

Shakes summed up the subject very well:

The measure of feminism�s tolerance should not be how well one conforms to any particular aesthetic, but how willing one is to embrace a myriad of aesthetics. A woman who wants nothing more than to be a beautiful bride with 2.5 kids and a suburban estate worthy of Better Homes & Gardens, but also totally digs my personal groove, isn�t my problem. A woman who thinks there�s only one definition of womanhood and one correct way to express it, whether she calls herself a Concerned Woman for America or a feminist, is.

This isn't a new issue; in my long-ago college days we were dealing with the same thing -- not being a lesbian meant I was locked out of the campus women's magazine -- only back then people weren't able to excoriate each other all over the blogosphere about it.

There have been times when I've wondered whether I was doing the right thing by not hiding behind anonymity or pseudonymity on the Internet. Each time I've thought about it, though, I've ultimately decided that if someone were to get so offended by what I put on this blog that they would not want to hire me or allow me to keep a job that I have, then I wouldn't want to work there anyway. My politics are almost boringly mainstream Democratic. Someone who found that objectionable would likely be a serious wingnut, or, since it's no secret that I'm Jewish, an anti-Semite.

And after seeing the latest feminist blog-drama going on regarding threats of "outing" and anonymous blogging, I regret my decisions even less.

I have no beef with people who choose to not reveal their identities online. There are a lot of good reasons for blogging in anonymity. Ultimately, what matters more (at least to me) is the quality of your blogging. However, the trade-off is that anonymous bloggers with a higher degree of visibility -- like Zuzu -- can be subject to pressures that those of us who are less hidden don't have. I have the luxury of not having to deal with those pressures, and I'm glad.

As Deborah said, it's really simple.

It's my body.

I get to decide what happens to it.

End of story.

I'm sure Echinde or some of the other, better bloggers than I out there will have a field day with this:

[Author Laura Session Stepp] writes a letter to mothers and daughters, in which she warns the girls: "Your body is your property. . . . Think about the first home you hope to own. You wouldn't want someone to throw a rock through the front window, would you?"

I've only got two things to say in response.

First off, it's outrageously sexist to suggest that an unmarried woman's body is the property of her future husband, and that sexual activity before marriage devalues her assets. What rock has the author been hiding under?

Next, is that really the best argument she can come up with for why adolescents should delay sexual activity? If so, that's pretty pathetic.

Kathy Dobie, the Washington Post's reviewer of this book, had a good response:

It seems strange to have to state the obvious all over again: ... one's sexuality is not a commodity that, given away too readily and too often, will exhaust or devalue itself.

It's certainly not seen that way for men. A man who's had a lot of sex partners is seen as sophisticated (James Bond, anyone?). A woman who's had a lot of sex partners, on the other hand, is all too often seen as a slut.

And books like this one don't help matters any.

UPDATE 3:10PM
As expected, Echinde has weighed in. Score 1 for my predictive ability. :)

Kathy Sierra writes a blog - Creating Passionate Users - that anybody who is in the business of creating technology products should read. And today she's running scared from a string of death threats and sexually-explicit online harassment.

Misogyny in the technology business is hardly new. And despite considerable advances for a lot of us women in the field, it's still an issue -- for just one fairly tame example, witness some of the comments about women in this thread posted over this past weekend on the widely-read 'Joel on Software' forums. There's plenty more where that came from; I just don't have the stomach to Google up examples right now. It sucks, and it needs to change, although sometimes I wonder if that change will come in my lifetime.

In the unlikely event that you're reading this, Kathy, all I can say is, hold onto your loved ones for support, and keep your chin up. You're right to be angry, and you're right to be afraid. But don't let that fear run your life, either. It just gives the people who do this kind of crap more power. It's like net trolls. They live and gain power by generating response. Ignore them, and they wither on the vine.

That's easy for me to say, of course; it's been more than 8 years since anyone has seriously harassed me online. Plus, I never got death threats, and I didn't have to worry about children. So perhaps her response is the right one for now, or at least for her.

UPDATE 7:11PM

Robert Scoble weighs in:

So, since she doesn’t feel safe. I’m going to stop blogging in support of Kathy, who I consider a friend and someone who’s voice would be dearly missed here. I’ll be back Monday.

The Internet culture is really disgusting. Today when I was on Justin.TV the kinds of things that people were discussing in the chat room there were just totally disgusting and over the top.

We have to fix this culture. For the next week, let’s discuss how.

And, Kathy, Maryam and I love you and are there for you. Don’t let these jerks get you down.

It’s this culture of attacking women that has especially got to stop. I really don’t care if you attack me. I take those attacks in stride. But, whenever I post a video of a female technologist there invariably are snide remarks about body parts and other things that simply wouldn’t happen if the interviewee were a man.

It makes me realize just how ascerbic this industry and culture are toward women. This just makes me ill.

Great response, and I can't say how much I appreciate some A-list recognition that this IS a big problem for women in technology. But taking a week off in support of Kathy? I'm not so sure about that. How about a 'blog against sexism in technology' week instead?

With everything else going on this week, the news of Kitty Carlyle Hart's passing is likely to pass unnoticed, and that's a shame. She was the kind of woman the world needs much more of.

She was known for her grace and charm, but by her own account she was slightly eccentric, a trait she treasured because she believed it gave her a lot of leeway.

She practiced singing every day, exercised every morning (and was the first to tell anyone that she had beautiful legs, which she did) and believed that discipline was the key to life. In her last decades, she became a popular lecturer. She often told her audiences, “With a soupçon of courage and a dash of self-discipline, one can make a small talent go a long way.”

...

“I’m more optimistic, more enthusiastic and I have more energy than ever before,” she said just after her 79th birthday. Energy, she said, came from doing the things she wanted to do.

“You get so tired when you do what other people want you to do,” she said.

I don't usually read The Onion, so I managed to miss this when if first came out, but it's funny as hell. It's also at least a tiny bit appropriate for that lovely Hallmark Holiday known as Mother's Day:

According to a study released Monday, women—once empowered primarily via the assertion of reproductive rights or workplace equality with men—are now empowered by virtually everything the typical woman does.

"From what she eats for breakfast to the way she cleans her home, today's woman lives in a state of near-constant empowerment," said Barbara Klein, professor of women's studies at Oberlin College and director of the study. "As recently as 15 years ago, a woman could only feel empowered by advancing in a male-dominated work world, asserting her own sexual wants and needs, or pushing for a stronger voice in politics. Today, a woman can empower herself through actions as seemingly inconsequential as driving her children to soccer practice or watching the Oxygen network."

Now, time to go call Mom.

Joss Whedon, for those unfamiliar with him, is a successful and well-respected creator of several television series, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly.

So Joss got a look at the Dua Khalil murder video that's made the rounds of the Internet (and no, I am not linking to it, go find it yourself) and got a little upset, saying:

What is wrong with women?

I mean wrong. Physically. Spiritually. Something unnatural, something destructive, something that needs to be corrected.

How did more than half the people in the world come out incorrectly? I have spent a good part of my life trying to do that math, and I’m no closer to a viable equation. And I have yet to find a culture that doesn’t buy into it. Women’s inferiority – in fact, their malevolence -- is as ingrained in American popular culture as it is anywhere they’re sporting burkhas. I find it in movies, I hear it in the jokes of colleagues, I see it plastered on billboards, and not just the ones for horror movies. Women are weak. Women are manipulative. Women are somehow morally unfinished. (Objectification: another tangential rant avoided.) And the logical extension of this line of thinking is that women are, at the very least, expendable.

[snip]

It’s safe to say that I’ve snapped. That something broke, like one of those robots you can conquer with a logical conundrum. All my life I’ve looked at this faulty equation, trying to understand, and I’ve shorted out. I don’t pretend to be a great guy; I know really really well about objectification, trust me. And I’m not for a second going down the “women are saints” route – that just leads to more stone-throwing (and occasional Joan-burning). I just think there is the staggering imbalance in the world that we all just take for granted.

Call me ungrateful, but I have to wonder, why did it take him so long to get to this point?

Whedon is one of the few writers who's been able to write a successful TV series about a strong female protagonist who doesn't end up either dead or pregnant for having sex, a woman for whom rape is impossible. You'd like to think that he's sincere when he says that this is an issue he's thought about for a long time, but it would have been nice if he's applied his massive talents to giving voice to the problem a bit earlier.

This is pretty pathetic: Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary to offer academic program in homemaking. Yes, really:

A description of the homemaking program on the seminary's Web site says it "endeavors to prepare women to model the characteristics of the godly woman as outlined in Scripture.

"This is accomplished through instruction in homemaking skills, developing insights into home and family while continuing to equip women to understand and engage the culture of today."

The whole thing sounds like an expensive way to find a 'suitable' husband more than anything else. If you honestly believe that the role of a woman is to stay home and raise kids, why would you be getting a bachelor's degree in the first place?

To be fair, at least not all Baptists share that college's view on things:

The Rev. Benjamin Cole, pastor of Parkview Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, and a frequent Southern Baptist critic, wrote about the homemaking program on his blog.

"At first it was almost incredible to me," Cole said. "I thought this is not happening. It's quite superfluous to the mission of theological education in Southern Baptist life. It's insulting I would say to many young women training in vital ministry roles.

"It's yet another example of the ridiculous and silly degree to which some Southern Baptists, Southwestern in particular, are trying to return to what they perceive to be biblical gender roles."

Good for Rev. Cole.