Crooked Timber

Megan of From the archives won’t be surprised that this NYT article, claiming that:

One survey, recently reported by the federal government, concluded that men had a median of seven female sex partners. Women had a median of four male sex partners. Another study, by British researchers, stated that men had 12.7 heterosexual partners in their lifetimes and women had 6.5. But there is just one problem, mathematicians say. It is logically impossible for heterosexual men to have more partners on average than heterosexual women. Those survey results cannot be correct.

is already getting play in the blogosphere. The only thing is that it isn’t logically impossible, at least as the author presents it. Ask Andrew Gelman

Jeff’s response: MEDIANS??!! Indeed, there’s no reason the two distributions should have the same median. I gotta say, it’s disappointing that the reporter talked to mathematicians rather than statisticians. (Next time, I’d recommend asking David Dunson for a quote on this sort of thing.) I’m also surprised that they considered that respondents might be lying but not that they might be using different definitions of sex partner. Finally, it’s amusing that the Brits report more sex partners than Americans, contrary to stereotypes.

I thought this news item involved several of those colorful British idioms that I never quite get exactly. But no – these are real birds.

A pair of gay flamingos have adopted an abandoned chick, becoming parents after being together for six years, a British conservation organisation said Monday.

I have been meaning to write an update to my post of last month. When I skimmed the first accounts of the captured British sailors’ time in Iran I was under the impression they had been subjected to full-on mock execution, of the Dostoyevsky type. That is, told they were going to be executed, lined up and blindfolded, etc. Reading more I learned that it was more of a confused situation (still very alarming, no doubt), in which they were blindfolded and cuffed and could hear weapons being cocked. So, not actually torture (and some people pointed this out in the thread at the time.) It was scary as hell, no doubt, and I hope I’m never in that situation, or at least that, if I am, John Derbyshire is there to rush the armed soldiers and bite their throats out. I’m still ready to go nuclear, though, and I actually learned a lot reading that not-flamewar comments thread.

On the other hand, I thought that the comments to Kieran’s post on Megan’s difficult situation were unusually useless for the most part. This from John Quiggin was good, though:
Continue reading “Corrections”

Nora Ephron remarks somewhere that a baby is a hand grenade thrown into the middle of a relationship. But there are a lot of people looking for someone to pull the pin:

So if some men think my urgency for kids is unappealing, FUCK THEM. In the first place, it is not something I can control, neither the wanting nor the fact that maternal age matters, and you can not shame people for what they can’t control. In the second place, they are fooling themselves about having an indefinite period of healthy sperm and energy for young kids and young women willing to be with them.

That second point reminds me of another Ephron line:

Sally: It’s not the same for men. Charlie Chaplin had babies when he was seventy three.
Harry: Yeah, but he was too old to pick them up.

I should note here that this post contains strong language, and thus probably makes the Baby David Broder cry. Consider yourselves warned.

Some time back a reader chastised me for making fun of Ross Douthat. (Hmm, that makes her sound completely insane, but she was actually rather polite in the thread. I promised I would address her points in another post “soon”, but I did not do so because I am fundamentally an indolent, unreliable person.) The complaint Douthat was making is one that is heard a lot in anti-feminist circles, and often in a doubly irritating concern-troll fashion. It boils down to this: sexual liberation has paradoxically furthered mens’ interests at the expense of the hapless women it purported to be liberating. This is because all men want lots of commitment-free, anonymous sex with lots of different women, while all women want to be taken to the State Fair and have their special man win them a giant, plush, pink teddy bear which will fill the car with the etiolated scent of frying fat while she gives the guy a hand job. I believe it all goes back to life on the veldt, when our proto-human female ancestors needed to eat the pink, heart-shaped fruit of whitmansampler africensis in order to have the energy they needed to bear young. Continue reading “Also, Feminism Is Not Responsible For Girls Gone Wild”

I’ve been at several of the Real Utopias Conferences that have been organised out of the Havens Center. The latestI attended part time, and, I must admit, not without a certain amount of bad conscience. The topic was Rethinking Gender Egalitarianism, and I was leaving my wife at home much of the weekend with a 4-week-old baby and the girls. So, I missed some of the best bits. It was also odd because I rarely attend a conference where I know almost no-one; and although Johanna Brenner is a very old friend, I knew none of the other out-of-towners except through their work, some of them being people whose work I started reading 2 decades ago. Rosemary Crompton, I’m pretty certain, mistook me for my dad. He should be flattered.

Nevertheless it was, in some ways, the best conference yet. Everyone was nicely on task, and although debate got quite excitable it was always good-natured. The lead document, by Janet Gornick and Marcia Meyers, authors of Families that Work: Policies for Reconciling Parenthood and Employmenr, argues for a mix of improved daycare provision, labour market regulation and parental leave at generous replacement rates; and the argument is that this will improve the quality of family life and increase gender equality. The proposal is less utopian and more real than some of the real utopian proposals (perhaps less utopian than I would have preferred) but I think that may have been an unavoidable feature of the subject matter; get too far away from what is feasible in the short-to-medium term and it is hard to say much that is supportable.

The papers are all here.

Continue reading “Rethinking Gender Egalitarianism”

It is February 14, and that can only mean one thing—the arrival of this year’s batch of Valentine’s Day slogans from the Freedom Road Socialist Organization:

Proletarians And Oppressed Peoples,

1. Progressive And Revolutionary People Everywhere, Resolutely Uphold The Militant Bolshevik Spirit And Revolutionary Romanticism Embodied In Comrade Valentine!

2. Decisively Smash Retrograde And Joyless Ultra-Left Lines Which Disparage Proletarian Love And Desire!!

3. Warmly Celebrate The 20th Anniversary Of ACT-UP, A Militant Organization Which Attacked The Bourgeois State and Big Capital On Behalf Of LGBTQ People And All AIDS-Affected Oppressed Communities Worldwide In 1987 And Has Remained On The Offensive For Two Decades! ! !

My friend Dennis Gaffney, a freelance writer, has a story in today’s NY Times about the return of “Postcards from Buster.” (He tells me that he has another piece on the same subject forthcoming in The Nation.) The PBS children’s show, you may remember, lost its funding after the animated title character, who interacts with real children, visited a girl from Vermont to learn about maple syrup. The child casually mentioned that she has two mothers – the implication, not stated explicitly, was that they are gay – and Buster replied with the unforgettable line: “Wow – that’s a lot of moms.”

In one of her first official acts, just before being sworn in as Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings wrote to the head of PBS threatening to cut its funding because “Many parents would not want their young children exposed to the life-styles portrayed in this episode.” The “exposure”, of course, was simply portraying the existence of gay parents. The real sin was clearly the casual manner of presentation – like it was no big deal. PBS refused to distribute the episode and didn’t renew the show. Here’s a 2005 Washington Post piece about the cancellation, and here’s a Boston Globe story quoting the mom involved.

But now Buster is back with a new (albeit small) commitment from PBS and a variety of non-traditional funding sources. This season he’s visiting a family living on an Army base, and he is returning to visit some kids that he met in Louisiana during the first season who survived Katrina. Even when dealing with these tough issues, I’m sure the episodes will be presented with the same fun and matter-of-fact attitude that makes the show so enjoyable.

For many of us, the hope has been that as same-sex marriage gains a foothold, it will seem less threatening and scary – more normal – to many people and opposition will temper. A data point from Canada:

Yesterday, the Canadian House of Commons voted to uphold same-sex marriage. According to the Global and Mail, “Prime Minister Stephen Harper has declared the contentious issue of same-sex marriage to be permanently closed…. The vote yesterday, which fulfilled a Conservative election promise, marked the sixth time since 2003 that the House of Commons has decided in favour of same-sex marriage.”

But what was striking to me was that opponents of same-sex marriage seemed simply to be going through the motions. According to the Washington Post: “The prime minister expended little visible effort to try to win the vote, and political commentators suggested that he simply wanted to put the issue behind him before another national election was called.”

I’m a few days late with this, but still wanted to write a short post about the total ban on abortion in Nicaragua. Abortion is now a criminal act under all circumstances, including when the life of the mother is in danger, or when the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest. There was not a single member of the Nicaraguan parliament who voted against the proposal, which has been explained by the fact that there are elections coming up soon, and no political party wanted to allienate the Catholic voters.
From a moral point of view, abortion is a very difficult issue for most people—also for the non-religious. But how can one vote for legislation that forces women to give birth to a baby that is the result of rape or incest? Surely those parliamentarians must not have the faintest idea of what rape and incest does to the life of a girl or a woman. And even worse, how can one take responsibility for legally forcing women to continue a pregnancy if it is likely that both the mother and the foetus will die?
Moreover, from a pragmatic/political point of view it’s clear what will happen. Girls and women from rich families will go to Cuba (where abortion is legal), and those from poorer families will have illegal (read: unsafe) abortions. The best road to minimising the number of abortions is not to criminalise them, but rather to acknowledge that, whatever degree of (religious) moralising, most people will have sex anyway; to make contraceptives available; and to support women who are faced with an unwanted pregnancy so that they have effective choices between different options, and that, if they choose for abortion, they will have it as early as possible in the pregnancy and under safe circumstances. And let’s hope that no other countries follow this irresponsible move by the Nicaraguan parliament.

The Netherlands is rightly regarded as one of the most gay-friendly countries. But in recent years there has been a growing concern about increased intolerance towards gays. The Dutch Parliament has therefore asked the Social and Cultural Planning Office to conduct a study on the acceptance of gays in this country, which was published last Friday. Is the Netherlands really a good place to be gay? Continue reading “A good place to be gay?”

Over the weekend, Political Theory Daily Review linked to a recent essay on the Gang of Four. (The band, that is. Not the group in power in China thirty years ago this month, and in jail thirty years ago next month.) The title indicated it would treat the band’s work as Marxist cultural theory. Not in terms of, mind you, but as. Good call: The Gang’s lyrics were always very explicit about reification, class consciousness, and whatnot. No ex post facto Zizekian-epigone hijinks necessary, thank you very much. Makes its own gravy! A critic who understood that from the start might go far.

Continue reading “Entertainment!”