by Eszter Hargittai on August 20, 2004
A propos this very interesting discussion about gendered pronouns, and à propos all the babies being born in my social circles, I thought I’d post a note about the salience of gender the moment we are born. I became an aunt last week and so the following has come up a lot in the past few days. The first thing everybody wants to know about the baby is its (their?:) gender. At first I was not hiding this bit of information on purpose, but by now I consciously phrase announcements about the event in gender-neutral terms to see how long it takes for the other party to ask whether it is a boy or a girl. As you can imagine, it doesn’t take long. One may argue that this is because, grammatically speaking, people are unable to ask questions about the baby without knowing its gender. But I think it is more than that. Our world is so gender-based that it is hard for people to think about a person without knowing the person’s gender. But what is it exactly about a baby that makes it necessary for us to know its gender? In what ways is it going to be important? Is it so we can say whether the baby is beautiful versus handsome? Is it so we know what types of presents to get for it? If yes then we are off on the path of gendered socialization the moment the little person takes its first breath. All this shows the pressure parents must be under to choose between girl and boy when a child is born sex unknown.
UPDATE: I thought I should add a bit to this post drawing on some work by sociologists who actually study this stuff. Some people in the comments – and elsewhere as well, I am sure – argue that if you look at the behavior of girls and boys already at an early stage you will observe their different preferences for certain colors and activities. We should not forget, however, that it is not possible to raise children in an isolated manner and their social environments – as evidenced by the anecdote in this post – start differentiating them by gender from the start. So the fact that a girl may opt for a “girlie” toy or pink may simply be a reflection of what she has already picked up from her surroundings. It is interesting to note, however, that historically pink and blue were assigned to girls and boys in the exact reverse of today’s conventions. I quote from Padavic and Reskin, Women and Men at Work (p.4.):
Clothing for babies illustrates the creation of sex differences in appearance that have no natural basis. Disposable-diaper manufacturers, for example, market different designs for girls and boys. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, however, male and female infants were dressed alike—usually in white dresses. When Americans began to color code babies’ clothing, they dressed boys in pink and girls in blue. Not until amost 1950 did the convention reverse, with blue becoming defined as masculine and pink as feminine (Kidwell and Steele 1989:24-27). Such shifts demonstrate that what is critical for maintaining and justifying unequal treatment between the sexes is not how cultures set the sexes apart but the fact that they do it at all.
Also, for a very good look at children in their early years, read Barry Thorne’s book on Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School.
by Ted on August 20, 2004
Eugene Volokh has more on Scott McClellan’s call for an end to “all of this unregulated soft money activity.” Says Eugene:
You can call it “soft money,” but it’s speech, of the sort that political movements such as the antislavery movement, the temperance movement, the civil rights movement, and many other movements (good and bad) have engaged in. Without such speech, who gets to speak effectively, in the large traditional media? The media itself; the parties; and the politicians who have the infrastructure to raise hard money in $2000 chunks; and a few super-rich people (unless they’re shut up, too). People who care deeply about a subject, enough to pool even tens of thousands of their dollars with others who care equally strongly, would be shut out.
UPDATE: Aaron Schwartz emails a link to Bush himself on Larry King Live. McClellan wasn’t off the reservation; Bush is saying (a) I want to get rid of unregulated, independent soft-money political speech, and (b) I didn’t understand the law I signed.
G. BUSH: Well, I say they ought to get rid of all those 527s, independent expenditures that have flooded the airwaves.
There have been millions of dollars spent up until this point in time. I signed a law that I thought would get rid of those, and I called on the senator to — let’s just get anybody who feels like they got to run to not do so.
KING: Do you condemn the statements made about his…
G. BUSH: Well, I haven’t seen the ad, but what I do condemn is these unregulated, soft-money expenditures by very wealthy people, and they’ve said some bad things about me. I guess they’re saying bad things about him. And what I think we ought to do is not have them on the air. I think there ought to be full disclosure. The campaign funding law I signed I thought was going to get rid of that. But evidently the Federal Election Commission had a different view.
UPDATE: Julia has more.
by Ted on August 20, 2004
The New York Times has looked into the claims of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
There were a lot of folks on the right who knew better than to lie down with these dogs. They knew that they were promoting a huge pile of horseshit, but they were desperate to believe that there was a pony in there somewhere. What they found is a charge that Kerry misreported being in Cambodia, thirty-six years ago, by as many as five whole weeks. Devastating.
They wanted mainstream media attention for this campaign. I do hope that they enjoy it.
(UPDATE: OK, sometimes comedy is pretty.)
A few highlights below.
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by John Q on August 20, 2004
Now that Brian has started the hare running on gender-neutral pronouns, I thought I’d weigh in on the old chestnut “When did the 21st century start?” (I saw this raised in a recent comments thread, but can’t locate it now). The commonsense view is that it began on 1 January 2000, and I think the commonsense view is right. Against this we get a bunch of pedants arguing, that, since there was no year zero, the 1st century (of the current era) began in 1CE, and therefore included 100CE. Granting this, the 21st century began on 1 January 2001.
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by Kieran Healy on August 20, 2004
Draft review of “A Man After His Own Heart”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1565847709/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/, by Charles Siebert. (Final version to appear in “The Drawing Board”:http://www.econ.usyd.edu.au/drawingboard/.)
The language of the heart is all-pervasive. Art and everyday life are full of emotions expressed through talk about the heart, be it given or joined, singing or broken, closed or kind. The Ancient Greek view that the liver is the seat of the soul can seem plausible on a good Friday night, and Descartes’ case that it’s our head that matters may be felt with some force the following morning. For sheer range of metaphor, though, the heart has no serious competitors. But what about the thing itself? The cheerful curve of a Valentine’s heart does not convey what a real heart looks like. A heart ache is not a heart attack. We all know that the heart is a pump that moves blood around the body, but very few of us could give an accurate account of how it happens. The dynamic interplay of all those chambers, arteries and valves is difficult to picture, hard to explain, and took a very long time to discover.
Yet, at the same time, we are more familiar than ever with the risks of cardiac arrest and the danger of heart disease. Coronary bypasses are routine and a heart transplant these days is a standard (if difficult) option rather than an exotic experiment. So there are two ways of talking about the heart: as a metaphor for ourselves and our innermost feelings, and as a key bit of internal plumbing, in need of maintenance and regular upkeep. Advances in medicine over the past century or so, and especially in the last thirty years, have made it difficult to keep the two separate. The real heart intrudes more and more on its imagined counterpart.
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by Kieran Healy on August 20, 2004
“BoingBoing”:http://www.boingboing.net/2004/08/19/happy_birthday_dd.html reports that “Dungeons and Dragons”:http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/welcome is “30 years old”:http://pc.gamespy.com/articles/538/538848p1.html. And it’s _still_ a virgin.
by Brian on August 20, 2004
I had always thought there was a dialect of English where _he_ could be used as a gender-neutral pronoun. That is, I always thought there was a dialect of English where one could say (1) without presupposing that the person we hire next will be male.
(1) The person we hire next will be able to teach whatever courses he wants.
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by Ted on August 19, 2004
Atrios has a good question:
I really don’t understand why there hasn’t been more attention paid to this, from little Scott McClellan:
We’ve called on Senator Kerry to join us and call for an end to all of this unregulated soft money activity.
What exactly does this mean? Should all expenditures be “regulated?” Regulated how? Should my friends and I not be able to throw some dollars together and buy ads?
I mean, I’m a tepid supporter of various Campaign Finance Reform endeavors, but I didn’t realize that president had such extreme views. Or does he? Can someone pin him down?
The quote isn’t out of context– I’ve got the whole exchange under the fold. McClellan repeatedly says that the President calls for an end to all unregulated soft money activity. Surely he can’t mean that?
McClellan also says “the President thought he got rid of all of this unregulated soft money activity when he signed the bipartisan campaign finance reforms into law.” Incredibly, he seems to be making the argument that Bush doesn’t understand the laws he signs. Even I know that campaign finance reform did nothing of the sort.
But let’s take McClellan seriously for a second. Are we supposed to believe that Bush thought he was signing away the right of Americans to engage in “unregulated soft money activity”? I mean, we Timberites pay money for our bandwidth. We engage in political speech. And we’re completely unregulated.
Did Bush think that he was outlawing this?
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by Daniel on August 19, 2004
Gosh, I remember this from my small collection of BCCI books, but had never realised it was the same John Kerry. This really ought to count in peoples’ minds a lot more than any tales of heroics in Vietnam. The fact that George W Bush borrowed money from BCCI in 1987 but John Kerry launched the investigation in 1988 that eventually brought them down really says about all you need to know about the character of the two men. BCCI was a really quite extraordinarily bad organisation and Kerry’s investigation opened the eyes of the whole world to the extent that it was possible to get away with corruption in high-quality financial centres. It was about this time, by the way, that the liberal media of the USA were smearing Gary Webb as a “crackpot conspiracy theorist” for reporting, accurately, on the fact that politically well-connected Nicaraguans were being allowed to get off easily on cocaine smuggling charges. The Washington Monthly story is well worth a read.
Link comes via Atrios, btw, who obviously needs the vast publicity that a CT link can generate.
by Brian on August 19, 2004
I basically agree with everything “Daniel”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002359.html and “Atrios”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2004_08_15_atrios_archive.html#109286835802888918 said about “Alex Tabarrok’s post on renting”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2004/08/economic_founda.html, but I just wanted to add one anecdote to support Daniel’s side of the story.
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by Daniel on August 19, 2004
I’m pretty sure that it was JK Galbraith (with an outside chance that it was Bhagwati) who noted that there is one and only one successful tactic to use, should you happen to get into an argument with Milton Friedman about economics. That is, you listen out for the words “Let us assume” or “Let’s suppose” and immediately jump in and say “No, let’s not assume that”. The point being that if you give away the starting assumptions, Friedman’s reasoning will almost always carry you away to the conclusion he wants to reach with no further opportunities to object, but that if you examine the assumptions carefully, there’s usually one of them which provides the function of a great big rug under which all the points you might want to make have been pre-swept.
A few CT mates appear to be floundering badly over this Law & Economics post at Marginal Revolution on the subject of why it’s a bad idea to have minimum standards for rented accommodation. (Atrios is doing a bit better). So I thought I’d use it as an object lesson in applying the Milton Friedman technique.
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by John Q on August 19, 2004
The meeting of the Iraqi National Conference has wound up in Baghdad, leaving, from the limited reports available, a very mixed record. Given the series of disasters we’ve seen in the last eighteen months or so, a mixed record is certainly better than the par outcome of total failure.
It was certainly good that the gathering was held at all, and appears to have encompassed a much broader and more representative sample of Iraqi opinion than anything of the kind held since the overthrow of Saddam (or, of course, while Saddam and his Baathist predecessors were in power). This report on the televised proceedings,at Healing Iraq gives an idea of what it was like.
On the other hand, the supposed purpose of the Conference, to elect an advisory council of 100 members to oversee the Allawi government, degenerated into farce. It appears that the Conference was presented with a slate of 81 members agreed by the big parties and a US-imposed decision that 19 members of the old IGC (originally 20, but Chalabhi was excluded after falling from grace). In the absence of any alternative, this slate was accepted by default.
But the biggest success (still not a sure thing, but promising) was the intervention of the Conference in the Najaf crisis, demanding that the assault by the US and the interim government cease and that Sadr withdraw from Najaf, disband his militia and enter the political process. Clearly, if it were not for the Conference, there would have been little chance of a peaceful outcome here, and the potential consequences were disastrous. Sadr has stated acceptance of the Conference’s demands, though it remains to be seen what that means.
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by Daniel on August 19, 2004
Finally, with the Google IPO pricing way below expectations and with a serious arbitrage[1] showing up on the Iowa Electronic Markets, I get round to reviewing James Surowiecki’s “The Wisdom of Crowds”. I’ll save the suspense; it’s a cracking read and well worth buying. To give you an idea of the style, I’ll start this review with my own shockingly unfair parody …
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by Ted on August 18, 2004
In the brutally competitive, take-no-prisoners world of fantasy sports team managment, sometimes we have to take matters into our own hands. That’s when McSweeney’s guide to heckling might come in handy.
While you’re out and about in your town, try heckling some of the locals to build your confidence and work on your repertoire.
To the Mailman: “Karl Malone would be ashamed.”
To the Paperboy: “Who taught you how to throw? David Cassidy?”
To the Grocer: “This orange blows.”
To the Bank Clerk: “I can buy and sell you at will.”
To the Bus Driver: “Flunk out of chauffeur school?”
To the Ice-Cream-Truck Driver: “Flunk out of bus-driver school?”
To the Town Vampire: “Even I have bigger teeth. And you call yourself a reanimated corpse that has risen from the grave to suck the blood of the living? You suck. In a nonliteral, yet highly amusing, way.”
To the Waiter: “How’s that whole aspiring-to-be-an-actor thing going? Not good? At least you got your degree in …? Oh. I’m truly sorry. Can I get a refill?”
by Harry on August 18, 2004
In his reply to Chris B’s response to his article on desert Will Wilkinson expresses dismay that no-one has taken up a point he made in his original piece, viz,
bq. Material inequality is one kind of inequality among many. Political
inequality is more troubling by far, for political power is the power to
push people around. Coercion is wrong on its face, and so the existence
of political inequality requires a specially strong and compelling
justification. However, if the luck argument cuts against moral
entitlement to material holdings, it cuts equally against any moral
entitlement to political power.
He goes on, in the original piece, to say that
bq. The justification for political power is generally sought in the “consent” of the people through free, fair and open elections. Yet the fact that someone has gained power by a democratic ballot can be no more or less relevant than the fact that Warren Buffet gained his billions through a series of fair, voluntary transactions. John Edwards (who, by the way, is a mill worker’s son) didn’t deserve his luxuriant tresses and blinding grin. Reagan didn’t deserve movie-star name recognition. Bushes don’t deserve to be Bushes. Kennedys don’t deserve to be Kennedys. Kerry’s war medals? Please.
If the luck argument is any good, then democratic choice and the resulting distribution of coercive political power is also, as Yglesias says, “chance all the way down.” And if luck negates the moral right to keep and dispose of one’s stuff, it also negates the right to take and dispose of others’ stuff.
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