Belle Waring

You’ve probably all already seen this Ryan Gosling Biostatistics tumblr, but just in case…I’m here for you. Totally not suggested by Cosma, at all. He didn’t even ever hear about it till now, because he is a serious researcher, and busy reading, and stuff.

My desire to see a Classics-themed Zachary Quinto tumblr is insufficient to overcome the inertia that would be needed to carry it out. So just go to google image search and then imagine a lot of excessively precise directions for wagon-building, a la Hesiod, interspersed with Pindar-like confusion as to whether gold, fire, fame, or perhaps even something else, is the best.

1. Female Genital Mutilation, Everywhere, Ever.
2. Women Getting Raped in Far-Away Lands, like Afghanistan. AND YOU DON’T EVEN CARE!
3. Growing Gender Imbalances in China and India (Also known as “Where’s Your Precious Right to an Abortion Now, Missy?”)
4. Sexist Islamic Law Codes (“Wait, why just–” “Shut up.”)
5. World Hunger (But not through those programs where they only give micro-payments/loans to women on the basis of research that it is more effective.)
6. Lack of Access to Clean Drinking Water For The World’s Poorest Citizens, Because, Hey, While You’re There.
7. Africa. Is Some Shit Just Fucked up There, or What? Get On That.
8. Access to The Most Basic Knowledge About Human Reproduction and Assistance of Midwives Can Lower Peri-Natal Deaths Tremendously, But Please Don’t Tell Anyone About Contraception or Abortions.
9. Forced Prostitution, Sex Slavery, Human Trafficking.
10. Are We Seriously Just Not Even Trying to Go to Mars Anymore? Really, Though? We Made it to The Moon in Like 5 Years With Some Slide Rules and Horn-rimmed Glasses and Shit, and Now All We’ve Got is These Weaksauce Telescopes Peering Back in Time. What the Fuck? Mars, Bitches!

Now you know, ladies. Sorry any sexism in developed nations up to and including your own personal experiences of sexual assault didn’t even make it on the list, but better luck next time!

For the record, I’m just going to go out there and say the Siri thing was a conspiracy–of one. One pro-life programmer who cared about it a LOT, and 8,000 other programmers who let the error stay in through multiple testing of multiple versions due to (in this case) malign neglect; they just never looked. The claims that Siri is worse than Google only when and where it relies on Yelp seem to have been falsified; the program really looks to have something of a significant blind spot, too significant to be chalked up to error. I’m willing to give the Apple programmers the benefit of the doubt and say they are not juvenile frat-boy assholes. There’s just this one asshole, and then a large number of men and some women (some of both of whom are no doubt, living in this fallen world as we do, also assholes), who never tested the program along this particular axis. People have bitched about it; Apple will fix it; the next time someone will check first. This is often how you fight sexism in ordinary life. You don’t dive in front of that Afghani girl about to take a bottle of acid to the face and shoot the guy attacking her. You just influence the people around you by expression your opinions forcefully. Should we all donate money to the many thousands of feminist organizations working overseas to combat the life-threatening situations many of the world’s women face? Yes. Really. And you should take that fucking sandwich out of your mouth and give the money to OxFam. Pro Tip: “Afghanistan, infinite no backsies!” is not a valid argument to the effect that a given woman should shut up about some given topic.

The only reason Catholics like Joe Paterno and Darío Castrillón Hoyos are able to commit such uniquely awful crimes is because they are ethical in a way that run-of-the-mill godless folk cannot understand. Plus, I hereby stipulate that raping children is, admittedly, bad, mumble.

Even shorter: I don’t doubt that people whom I have just admitted committed evil acts are, in fact good, because [makes mysterious, several-part gesture with hand and wrists which magically resolves obvious contradictions.]

This conversation actually happened at our house just now. In truth, I was first lying in bed with the laptop and then addressing John from a somewhat lascivious position difficult to illustrate with stick figures. No, now you’re imagining something worse. Anyway, I think the xkcd couple should be able to afford a better desk and computer by now. Little thing that pulls out for your keyboard? What is it, 1996?
“I thought of the title! And I helped with Photoshop!”–John.

This is a good post about why rape victims are likely to lie…about the circumstances of the rape in order to make their rape conform to the narrative they think the cops/prosecutors/jury needs to hear.

Thanks to prevailing rape mythology, many people also have very definite ideas about what happens before, during, and after a “real” rape. Real rape victims want no sexual contact of any kind with their attackers and make this crystal clear right from the start. When attacked, they don’t just say “No;” they scream, fight, yell for help, and/or try to escape. Ideally, the victim will duke it out with her attacker to such an extent that she is left with obvious physical injuries. After the rape, she will be visibly distraught and in tears, but this will not prevent her from reporting the attack right away. In the days and weeks following the assault, she will spend a lot of time in the shower and be too traumatized to appear to function normally.

Some rapes do indeed happen like that; most don’t. And the more a rape departs from this script, the harder it is for the victim to be believed and taken seriously. She didn’t fight or try to escape? She must’ve wanted it. She wasn’t crying or visibly upset right after the rape? She’s probably lying about being attacked. She was seen laughing and seemingly having a good time just days after being raped? It couldn’t have been that bad.

Rape victims know this. Realizing that many people won’t understand why you acted in a way that doesn’t fit their preconceived notions of “how rape victims act,” or worse, knowing that many people will automatically disbelieve you because of your background or even blame you for being attacked brings some rape victims to the conclusion that there’s only one way they’re going to see their rapist punished: lie.

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Katie Roiphe recently wrote an article on the new book “Go the F#$k to Sleep.” She makes rather sweeping claims about miserable, sexless yuppies who have mollycoddled their children so extravangantly that the parents can no longer even steal enough time to watch a single episode of Mad Men together. During which they could take notes on parenting tips, one imagines!

Are our enlightened, engaged, sensitive parenting practices driving a certain segment of the population insane? Is the nice, liberal father who has just this Saturday carted his kids to soccer practice, play dates, piano lessons, made sunflower-butter sandwiches, and read Goodnight Moon three times seething with quiet desperation? The surprise ascendance of Adam Mansbach and Ricardo Cortés’ Go the F**k to Sleep on all sorts of best-seller lists eloquently answers that question….One wonders if this hostility [evident in the book] toward the child, who is naturally and rightfully manipulative, is just a tiny bit misplaced….The book, in all its cleverness and artfulness and ingenuity, raises certain other questions: Are they having sex, these slouchy rageful parents? Not enough, perhaps. When the father turns back to the waking child’s bedroom, we look out at the comfy, sexless, vaguely depressive scene of his wife sprawled asleep on the couch under an ugly old blanket. No wonder the slouchy dad is full of rage.

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Recently Pajamas Media’s own Anthony Klavan got some attention in the blogosphere with his moronic provocative contention that men’s bad behavior, ranging from tweeting pictures of their tighty-whities to serial forcible rape, is all the fault of…women!

I blame women. No, really. Women — by which I mean each and every single member of the female gender — you know who you are — need look no further than themselves to explain why Weiner-types behave toward them in this fashion. We men are always hearing complaints from women about how badly we treat them, what pigs we are, how pushy and abrasive… on and on. But what these same women conveniently fail to mention is that this stuff really works on them!….
So, then, ladies — what do you expect? All we guys want is for you to love us. If this is the sort of guy you follow after in droves, this is the sort of guy we’re encouraged to be.

Now, it’s very likely that I’ll be assassinated by a crack team of female ninjas before I can hit “post” (they are all hot 22-year old Japanese women who may also subject me to intensive questioning, should anyone in the Valley be at a loss for movie ideas.) But I am about to reveal a huge secret here: OPPEC. That is, Other People’s Pussy Economic Consortium. Note that the “People” who own the pussy in this case are the women themselves, contrary to traditional usage. But think about it: women, taken as a whole, have control of all the pussy in the world. That is some valuable assets right there. What could be more natural than the formation of a cartel?
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In my original post I, ignoring all of common sense and the experience of the entire internet, imagined that people would click through and read the linked Kevin Drum piece, and then perhaps click on the link there as well. I really don’t know what came over me; I must be out of practice or something. As was mentioned in comments to the previous post, Kevin Drum was responding to a NYT article in which it was suggested that hotel housekeepers receive unwanted sexual approaches fairly often in big hotels. It seems to be necessary to be very clear on this; I am merely suggesting that Kevin Drum’s indignant suggestion (that hotels refuse service to guests who repeatedly flash the staff) is indeed a reasonable one. Even threatening to do so would probably bring lots of men around, since it might be a little hard to explain to the boss why you suddenly can’t stay at the Mandarin anymore. From the NYT:

On top of that [their grueling, physically demanding jobs], they [housekeeping staff] have to be sexually accosted by guests? Sadly, yes. And more often than you’d think. It’s not an everyday occurrence but it happens enough to make this question all too familiar: “Mr. Tomsky, can you give the new girl Room 3501 until next Tuesday? That man is back, the one who loves to let his robe fall open every time I try to clean.” So, yes, we assign the room to the new girl.

Now I hate to say this, but I’m pretty sure this is the end of most actual stories along this lines, i.e., give it to the new girl. Per the NYT, though, it’s more like some awesome SWAT thing:

But not before hotel managers roll up to the room, flanked by security guards, to request that the guest vacate during cleaning, or at least promise to remain fully clothed or risk expulsion. Often it need not be discussed in detail: those guests who can’t seem to tie their robe properly usually know exactly what they’re guilty of. Typically, an unsolicited phone call from management inquiring if the service in their room is up-to-standard, and offering to send a manager to supervise the next cleaning, improves their behavior. I remember one exhibitionist guest, in New Orleans, cutting me off before I could get down to business:

“Sir, this is Jacob, the housekeeping manager — ”

“O.K., fine, O.K.!” And he hung up. That was that.

Being flashed is very different from being violently assaulted, but they are on a continuum of unwanted sexual encounters. Also, it’s difficult to believe that a man who gets to that point hasn’t gotten away with quite a lot of other skeezy things in the past, such as exposing himself. Perhaps if M. Strauss-Kahn had had repeated, embarrassing conversations with the male hotel staff in which banning him from further stays was mentioned it would have been salutary.

It also occurs to me if a women left her hotel room door unbolted and someone came in and raped her, the number of times (hint: infinity) she would be told that she should always keep the door locked, and call downstairs to check with the front desk when a male staffer came to the door even in uniform, etc. etc., might make her decide to just not bother reporting the crime.

I thought it was interesting that despite the subject matter, the Times was unable to find a woman to write about the topic, perhaps one who had worked as a housekeeper? Just a thought. I understand that “Jacob Tomsky is writing a memoir about his experiences in the hotel business,” but that hardly seems the most salient concern, unless someone’s agent knows someone. And you may object that most of these workers are recent immigrants, but I see Maureen Dowd’s name out of the corner of my eye oftener than I would like, so it’s not as if having a woman with limited English-language skills on the Op-Ed page is somehow a problem.

Kevin Drum recently posted in a sort of muddle-headed, if well meaning, way. His post is entitled, “Why Do Hotels Tolerate Sexual Predators?” His readers were there to point out that if you kicked all the rich flashers out of your hotel you’d lose a lot of money. I might additionally suggest that the victims (in these cases, the housekeepers), are mostly immigrants working in a low-status job, and their right to be free from unwanted exhibitionism looms small in the mental world of a hotel manager.

When I say the post is muddle-headed, I only mean that it is surprising that Drum is surprised. Many (most, actually) of the women I know have been flashed, usually as younger girls. It’s not as though it’s some astonishing thing that never happens; it’s just going on all the time, but not happening to Kevin Drum. But in swoops Megan McArdle and I thought, how is she going to defend rich assholes who flash hotel housekeepers? I mean, really. Especially considering that Megan grew up in New York City in the 70s and 80s, which means I am morally certain some dude has flashed her, or masturbated next to her on the subway, or done something equally unwelcome. How not? (I have experienced all these things, and more! Ask me about the time the cops told me the man hassling me was a convicted sex offender who had forcibly raped at least 6 women, and I was “an idiot” because I returned idle pleasantries, in a deflecting way, on the BART. It was apparently my duty to remain silent at all times.) But then, she doesn’t mention it, so perhaps she was weirdly lucky in this regard. Really weirdly lucky.
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Some feel we should take a more active approach to managing comments. I think we do pretty well on the whole (although the Lord love you, you are a grumpy lot). Question of the day: is the unremitting, permanent badness of Matthew Yglesias’ comments the result of intentional sabotage, or can it be chalked up to his policy of utterly ignoring them at all times? I favor the former explanation, because he’s influential enough that I can imagine some testy Republican or two taking it on as a volunteer project to wreck it up constantly. There was never a time when they were good, either, even in the early days. He was assigned what I consider to be, in John Emerson’s formulation, an Al-bot; a rotating crew of people commenting as “Al” day and night there and at Kevin Drum’s and Ezra Klein’s with the result that every single thread was derailed. Final note: why has Digby never been promoted to the big leagues, despite her obvious rightness and acerbic wit? Sexism, or a lust for mindless contrarianism that she will never satisfy?
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I congratulate journalist Megan McArdle for having the good fortune to encounter such a talkative fellow passenger on the D.C. bus the other day.

Yesterday, I rode the bus for the first time from the stop near my house, and ended up chatting with a lifelong neighborhood resident who has just moved to Arizona, and was back visiting family. We talked about the vagaries of the city bus system, and then after a pause, he said, “You know, you may have heard us talking about you people, how we don’t want you here. A lot of people are saying you all are taking the city from us. Way I feel is, you don’t own a city.” He paused and looked around the admittedly somewhat seedy street corner. “Besides, look what we did with it. We had it for forty years, and look what we did with it!”

He’s a little off, because I think black control of Washington D.C. officially occurred only in 1975 when Parliament’s “Chocolate City” was released.

Are you following the peregrinations of feminist hulk through the twitspace? You should be. So much goodness:

#HULK SAY BIOLOGICAL DETERMINISM IS FOR WUSSES. HULK NOT PASSIVE IN HIS APPROACH TO GENDER IDENTITY.
#HULK POLITELY REQUEST CHANGING TABLE IN MEN’S ROOM. HULK CHOOSE NOT TO EMPLOY SMASH IN THIS MOMENT. MULTIPLE TOOLS FOR CHANGE.
#HULK MAKE CAPITALIZATION EXCEPTION FOR bell hooks. HULK LOVE HER ESSAY ON MADONNA AND RACIST APPROPRIATION.

Jonah “organic honey at Dachau” Goldberg wonders, “Is ‘Nazi’ the only label our culture understands as irredeemably evil?”

Additional Corner hilarity: someone ought to tell n00b Lee Edwards about his colleague Andrew McCarthy’s views. Edwards puts forward Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer as a more plausible Nobel Peace prize-winner, as she supports peaceful dissent from the Chinese government over its “deliberate and often brutal campaign to suppress the Uighur language, culture, and religion (the Uighurs are Muslim).” I couldn’t agree more, but there’s that niggling “Muslim” detail. McCarthy opposed the release of any of the 17 Uighur detainees at Guantanamo, calling them “alien jihadists” who are “affiliated with a terrorist organization and have received terrorist paramilitary training.” Likewise, during the recent conflict between Uighurs and Han Chinese in Xinjiang, McCarthy deferred to “accounts of some witnesses to state-controlled media” in his sober assessment entitled “Hard to Believe the Lovable Uighurs Could Be Involved in Terrorism . . . ” Then again, this is the same McCarthy who observed that “as a man of the hard Left, Obama is more comfortable with a totalitarian Islamic regime than he would be with a free Iranian society.” Thus, as a man of the hard Right, McCarthy is more comfortable with a totalitarian Communist regime than he would be with a free Chinese society. I feel something has gone sort of wrong there, but–SCARY MUSLIMS OMG!

I decided just to boost this comment I made in the thread below about Dr. Kealey’s failed attempt at humor. (My sexism. Let me show you it.) I considered removing the bad words, but then decided, fuck it. If Panera bread is banning CT from its wireless for you right now, sorry hypothetical Panera-eating CT readers. Who can’t read this apology.

I’d like to share a little anecdote from my college years. I had a Roman History prof who would frequently make comments on my appearance, in front of the gathering class, as I made my way to my seat in the front row (because I was a very diligent student!). And at a gathering of students and faculty I decided to leave and put on my coat, but then got sidetracked into a discussion with him and said I needed to take my coat off. And he said, you can do that but if you do I’m going to stare at your breasts—but you knew that when you got that tattoo there. (The tattoo is like 3 inches below my clavicle anyway, thank you.) He actually said that to me! And then, when I was applying to graduate school, I had to approach my advisor with a problem, because normally I would ask this prominent scholar who gave me an A+ (which, I may say, I thoroughly deserved) in Roman History to write a recommendation, but I knew from previous experience that I didn’t actually want to be alone with him in his office. And so my advisor had to convince another professor, of equal status, to write me a recommendation that was somewhat fictional, on the assurance that when I did have a class with him that term he would find me everything promised, etc. He kindly did so and didn’t regret his decision. So where I’m going with this is, that fucking sucked and was a terrible experience for me, and Dr. Kealy is a fucking asshat who is even now making the lives of his attractive female students needlessly miserable. And just FYI, dsquared’s reliable, not-making-a-big-deal-out-of-it, stand up feminism makes him infinitely more sexually appealing to the leftist ladies of the world. That shit is like catnip. It is only the strict, sex-hating conventions of Crooked Timber, under which fraternization between co-bloggers is totes banned, which keeps us apart right now. And the happily married thing.

Just adding, it was particularly irritating about the grade, because I really did deserve an A+ in that class, but it was impossible to know whether my grade was influenced by my breasts. My boyfriend at the time, for example, questioned it on this basis. I doggedly went on earning the same grade in other classes until at one point my GPA was above 4.0. But the tarnish never really went away. And all of this fell under the look but don’t touch rubric, while still being humiliating and awful.

Particularly humiliating and awful in light of the fact that a teacher at my middle/high school “fell in love with me” on the first day of 7th grade (when I had just turned 13) , and proceeded to have a protracted–I don’t know what you would call it, affair, maybe–which he carefully avoided consummating until four weeks after I reached the age of consent in Washington D.C. The schmuck wrote a book about me, in addition to taking approximately one billion pictures of me (he was the photography teacher, natch.) I mean really, a whole novel. What a pitiful, yet shitty thing to do. And then I finally told my mom about it, and he got fired from the school in my senior year, and then almost all the girls at my (all-girls) school turned uniformly against me and treated me awfully for “ruining his life.” So think how happy I was to get to college, where there would be real scholarship and adults who behave with minimal decency! Hollow laughs ensue. Now I’m not writing this so you can all say, poor Belle, that’s really awful. I’m fine now and that’s not the point. But there’s a reason all those annoying strident feminists go on about how the personal is the political. Kealy doesn’t know the personal histories of the female students he’s ogling. And they deserve to be treated like human beings, not fresh-faced dollies to use as mental props during masturbation.