Sexual politics

Aside from containing a brilliant exposition of how blogospherical “rebuttal” actually works — basically endless posts by halfwits repeating that X (an eminent scholar) is an ignoramus because X has contradicted the received wisdom of a tribe — this post by Dave Graeber at Naked Capitalism has to be one of the most informative and entertaining pieces I’ve read in a long while. What happens when the findings of anthropologists about earlier societies clash with the a priori assumptions of economists about how things _must_ have happened? Well, you can guess. The really interesting stuff is in the anthropological detail, so read the whole thing, as they say, but I’ll just quote Graeber on economics and scientific method:

bq. Murphy argues that the fact that there are no documented cases of barter economies doesn’t matter, because all that is really required is for there to have been some period of history, however brief, where barter was widespread for money to have emerged. This is about the weakest argument one can possibly make. Remember, economists originally predicted all (100%) non-monetary economies would operate through barter. The actual figure of observable cases is 0%. Economists claim to be scientists. Normally, when a scientist’s premises produce such spectacularly non-predictive results, the scientist begins working on a new set of premises. Saying “but can you prove it didn’t happen sometime long long ago where there are no records?” is a classic example of special pleading. In fact, I can’t prove it didn’t. I also can’t prove that money wasn’t introduced by little green men from Mars in a similar unknown period of history.

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.

[click to continue…]

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?
[click to continue…]

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.
[click to continue…]

Will Hutton had a piece in the Observer a week ago about immigration policy in the course of which he made the following remark:

bq. the European left has to find a more certain voice. It must argue passionately for a good capitalism that will drive growth, employment and living standards by a redoubled commitment to innovation and investment.

I’m not sure who this “European left” is, but, given the piece is by Hutton, I’m thinking party apparatchiks in soi-disant social democratic and “socialist” parties, often educated at ENA or having read PPE at Oxford. I’m not sure how many battalions that “left” has, or even whether we ought to call it left at all. Anyway, what struck me on reading Hutton’s remarks was that calls for the “left” to do anything of the kind are likely to founder on the fact that the only thing that unites the various lefts is hostility to a neoliberal right, and that many of us don’t want the kind of “good capitalism” that he’s offering. Moreover in policy terms, in power, the current constituted by Hutton’s “European left” don’t act all that differently from the neoliberal right anyway. In short, calls like Hutton’s are hopeless because the differences of policy and principle at the heart of the so-called left are now so deep that an alliance is all but unsustainable. That might look like a bad thing, but I’m not so sure. Assuming that what we care about is to change the way the world is, the elite, quasi-neoliberal “left” has a spectacular record of failure since the mid 1970s. This goes for the US as well, where Democratic adminstrations (featuring people such as Larry Summers in key roles) have done little or nothing for ordinary people. Given the failures of that current, there is less reason than ever for the rest of us to line up loyally behind them for fear of getting something worse. Some speculative musings, below the fold:
[click to continue…]

Sometimes a thought occurs about something that might make for an interesting blog post, but I realise that whilst I know enough to have the thought, I’d have to do a great deal of research to write something that would survive the scrutiny of people who know their stuff. Still, it may be that commenters who know more than me can say something of value, and that I could at least serve as a prompt. So here goes. An article on the BBC website discusses the recommendations of a French parliamentary committee which described the veil as :

bq. “contrary to the values of the republic” and called on parliament to adopt a formal resolution proclaiming “all of France is saying ‘no’ to the full veil”.

Hmm, I thought. It wasn’t so long ago that “all of France”, at least for some values of “all of France” had a more divided view about the veil. Roughly at this time, in fact:

(Picture nicked from the very excellent Images of France and Algeria blog, which has, incidentally, lots of interesting stuff on the 1961 Paris massacres of Algerians.)

But then I also remembered that official France had not, in fact, been very tolerant of the veiling of Algerian women. The photographer Marc Garanger is famous for his many pictures, taken during the war, of Muslim women forcibly unveiled so that they could be photographed for compulsory ID cards. There are some “here”:http://www.noorderlicht.com/eng/fest04/princessehof/garanger/index.html . So how did that all work out then? A little googling reveals that this very month, historian Neil MacMaster has a new book entitled _Burning the Veil: The Algerian war and the ’emancipation’ of Muslim women, 1954-62_ (Manchester University Press). I couldn’t find any reviews, as yet. The blurb writes about a campaign of forced modernisation followed by a post-revolutionary backlash involving a worsening of the position of women in Algeria.

So two thoughts then: (1) far from being an aberration in France, there was a very recent period when very many French women (or perhaps “French” women) were veiled; (2) attempts by the state to change that didn’t lead to female emancipation and the triumph of Enlightenment values.

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.

I’ve been a bit remiss in not covering the “recent shenanigans”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/22acb81a-64f6-11de-a13f-00144feabdc0.html in Italy:

Appearing on a billionaire’s luxury ship in the Bay of Naples on Monday, nine days before he hosts a Group of Eight summit, Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s prime minister, rejected reports that his government risked falling apart over his personal life. “My government is probably the most safe and secure in the west,” he said. He specifically rejected “foreign” press reports questioning its stability in the wake of allegations by escorts that they had been paid by a businessman to attend parties at the prime minister’s residences and that one had sex with him on the night of the US elections in November.

My acquaintance with Italian society and politics is mostly second-hand these days, and Berlusconi certainly been extraordinarily good at “turning bad publicity into good”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/02/18/follies-berlesque/#more-4337 in the past, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the one that finally sinks him. Cavorting with eighteen year old starlet wannabes was probably a mild net positive for Berlusconi, allowing him to project an image of continued virility etc. Over-excited Czech prime ministers bedecked with young women at his private villa not so good – but more awkward than genuinely embarrassing. However the most recent allegation – that he had sex with a prostitute (who claims to have recorded the whole thing) seems to me to directly undermine the image that he wants to project of a debonair and charming, ladies’ man, making him sound like a bit of a loser. Certainly, Berlusconi himself “seems worried”:http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSTRE55M5OH20090623.

“I have never paid a woman,” Berlusconi said in an interview with the Chi weekly owned by his Mondadori publishing empire. I’ve never understood what satisfaction there is other than that of conquering (a woman),” he told the magazine, according to excerpts sent to Reuters ahead of publication on Wednesday.

I’m predicting (cautiously, and with fingers crossed) that he will be gone within 3 months.

[As an aside, my favorite bit of the story is that the prostitute (who was allegedly paid by a businessman to attend the party), seems not to have asked Berlusconi himself for money “because she was more keen on favors to obtain building permits.”]

The 1984 documentary “The Times of Harvey Milk” is available for free on hulu.com – you just have to be prepared for the commercial interruptions. I remember seeing it in a theater when it came out – I must have been 17 or 18 – and being devastated. The opening shot, the famous footage of Dianne Feinstein announcing the assassination of Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Milk, is still shocking. But more shocking to me was the verdict in the Dan White trial – guilty of manslaughter. I knew about Milk’s death going into the theater, and I’m pretty sure I had heard of the “Twinkie Defense” but I hadn’t put them together. At one point in the film, Jim Elliot – a previously homophobic auto machinist who got to know Milk through his union work – comments on the verdict: “if it had just been Moscone that got killed, I think he [White] would have been guilty of murder and he would have been at San Quentin the rest of his life. But, sad to say, I think there’s a lot of people in this world that still think that if you kill a gay, you’re doing a service to society. I think I’d have thought that too if I hadn’t been associated with Harvey and the gay community – I probably would have felt the same way.” I distinctly remember thinking: “that’s absolutely right.” I don’t think I had any (out) gay friends at the time, and it was a shocking revelation to me that gays faced this kind of attitude as a matter of course.

It’s interesting to compare “The Times of Harvey Milk” to “Milk.” Despite Sean Penn’s amazing performance, I like the documentary much better – but this very well could reflect my own failings in film appreciation. Some footage is used in both – including the Feinstein announcement. But the clips don’t always serve the same purpose. In “Milk”, they show President Carter telling an audience to “vote against proposition 6” – the 1978 California initiative to prohibit gays and lesbians (and arguably anyone who supported gay rights) from teaching in public schools. But “The Times of Harvey Milk” shows more. Carter had finished his speech, and began to leave the podium. Off-mike, Governor Jerry Brown says to him: “and Ford and Reagan have already come out against it, so it’s perfectly safe.” Carter leans back to the mike and says: “Also, I want to ask everybody to vote against proposition 6.” He smiles, and walks off. Anyway, whether or not you’ve seen “Milk,” you should find 1-1/2 hours, brace yourself, and watch “The Times of Harvey Milk.”

From the “Chronicle of Higher Education”:http://chronicle.com/news/index.php?id=6065&utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en

Brigham Young University has rejected an appeal from a student who had completed all the requirements for a degree but saw his diploma withheld last year after he published Men on a Mission, a calendar of buff Mormon missionaries without shirts, the Associated Press reported.

The student, Chad Henry, was excommunicated from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which owns the university, over the calendar last July. In September he was told that, to receive his degree, he would need to be reinstated as a member of the Mormon church.

Which reminds me that anyone who hasn’t read Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s wonderful account of how she “came to be excommunicated”:http://nielsenhayden.com/GodandI.html by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints really doesn’t know what they are missing.

Andrew Sullivan “links to”:http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/02/christianists-a.html a “New Scientist”:http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16680-porn-in-the-usa-conservatives-are-biggest-consumers.html story suggesting that they do.

However, there are some trends to be seen in the data. Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds. … Eight of the top 10 pornography consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain in last year’s presidential election – Florida and Hawaii were the exceptions. While six out of the lowest 10 favoured Barack Obama.

But if you look at the “actual study”:http://people.hbs.edu/bedelman/papers/redlightstates.pdf (PDF), not so much.

bq. The fourth column reports that in regions where more people report regularly attending religious services (per National Election Studies 2004), overall subscription rates are not statistically significantly different from subscriptions elsewhere (p 0.848).

bq. … Furthermore, I found no significant relationship between subscriptions to this adult entertainment service and presidential voting in 2004, based on poll data by congressional district. However, using individual-level data from a Hitwise sample of ten million anonymized U.S. Internet users, Tancer (2008), finds that adult escort sites are more popular in blue states that voted for Gore in 2004, while visitors from the red states that voted for Bush in 2004 are more likely to visit wife-swapping sites, adult webcams, and sites about voyeurism.

What evidence there is in the paper of a relationship between religious faith and porn consumption seems, as best as I can interpret the relevant table, to be based on a simple OLS regression with no reported control variables. Nor does there seem to be _any_ discussion in the piece of correlations between porn consumption and voting patterns in the most recent presidential election.

I’m not sure whether to blame the New Scientist or the paper’s author, who perhaps seems (if quoted fairly and accurately, which is of course by no means certain – he could have made a few vague handwaves that were taken completely out of context) to have hammed up his results a bit in the interview. But even if there _were_ strong results, they wouldn’t necessarily tell us much. The data is all aggregated at the state or zipcode level, but the decision to purchase or not purchase porn online is obviously an individual one. There are _all sorts_ of obvious ecological problems in drawing inferences about religious people’s individual propensities from aggregate data. This is directly analogous to “Heritage horseflop”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/11/06/a-little-rich/ claiming that because rich states tend to support Democrats, therefore the Democrats are the party of the rich. As Gelman, Park et al. showed, that inference was directly misleading. Similarly, even if people in more religious or Republican states _were_ more inclined to purchase porn online, this doesn’t imply that religious _people_ or _individual_ Republicans were more inclined to purchase porn online, and I can think of at least two or three plausible alternative causal mechanisms that would explain the observed correlation.

I was in touch with Astra Taylor about her documentary Žižek! quite a long time ago, or so it seems. She has a new film called Examined Life consisting of what might be called philosopher-in-the-street interviews. The talking heads include (to reshuffle the list alphabetically) Kwarne Anthony Appiah, Judith Butler, Michael Hardt, Martha Nussbaum, Avital Ronell, Peter Singer, Sunaura Taylor, Cornel West, and Slavoj Žižek.

Here’s the trailer:

I haven’t seen the film yet — it’s only showing in NYC now, it seems — but would welcome a screener DVD. It’s not like I’m going to bootleg it out of the trunk of my car or anything. I don’t even have a car, if that makes the folks at Zeitgeist Films feel any better.

(crossposted)

What “Robert Farley”:http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2008/10/somebody-went-there.html just said.

Update: Gregory King, associate director of public relations for AFSCME has spoken to me on the phone at length, and sent me the statement below. I remain highly skeptical about the claim that this wasn’t gaybaiting, but am happy to give both sides of the argument.

AFSCME’s radio advertisement in Kentucky says absolutely nothing about Senator McConnell’s sexual orientation. We are as interested in McConnell’s undisclosed service records as we were in those of George W. Bush. Urging Senator McConnell to be “straight” with the voters of Kentucky is not gay-baiting. That is as ridiculous as suggesting that Senator John McCain named his bus the Straight Talk Express in order to appeal to anti-gay voters. AFSCME is being unfairly smeared with an unfounded charge of gay-baiting. We have done no such thing.

I first became aware of Dru because she was a member of the Bristol Flickr group, and I was looking to buy a camera. What better way of deciding than to look through other people’s photos, and see what the ones I liked were taken with? So there was Dru, a slightly mumsy, middle-aged woman with a young daughter and a Morris Traveller. In other words, extrapolating from the various signifiers, I’d formed an impression of what Dru must be like. Then I met her, at one of our monthly get-togethers, in the Royal Naval Volunteer. And then she spoke. “Bloodly hell!” I thought to myself, “you’re a bloke … or used to be.” A very quick update of my mental image of Dru took place.

It isn’t very often that people I know have their biography published. In fact, through not paying attention again, I’d failed to notice that Dru’s was coming out. Only when a friend send me “a link to the Guardian”:http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/relationships/story/0,,2275803,00.html , with the question “Is this Flickr Dru?” did I catch on. Well, “Becoming Drusilla”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/184655067X/junius-21 isn’t so much a biography as the record of a friendship, and what happens to it when one of the parties announces their desire to change sex.
[click to continue…]