Embitterment and "Elitism"

Barack Obama is in hot water over his suggestion that working-class voters are bitter over their economic disenfranchisement and that they're seeking solace in such distractions as guns, God, and religion. Here's the quotation that's causing the brouhaha, in case you're even further behind the news than I am:

"You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them," Obama said. "And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
(Source: Time)

Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic rightly points out that the trigger words here are "bitter" and "cling." Also "guns" and "religion," which suggests we're in big trouble if you can't even mention either term except to praise them. I'll get to them too in a moment.

Aren't people embittered? On this score, Obama said nothing new. It's basically the same argument that Thomas Frank put forth a few years ago in What's the Matter with Kansas? Frank himself, interviewed by Sam Stein for the HuffPost, confirmed that he found a country rife with bitterness when he researched his book. Even apart from economic issues, there's plenty of cause for embitterment, starting with our lost war and eviscerated Constitution, and ending with eight lost years when it comes to energy independence and climate control.

"Cling" was a crappy choice of word, and I won't try to defend it. It makes people sound weak - and who wants to see themselves as a weakling? Had Obama left out that word, he might've avoided this shitstorm. Instead, both of his opponents immediately attacked him as "elistist."

Democratic guru Bob Shrum points out at the HuffPost that it's the other two candidates, Clinton and McCain, who are far more deeply rooted in the economic and political elites:

Ironically, Obama's the one raised by a single mother. He's the one who only recently finished paying off his student loans. He doesn't know what it's like to have $100 million. The opponents who are attacking him are the ones who inhabit that financial neighborhood. ...

The Clintons haven't lived in the real world for at least twenty-five years; they've been in a bubble surrounded by aides moving from one mansion to another. This doesn't mean they don't care or can't empathize. But it does make it awkward to damn the guy who was a community organizer helping laid-off steelworkers as someone who is out of touch.

The Clinton-McCain axis can portray Obama as elitist partly because it's clear to them, and to much of America, that as a half-black man Obama can't be part of the working class, no matter how humble his origins. This assumption is rooted in real material conditions, on one level: Those laid-off steelworkers are overwhelmingly white men. But it's primarily ideological. Ever since the Reagan era, many white Americans "know" that poor blacks belong to the underclass. It's evident that Obama's too well-educated for that, so he must belong to the elite. There's no middle ground in this ideological binary, which of course willfully ignores the actual existence of America's black middle class.

The elitism smear sticks a bit too easily to Obama because his education left an imprint on him that's familiar to anyone else who's enjoyed a highly privileged education. I didn't go to Columbia and Harvard Law, but I did study at two fancy-pants private universities (with oodles of financial aid, which Obama must have received too). I recognize his ability to project an almost aristocratic intellectualism and an aura of deserving to lead - both of which are by-products of that sort of rarefied education. I suspect this is just as recognizable to people who've been shut out of privilege. To the extent this inspires resentment, Obama's opponents can exploit it.

Probably more importantly, as long as Clinton and McCain are willing to kowtow to unreason and anti-intellectualism, they can paint Obama as elitist merely because he refuses to genuflect guns and fundamentalism. But why do "guns" and "religion" set people off? Why does their mere mention make a candidate vulnerable to charges of elitism? Like opposition to immigration, which Obama also cited in his remarks, NRA-style pro-gun advocacy and fundamentalist religion are rooted in profoundly irrational human impulses. These are pre-Enlightenment refuges.

By contrast, Obama expresses a faith in human reason, decency, and civil discourse that's rare in our political culture. This, more than anything, may be what's read as elitism. We live in a time when reason, intellectualism, and science have all been smeared with the mud of elitism. The Republicans have succeeded brilliantly in discrediting all of these things as weapons that a powerful class of liberal intellectuals wields against the common man. In fact, this is all a smokescreen for the Republicans' own manipulations, but that doesn't hamper them from casting people like me (me!?!) as the enemy of ordinary people. Does it make any sense? Let's just say I haven't shipped anyone's job overseas lately. Does that matter? Heck no.

Seen from this angle, a certain kind of elitism - leadership, myth-busting, wisdom, and discernment - might be just what's needed to dismantle the illusions the right wing has constructed. I'm not much of a Marxist, but the old Marxian notion of "false consciousness" doesn't seem like an entirely wrong label for those illusions. I'd prefer to see myself as a radical constitutional democrat (small D, this time). But when people have been so thoroughly misled about their own interests that they consistently vote against it, maybe a dose of benevolent elitism might be a necessary corrective.

Non-dogmatic kitteh from I Can Has Cheezburger?

Academics Anonymous

One of the paradoxes of academics who blog is that we practically grovel for name recognition in all of our official work. You get published in your field and your name is the currency that helps you get a job, keep a job, earn tenure. Scientists tussle over who gets to be lead author on a paper. Yet academics who blog tend to go underground, taking on a pseudonym and often not revealing their blog to their colleagues.

It's not just bloggers who do this. Authors of personal essays in The Chronicle of Higher Education routinely use pseudonyms, too. This practice recently came under fire in the Chronicle with an article by Peter Plagens hyperbolically titled "The Dangers of Anonymity":

I understand why Valerie Plame might want to use a pseudonym, or why Larry Summers probably should have used one, but I don't understand why so many academics, even when writing fluffy little "casuals," think they have to use them. The practice is particularly common in The Chronicle's Careers section, with articles that are neither scandalous personal confessions nor heroic acts of whistle-blowing.

Plagens' argument boils down to his accusation that these authors are, in a word, "chicken." He sees no reason why people can't use their real names while complaining about leaky faucets or airing their fantasies of being a biker chick.

The specific authors Plagens attacked got a chance to respond in the Chronicle. They very reasonably said they didn't want to be Google-able from here to eternity by current students or future employers. They pointed out that academic freedom is pretty damn fragile if you're untenured, and that Plagens' proposed remedies for discrimination - suing your colleagues' asses or getting a shiny new job - are un-amusing and often infeasible. Even barring serious repercussions, these authors are reluctant to poison relations with co-workers who'd dread appearing in an essay lampooning them or their department.

But none of these authors addressed what I see as the biggest barrier to using one's real name: the threat of not being taken seriously. Dr. Crazy hints at this issue in her blog, Reassigned Time:

Sometimes people want to write about the mundane. Tragically, the mundane does not generally accord one professional accolades. While it's true that one might not face profoundly negative repercussions (like not getting tenure) for writing such things under one's "real" name, one also will not receive professional accolades. In a culture of tenure and promotion that depends upon accolades, well, it certainly doesn't make sense to write about the mundane under one's "real" name. Why? Because, well, it makes one seem mundane as opposed to outstanding, which is what tenure committees even at the most lame universities seek.

Yes! And in fact, if you look at the quotation I grabbed from Plagens, you can see from his use of the term "fluffy little 'casuals'" that he doesn't just object to anonymity or pseudonymity, he's sneering at anything less than Deep Serious Intellectual Texts.

Writing about anything personal can quickly be perceived as not just mundame but frivolous. Sure, once you've achieved a reputation through more conventional channels, you may get away with publishing glimpses of your personal life. (I'm thinking of the autobiographical portions of Susan Bordo's wonderful The Male Body or Jane Gallop's Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment.) But if you're not already famous, you tread lightly. Academics and network news anchors are about the only remaining professions where "gravitas" seems to be regarded as a basic job qualification. (This is no longer even required of the POTUS, as evidenced by the Current Occupant.)

Academics who blog bump up against the prevalent academic norm that there's no such thing as "spare" time. You ought to be devoted to your job 24/7, living a sort of modern-day monastic life. Which is why parenthood and motherhood are too often regarded as crippling one's chance at a tenured position (whether that's true or not in any particular case). (Note that failure to win tenure doesn't just mean job insecurity; it often means unemployment and a strong chance you'll never work in your field again.)

There's also a gendered dimension to this. Insofar as women are still taken less seriously in many academic disciplines, there's probably more pressure on us not to appear too frivolous. We're also still more closely associated with the body, which means that if we blog about mothering or sex or anything else with a major corporeal dimension, we may play into stereotypes and again provide fodder for those colleagues who still have (usually unarticulated) problems seeing women as their equals. We're also too quickly presumed to be mired in our personal lives.

All of this can vary, depending partly on your discipline. Women remain highly marginal in many of the sciences, but indefinable bullshit like gravitas seems to matter less there. In the humanities, women are quite prevalent but a certain tweedy seriousness plays more of a role than in the sciences. (Picture the historians who appear on TV as talking heads. Doris Kearns Goodwin is the only female, and she sure does the tweedy thing.) In the program where I currently teach, women's studies, none of these intangibles seem to be very important. I'd have no problem with my colleagues reading my blog; they're wonderful and real people. But we're also marginal to the rest of the university.

Being pseudonymous can offer some nice positive benefits, too, as the Chronicle commentators point out. When you detach from your real-world identity, what you write can more easily be read as universal. You can develop a different voice than you might use in your other writing projects. You can explore personal topics frankly. You tell the truth, as you see it, without embarrassing innocent bystanders. All of these benefits apply to pseudonymous academic bloggers, too, as Profgrrrrl has thoughtfully explored.

Is this irresponsible, much less "dangerous," as Plagens suggests? Dr. Crazy notes that there's a big difference between pseudonymity and anonymity.

Pseudonymity ... is not about being untraceable but rather about taking on a traceable identity that is distinct from one's legal identity, or one's identity at birth. It's about taking on a "pen name," a name that people can follow, and by extension a way of thinking that people can follow.

If you use a pseudonym, you develop a consistent persona over time. In fact, it'd be really hard to do otherwise. You also feel a sense of responsibility to your readers. As I learned last week when I got attacked by Clintonista partisans for blogging on the O'Bleness story, I felt no less beholden to getting it right just because I wasn't using my legal name. I carefully re-examined what I'd written, and precisely that self-scrutiny let me feel confident that I hadn't distorted the truth insofar as it could be known from a sparse set of facts.

I was also grateful for pseudonymity when I started getting hateful comments. Someone who really wanted to track me down could do it, but I haven't left a trail of bread crumbs leading straight to me. If there's any danger lurking out there, it's not from "chicken" grad students and professors airing their dreams and complaints under an assumed name; it's from crazies and stalkers who'd like to put the chill on those of us they call eggheads, surrender monkeys, and feminazis. In this climate, I'm happy to share a name with the world's yummiest cherry tomato.

Gratuitous crocus photo from my garden, taken about a week ago.

Those Bloomin' Taxes

I should be working on my tax return, but dang it, I haven't filed away any paperwork since last June, so I first have to sort through a foot-tall pile of paper. True to form, I'm procrastinating. Which is just how I got into this pickle in the first place.

One of the other annoyances of tax season is how it coincides with planting season. This morning I said to heck with the taxes and planted some sweet pea seeds. Then I came inside and read about a nifty proposal that would give tax breaks for gardening! Well, not necessarily for planting sweet peas (they're poisonous) but for growing food in our yards, similar to the Victory Gardens in WWI, except this time with a little tax incentive.

Writing in Alternet, Roger Doiron says:

I am proposing that home growers finally catch a break. Not from bugs, weather, or clunky garden shoes, but from taxes. It's not as silly an idea as it may sound. We give tax breaks to people to encourage them to put hybrid cars in their garages and solar panels on their roofs, so why not offer incentives for solar-powered, healthy food production in their backyard? ...

More home gardens would offer us victory not only over rising food and health care costs, but also foreign oil dependency and climate change. Researcher estimate that locally-grown foods use up to 17 times less climate-warming, fossil fuels than foods from away. And when it comes to local foods, it doesn’t get any “localer” than one’s own yard.

Doiron would have the government waive taxes on gardening supplies and - more significantly - offer an income tax deduction for a kitchen garden (or for rental of a community garden plot) similar to the break for a home office, based on square footage.

This is such a cool and clever idea. It won't save the earth all on its own. But as the price of oil climbs ever higher, it might help ease the transition to the more local world that we'll all be forced to inhabit in the future. Less lofty - but no less important - more people might discover the pleasures of perfectly fresh vegetables: tender-crisp baby lettuce, sun-warmed tomatoes, sweet buttery purple-podded beans.

By that way, that sweet feline pansy pictured above, taunting those of you who are still digging out from winter? It survived from last fall, along with most of its companions, under layers of snow and discouragement. And since it's a pansy, it's edible - though this particular specimen probably has too much dirt-and-oil grime from the street in front of my house.

Oil in Them Thar Badlands

Anyone who grew up in North Dakota perks up when their home state makes national headlines. So this week, when I saw that there may be massive oil fields in the wild western half of the state, I got excited even though I haven't lived there in nearly three decades.

According to Andrew Leonard at Salon, earlier estimates ranged as high as 500 billion barrels in the Bakken shale formation, which extends from North Dakota into Montana and Canada. (I hope this doesn't mean we'll have to invade Canada.) Even if that figure were correct, no more than half would be recoverable in the best-case scenario.

Now, with the release of a United States Geological Survey report on Thursday, the amount of technically recoverable oil there has been estimated between 3.0 and 4.3 billion barrels, as Leonard reported. (See his post for links to the actual report.) Note that this is technically recoverable, which still doesn't tell us if or when it'll make economic sense. As Leonard further notes, the extraction process for shale oil usually involves pulverizing mountains. Here, companies would likely use "horizontal drilling," which the AP described as follows:

Oil companies began sharing technology about two years ago on how to recover the oil. The technology involves drilling vertically to about 10,000 feet, then "kicking out" for as many feet horizontally, while fracturing the rock to release the oil trapped in microscopic pores in the area known as the "middle" Bakken.

If it seems like there ought to be a better way, I've got a fine idea. North Dakota has another major resource that's never been a secret to its sons and daughters: wind.

Way back in 2000, the New York Times reported:

Together, South Dakota, North Dakota and Texas have sufficient wind resources to provide electricity for the entire United States, according to studies cited by Energy Secretary Bill Richardson.

Being a good North Dakotan, I read that piece. And then I saw dollar signs. My dad still owns six quarter sections of land. It's not prime farmland, but wind? Boy, have we got it!

What we don't have is transmission capacity to move all that electricity out of the Dakotas and into the rest of this energy-greedy country. We also don't have clever ways of storing really massive amounts of electricity. Those are the the two things that would lay the groundwork for large-scale exploitation of wind power.

Of course, revamping our transmission grid and reinventing the battery would require huge investments. It'd take a major public initiative. But it might still be cheaper than pulverizing or drilling under the western half of North Dakota. It would certainly be cheaper than invading any more countries for their oil - yes, even cheaper than attacking Canada, never mind Iran.

Photo of the North Dakotan Badlands by Flickr user zanzibar, used under a Creative Commons license.

My Sandbox, My Rules

Kittywampus is an itty-bitty blog. Maybe a few dozen people people come around and read regularly, and I love you guys for doing it. I love you even more when you leave comments. Others find me through search terms like "natural shrinkage of ovaries" or "attention getter activities for English classes" (which led to the Best Penis Spam post, so it'd better be a liberal school!) or "basement flooding pepper pike Ohio" (huh?!). Most of these random encounters end in one or the other party simply going "WTF?" and moving on.

But the past couple of days have been different. First a client (a certain publishing mega-conglomerate that shall henceforth remain nameless) found a post from a few days ago where I mentioned working on a job for them. In that post I promised I wouldn't divulge anything about the current translating job because it was unpublished, and then I referred interested readers to the public website for the larger project. The client objected - I still don't know why, since I was scrupulous about anything that was even remotely confidential, and the post was snark-free - but I removed it since I wanted to protect the job that shall also remain nameless.

Then yesterday I got a succession of increasingly unpleasant comments. The first took a mildly bullying tone on the Clinton-O'Bleness dust-up. The next took me to task for a spelling error (and for not fully appreciating my mother!) in my post on reproductive rights. The last one, by "John" on my follow-up post to the O'Bleness story, informed me: "You are so full of shit that the best I can offer is a cyber enema." (None of these three commenters had properly traceable IDs. Welcome to Trollville.)

That's not what this blog is about. The blogosphere bristles with rants and invective. So does cable TV. I don't think the world needs much more of that. Call me idealistic, but I don't think democracy can thrive without civil society. As a matter of style and temperament, too, I prefer reasoned arguments over name-calling. I try not to be too dull or pedantic, and while I'm sure I don't always succeed, I don't think potty humor is any remedy. I get enough of that from my beloved four-year-old Tiger, anyway, whose favorite "naughty" phrase right now is "poop on your head."

I'm sure this is just the normal bloggy growing pains that go with wading into controversial topics. Maybe it's also a reflection of the bitterness of this primary season. I'm aware I can be grateful that all I got was some scat and not overtly sexual threats or insults. (Then again, I don't know "John's" preferences; perhaps he thought he and I could have a real good time with an enema? Sorry, buddy. Not my thing.)

But I also don't need to put up with this Scheisse. So, you'll now see a comment policy right below Grey Kitty's picture. I'll delete liberally, if I must; I don't want to impede the conversation by turning on comment moderation. I'm leaving yesterday's comments up for the same reason my brother-in-law used to leave a trail of dead ants on his kitchen counter: to warn the next insects. We'll see if it helps!

Rock iris courtesy of Sungold's garden porn collection. It just finished blooming.

Honeymoon Impotence: Wedded to Repression

I'm feeling a little bit flummoxed because I've had not one but two rather hostile comments today - a new experience for me. So what better way to get re-centered than to read obscure medical articles? And what's more interesting than a sexual malady you've never heard about?

Well, at least I'd never heard of this one: "honeymoon impotence." It's what it sounds like, and then some. Not only is the wedding night a flop; couples may go for months and even years without consummating their marriage.

As you might expect, honeymoon impotence is mostly due to anxiety, though a Turkish study found blood flow problems in a little more than a quarter of men being treated for it.

According to an Egyptian specialist in sexual medicine, Hussein Ghanem, the condition is more common in countries where premarital strictures against virginity are rigidly upheld, particularly in predominantly Muslim societies:

It is estimated that 12% of visits to sexual dysfunction clinics in Egypt & Saudi Arabia are related to honeymoon impotence.

Physicians attending patients with erectile dysfunction in certain conservative societies frequently face unique situations related to the culture and family attitudes. Newly wed couples in conservative societies probably have limited premarital sexual experiences. Although this makes the wedding night a very special event, yet men with fear of failure are under a significant amount of stress. Not only do they fear embarrassment with their wives but also possible humiliation with the bride's family.

It seems that rigidity in one area spawns a lack thereof in other realms.

It's too easy to target other people's religion, so I want to tread lightly here. I'm sure lots of men in more permissive cultures have nerves the first time, too, and some have trouble getting it up as a result. Others will finish too fast or just plain have no clue what they're doing. With premarital experience, most men will have those bugs ironed out long before their honeymoon.

But all those normal start-up glitches just add fuel to the idea that practice is a good thing.

Honeymoon impotence shows one more time that you can't spend a lifetime being taught that sex is evil - and then flip a switch on the wedding night and start embracing pleasure. Repression tends to linger and become part of people's identities and worldview; it can even become embodied in their very flesh.

Standard treatment for honeymoon impotence is Viagra, Cialis, and (ouch) penile injections. Dr. Ghanem's team reports good results for Cialis (tadalifil):

Thirty-four patients (76%) needed tadalafil for less than 1 month, five (11%) for up to 3 months, and two (4%) for more than 3 months. Four patients (9%) were unsuccessful.

In contrast to the Turkish study I cited above, Ghanem's findings indicate that the problem is overwhelmingly psychogenic. Once men gather confidence, most of them are good to go.

But wouldn't it be better to treat society - to eliminate repression on a sociocultural level, long before young children start to absorb it? Especially when you consider that a man may be cured of his honeymoon impotence, only to find his wife has such severe vaginismus that sex is still impossible? Dr. Ghanem and his colleagues report that this is a non-trivial issue, one that requires psychotherapy and not just a quick pharmaceutical fix.

And might it be worth asking: How common is honeymoon impotence closer to home, in fundamentalist Christian marriages? Logically, you'd think Christian sexual repression would be no more benign than the Muslim variety. But I didn't find any information on this; Google only gives you 649 hits for "honeymoon impotence" and apart from a scattered study in Japan or Korea, virtually all of the material deals with the Islamic world, much of it authored by Dr. Ghanem. All I found was a WebMD article that states ED is common in the United States, too, among young men first becoming sexually active. But it's silent on the role of religion and repression.

I have a hard time believing this is overwhelmingly an Islamic issue. My guess is that honeymoon impotence exists among highly religious Americans, too, but we just don't name it.

Bridegroom Ken photographed by Flickr user Patrick Q, used under a Creative Commons agreement.

More on the Clinton-O'Bleness Flap

In comments to yesterday's post on Hillary Clinton's distorted tale of health care denial here in southeast Ohio, Big Kahuna wrote:

Sorry you were misled, but nobody has accused O'Bleness of anything. The accusation is against Holzer Medical. And the story has been updated in several locations. I reported on it at NoQuarterUSA. Clinton never mentioned O'Bleness, nor did Deputy Holman. In fact if you watch his comments again you'll see he clearly states "so she went to another hospital". The 'another hospital' is O'Bleness.

So please update your article.

No need to update. I was relying on current information. Big Kahuna's comments, while appreciated, are off the mark for two reasons.

First, it's not the deputy's statements that are at issue, it's Clinton's.

Second, Clinton didn't have to name names in order to identify O'Bleness uniquely. When anyone in Meigs or Athens County says "She went to the hospital," it can only refer to O'Bleness because there is no other local hospital. Holzer is a chain of clinics. Holzer offers specialist physicians and urgent care facilities. Holzer does not provide in-patient care. Holzer is not a hospital.

Yes, the deputy made a misleading statement in that he referred to two different hospitals. (Big Kahuna has helpfully posted a transcript of the deputy's chat with Clinton here.) I'm not faulting the deputy, who likely thought he was involved in a casual conversation and may not have realized he was giving Clinton's campaign a new meme.

It would've been incumbent on Clinton's staffers to verify the story and get the details straight. And they didn't. (Obviously this wouldn't have been an impossible task, because the media have gotten the story through relatives.) When she then repeated the deputy's vague version of the story, the phrase "went to the hospital" unambiguously referred to O'Bleness. It's like if you refer to the moon: If you lived on Saturn, you might mean Titan or Rhea or one of dozens others. But living on Earth, we can only mean The Moon - our moon, the one Neil Armstrong visited. Same deal for hospitals in my little neck of the woods.

I should also point out that I have no connections with either O'Bleness or River Rose except as a patient. My main reason for writing about this is my sense of offended decency. I am an Obama supporter, but I'm also an equal opportunity critic. For example, I've strongly criticized the open sexism toward Hillary. (If you don't want to follow all four of those links, you can just click on January's archives.) I've been more critical of her lately as her campaign has resorted to increasingly desperate tactics. But unlike NoQuarterUSA, where Big Kahuna writes, mine is an independent blog, not an informal extension of anyone's campaign. I find it fascinating that there are entire blogs out there devoted to single-mindedly promoting a candidate, and not a little ironic that the tag line at NoQuarter is "Tired of Spin?"

Clinton Slanders My Ob/Gyn

I think the latest flap about Hillary Clinton distorting the truth may be slightly overblown. This time, her problem seems to have been sloppy fact-checking, not outright lying. But this particular episode cuts very close to home for me.

Up 'til a few days ago she's been telling a story about a young pregnant woman in southeast Ohio who was denied medical care at the local hospital for lack of a $100 upfront payment. The baby was stillborn, and the woman died, too. Now, Clinton is right that the health care system is broken. But she relied on gossip and no one on her staff verified the story before spreading it all along the campaign trail.

These are accusations that hurt my neighbors, my doctors. Here's how CNN debunked it. (Video via Alternet.)



The hospital accused of this heartlessness is O'Bleness, our one and only local hospital. (The CNN anchorwoman totally mangled its name.) The doctors so accused are at River Rose Obstetrics and Gynecology. Now, O'Bleness is a small-town facility that does not always offer cutting-edge care; financially and technologically, it just can't. But these obstetricians are fine doctors, good human beings, and I hate seeing them libeled and slandered.

I know about this firsthand. I gave birth to the Tiger at O'Bleness and had just about a perfect experience, apart from the nurse anesthetist having been sprayed by a skunk that same morning and still stinking to high heaven. The doctors at River Rose attended us, and I'm still very happy with them. They've been wonderful with everything from my infernal UTI to a slow-motion breast cancer scare I had over the past year.

If you've been following my blog, you know that I reflexively take a critical position toward medicine (one example is here), so when I say my ob/gyns are good, it's not just empty words. These doctors listen. They take you seriously. They don't make unfounded assumptions or leap to conclusions.

They also don't just cater to the well-heeled. I was in there just a week ago, and I was struck again by how their waiting room is a microcosm of rural poverty. You see teenage mothers accompanied by their own thirtysomething mothers. You note that these young women are on their second or third baby. You smell the acrid odor of cigarette smoke, even though smoking is banned in the building. You hear the exhaustion and impatience in the women's voices as they deal with their kids. You see new mothers feeding their babies formula, even though both the hospital and the physicians strongly promote breastfeeding.

This is not the picture of a practice that turns away the needy. And it turns out that in this case, too, neither O'Bleness nor River Rose denied care to this terribly unlucky young woman. As O'Bleness states on its website: "We provide care regardless of patients' ability to pay." And in this case, as the New York Times reported over the weekend, O'Bleness admitted her without any delay.

Was the distortion of this story an honest mistake on the part of the Clinton campaign? Could be. But if so, it shows egregious negligence:

Linda M. Weiss, a spokeswoman for the not-for-profit hospital, said the Clinton campaign had never contacted the hospital to check the accuracy of the story, which Mrs. Clinton had first heard from a Meigs County, Ohio, sheriff’s deputy in late February.
(Source: The New York Times)

What exactly happened remains unclear. The expectant mother apparently visited another clinic closer to her hometown where she'd once owed money at an earlier time when she'd been uninsured. The Washington Post reports that Holzer Clinic - a local chain of for-profit providers - had taken her to court for a debt, which she however repaid in full back in 2005.

It's unconfirmed that Holzer was the outfit that turned her away, but I think it's highly plausible. I get some of my healthcare there, and the doctors are good. (Disclosure: one of them is a friend of mine.) But Holzer is pretty tough when it comes to bill collections (first-hand experience there, too!) and the people at the reception desk are known to stonewall, at least at my local branch. If their books erroneously caused them to think she owed money, I can easily imagine the receptionists sending her away.

So it looks like yes, lack of insurance almost certainly caused her to miss care that might have made a difference. At the same time, the woman suffered from preeclampsia (according to the WaPo), a condition that sometimes still proves lethal to mother and child even with the best of care. A college classmate of mine suffered that fate. So did the wife of a former co-worker of my husband's. They were both well insured. Sometimes nature is brutal.

I hope both Clinton and Obama will make health care reform a priority. The only real answer is single-payer system that would ensure everyone gets the care she needs, whenever she needs it - "Medicare for all." But it's neither ethical nor politically effective to rely on unvetted stories that slander my smart, kind, and dedicated health care providers.

Positively Ambivalent about "Sex Positive"

Sunflower has lately been ruminating on what, exactly, "sex-positive feminism" encompasses. Hint: it's a lot more complex and inclusive than celebrating Girls Gone Wild or Sex in the City. She distinguishes between sex-positivism - embracing sexuality in all its wonderful, messy variety - and "sexy feminism," which she rejects if it means she has to be a twentysomething Barbie doll flashing her boobs. I love the way she redefines sexy:

I'm definitely and emphatically a sex-positive feminist - the exploring I've been doing has strongly confirmed that, in all sorts of unexpected ways, that modifier is the right fit. Whether or not I'm a sexy feminist depends entirely on what the observer finds sexy - if one's taste runs to a strong-willed, outspoken, opinionated, obstinate, well-read, geeky woman with an excellent command of the English language, a snarky wit, and a mind like a steel trap, then I'm sexy as hell, with very little reference to media-driven conventions. And, bloody hell, if being able to be sexy in one's own, unique, individual way, entirely independent of conformity to some hypothetical standard, isn't part of what we've been fighting for, I'm in the wrong movement.
(Read more here.)

And now figleaf has put together a very nice list of the qualities that correspond to being sex positive and asked for others to comment on it. I'd sign on to pretty much his whole list, and yet I'm still wary of the label. First, here's figleaf's lovely list, and then my qualms. (His post is much longer than this, but I didn't truncate the list for fear of distorting it.)

Sex positivity:

• Sexual behaviors are pleasurable, not just for procreation
• Sex is for pleasure; it's a form of *play*
• There's an absence of shame
• No one makes another feel bad about *wanting* something sexual. (Whether they agree to engage is entirely separate.)
• Agency not objectification for all parties
• Everyone always has the freedom to decline
• There's a gender and orientation-free perspective. (This doesn't have to mean you have to be polymorphous, just that you're accepting of those who are.)
• No moral judgments about masturbation, virginity, asexuality, and celibacy
• Sexuality is an element of health -- appropriate amounts are good for mental and physical well-being
• Sex safety (a.k.a. "safe sex" or "safer sex") is strongly endorsed
• Developmentally appropriate sex education is strongly endorsed
• Contraception is strongly endorsed where pregnancy is a risk and is not desired.
• Accepts porn under specifiable conditions
• Uses inclusive language
• Respects unique and individual preferences (what's true for you or me isn't universal)
• Comprehensive definition of sexuality

And notes for what constitutes sex negativity:

• shame and blame oriented
• privatizing
• prohibitions
• controlling

(Read the rest here.)

The problem is that anyone who lived through the feminist sex wars of the 1980s recalls - vividly, painfully - how labels were thrown around as epithets. And it just seems to me that calling oneself sex positive can't help but revive those old divisions. Heck, there's still so much mistrust on these issues that maybe it's moot to worry about reviving the sex wars; they never really stopped, they just picked up and moved to the Internet. Still, I don't want to place myself firmly on one front or the other. I even deplore the term "sex wars" because it both escalates the political conflict and trivializes the horrors of actual war.

I really regret the feminist schisms over sex because I happen to think that both sides had valid and important points. And an important avenue of growth and critique just got nailed shut when the two sides stopped talking and started shouting at each other.

The critics of women's sexual objectification and exploitation are right that women's participation in exploitative systems can harm women as a class. They would set their sights on "Accepts porn under specifiable conditions" and argue that porn is always harmful, the conditions be damned. I'm not convinced of that myself but boy, it's hard to figure out just what conditions make porn okay, both within individual relationships and in society more broadly. Also, a lot of feminists who abhor porn don't necessarily feel that way about sex, and they understandably object to the implication that if you're not sex-positive, you're sex-negative.

The so-called sex-positive factions are right to question dictates about what women (and men) ought to find pleasurable. Radical feminists too often had a problem with "Respects unique and individual preferences (what's true for you or me isn't universal)." Sometimes in the 1980s it felt like radical feminists were proscribing anything that smacked of power, even (or maybe especially?) within feminist lesbian relationships. And I'm sorry, but sex that's all about perfect egalitarianism, that's only tame and gentle and all about rolling around naked in the daffodils without anyone ever penetrating anyone else? No offense to daffodils - the one above, from my garden, is quite fetching - but as a steady diet that's just not very sexy for a lot of women. Including many of us who prize egalitarianism in the rest of our lives.

But to make things way too convoluted, I've also got qualms about my qualms. Because if I write off the term sex positive, which really does describe me well (at least in figleaf's formulation), aren't I doing the same thing many women do when they reject "feminism" and "feminist" because the terms seem hopelessly laden with baggage? And doesn't that make it harder to build alliances and take collective action? Even if I came up with a clever new term, the fronts are already hardened and no one's likely to be fooled.

1998 Nostalgia Quote of the Day

Asking an academic to explain humor to you is like getting Kenneth Starr to explain the sex act: The explainer has already waged war on the thing being explained.

-- Louis Bayard, "Can Stephen Colbert Save America?" at Salon.com

Tragicomic LOLcats from I Can Has Cheezburger?

Reproductive Rights Are Human Rights

My friend The Political Cat posted his thoughts yesterday on why the right to contraception ought to be regarded as a human right. His argument emphasizes the ways widespread use of contraception serves a common good. Some of these are global: overpopulation, declining resources, pollution, global warming, and the violence that each of these can provoke. TPC also strongly advocates reducing child abuse and neglect by preventing unwanted births in the first place. When I commented that "This post cries out for the bookend to it - the individual-rights argument," TPC tossed the job back to me. :-) So here goes.

I generally prefer the term reproductive rights because it's broader than just legal, affordable access to both contraception and abortion. It also encompasses freedom from coerced sterilization or abortion as well as support for needy pregnant women and new mothers. Here, to stay roughly parallel to TPC's post, I'll focus mostly on freedom from unwanted pregnancy.

Reproductive rights are a fundamental human right. Without the ability to decide freely whether one wants to share one's body with another and nurture and sustain it at considerable cost to oneself, a woman is not a free human being. She's a slave. And we outlawed slavery 150 years ago.

Unplanned, unwanted pregnancy doesn't just reduce women's freedom to do the fun things in life, as anti-feminists often argue. Its penalties are not trivial and frivolous. It interrupts and often ends educations, makes it impossible to perform certain types of paid work, and puts both mother and child at long-term risk for poverty.

American society guarantees bodily autonomy and integrity more solidly and consistently for men than for women. There's no broad consensus on women's reproductive rights, as evidenced by the deep cleavages on abortion, escalating controversy over the right to buy birth control pills (!) at any pharmacy, and nonsensical legal restrictions on both abortion and Plan B (the morning-after pill). By contrast, while plenty of wingnuts deride condoms as useless, no one is trying to pressure pharmacies and other stores to stop selling them.

This double standard was dissected over a generation ago by the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson, whose 1971 essay "A Defense of Abortion" famously proposed a thought experiment in which a virtuoso violinist with kidney failure was hooked up to another person's kidneys for nine months against that person's will. Without using the other person as a human dialysis machine, the violinist would die. Of course no one would insist that the second person had an obligation to permit this. No one, Thomson argued, has the right to another's body. While her analogy is obviously imperfect, the disanalogies are not strong enough to invalidate her argument. (See Wikipedia for a nice summary of objections to Thomson and the rebuttals to them. Note also that her argument generously posits that the fetus is a full social and legal person; if you don't grant that premise, then there's no reason to restrict abortion on ethical grounds and her whole argument becomes unnecessary.)

I'd like to extend Thomson's reasoning with a more explicit analysis of how gender plays into this. (I'm basing my thoughts partly on arguments that Susan Bordo makes much more eloquently in her essay "Are Mothers Persons? Reproductive Rights and the Politics of Subject-ivity," in Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body.) Here's a particularly crass example. Abortion opponents often argue that women need to bear the consequences of choosing to have sex. As soon as fertilization has occurred, they grant the fetus an absolute right to life, which logically entails significant bodily sacrifices from the woman. Yet they never argue that fathers have a legal obligation to make sacrifices for their born children that would impinge on their own bodily autonomy and integrity.

If, say, a child needs an kidney donated or even simply a life-saving blood transfusion, most people would agree that a parent who's a match has a special obligation to donate the needed body parts or fluids. Most parents would do so - without hesitation. But no law compels any parent to donate any part of his or her body. And why not, if the foes of legal abortion believe that a mother has such an obligation to sustain her fetus that she must allow it the use of her entire body for nine months, running non-trivial physical risks in the process? Why would they legally require mothers to make sacrifices far greater than mere blood donation, yet fathers are let off the hook entirely? This inconsistency, Bordo suggests, stems from a belief that mothers are not full persons, either socially or legally.

These are not just abstract philosophical questions. Without reproductive rights, women's health suffers grave harm. Worldwide, millions of women have died of botched and self-induced abortions where the procedure is illegal. When Roe v. Wade made abortion legal throughout the United States in 1973, the number of live births remained steady while maternal mortality plummeted. This indicates that legalization didn't actually increase the number of abortions, at least initially, but it did save thousands of women's lives each year. In those countries where it remains illegal, abortion often accounts for the lion's share of maternal mortality.

Without reproductive rights, children's lives suffer, too, and not just from the abuse and neglect that TPC deplores. As I've argued elsewhere, children in developing countries fall deeper into poverty and face higher risks of being orphaned where their mothers have poor access to contraception and abortion.

So the stakes are high. This is why Human Rights Watch has defined reproductive rights as human rights. Yet, seeing how some of their putative defenders have weenied out in recent years, you might conclude that reproductive rights are a fringe issue here in the U.S. One of the highest ranking Democrats, Senate Majority leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada), opposes abortion rights - no big shock, given that he's a Mormon. More surprisingly, much of the Democratic leadership seems to think his position is just hunky-dory.

Reproductive rights are not a fringe issue. They affect the 51% of the population that has the present, past, or future capacity to become pregnant. Unless you're pretty sure a woman sheds her personhood as soon as she becomes a potential mother, why wouldn't she deserve the same legal right to bodily autonomy and integrity as any man?

Image by Flickr user stormbear, used under a Creative Commons license.

Hair-raising Tales of Parenting in Poverty

Yesterday I mentioned I had a slew of reading to do. But my other beginning of the term preparation is my quarterly, whether-I-need-it-or-not trip to the beauty shop. (And yeah, believe me, I needed it.) I spent a few hours there yesterday morning, getting highlights and a sleek new cut and a big dose of class consciousness.

My last hair stylist was also a college student, so she and I could talk about the university and be more or less on a familiar, comfortable, middle-class wavelength. My student stylist is about to graduate and was booked out anyway, so yesterday I tried a new stylist. She did a great job on my haircut and color (I went pretty red!). Along the way, she told me some fairly hair-raising stories about her life.

Apart from the student, every other stylist I've known in this town has lived in modest-to-wretched conditions outside of town. Lots of them are single mothers. They struggle to make ends meet. This gal, who I'll call Helen, was no exception.

The problems start with that most basic need, housing. Helen recently moved out of a small trailer whose main charm was its proximity to her aging mother's house. Over a period of years, her landlord had refused to fix the roof, where water pooled and leaked into the trailer. Over that same period, her younger son's asthma returned. Everyone got bronchitis repeatedly. Helen had multiple episodes of pneumonia. One day Helen went to the emergency room with severe chest pain. It turned out to be bleeding around the lung (hemothorax) caused by toxic black mold. And black mold can only thrive on moisture. For this privilege she paid $450 a month in rent, not to mention the medical bills.

She says she's been lucky that those doctors, and others, have put her on a payment plan. This is necessary because her health insurance situation is abysmal. Her employer doesn't provide any. I think she mentioned having some catastrophic coverage but she pays out of pocket whenever she sees a doctor. She's had melanoma and needs treatment that would cost about $500 per month. She has no idea how she'll finance it. She already has thousands of dollars in medical debt. Her kids were eligible for state-subsidized insurance, but their eligibility got revoked, then reinstated upon appeal, which didn't exactly enhance her sense of security.

Helen's kids go to a rural school that's lately been plagued by sexual harassment scandals. But it seems to have more mundane problems, too. Both of her sons have been harassed by bullies without the school taking action. They're athletic kids, but she's raising them to try to take the high road, so they don't usually fight back. I worry about the kid who's been harassing my Bear during recess by getting in his face, chasing him, and poking at him. She worries about the child who threatened her second-grader with slitting his throat. When she reported this to the school, the bully was told he'd been busted. He was ordered to stop the harassment and leave his knife at home. No other consequences. The next day, he threatened Helen's son again, this time calling him a snitch. Helen hopes to get her kids enrolled in my kids' district, but I think she probably missed the deadline for inter-district transfer applications.

After school, a lot of the kids hang around on the streets. The scene, as Helen described it, sounds like what you might expect in a decayed urban neighborhood but not in a declining coal town in the beautiful Appalachian foothills. And yet, these kids are dealing and doing drugs just like any gangbanger in the 'hood. Helen is pretty confident her own kids are dodging this - so far, anyway. But she knows Oxycontin, crystal meth, even heroin are prevalent. She knows people who've died as a result.

One reason Helen is pretty sure her eighth-grader isn't doing drugs is that he's amazingly frank. Not long ago, he voluntarily confessed to her that he and his girlfriend had had sex. She read him the riot act on condoms (luckily, the girl was on the Pill, but she wants him to protect them both) and after much drama the kids have agreed not to repeat the experience anytime soon. It happened after school when the boys' father was supposed to be on duty. It could've been worse; there've been three pregnancies so far in that eight-grade class.

Helen works full-time, and she does her job well. She goes to church on Sunday and keeps her kids busy with sports. She seems to be making the best life she can for her kids. Her only real screw-up, as she readily told me, was mating with a couple of loser men. But she lives in Glouster, Ohio, a town where as of 2000

The per capita income for the village was $11,837. About 24.2% of families and 28.2% of the population were below the poverty line, including 36.3% of those under age 18 and 21.4% of those age 65 or over. (Wikipedia)

And Glouster, as we all know, is located in the richest country in the world. I sure feel that irony when I spend a heap of money on what's really a luxury. (No one ever expired for lack of hair color, though I bet a really bad dye job could be at least psychologically lethal.) And yet, if I didn't go to this salon, which is fancy by local standards, I'd go somewhere that paid its employees a whole lot less. That wouldn't help Helen either.

I don't know how to fix the poverty problem. But a single-payer health system would be one good start. Moving away from local school financing would be another.

Photo of Barbie in pins by Flickr user Mz Kit Kat, used under a Creative Commons license.
Photo of the Glouster hotel by Flickr user shuggatang, used under a Creative Commons license.

Floral Procrastination

I've been a bit spotty about posting because the new quarter is revving up and I'm co-teaching a new-to-me course. I'm almost on leave from teaching this quarter; I'm don't have my usual Women's Studies course but am helping out as a discussion leader for a class called Religion, Gender, and Sexuality. I'm really sort of a glorified TA, which feels like a welcome break, since it'll give me time for an upcoming translation project and a scholarly article I probably should've written over winter break.

I'm sure this class will inspire a slew of posts once I pull my head out of my butt and get up to speed with the reading. For tomorrow alone, the readings range from Sufism's dichotomous view of gender to Old Testament texts on women and purity; from Buddhist renunciation of fleshly pleasures to Mary Daly on footbinding.

But I'm already behind with all that reading for the best of reasons. Today was a gorgeous day, a short respite from the grey skies and rain that have clouded any chance of preparing my garden. And my new camera arrived in the mail today. Lucky me! So I spent the afternoon outside cleaning up garden debris, pruning my clematis, and trying out my new toy. Here's a first taste of last year's planting, my spooky blue rock iris, which have been in bloom for the past couple of weeks.

The Children of Abu Graib

This is not an atrocity blog. I promise this sort of thing won't become a daily feature. But I spent a long while crying about this today, and then I decided to turn those tears into outraged action. Since I can't singlehandedly shut down Abu Ghraib, I can only write about it - and urge y'all to vote for candidates who seem likely to shutter that hellhole forever.

In the not-quite-latest New Yorker, there's a profile of Sabrina Harman, the woman who took most of the infamous Abu Ghraib photos, that's as insightful as it is chilling. The authors, Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris, use extensive interviews with Harman and several of her fellow MPs to illuminate how a bunch of young people who mostly just wanted to subsidize their college education gradually became inured to torture. Or nearly so; it turns out that Harman's pictures were motivated by a mixture of macabre fascination, gallows humor, and a partly-inchoate awareness that she was partaking in atrocities that needed to be documented.

The whole article is long and upsetting but very much worth your time. For me, the most upsetting part is Harman's comments about children being held in Abu Ghraib. Yep, that's right - kids as young as ten were locked up, generally in order to coerce confessions from their fathers.

You may be asking: Wait, don't you mean Saddam's Abu Ghraib? Well, yes, Saddam also imprisoned and raped family members to extract confessions. But guess what: We didn't just take over his prison, we took over some of his most heinous tactics.

Gourevitch and Morris write:

It was easier to be nice to the women and children on Tier 1B [than to the adult male prisoners], but, Harman said, “It was kind of sad that they even had to be there.” The youngest prisoner on the tier was just ten years old—“a little kid,” she said. “He could have fit through the bars, he was so little.” Like a number of the other kids and of the women there, he was being held as a pawn in the military’s effort to capture or break his father.

Harman enjoyed spending time with the kids. She let them out to run around the tier in a pack, kicking a soccer ball, and she enlisted them to help sweep the tier and distribute meals—special privileges, reserved only for the most favored prisoners on the M.I. block. “They were fun,” she said. “They made the time go by faster.” She didn’t like seeing children in prison “for no reason, just because of who your father was,” but she didn’t dwell on that. What was the point? “You can’t feel because you’ll just go crazy, so you just kind of blow it off,” Harman said. “You can only make their stay a little bit acceptable, I guess. You give them all the candy from the M.R.E.s to make their time go by better. But there’s only so much you can do or so much you can feel.”

But even this account plays down the horror of it, though the article otherwise doesn't pull many punches. Since Gourevitch and Morris have kindly posted some of their primary source material at the New Yorker online, you can read in the interview transcript that the ball playing petered out as the prison grew increasingly overcrowded. Said Harman:

It got filled up pretty fast, so fast that we couldn’t take the children out anymore and they had to stay in their cells. We used to let them out and play ball with them. Like, just let them out in the tier and locked the main lock, like the main door so they couldn’t get out. And we’d have like 20 kids just running around and we couldn’t do it anymore because these other prisoners were coming in. These…We had people that were crazy and we had people that were just causing problems and we just couldn’t let them out because you don’t want them talking to these other people or passing them notes or corrupting the kids. So we had to keep the kids inside also. So it was pretty much like they were also being interrogated pretty much because they were in a cell. Maybe if you were one of the lucky ones, you would get out for like a half hour to help pass around food or go take your shower, or if you want a cold shower. But it was getting really crowded.
(Read the rest of Harman's comments on the children.)

We had people that were crazy. Yeah, I know she means prisoners who'd snapped, but what about her direct superiors, who put Harman and the other MPs into a situation without any training, apparently precisely so they wouldn't know that they were being ordered and encouraged to violate U.S. military and international law on the treatment of prisons? What about their superiors - all the way up to and including Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush?

I do recall Sy Hersh referring to women and children being raped in Abu Ghraib shortly after the first torture photos became public, but I had no clue that their detention was a systematic, long-term practice as opposed to a few isolated incidents. And I'm one of the people who's paying attention, most of the time. (For a round-up of the "old news" on this, see this American Leftist post from July 2004 and also Hersh's comments as reported in Salon's War Room.)

What I want to know - and what I can't figure out, despite having googled it like crazy - is this: Are children still being held in U.S. military and CIA prisons today?

Maybe we'll get an answer to this from the New Yorker article's co-author, Errol Morris, who has directed a documentary on Abu Ghraib, S.O.P.: Standard Operating Procedure, that won a jury prize at the Berlinale and is scheduled for release in the U.S. later this month. Or maybe, like so much else about this war, we won't know the answer even when the historians get their say.

One thing I do know for sure: Holding family members hostage to extract a prisoner's confession violates international law. Our next president better know this, too.

Not Shrinking Violets

One more time, the trolls and troglodytes are harassing women on the web. This time, sex columnist Violet Blue came in for a bunch of unwarranted crap. She fought back late last week with a column that's worth reading in its entirety (so go check it out). The proximate cause of it was this chivalrous comment in an online chat about sex scandals:

"Sorry, but being an unattractive skank is not enough to make you an expert. Watching Violet is like watching the female version of Bill Gates expound on sex — something you just don't want to see. Or hear (thank God we don't have smell-o-vision!)"

Eew. Thank God we don't have to see what this guy is insecure about! Does he look like the Geico caveman? Or is he just an ordinary guy who'd be lucky to get a date with a smart, witty, attractive woman like Violet Blue who knows way more about sex than he ever will?

See? I can play that game too. But mostly, when women attack men online, we go after the substance of what they've said. We do sometimes take aim at their personal qualities, especially when they've got a long track record of assholery and dipshittery. I'm speaking now mostly about liberal women, not wingnut women, who generally inhabit a different Internet than I do.

Women aren't angels. Online, plenty of women indulge in ad hominem attacks, launched at each other as well as at men. That's part of the general coarseness and incivility that online anonymity seems to breed in people. (For a particularly vile example of this, see this comment thread at Pandagon, which in general is one of my favorite-most blogs.)

But liberal women don't generally attack people's appearance as a first or even last resort, and I have yet to see a woman threaten another poster with physical and/or sexual violence. While men, too, can take the brunt of nasty and even bullying behavior online, I don't know of any case involving a man that went as far as the death threats that dogged Kathy Sierra and forced her to quit tech blogging.

Violet Blue's response to the targeting of women online was inspired - and inspiring:

I just write and talk about sex. But every woman on the Internet gets called slutty and ugly and fat (to put it lightly) no matter what; all we have to be is female. ...

The problem is, with so many women I talk to, the trolling is effective. The number of times I've talked down a crying girlfriend after she's been trolled in her comments about being fat, ugly, skanky, slutty or stupid is higher than I can count (no matter what she writes about). Trolls watch too much mainstream porn and TV, and believe stereotypes are real; they slap us with it and then we believe it, too. ...

In Margaret Cho's "Beautiful" tour, she talks about recently being on a radio show and having the host ask her point-blank, live, on the air, "What if you woke up one day, and you were beautiful?" When asked, he defined beautiful as blonde, thin, large-breasted, a porno stereotype. Cho says, "Just think of what life is like for this poor guy. There's beauty all around him in the world, and he can only see the most narrow definition of it."

So maybe if you're a woman, you're just going to be fat and ugly on the Internet no matter what you look like, say or do. Of course, I could swap out my SFGate bio photo for Jenna Jameson's. Then maybe we'd have some serious discourse about sex culture around here.

(I quoted at length because it's all spot-on, but do read the rest here.)

Right. It's a classic double bind. If you're sexy, you can't be smart and serious. If you're smart and serious, you'd better not reveal your sexy side or you won't be taken seriously. And yet, when women don't combine all those things at once, we fall short of what Anna Quindlen called "effortless perfection."

I'm not suggesting the guys need to shoot for perfection, too. But how about we all cut women a little slack, and let us be our imperfect, sexy, smart, silly, sassy selves - out loud, in public, without fearing attacks on our person or safety.

Photo by Flickr user Lady-bug, used under a Creative Commons license.

Questioning En-title-ment

The latest tactic out of the Clinton camp has got me laughing (not out loud - it's more of an internal snicker). They're questioning whether Obama has the right to say he's been a "professor" at the University of Chicago. As summarized by Salon's War Room, here's the accusation on Clinton campaign's website:

"Sen. Obama consistently and falsely claims that he was a law professor." The item referenced a Chicago Sun-Times article that stated, "'Several direct-mail pieces issued for Obama's primary [Senate] campaign said he was a law professor at the University of Chicago. He is not. He is a senior lecturer (now on leave) at the school. In academia, there is a vast difference between the two titles. Details matter.' In academia, there's a significant difference: professors have tenure while lecturers do not."

This is true up to a point. Beyond the assistant professor rank, professors have tenure. As a rule, professors are at least tenure-eligible, though my university also has a special category of non-tenure-line professors. University administrators like that, because they can be fired capriciously.

Personally, I can't call myself a professor, because I'm a lowly instructor. This is a theoretically less secure spot than the non-tenurable professors, as I'm hired only on a quarterly basis, but practically speaking, I'm more secure since I'm the cheapest labor they've got. I'm a captive "trailing spouse" - an awful term that always evokes snail trails for me - but I keep adjuncting for the love of it, even though Wal-Mart, our only other large local employer, might well give me better benefits. Seriously. That's assuming that Wal-Mart would even hire me, a dubious proposition since they'd smell subversion as soon as I walked in the door. Anyway, the administration really loves people like me, and they'd probably be happy if we had 95% of all teaching staff in my category, with the other 5% reserved as actual professorships for Famous People who teach only a reduced load anyway.

But that's the true and ugly story of how the more academic branches of academia function. As War Room points out, in professional schools such as law and medicine, the titles get blurry and don't map onto the rest of the professoriate.

It's not too suprising, then, that the University of Chicago has issued a statement in full support of Obama calling himself a professor:

From 1992 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004, Barack Obama served as a professor in the Law School. He was a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996. He was a Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2004, during which time he taught three courses per year. Senior Lecturers are considered to be members of the Law School faculty and are regarded as professors, although not full-time or tenure-track. The title of Senior Lecturer is distinct from the title of Lecturer, which signifies adjunct status. Like Obama, each of the Law School's Senior Lecturers have high-demand careers in politics or public service, which prevent full-time teaching. Several times during his 12 years as a professor in the Law School, Obama was invited to join the faculty in a full-time tenure-track position, but he declined.
(I'm not sure how permanent this link will be; sorry if it's not stable. For more detail on this, see also FactCheck.)

Pretty clear, huh?

So Clinton and her cronies are playing a game that I recall from my time hanging around German universities, where everyone is closely scrutinized to make sure they haven't appropriated a title they don't deserve. I remember early on during my research in Berlin, I referred to the director of an archive as "Herr Doktor So-und-so," and his secretary - who was scandalized! - told me I'd better refer to him as "Herr Doktor Doktor So-und-so" because he had two doctorates. And as horrified as she was, I was grateful for the correction; the guy made me nervous as it was, with his waxed mustache and his grandson-of-Bismarck demeanor.

So that's why I had to snicker at the absurdity of Clinton's tactic. It reminds me of some of the pettiest jockeying for respect in academia. You wouldn't think it could have legs in politics.

And yet, it's not funny in the least if you recall how the Republicans and the media pigeonholed Al Gore as a serial exaggerator. The title of Clinton's press release? "Just Embellished Words: Senator Obama’s Record of Exaggerations & Misstatements." Eek. Wanna bet on whether the press is smart enough to sniff out the real exaggerators and mis-staters in this kerfuffle?

LOLcat by me, featuring my own dearly departed Grey Kitty, at I Can Has Cheezburger?

Democrats Rolling the in Racist/Sexist Mud

Via Art Levine at the Huffington Post, I read today of a new Pew Foundation report that casts a disturbing light on the role of race in this presidential campaign:

In particular, white Democrats who hold unfavorable views of Obama are much more likely than those who have favorable opinions of him to say that equal rights for minorities have been pushed too far; they also are more likely to disapprove of interracial dating, and are more concerned about the threat that immigrants may pose to American values. In addition, nearly a quarter of white Democrats (23%) who hold a negative view of Obama believe he is a Muslim.
(quotation from the Pew Foundation)

So, this is pretty straightforward. Except I'm not sure how equal rights can be pushed too far; you're either equal - or you're not. (This is a corollary of: you're either logical - or you're not!)

In other words, Obama's Democratic foes are more likely than other Democrats to be racist, xenophobic, and religiously intolerant.

And would someone please explain to me: Why is it considered a smear to call someone a Muslim? I haven't known that many Muslims well. But those I've known (I'm thinking particularly of a straight-A student from Indonesia whom I had the pleasure of teaching last spring) have tended to be a heck of a lot more reasonable and open-minded than many people who claim to be Christians.

Interestingly, gender is playing a more benign role in Democratic voters' attitudes. Says the Pew Foundation:

Gender makes a significant difference in personal perceptions of Hillary Clinton. Democratic women voters are much more likely than their male counterparts to view Clinton as honest and down-to-earth, and they more often report that Clinton makes them feel proud and hopeful.

That is to say, gender is creating positive identifications. The reverse doesn't seem to be a big factor. Pew notably does not report that Obama supporters tend to be more sexist than the average Dems. Instead, they found the reverse correlation:

Democrats with more liberal views on interracial dating, the country's pursuit of equal rights, and even the question of whether men make better leaders, hold a more favorable opinion of Obama than do Democrats with conservative views on these questions. [My emphasis.]

By contrast, most of these values are only weakly related to favorability ratings of Clinton. Taken together, they give little indication of a Democratic voter's impression of Clinton.

Given the relative youth of Obama supporters, this seems to reflect generational change, with young people rejecting their parents' and grandparents' tired old racism and sexism. I like to think that's true, and this Pew survey happily bears it out. (Follow the links for the detailed data, which show a striking generational shift away from open prejudice.)

Staying A-Breast of Human Rights

Good news for mamas and babies who don't want to live in seclusion until the kid is weaned. The AP reports:

The Vermont Human Rights Commission ruled there are grounds to believe Freedom Airlines discriminated against a woman ordered off a plane after refusing to cover up while breast-feeding her child. ...

The panel found grounds to believe that Freedom Airlines, a subsidiary of Mesa Air Group, Inc., "violated Vermont's prohibition against discrimination against women breast feeding in places of public accommodation," said Commission Executive Director Robert Appel.

First off, how fucking cool is it that Vermont has a Human Rights Commission? A quick Google search on "Ohio" and "human rights" turned up a hit for Ken Blackwell (who served on the UN Human Rights Commission! WTF?) and a colleague of mine here at the university who's got an intriguing project on human rights and feminist ethics. But no Ohio commission for human rights. Maybe one exists; but doesn't the name matter? How can we get one of these?

And how ironic is it that the offending company is called Freedom Airlines?

Here's the incident that sparked this case, again according to the AP:

On Oct. 13, 2006, Gillette, her husband and their then 22-month-old daughter, River, were headed to New York. While waiting at the gate to take off, Gillette, seated next to the window in the next to last row, began to breast feed her child.

She says a flight attendant handed her a blanket and told her to cover up. She refused. A short time later they were removed from the plane.

If you're reading my blog, you probably already agree that this is just silly. America really stands alone in so thoroughly sexualizing women's breasts that we're scandalized when they're used to give a child a healthy start.

What I want to add is how impractical a blanket usually is. Both my boys - but especially the Bear, who was born with his eyes wide open and pretty much hasn't closed them since - would never settle for eating under a tent, at least not once they were able to lift their heads. I mean, try throwing a large beach towel over your head during dinner and see how much you enjoy your meal! Better yet, move your plate into the bathroom and then savor your towel-bedecked meal. That's what babies and mamas are repeatedly demanded to do.

This kid was nearly two years old, so you can imagine how gladly she would've accepted a blanket over her face. Of course, if she'd thrown a tantrum as a result, that might've gotten her ejected, too. Then again, if your kid just repeatedly says "bye-bye" and you refuse to dope her with Benadryl, that alone can get you booted these days.

It doesn't have to be like this for nursing mamas and babies. I did most of the early care and feeding of the Bear in Germany, where he was born, and you know what? Breastfeeding in public was just a non-issue. Like most civilized people, the Germans recognize that sometimes, a breast is just a breast. And that mother's milk is a human right.

LOLmama and well-nursed LOLkitteh from I Can Has Cheezburger?