A Sweeter Gig than Wall Street Tycoon

"Money" by FLickr user TW Collins, used under a Creative Commons license.

So the poor Wall-Street fat-cats are wincing at a $500,000 pay cap? They just picked the wrong job. A recent article in the Columbus Dispatch reported that the presidents of Ohio's public universities and their senior henchmen advisers won't see pay cuts this year - although unionized state employees are staring down a six percent cut:

According to figures compiled by the Associated Press, the 154 individuals at Ohio's 14 four-year public institutions made a combined $34.6 million last year.

They were led by Ohio State University President Gordon Gee, the highest paid public university president in America. He makes $775,008 a year before bonuses. [My emphasis. WTF does he make after bonuses??!!]

A 6 percent pay cut akin to what Strickland is seeking from unionized agency workers would amount to a $2 million savings if applied to university presidents and other top university officials.

My own university's president makes less than $400,000, a comparatively penurious sum. Of that, $85,000 came from this year's raise alone (about a 30% increase on his previous base). Elsewhere in Ohio, Miami University's president is foregoing his $68,000 performance bonus. No word of anything similar happening here.

Instead, my university has hired a headhunting firm to control the search for our next provost. According to the Athens News, the headhunters will be paid a quarter of the new hire's first-year salary. The outgoing provost makes $264,000. Administrators are not typically hired at lower salaries than their predecessors, so my university will likely shell out over $65,000.

For that amount they could hire:

• one well-paid assistant professor
• one-and-a-half instructors at my current level
• five people working under my former conditions as an adjunct
• or a scant one-fifth of our current president.

I guess they need a headhunter because there just aren't any smart, ambitious university administrators willing to work for less than half a million, and so none would apply. They'd all waltz off to Wall Street instead. Hey, times are tough all over.

To the Highest Bidder

This evening my university is hosting an event that makes me deeply uncomfortable, yet there's been not a peep of protest. Probably because it's "for a good cause."

Over the past two weeks I've gotten two emails asking me to support this event - a formal dance - either by attending or by purchasing an ad in the program booklet. This already struck me as vaguely weird. Why would students solicit faculty to buy ads? What am I selling, my ideas? They may be priceless, but their value on the open market is mighty low. Plus, I don't know any faculty who are keen on attending undergraduate parties. The colleagues I hang with understand the importance of appropriate boundaries.

But what really got me is this: The sponsoring groups are going to hold a date auction. Proceeds will benefit the March of Dimes. I don't care how good the cause, or how pure the students' intentions. The idea of a date auction still creeps me out.

First, there's the obvious insensitivity of evoking slavery in any lighthearted manner. There was nothing funny about slavery. The ritual of auctioning a person even for temporary services - no matter how much in jest, no matter how good the cause - can't help but echo the history of real slave auctions.

To complicate matters, this particular date auction is being sponsored by a historically Black fraternity. As a white person, I don't want to impute "false consciousness" to the organizers, but I do have to wonder if anyone thought this through. Is it possible for Black people to subvert the history of slavery by parodying it? Maybe, if the parody is very evident. But I don't see that happening in this case. There was nothing ironic in the email I received, and black-tie affairs don't usually mix with mockery.

Then there's the exchange of cash for a person's potentially romantic company. Now, I'm pretty sure that at this dance, both women and men will be auctioned as dates. Yet it means something different when a woman is "for sale." We don't live in a society where women routinely purchase men's sexual favors. Even if there's gender parity on the auction block, only the "sale" of women resonates with the gender inequities built into prostitution. I'm not ignoring the existence of male prostitutes, just saying that realistically, this auction is much less likely to conjure up images of a gigolo.

My concerns aren't just theoretical. A 2005 article from The Daily Northwestern quotes dean of students Mary Desler as seeing problems with date auctions:

"I think they have the potential of putting students -- women and men -- in compromising and hurtful situations." ...

"What if no one bids money for a date with someone? Might that be hurtful? What if someone purchases a date with someone else and there is something about the purchaser that makes the student feel uncomfortable or, even unsafe? What if something happens on that date that is hurtful?" she said.

"I was involved in a situation a few years ago that was not at all positive for the student 'purchased.' I can't forget that situation," Desler continued.

The article doesn't specify exactly what happened, but in a culture awash in masculine sexual entitlement, I'd worry that women could be at somewhat higher risk of sexual assault when going on a bought-and-paid for date. Most men will be perfectly respectful, I'm sure. But when a guy has put out cold cash for the woman's companionship, aren't the odds increased that he'll expect her to put out, too? To be sure, this is a problem with dating in general - and a good reason to insist on going dutch whenever you don't want to get physical with your date. It seems to me, though, that at the very least, "buying" a woman's company at a date auction is reinforcing rape culture. That's the last thing I'd like to see colleges supporting.

I get why student organizations turn to date auctions. They can raise hundreds of dollars and - unlike raffles or auctions of products - it's all pure profit without any need to seek donations.

Maybe I'm just a killjoy. Still, I'd love to see schools and universities actively discourage date auctions. Citing concerns much like mine, the Office of Student Activities and Leadership at the University of Michigan has issued a statement opposing them. (It's not clear whether this statement came out before or after a student group at Michigan held a date auction two years ago to benefit a Peruvian women's shelter - oh, the irony!) Am I asking too much to want my own university to adopt similar guidelines?

Update 2-1-09, 9:30 p.m.: Duh! I meant to mention this in the original post: Though I wasn't there at the event, I'm pretty sure date auctions are mercilessly heterosexist, too. Can you imagine the fuss if one college-aged dude tried to buy another? Maybe it'd fly as a joke - humor is the main way that students deal with discomfort about homosexuality, 'cause they know that overt homophobia is uncool - but never, ever as a for-real date. Then again, if the girls started bidding on each other, that'd be hawt. Ugh.

Cornel West, Love, Justice ... and Me

Well, okay. I didn't actually even shake his hand, much less get to talk with him one-on-one. But I got to hear Cornel West speak at my university today, and I was both moved and impressed.

Impressed: because he's got such an stirring delivery. If I tried to riff on the whole scale of emotion and power that he uses, I'd come across as a screeching, bombastic pedant. (Heck, I'm still trying to get comfy with wielding a microphone when I lecture!) But he's got the voice and presence to pull off the sort of oratory that's otherwise reserved for legendary preachers.

Moved: because he's not just way smarter than me, and he's not just a brilliant showman. He calls us to tend to our own spiritual maturity while committing ourselves to rooting out oppression. He takes Socrates' injunction that "the unexamined life is not worth living," mixes it with the blues, and inspires you to recommit to a better self and a better world. Actually, the better self is the bridge to that better world.

I'm not going to try to summarize all that West said. (He was giving the keynote at a conference on a founder of progressive Islam, Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, a Sudanese visionary executed by his government for his beliefs, whom West grouped with Gandhi, King, and Mandela.) Instead, I'll just share a few of the lines that I found most inspiring, yet pithy enough that I got them on paper - no small thing, because the ideas were flowing so furiously.

Indifference is the one trait that makes the very angels weep. It's the very essence of inhumanity.

Optimism deodorizes the catastrophic. Hope allows us to confront the catastrophic.

These weren't just eloquent yet empty phrases. While celebrating Obama's upcoming inauguration, West called on "Brother Barack" to serve hope, not optimism. To speak out against the carnage in Gaza. To explain why he chose Rick Warren in apparent contempt of his LGBT supporters.

This, however, is the thought I've promised myself to repeat every day until it becomes part of my blood and bones:

Justice is what love looks like in public.

Imagine what the world might look like if that became everyone's mantra. Imagine how different our history would be. How radiant our future.

Of course this is way out of season, but I swear it's posted in a spirit of hope, not optimism. (The flower is a Climbing Peace Rose from early September 2008.)

God O Thunder Falls to Earth

Lego version of Thor, the Norse God of Thunder; image by Flickr user Dunechaser, used under a Creative Commons license.

Yesterday, Columbus police arrested a guy who'd been an active member of an Internet discussion board for johns, where he reviewed prostitutes and issued advice on not getting busted. The Columbus Dispatch reports he posted under such charming screen names as "God O Thunder." Among the allegations is that he promoted online the prostitution services of a 17-year-old.

The real name of this Thor wannabe: Robert Eric McFadden.

Previous government position: director of Ohio's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Before that, he was field director for Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good.

Current employer: Ohio's Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.

So (assuming the charges are true), he's managed to come pretty close to maxing out the hypocrisy angle, and he's making good headway on the irony angle, too. Does his current job mean he might be able to oversee his own prison sentence?

It gets even more sordid (again from The Dispatch):

Police said they have seized a computer and two vehicles. One was his wife's car, which detectives said was the setting for photos of the 17-year-old girl that McFadden then posted online.

Eeeew. This man sounds like he's got some serious boundary issues. Not that I think it'd be perfectly kosher if he'd used his own car. Still, using his wife's vehicle speaks to a level of hubris and/or passive aggressiveness that too-neatly matches his pseudo-Norse-god alias.

There's also a nice irony in his being busted through one of these john forums. I'm pretty grossed out even at the idea of such forums. The little I've seen of them looks to me like they're more about reviewing a product than a service. They confirm my sense that too many johns view women's bodies as commodities. They underscore my suspicion that for too many of them, paying for sex is both an exercise in and confirmation of masculine sexual entitlement.

Professional escort Peridot Ash, who obviously knows a heck of a lot more about sex work than I do, seems to concur. She recently had a smart post on the demeaning terms johns use in these "reviews." She concludes that their disparagement of prostitutes' bodies is just an extension of contempt in which they hold all women's "saggy, fat, and ugly" bodies. She writes:

This list says to me: women are THINGS. And we only like certain kinds of these things. And the consumer has a right to prefer these things. Because in business, the market decides. Female bodies are consumable and the market has decided that fat, black, old, or flat-chested ones are not as economically valuable as nubile, white, young, big-boobied ones. BUYER BEWARE.

(Read the whole thing.)

And that's why - even though I'm sorry for McFadden's wife and others who'll have to deal with the fallout, and even though I'm convinced that criminalizing prostitution only multiplies its ills - I can't feel sorry that this particular God O Thunder is apparently hoist on his own lightning bolt.

The Nanny Diaries' Classy Critique of Class

Here's my latest installment in my series, "Reviewing movies that everyone else has already seen." (The first one was "Juno.")

I watched "The Nanny Diaries" this weekend (on DVD, how else?) and thought it did a surprisingly nice job of reflecting critically yet unobtrusively on how social class functions in the United States. If you've seen it, you know that its portrayal of Upper East Side matrons is merciless. They're self-absorbed, petty, bored, materialistic, and completely unavailable to their kids. They scheme to get their children into the right preschools. They mandate hours of French instruction every week for their preschoolers. They spy on their employees with nannycams hidden in teddy bears. They're a more selfish but equally obsessive version of the mothers that Judith Warner profiles in Perfect Madness: Motherhead in the Age of Anxiety. It's easy to take potshots at them, which the movie plays for both laughs and tears.

While that's probably the most obvious level where the film deflates class privilege, it's not the most interesting one. There are more subtle - and sober - messages about the nannies themselves. And I thought that was cool, and unexpected, for a Hollywood movie.

The first of these is how class and race intersect in toxic ways. The central character, Annie, is a white gal from New Jersey, fresh out of college. When word spreads among the rapacious matrons, they fall all over each other trying to hire her because, as one of them says bluntly, "she's white." And she's not an immigrant.

Since the movie's a comedy, it's not going to give us a blistering critique of how nannies are often women who've been forced to emigrate in order to feed their children in a faraway country. But it doesn't ignore that reality either. There's a painfully funny scene where the matrons drag the nannies en route to a seminar on "conflict resolution" and the matrons sit on gilded chairs while the nannies are pressed up against a wall as if in a police lineup. While the nannies are being interrogated about their grievances (which of course will be punished, not resolved!), one of them, a black woman from Africa, says that she's had to leave her children in order to raise a rich family's kids. That moment is not played for laughs. There's no way you could. You see the discomfort of the matrons as they struggle to repress this knowledge, to sink back into their comfortable denial. And you're reminded of how easy it is for any of us with relative privilege to repress and deny the reality that poverty lives cheek-by-jowl with wealth - that the enjoyment of class privilege depends on that juxtaposition of the rich and poor.

The movie's most subtle insights on class privilege deal with Annie (played by Scarlett Johannson) and her post-college employment dilemmas. Her mother, a nurse who's struggled as a single parent, fiercely wants Annie to enter the financial world and enjoy the security she lacked. But Annie is burnt out after working her butt off in college and has neither the drive nor the desire to become a high-powered businesswoman. Becoming a nanny is her little rebellion against lower-middle-class ambition. It's a gentle but revealing commentary on how class privilege hurts even those who are above the poverty line but still feel constrained from taking chances. In the end, Annie does take a real chance, enrolling in an anthropology graduate program. (Well, humanities grad school is not just chancy; it's a pretty sure ticket to being perennially underpaid. But that would be another post.)

Sure, you could fault the movie for being mostly about a pretty young white girl whose problems are nowhere near as severe as those of the women of color tending their charges in Central Park. There's certainly a need for exposés of the exploitation - and even trafficking - that nannies and other domestic servants too often suffer. But given that it's a romantic comedy and not a crusading documentary, "The Nanny Diaries" went much further than I'd expected in untangling the fraught rat's nest that is social class in America.

Image from Flickr user Roger528, used under a Creative Commons license.

Rape as Rebellion?

Photo by Flickr user Captain Midnight, used under a Creative Commons license.

Why do (some) men rape?

It's not an academic question. If we knew why it happens, we might know how to stop it.

Figleaf is proposing that rape may be a form of rebellion against patriarchy. I nearly always agree with him, but I'm not at all convinced by this. He recognizes that it's a completely self-defeating form of rebellion, and he's not in any way excusing or condoning, just trying to understand it. But I think it's much more plausible that at least some rapists - not necessarily all - are motivated by resentment at feeling excluded from the perks of patriarchy. That's not at all the same as rebelling against patriarchy per se. (To stay within his frame of reference, I'll going to use the term patriarchy here, even though it's problematic, as I've already discussed, and I'd much rather substitute "male privilege" for it.)

One difficulty here is that it's folly to think there's a single motivation common to all rapists. Figleaf starts from Susan Brownmiller's assertion that rape is an act of violence. Brownmiller's work set the paradigm for virtually all feminist thought about rape since the mid-1970s, and it's been a highly productive lens. But I think her re-framing of rape as violence - crucial as that was in undermining the view of it as mere sexual deviance - can't capture the whole spectrum of possible motivations. Of course, rape always includes at least an implicitly violent component, even if it occurs while a woman is passed out and cannot possibly resist. But if we want to understand why rape happens, I think we need to think about the various meanings and motives that may lurk behind it. The urge to commit a violent act may not always be paramount.

To start what I consider the least important motivation, I'm willing to at least consider a possible role for biological factors, even though I'm skeptical of evolutionary psychology that claims men will try to spread their seed as widely as possible by any means necessary. After all, people created laws, religion, and ethics to contain our most destructive impulses, and men are just as capable as women of abiding by these basic principles of civilization. If biology alone is a suficient explanation, then why do the vast majority of men never commit rape? Still, since I'm trying to cast a wide net here, I'm willing to concede that there may be some biological predisposition. (I'm not willing to grant that testosterone accounts for this. The relationship between testosterone and aggression is by no means a simple linear one.)

Rape can be a form of male bonding, particularly in contexts like fraternities or bars. This is most obviously the case where gang rape occurs (and applies at least partly to the example figleaf cites). But male bonding can also be in play when a man commits an assault on his own but later brags about it to his buddies. There's nothing remotely rebellious about any of this. Participation in a fraternity gang rape, for instance, is a way to establish one's patriarchal bona fides, not to lash out against any system of privilege.

At least in a few instances, rape can be a way to get sex if a man perceives no other options. Prison rape is probably the most obvious example of this, but heterosexual men who feel that no woman would have them may also use this perception to justify rape. Again, I'm not saying this negates the element of violence, only that the desire for sexual release may be part of the mix. Rape as a means to sex is not rebellion against patriarchy - not in any form. Instead, it's rebellion against one's perceived exclusion from its privileges, and particularly from masculine sexual entitlement. This motivation is not about real needs, but about perceived entitlements.

Men may indeed be acting out resentments against individual women or against women as a class. Nearly two decades ago, I knew a man who'd recently been divorced. I had an experience with him that was not entirely consensual. Maybe I'll write about that in more detail some other day. But it was clear to me then, and it's still clear now, that he was acting out his anger against his ex-wife and his more generalized sense of sexual deprivation. The mix of motives here is similar to those guys who perceive no other sexual options, except here the man resents not getting as much sex as he thinks he's entitled to. Plain old misogyny plays into it, too, since resentments aren't necessarily limited to sexual ones.

Other systems of oppression may play a role. Insofar as men feel boxed out of the benefits of patriarchy, as figleaf suggests, we need to think about the intersection of different oppressions. A man who has experienced racism or classism or discrimination based on age or ability or any other "isms" won't likely to see himself as a beneficiary of patriarchy. He may harbor resentment that then gets turned against someone who's lower than him in the food chain. This can occur even when a man is not evidently oppressed; white, middle-class men may still feel cheated of the patriarchal privilege that they think ought to be their due. What counts is the perception. But again, this isn't rebellion against patriarchy per se, it's merely acting out against a feeling of not getting one's fair share of the patriarchal goodies.

But I think figleaf's on a much more productive track when he discusses entitlement:

The problem with the myth of (hetero) sexual scarcity isn't "stuff like this wouldn't happen if women just put out more." Because women *do* "put out" more than ever before without much affecting the myth, or it's consequences, one bit.

Instead the problem with the myth of sexual scarcity is that you wind up with a *climate* of wherein men feel not desperate for sex with women but *entitled* to whatever they can get. But it's a funny sort of "entitlement." Entitlement, no question about it, but an astonishingly alienated kind.
(The rest of his post is here.)

I think alienation enters into it because masculine sexual entitlement really is ultimately more about power than about pleasure; that's the common thread in all of the motivations that I just outlined. And that's why it's partly irrelevant if women say "yes" to sex now more than ever before - and partly just more infuriating to some men, who see their power slipping away.

The power to say yes encompasses the power to say no. And that poses a huge and fatal challenge to the very idea that men are owed sex. In the face of this challenge, men have a choice: either change their thinking and embrace enthusiastic consent as the prerequisite to sex - or simply take what's not freely offered.

------------

This is the sort of post that really needs footnotes because a whole lot of other people's ideas flow into it. Here are the main ones. Sorry to be so nerdy but they aren't things I can just link to. If you were to read just one of them, I'd suggest going straight to Michael Kimmel at the end of the list.

On rape as violence: Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will (New York: Bantam, 1976).

On evolutionary psychology: Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer, A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000)

On male bonding and fraternities: Patricia Yancey Martin and Robert A. Hummer, "Fraternities and Rape on Campus," in Feminist Frontiers, ed. Laurel Richardson, Verta Taylor, and Nancy Whittier, 5th edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001), 444–53; and A. Ayres Boswell and Joan Z. Spade, “Fraternities and Collegiate Rape Culture: Why Are Some Fraternities More Dangerous Places for Women?” in Men's Lives, ed. Michael S. Kimmel and Michael A. Messner, 5th ed. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2001), 167–77.

On masculine sexual entitlement: Michael S. Kimmel, "Clarence, William, Iron Mike, Tailhook, Senator Packwood, Spur Posse, Magic … and Us," in Men's Lives, 540–51.

Out, Out Danned Spot

I wish Marc Dann would step down for the sake of the young women whose careers have been derailed due to sexual harassment. I wish he'd disappear for the health of the Ohio Democratic Party. And to be honest, I wish he'd go away because I'm getting annoyed with writing about him, but each day some new detail comes out that's buried in the reporting but sheds some light on the dynamics of sexual harassment.

Today's Columbus Dispatch reports that Dann more or less admits what I suggested a couple of days ago - that his affair with an employee in his office set a tone that encouraged his aide, Anthony Gutierrez, to sexually harass his subordinates:

Perhaps the tolerance for Gutierrez' behavior could be found in Dann's hour-long confessional, question-and-answer session with reporters on Friday. At one point, he was asked if his secret love affair and personal behavior made him a role model that allowed Gutierrez to behave inappropriately.

"You know what, I'm really afraid that it contributed to that."

The Dispatch further reports that Dann's office systematically ignored complaints about Gutierrez's behavior. As early as October 10, 2007, another young female staffer who reported to Gutierrez, Mariellen Aranda, complained to HR about his sexually inappropriate behavior. (The exact substance of her complaint is not very clear from the Dispatch article.)

In response, Aranda got sympathy from the director of HR but no response for the higher-ups who might've put a stop to the harassment. Instead, a climate of fear prevailed:

Even the human-resources director was afraid of Gutierrez.

"I thought, 'Oh, boy, this is Marc Dann's best friend' and … I had heard these stories about the Mafia, and I was afraid I was going to lose my job."

Aranda said in her testimony that she was fearful of going to HR to complain, but she decided to go "because it had finally been enough for me. That day he had told me to shut up and not speak unless I was spoken to, and that was just what did it for me.

All of this brings to mind figleaf's comments on sexual harassment being a euphemism for solicitation of prostitution (in quid pro quo cases) and for extortion (in hostile environment cases). The response of Dann and his deputies - or lack thereof - shows what's at stake. It's not just a matter of women being a tad oversensitive. It's a pervasive sense of intimidation that often extends well beyond the women directly targeted. Something is deeply wrong when the head of HR fears for her own job and evokes the Mafia to describe the office atmosphere. And the wrong runs deeper yet when we're talking about the Attorney General's office.

AG Dann's Columbus Playboy Condo

LOLcat from I Can Has Cheezburger?

Sorry, but sometimes I can't help gloating. Today's one of those days. Ohio's Attorney General, Marc Dann, just admitted responsibility for creating an atmosphere that fostered sexual harassment. He also confessed to an affair with an underling. I'm feeling some Schadenfreude about the truth coming out. From the get-go, it seemed obvious to me that he must have known about and condoned the activities of his top aides and condo mates.

Here's how the Columbus Dispatch is reporting it:

Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann admitted today he had an affair with an underling that created an atmosphere that encouraged sexual harassment and cost four people their jobs.

Two top Dann employees were fired and a third resigned because of an internal investigation of sexual harassment complaints released this morning.

And Jessica Utovich, Dann's former scheduler, quit last night.

Although Dann wouldn't name the employee with whom he had a "romantic relationship" during a "difficult time" in his marriage last year, he did admit Utovich had spent the night in his Dublin-area condo.

"To (my wife) Alyssa and my children, to the employees of the attorney general, I apologize for my human failings."

I don't really have any business dissecting Dann's marriage, and anyway I don't know enough to even be tempted. My beef is slightly different. As the reports have trickled in of twentysomething female employees passing out at Dann's condo after a surfeit of bourbon and Hawaiian pizza, it's sounded more and more like the AG's office was trying to recreate the Playboy mansion in miniature.

I'm not against people playing together outside the office - not even romantically, if they're roughly equals. Of course, it's impossible for Dann to meet that condition no matter who his partner was in his affair. He's the boss, after all.

I'm not not even against bourbon and Hawaiian pizza, though I personally wouldn't consume them together or in excess. (I'm still trying to figure out WTF the pizza has to do with anything in this story!)

But if you nurture an environment where even the hiring of young female staffers appears calculated to provide fresh meat (to put it indelicately but accurately), and if you encourage them to come back to the condo you share with a couple of your top aides, and if you're using that condo as your own love nest, it's not exactly shocking if the men involved feel they almost have permission to get hands-on with the young women.

It's not even all that surprising that Anthony Gutierrez, one of the three aides to Dann who was fired today, felt entitled to undo the pants of one of the women while she was passed out drunk on his bed. He won't be charged with criminal conduct, according to a Dispatch report a few days ago. But his conduct goes beyond sexual harassment and really does constitute a form of sexual assault. Amanda Marcotte argued this already a few weeks ago. I was initially skeptical - but then I read about how the young woman woke up in Dann's condo with her pants unbuttoned, and with Gutierrez next to her wearing only his underwear. And it's really very simple: making sexual contact with someone who's passed out and unable to consent is against the law. I have no clue why Gutierrez isn't facing criminal charges. This is more than just a "hostile environment" civil case.

The women who brought the sexual harassment suit feel vindicated, according to another Dispatch report, though they also say there are other culpable people in the office who haven't gotten the discipline they deserve. And while I wish that none of this had happened in the first place, I'll admit I feel satisfied that these guys aren't going to just keep their jobs. Even though Dann is a Democrat - maybe because he's a Democrat and I'd like to think that our guys are being held to a standard of decency - I'd feel even better if he too joins the growing unemployment line. Because Dann did create a hostile environment for these young women. And let's not forget: As Ohio's top law enforcement official, Dann is the last person who should be exempt from the law.

Extremely Unfree Rice

I cooked rice this evening for the first time since I heard that its price has skyrocketed. My house is now redolent of basmati and my belly is happily full of delicious chick pea curry and spinach with paneer that my neighbors cooked. I guess it's the smell of privilege, though not the kind of privilege that I think we should feel bad about having; it's the kind that ought to be extended to all of humanity.

And you know, if it weren't for the completely misguided and shortsighted idea that we can keep guzzling gas if we just plant enough corn for ethanol, there might actually be enough food to go around. It used to be that I saw "corn as high as an elephant's eye" when was a kid only if we were driving through a small patch of southeastern North Dakota and southern Minnesota into Iowa. The landscape of my Great Plains childhood was durum wheat. Now, over the past several years, I've seen corn spread across Ohio like a malevolent stain. It's even taken over large swathes of southwestern Germany. Amazing how subsidies and the promise of a new market can totally warp agriculture! Whatever happened to the wacky idea that crops are meant to feed people?!

The price of rice locally has gone up about 50 percent (says my neighbor who just bought a jumbo bag of basmati at our town's one and only Asian grocery). Some of the big American retailers are restricting sales to no more than four bags. This is no big deal for southeast Ohio, where we have oodles of other food choices. But if you're poor and live in Vietnam or China, the rice shortage may threaten your ability to get enough calories.

Nothing is really going to change until citizens demand an end to the sort of perverted agricultural policy that would have made the Soviets proud. Or if we want to maintain an ag economy based on subsidies, let's at least diversify and remember that we need food even more than we need cheap fuel. (I feel almost stupid writing that - it's so obvious! - but duh, I guess it's not quite obvious enough.) And here's a really radical idea: If we could manage to conserve - by tightening our fuel consumption standards, driving fewer miles, and moving rapidly toward hybrid cars that can be plugged in and charged - we could decrease our appetite for ethanol and allow the appetites of actual humans to be sated instead.

This is a minor tangent, but if you haven't already discovered the Free Rice game, now's not a bad time to check it out. It's a vocabulary game, and the site's sponsors promise to donate a grain of rice for every word a player gets right. I'm sure the amount of rice donated won't make a dent in the hunger problem, but the awareness it's raising just might make a difference. And the game is seriously addictive. I quit cold turkey last fall, but when I played it again a few days ago I noticed they've got a bunch of new words at the higher levels, plus a new algorithm that feeds you the words you missed a few turns later, so I might actually learn something. (Hint: If you get up to about 44 or 45 - out of 50 possible levels - and don't know a word, assume it's something medical or archaic or related to weaponry. Oh, and if you're clueless but one of the possible answers has two words instead of one, that's usually the best guess.) Let me know if you get all the way to 50 - or have any clever ideas for tackling the hunger problem.

The muscari in the photo grows next to our elementary school; I took the picture.

I Don't Blame the Patriarchy

Well, not much, anyway. Let me explain. (And yeah, I realize I'm courting trouble here.)

Before anyone starts throwing rotten tomatoes at their computer screens, I'll give you an actual thesis statement: Patriarchies (note the plural, she says pedantically) have existed in many parts of the globe over many centuries. To call the present-day United States a patriarchy is just inaccurate. Yes, male privilege is still the rule rather than the exception. But to collapse all societies including our own into this single category ignores the substantial cracks in the edifice of male power today. The term patriarchy vastly overgeneralizes. It's ahistorical.

Lion of Ishtar, Babylonian frieze displayed in Berlin's Pergamon Museum; photo by Flickr user kairoinfo4u, used under a Creative Commons license.

In the gender and religion class I'm helping teach, we've been discussing the patriarchies of the ancient Middle East. Patriarchy was invented, according to Gerda Lerner's now-classic study The Creation of Patriarchy, when humans morphed from hunter-gatherers into settled farmers. Increased productivity from agriculture meant people could begin to accumulate property for the first time. Control of property gave men both a motive for controlling productive and reproductive resources - slaves of both sexes and fertile "free" women. Holding property also gave dominant men leverage in controlling subordinate persons.

What, exactly, did this patriarchal control look like? Relying largely on Lerner's account, Leila Ahmed's Women and Gender in Islam describes this history for ancient Mesopotamia. In ancient Assyria, laws were geared to give men as much control as possible, up to and including selling wives and children into slavery (or pawning them in cases of debt) and killing them under certain circumstances. Virgins essentially belonged to their fathers and were sold into marriage; virginity was thus an asset that belonged to the patriarchs. Veiling and seclusion marked wives as respectable - and their opposites, harlots and slaves, as not. (Concubines occupied a middle position in this hierarchy.) Men were free to screw around with slaves, prostitutes, and concubines. Women could be put to death for adultery.

Initially, under the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi (ca. 1760 B.C.E.), women - especially wives - did have a few rights that mitigated this bleak situation. They could hold property, practice a number of occupations, make contracts, and sign pre-nuptial agreements that might spare them from debt slavery or other abuses. Wives could hold slaves as prostitutes and pimp them out, which just goes to show how the upper-crust women were complicit in the system and profited from it.


The Code of Hammurabi in the Louvre; photo by flickr user Scott MacLeod Liddle, used under a Creative Commons license.

Over time, though, women's status went from bad to worse throughout the Middle East, due largely to the increasingly warfare and militarization in the region. Where Zoroastrianism reigned several centuries before the birth of Jesus, women lost rights precipitously, and - as Ahmed puts it - "Elements of these Zoroastrian regulations suggest that notionally women were somewhere between personhood and thingness – as evidenced by wives being legally loaned for sexual and other services." (Ahmed, 20–21) A man could loan out his wife to another man without her consent; she had to give him sex and raise his children if he was a widower. But any offspring still belonged to her lawful husband, in accordance with the idea that "a woman is a field. … All which grows there belongs to its owner, even if he did not plant it." (Ahmed, 20) Disobedience was grounds for a man to divorce his wife and invalidated any pre-nup. Incestuous marriage was held to be pious and a smart way to outfox demons, with the result that men married their own mothers and sisters and daughters.

What sets modern America apart from ancient Mesopotamia? Mainly, the control of women isn't nearly systematic enough to qualify as patriarchy. In fact, patriarchy has been in a slow though uneven decline ever since the early days of Christianity. Yes, I know that Christianity has much to answer for in its history of misogyny and loathing of sex and the body. But compared to a society where women had no sexual determination, the ability to opt for celibacy offered women at least the chance to say no.

Fast-forwarding to today: I realize we're still far from full equality. We haven't had a female president. Women are still a minority in each house of Congress. Female CEOs are scarce on the ground, too. Absolutely, there are fuckwits of both sexes who'd like to give the state far-reaching control over women's reproductive lives. People like Leslee Unruh and Ann Coulter prove the point that those who'd like to restore patriarchy need female collaborators.

But the fact remains that American women do have the right to abortion, which fundamentally and fatally undermines male control of women's reproductive capacities. We have a viable female candidate for the presidency, even if her campaign has been beset by media sexism. We've gone from having just a token woman or two in Congress to women making up 16 percent of each chamber - not to mention our first female Speaker of the House. (Even if I don't always agree with Nancy Pelosi, I'm mostly glad she got the job.) Ann Coulter has a megaphone but I'm not sure anyone other than hypnotized wingnuts take her seriously. I'll admit Leslee Unruh scares me, especially since her latest brainstorm, a new ballot initiative banning abortion in South Dakota that might actually pass since it has a rape/incest exemption. If you want to convince yourself that the patriarchy has planted pod people among us, just read The Well-Timed Period's take on Unruh.

But Unruh is just one super-scary chick, up against legions of young women who believe that they get to do with their bodies what they will. Women in the United States now have very substantial reproductive and sexual freedom. Even something as apparently trivial as no-strings-attached hookups undercuts patriarchal control of women (unless the women involved are being coerced). I'm not saying women should all go out and get laid to smash the patriarchy. But women's sexuality and fertility was the main "resource" captured by patriarchy in the first place. Where women dissociate the two and claim an autonomous sexuality, true patriarchy cannot exist. This (and not the welfare of the fetus or even anti-sex hysteria) is the rock-bottom reason why right-wingers froth at the mouth over abortion rights.

Patriarchy is still absolutely a useful term. It can explain a great deal about the history behind today's gender woes. But we'd be better off not just intellectually but politically if we reserved it for those situations where it really fits: Afghan fathers who sell their 13-year-old daughters into marriage with men four decades their senior. Or polygamist Mormon men who do the same with their daughters in Texas. When feminists use "patriarchy" imprecisely (as happens all the time in the blogosphere), it diminishes those abuses while painting us into a corner, politically. If patriarchy is timeless, then what's the point in blaming it, much less fighting it? If instead we note that male control of women is no longer monolithic, we might have better luck dismantling its remnants - and inspiring others to join us.

Prostitution, Privilege, and Spitzer's Folly

I'm actually spring cleaning and starting tomato seeds this weekend, but in the midst of all this wholesome activity, my thoughts keep circling around the Eliot Spitzer scandal. Why did he do it? Why does any man patronize prostitutes, especially when he could easily have sex with any number of willing women for free? A few days ago, I ruminated on the ethical problems of buying sex. Since the Spitzer scandal broke, I've been wondering how the motives for doing it are tangled up with gender and power.

I'll admit we'll never truly know another person's motivations. We'll never know what drove Spitzer to book repeated rendezvous with "Kristen" and presumably others, too. (This post is not about Kristen, but since I'm as interested in the prurient details as anyone, here's her MySpace music page. Turns out she may be making more off her music in the wake of the scandal than she earned entertaining clients.)

Anyone who buys sex from another person can do so only because they're coming from a position of relative power and privilege. If we question why it's "normal" for men but not women to buy sex in our culture, I don't think we need to look much further than male privilege and masculine sexual entitlement. Those relatively few examples of women buying sex also reflect privilege. Last fall there were reports of growing sex tourism in Kenya, with rich white women purchasing the services of young African men, though this has likely diminished due to the post-election violence.

At least some of the johns must be getting off on the power itself. It seems to me that Spitzer's apparent predilection for going bareback might fall in that category. Yeah, I'm sure it does feel better without a condom, but he's being heedless of his own health, not just the sex worker's, so you'd think he'd want to play by the rules. But maybe setting his own rules is the whole point of hiring a woman.

On a less speculative note, Pajamas Media carried an article a few days ago by a pseudonymous former booker for an escort service. She's worth quoting at length:

But why would a rich, powerful and handsome man pay for extra-marital sex? Aren’t there tons of women waiting to throw themselves at him for free? Yes, there are. But those women always want something: they want attention, intimacy and romance. They want to enjoy the high of sleeping with a powerful man. Escorts don’t want or care about any of those things. ...

One high-powered New York attorney explained it to me like this: “Of course I love my wife. Escorts have nothing to do with that. She comes to my hotel room and I don’t have to know her name, because they all use fake names like Amber and Kimberly. I don’t have to worry about how she feels or what she wants. It’s a simple exchange: I give her a thousand bucks, we have a good time for a couple of hours, she goes away and we never have to see each other again.”

... And if you are about to say that for a thousand bucks those girls must supply the best sex in history, then you really do not understand this world. Because it is not about sex; it is about power. And the simple act of ordering up an anonymously pretty 22 year-old girl to do your bidding in the salubrious confines of a luxury hotel suite is an act of power.
("Ruth Henderson," on Pajamas Media, via the Huffington Post)

To my mind, the really telling comment is the attorney saying: "I don’t have to worry about how she feels or what she wants." Plenty of pundits have commented in the past few days that what guys want from an escort is no-strings-attached sex, but this goes further than that. This is sex that's all about the man's pleasure - where the woman is really just reduced to an object of his pleasure.

This isn't always the case. Journalist Susannah Breslin has started a fascinating project of compiling "Letters from Johns." These letters reveal a more nuanced picture. One of her correspondents writes that giving pleasure is a big part of what turns him on:

The thing is, I like going down on women. I like it a lot. The last time I made a visit, I chose this tall, thin brunette with nipple piercings topping her small breasts and a few tasteful tattoos adorning her lean frame. Her eyes smiled as she was introduced to me, and more than anything else that's why I picked her. I went down on her for a full half hour, and after she came (or expertly faked it) she panted that this didn't happen often to her.

His story makes me curious about how many customers engage in foreplay, and how many expect the woman to be ready for intercourse at the drop of a hat - or other garments. Still, I can't help but think clients like this are the exception, not the rule, based on the content of the other letters.

The johns who wrote Breslin commonly remark on the thrill they got from selecting "their" girl. They get off on being able to choose anyone, knowing she won't say no unless they don't have enough cash in their pocket. At least two of them mention that they're aware of their privilege and the exploitation of the women, but they vary in their response to uncomfortable facts. One young man who traveled to Colombia with a group of buddies for an elaborate, coke-fueled bachelor party says:

We discovered that all the girls had admitted that they where mothers and that they lived in the brothel while making money to support their kids who I imagined lived somewhere else. I can't speak for the rest, but the guilt of my total lack of self-control on the trip hits me in the gut every time I think of it. I know I can't change the economic situation for these girls, but I'm morally disgusted by how much I enjoyed sex with the most sensual women I've ever met while at the same time she has no choice in the matter.

But another man who'd been a sex tourist in Thailand expressed no remorse. This is another guy who mentions that he likes to perform cunnilingus, though he'd only done it once with a prostitute. He says he likes to give as much as he gets, so he's not a power freak. But he's blind to the likelihood that his "Czech beauty" in Amsterdam was probably trafficked. To the extent that he does recognize his own complicity, he's remarkably able to reconcile it with a clear conscience:

One can try to hang a sign on us, the collective john, as perpetuating the global conspiracy of sex/slave traffic, and I'll grant that my Thailand trip may have/probably did contribute to some sort of thuggery. But in the end, I am ashamed of nothing I have done.

This is raw privilege speaking. White privilege. Male privilege. First-world privilege.

I'm not suggesting that privilege and power are the main motives for all men, though they're enabling factors in virtually every case. Breslin's Newsweek article on Spitzer's folly paints a fairly sympathetic portrait of johns and their reasons for buying sex. She says some get turned on simply by the fact of paying for it. Others get off on its illegality; she suspects Spitzer falls into this group. Many are sex-starved and lonely:

In many cases, like Spitzer, they're married. Many report they are in relationships with women who are no longer interested in sex. ...

Often these guys aren't just looking for sex. Many are depressed or stressed, lonely or bored, looking for intimacy or a connection, no matter how transient, no matter the cost. One john who was rejected on a regular basis in the dating scene wrote that, in contrast to the women he met at bars, prostitutes saw him as "a normal and charming guy."

I'm not at all unsympathetic to lonely people. But the fact remains that lonely women don't normally have the same recourse. Even if a woman did hire a male escort, it's be more stigmatized because people would assume she must be a real dog if she can't even give it away.

I'm also not unsympathetic to married people who aren't getting any. In an ideal world, people would communicate - and even confront each other - when their marriage suffered bed death. I'm not so naive to think that this will always result in revived passion. I suspect, though, that an awful lot of people just accept the situation without fighting hard to change it. I also wonder how many of these men whose wives lose interest have really focused on her pleasure and not just on their own - given the existence of guys like the attorney quoted above, willing to pay for sex that's all about them, where they don't have to worry about their partner's pleasure.

But even assuming that a man (or woman!) has tried, and tried, and finally failed to revive a sex life with their spouse - and assuming further that they're otherwise reasonably compatible - and that divorce would be hideous (especially if there are children involved) - I still don't get why one's first recourse would be to go out and pay for sex.

Figleaf points out the array of legal, free options for married people looking for an affair, a friend with benefits, or just a brief fling. (He's not endorsing them, just noting them.) There are online and offline dating services that specialize in setting up discreet matches, sex-oriented community centers (well, he's in Seattle, not southeast Ohio!), and even sex clubs. Figleaf writes:

The point being, one again, not so much that (prosecutorial hypocrisy notwithstanding) Eliot Spitzer shouldn't have hired escorts. It's that even he probably really didn't *need* to. And I bring this up because there's so much fuss about prostitution on the one hand, and yet so little effort to develop frameworks more sophisticated... and less covert... and more egalitarian... when it's already surprisingly legal.

Well, what did Spitzer get out of the deal by paying for it? One reason I've often heard cited is discretion, but that's a crock. Yeah, you're paying for the woman to disappear at the end of the evening. That's only good until you get caught - and as call girl Tracy Quan writes in the New York Times (free registration required), the sort of Internet agency Spitzer patronized is at high risk of being busted. If he'd had an affair with someone like himself - married, smart, high-profile - she'd have kept mum for free, and eventual discovery wouldn't have cost him his career.

I wonder if the real value-added for men with other options is that they get to pick and pay for a woman who might otherwise be "out of their league." "Ruth Henderson," the pseudonymous booker I quoted above, says that youth is at a great premium:

And then one day, usually between the ages of 25 and 28, once [the girls] developed that knowing, experienced look that clients instinctively disliked, they found that themselves in a classic bind: they were addicted to high living but could no longer pay for it; they had no marketable skills; and years of late nights and lazy days had left them with no self-discipline. ...

So the value of the escorts declined rapidly as they aged. Meanwhile, the value of the clients increased because they accumulated more money and more power. ...

Breslin's letter-writers also frequently mention youth and beauty as the main allure of the prostitutes they patronized. The ability to acquire beauty by the hour, for a price, is again the spawn of privilege.

But I have to wonder if this fixation on extreme youth - which you also see in men's personal ads (online and elsewhere), in porn, even in the Clinton-Lewinsky saga - is in many ways a futile attempt to fight their own aging, their own mortality. If so, that's even sadder than the loneliness that Breslin says drives many men - although maybe the fear of mortality is also a fear of existential aloneness. And that's where privilege ceases to matter, where no one is exempt.

I could end on that somber note, but instead, since I'm sure you were wondering what your own value might be in the sex-for-pay marketplace, here's a silly quiz that purports to tell you. I'm skeptical, partly because there's no over-40 category, partly because their average per-hour figure has some sort of bug, but mostly because I can't quite imagine that the average client would pay more for me than the $1000 per hour that "Kristen" allegedly got - no matter how lonely, horny, or mortality-stricken they might be.



Privileged kitteh captioned by me at I Can Has Cheezburger?