feminist blogs in english

by Amanda Marcotte

The quick news story to kick off this Friday’s Genius Ten: Turns out The Princess and the Frog had lackluster box office, and now the blame game has begun.  One could point out that perhaps the problem is that the movie came out in the midst of the worst recession in the U.S. since the Great Depression.  Perhaps many parents thought to themselves, “Instead of ponying up the cash to see this movie multiple times, we could just put the kids in front of TV to watch The Little Mermaid or Cinderella or Beauty and the Beast for the umpteenth time, since all these movies have exactly the same plot and aesthetic.  And we’ll buy Princess when it comes out on DVD.”

But who wants to consider factors like that when you can always resort to straightforward sexism?  No, Disney has decided that girls suck, and what they need to do is stop making movies centered around them. They’ve retitled the upcoming Rapunzel movie Tangled and have made the prince the center of the story, and they’ve shelved The Snow Queen, with its scary, female-centric title.

Of course, Disney did this once before, making Aladdin to break up the supposed monotony of female-centric fairy tale films.  It did great box office, but it was riding the Beauty and the Beast coattails.  And in the subsequent years, what character did they make a killing merchandising from that movie?  Oh yeah, the love interest Jasmine.  Because the Disney Princess brand is making them a killing!  But the idea that female money spends as good as male money is something Hollywood has never wanted to hear.  The funny thing is that the Disney aesthetic is associated with little girls in the public mind, so no matter how butch they try to make Tangled, it’s going to be all about the little girls. But at least the executives can sleep better at night, having convinced themselves they avoided the hellish emasculation of making their money selling fantasies to little girls.  Apparently, the fact that those fantasies are utterly sexist wasn’t enough to stop the smarting.

Genius Ten’s original song is chosen for this story, of course.  Leave yours in comments.  Or make fun of this story.  Or say whatever you like, Genius Ten’s should be considered open threads.

Original song: “Princess” by Datarock

1) “Pieces of the People We Love"---The Rapture
2) “Meeting Paris Hilton"---Cansei De Ser Sexy
3) “Shake A Fist"---Hot Chip
4) “Watch The Tapes"---LCD Soundsystem
5) “Girls In The Back"---White Rose Movement
6) “Must Be The Moon"---!!!
7) “In One Ear & Out The Other"---Fujiya & Miyagi
8) “Hearts On Fire"---Cut Copy
9) “Grip Like A Vice"---The Go! Team
10) “Count Souveneirs"---Junior Senior

Videos and a cat pic under the fold.

Molly has been a real lovebug lately.  I sat on the couch yesterday to finish reading Carole Joffe’s page-turner Dispatches from the Abortion Wars: The Costs of Fanaticism to Doctors, Patients, and the Rest of Us, and Molly jumped up on the couch, crawled inside my blanket and purred as loud as I have ever heard a cat purr.  I didn’t get a picture of that cuteness, but I did get her snuggling my feet while we watched “The Shield”.

I can’t tell if she loves me, my blanket, or if it’s the combination that’s so intoxicating.

by Amanda Marcotte

Drop what you’re doing and read Peter Daou’s impassioned response to the news that nearly half of Americans now have bought into the idea that global warming is an exaggerated and quite possibly made up problem.  That’s the sort of thing that really makes you want to throw your hands up in the air and give up, but of course, we can’t do that.  Pro-science people feeling overwhelmed by the problem is half the reason denialists are getting an edge. 

It’s time to take a serious look at why anti-science arguments are gaining an edge in our society and think very hard about what it’s going to take to fight back.  I think part of the problem is that pro-science people feel that the twin pillars of evidence and moral responsibility to not ruin the only planet we have is argument enough, and we just keep running on this hamster wheel of pointing to the evidence and thinking that settles it.  Why on earth are conservatives winning this rhetorical battle?  Peter:

Green-bashers have had a banner year—they found a couple of openings, some hacked emails, a few scientists being flawed humans rather than data-processing automatons, and they went ballistic. With funding from big oil, they’ve engaged in an all-out assault on science and reason, and this assault has been tepidly rebutted, if at all. The rightwing message machine has been in high gear, blasting out misinformation and pseudo-science, cynically sowing doubt.

He then goes on to talk about the baffling effectiveness of beating up on Al Gore as an “argument” against global warming.  It’s so fucking disturbed.  Every fucking Republican I know melts into giggles at the very sound of Gore’s name.  I tend to take it personally, too, not because I’m in love with Al Gore or anything, but because the “joke” is that he’s a smarty-pants that has the audacity to educate himself thoroughly on topics and then share what he knows with the world.  And as someone who makes her living doing something similar, I find that incredibly offensive.  I remember that he was a punchline even before he was Vice President, probably because the nascent right wing media of the 80s already had him pegged as a threat, and they trained their followbots to hate Gore.  I’ve made it a minor life mission to swiftly correct anyone who makes jokes about inventing the internet.  “Al Gore is a nerd” doesn’t disprove fucking global warming. 

But this all does show exactly how we’ve come to this place.  The global warming denialist industry intuitively (or perhaps not intuitively---I’m sure they’ve spent their money on collecting thorough cognitive research on how to persuade) understands that playing on people’s prejudices tends to be a lot more effective than a straightforward facts-based argument.  And the Gore thing isn’t logical, but it plays on people’s childish desire to resent someone for being better than they are---oooooh, Gore thinks he’s so smart and noble, just because he cares about the planet!  Well, we’ll show him.  We’ll take a big ol’ crap on this planet to show him who’s boss!  We hope that people get over this by the time they reach the 3rd grade, but apparently not. 

It’s arguable, however, that the Gore thing is only a minor issue in selling denialism to the general public.  Where the right wing is really making inroads is convincing people they know better than the scientists, because they have “common sense”.  Americans eat that shit up.  It’s not just when it comes to global warming, either.  Americans enjoy feeling like they’re smarter than the people who invented vaccines, smarter than the scientists that put a man on the moon, and smart enough to think that random herbal crap you picked up off the shelf will work better than a thoroughly tested medication.* Now they get to feel smarter than those number-crunching climate scientists. 

Of course, you have to be engaging in some bone-deep stupidity to think, “Ha ha, those stupid scientists spend all their time crunching numbers, but they didn’t take the time to notice that it’s snowing.  I know more than them by looking out my window!” Perhaps you can believe this if you forget that scientists have homes they go to after work, and so do in fact have the same exposure to the weather that non-scientists enjoy.  The levels of denial you have to go through to get yourself to a point where you can be that stupid must be astounding. 

The other part of this is plain old fear of change.  I loved Peter’s piece, but if we’re really serious about winning the rhetorical battle---and if we really need to view this as all-out war over the fate of the planet, which it is---we need to start being as thoughtful about language and working with the audience where they’re at, like conservatives do.  And so I object to Peter’s use of the term “sacrifice” to describe what needs to happen to fix this problem.  Environmental changes often have all sorts of unexpected benefits that make them seem less scary after the fact than you might have initially thought.  I see no problem in highlighting this fact.  In fact, a lot of what I do in my brand new book about liberal politics (see how I did that?) is that cultural changes that need to occur to clean up the environment can be sold as beneficial in and of themselves.  For instance, we should really not talk about urban density so much as walkable neighborhoods. There’s a minor movement in some liberal yuppie circles to look at the upside of living in smaller spaces, for instance.  Reading one issue of Ready Made on how to live in a small space will charm you so much you’ll demand 300 less square feet in your apartment before you hit the last page.  We need more of that, even if it seems a little crass and distasteful at times.

Fear of change is the problem we really need to tackle, because above all other things, it’s what lays the groundwork for people to be willing to hear these other arguments from denialists.  How to make people not only not fear change, but to embrace it?  Part of what we need to do is really create a vision of what the world looks like after we get the environmentalist policy wish list.  And that means all the details, not just vague visions of cleaner air and water.  Will it be a world of smaller homes and more walkable neighborhoods?  What does a society that doesn’t have much use for cars look like?  Are there places where they’ve made these changes, so we can get a better picture of what we’re going to get?  (Rhetorical question: I know that there are.) After we have the details down, we need to start selling this shit out of this vision, using every tool we’ve got.  The pitch has to be positive and upbeat.  No talk of sacrifice, no guilt trips. 

For instance, IBM made this ad about congestion pricing in Stockholm, and it’s incredibly effective:

That’s how you sell environmentalism.  Make it sexy.  And dangle some goodies out that you can’t get without the policy changes.  Most people are going to have a highly emotional reaction to the image of the pre- and post-policy traffic pictures, showing how the traffic jams completely disappeared after the policy was implemented.  Being able to get out of traffic jams will make people salivate.  In an ideal world, people would vote for these reforms because it’ the right thing to do.  But in our world, they’ll vote for it if you can promise them immediate improvements to their daily existence. 

*OT, but my favorite example of how stupid this gets is the proliferation of expensive herbal acne medications marketed as “willow extract”, which is presumably a “natural” alternative to mundane OTC acne medications made by Neutrogena or Johnson and Johnson.  But the active ingredient in those mundane acne medications is salicylic acid.  You know, willow extract. I’m surprised I’ve never seen “willow extract” sold as a “natural” alternative to aspirin, which is also made of salicylic acid.  Huh, maybe that’s how I should get rich.

by Amanda Marcotte

A while ago, there was a video circulating where the people filming asked anti-choice protesters how much time a woman should do for abortion.  What was interesting about the video was basically everyone but one dude responded with inane blather to distract from the question.  Sadly, this was taken as evidence that anti-choicers are morons who haven’t thought through the consequences of their hope that abortion might become illegal. 

But that’s not how I read it.  I’m not inclined to think someone who protests at clinics is someone who doesn’t think about the issue at length.  On the contrary!  Their information may be bad, but most avid anti-choicers think about abortion and women having sex without punishment at length. I dare say they’re obsessed with the topic.  And most of them are hip to the P.R. trends.  In the past, anti-choicers who protested clinics tended to be straightforward in their assessment of women who get abortions (or any form of reproductive health care)---they were “sluts” or whatever nasty insult you can think of for women.  Then they realized that this was a bad sales tactic, and now the thing is exhibiting this faux concern for women, who are presumed to be too stupid to know that abortions terminate pregnancies. And part of this strategy is claiming that abortion happens because evil doctors sell it to women who would otherwise be shiny, happy mothers.  And that therefore abortion bans should only target said evil doctors.

The reason that anti-choicers get all bundled up when asked how much time a woman should do for obtaining an abortion isn’t that they haven’t wished they could just toss the sluts in jail, therefore.  It’s that they know it’s impolitic to say so.  Where they’re stupid is that they haven’t come up with a snazzy lie to tell you when you ask.  Or, they hadn’t then.  Since then, I’ve found a lot have self-corrected and now are quick to explain that women are supposedly victims of abortion, and that only doctors should go to jail.

I bring this up, because Utah’s governor just signed a law to throw women in jail for miscarriage. There was some tweaking of the language to conceal this, but that’s what it is.  But what’s really interesting to me is that when it’s not a P.R. effort, but straightforward legislation, there’s no concealing that this is pure punishment aimed at women for basically being women.  If you miscarry in Utah, you can be subject to an investigation of homicide.  If they can create a case that you did something you knew was dangerous to the fetus, they can throw you in jail. That’s the end game for anti-choicers---tossing women in jail for failure to perform reproductively as expected.  And they all know it, even if they know better than to say it.

by Amanda Marcotte

Wow, Bank of America is getting rid of its overdraft fees on debit cards. This is how little I trust commercial banks: I’m sure there’s a rub.  I’m sure they’ve found a secret, special way to screw customers that live paycheck to paycheck, and this is all just a P.R. campaign to obscure that.  But maybe not.  Maybe this is how they’re going to be competitive.  Instead of overdrafting your account when you use your debit card and don’t have money, the plan is to have your card denied, which the vast majority of people would prefer, I’m sure.  If this is what it purports to be, then it’s such great news.  Overdraft fees are a pernicious form of usury, a real human rights abuse.  G.D. explains:

In practice, though, many banks enroll their customers in the programs without telling them and assess charges to customers’ accounts out of sequence in order to force them into overdrafting their account.....

But the proliferation of banks in poor neighborhoods has done little to keep the unbanked from opting for “fringe banking services” — check cashing services, payday lenders, and the like. Those institutions charge onerous fees of their own, but unlike the big banks, their fees are explicitly outlined. Customers may cough up $12 for the privilege of cashing a $300 check, but it makes more economic sense than being stuck with miscellaneous surcharges over the course of several weeks for not maintaining a minimum balance, withdrawing money from an ATM, writing a check, or overdrafting your account — penalties that can accrue much more easily and be much more disastrous when your life is inherently unstable.

However predatory and exploitative you may think the banks are towards the working poor, I promise you that they are much worse than you can imagine.  How do I know?  Well, I used to work at a bank. For the first couple of years I worked at a bank, I had a fairly laid-back, easy existence.  I had a good life working at a branch that served downtown Austin, and I worked mainly with business customers, the people from the bars and restaurants that came in and out all the time because they were moving a lot of cash.  But then I got promoted to manager and moved to a smaller branch in a wealthy neighborhood.  That didn’t worry me overmuch, though.  Working with wealthy customers can be a headache, since they’re so entitled, but at least your customers are making money off the bank and are by and large happy about that. 

What I didn’t realize when I signed up for the job was that I was also inheriting a mini-branch in the mall.  And even though that branch was small and not even really full service, it immediately became the source of 90% of my headaches.  What’s not fun in commercial banking is having paycheck-cashing being a huge part of your foot traffic.  How it works is this: banks don’t cash checks for non-customers, unless the check is drawn on that bank.  Then they have to.  A lot of people who don’t have bank accounts would far prefer to get their checks cashed at the banks, where the fees are usually a lot smaller than those horrible check cashing places.  But the bank management hates these folks, because they don’t make any real money off them, besides the relatively small $3-$5 check cashing fees.  So they make it hellish to cash your paycheck at a bank.  The ostensible reason is “security”, but it doesn’t take even the dimmest teller but a week to figure out how little sense that makes.  (Checks drawn off other banks are riskier to cash, because they aren’t funds verified.  The losses from fraudulent checks aren’t nothing, but are better and more efficiently handled by training tellers to spot frauds instead of putting the customers through some of the security theater they subject them to.) They had to present one or two forms of ID and put a thumbprint on the check, and since everyone tends to cash their checks when they get them, this level of ID requirements plus the crowds makes the lines unbelievably long.  The people who suffer the most are the poor tellers, cashing one check after another for people who are crabby because they’ve been working all day and this long ass line is the only thing between them and having their cash.

All of this was really bad in a mall, where all the stores would have an account at our branch so their employees could march straight off work on Fridays and cash their paychecks before going out for the weekend.  So having these overworked tellers on my plate wasn’t fun, but it was manageable.  But then things got really ugly, when they changed the district that my branch was in, which meant that I had new management.  Management that was less interested in keeping the wealthy customers that I had signed up to help happy, and way more interested in the earning potential they saw in the working poor who constituted most of the foot traffic in the mall branch.

I was immediately instructed to put most of my time and effort into converting paycheck cashers into account holders.  I resisted.  As I saw it, these people weren’t fucking stupid.  If they wanted a free checking account, they could have one.  There were signs everywhere helpfully explaining that it was free if you had $100 to open it with.  If they wanted to cash their checks and live off cash only, then they had their reasons.  And they were good reasons!  The worst parts of my job were 75% due to people who kept average account balances below $500.  Those were the people who overdrew their checking accounts all the time, and then came in sobbing and begging for relief from what was often hundreds of dollars in overdraft fees.  To make it worse, the bank’s official policy (this is standard) was to clear debits from highest to lowest amount.  In other words, if processing had a rent check of $400 and then fifteen debit card transactions of $5-$10, they took the $400 first, and then the rest.  So if the $400 overdrew the account, then every single transaction after was an overdraft fee.

I may not seem like it, but I’m a human being and having someone suffering from this injustice in front of me---a regular part of my job---was enough to suck the life out of me, over and over again.  There’s some things you can do to help, but you have to be careful to fly under the radar, or your own job will be on the line.

So when my managers wanted me to recruit all these paycheck cashers as account holders, I went into shut down mode. It was straight up exploitation of the working poor, an attempt to get people who don’t have a lot of experience with banks to create accounts they’ll immediately overdraw.  From the bank’s perspective, it’s pure profit.  Either the customers pay you for all the fees or, more commonly, you end up shutting down the account and selling it to a collection agency (I think for pennies on the dollar, though I’m not sure), who then tries to recoup their investment through harassment and ruining your credit rating. From my perspective, this was a human rights violation that I didn’t want to be party to.  They went around me, holding training sessions with my tellers to explain how to present a hard sell.  (A big part of it was using the existence of the long lines and multiple ID requirements to sell them, pointing out that this all goes away if you deposit a check instead of cashing it.) Then they decided to get rid of me, first by hiring someone for a redundant position, and then watching me like hawks to see if I screwed up anything, no matter how minor, and then use that as an excuse to fire me.  So I quit.

I think/hope this goes a long way to explaining how deeply cynical I am that the financial industry has an ethical bone in its collective body.  The minimum wage service employees of the world may seem like human beings trying to get by the best they can to you or me, but to them, they’re marks.  Banks are vampires, and they see the working poor---and increasingly the middle class---as nothing but sacks of blood to be drained dry and thrown aside.  They don’t care if their accounting practices ruin you so badly that you lose your apartment and then your job because you have trouble getting to work now that you’re homeless.  They see people coming into the bank cashing $250 paychecks and they see nothing but the huge numbers of overdraft fees they could be racking up on that person, instead of the measly $3 check cashing fee.  And by god, they’re going to get it.

Maybe someone at Bank of America is afraid of hell.  I don’t know.

by Amanda Marcotte

If you haven’t seen the original in a long time, it’s worth watching before this mash-up, to really appreciate how note for note it is:

by Amanda Marcotte

This is super interesting.  (Via.) The NY Times is understandably fascinated by the cultural and effort-related aspects of this story, which involves a bunch of researchers swooping in and using an isolated religious farming communities to conduct a test on disease transmission, but the results of the test are just as, if not more fascinating. The finding was straightforward---vaccinating a little over 80% of the children and adolescents in the community against the flu vaccine created what they deemed a 60% “protective effect” in the community.  Not just in children; in the community. 

First of all, those of us who always suspected children are disease-ridden monsters are proven totally correct.  Just kidding!  Well, sort of.  It’s been a long-standing bit of folk wisdom that people who spend a lot of time around little kids get sick more.  I don’t know if that’s the reason to target children with these interventions or if it’s something else entirely, though.  But it doesn’t really matter.  What does matter is that public health officials who want to target children for mass inoculation against things like the seasonal flu or the swine flu are right to want this.  To save Grandpa, vaccinate Junior.  Well, ideally vaccinate both, but that doesn’t always happen.  Mass vaccination of children can go a long way to preventing thousands of deaths, especially amongst the elderly, every year, though.

Of course, this sort of intervention runs up against an enormous political wall in the U.S.  It’s not just the anti-vaccination movement, though that’s part of it.  The anti-vaxxers have a foothold in this country, because Americans are irrationally individualistic. To make it worse, there’s a lot of zero sum thinking in our culture.  I think the anti-vaccination theories take off for this reason; people are convinced that selfishly refusing to join in herd immunity that can save lives must mean some gain for the individual.  And without any evidence of this, they just make shit up about the dangers of vaccines that by and large don’t exist. 

Fighting this problem isn’t going to be easy.  For those interested, I highly recommend checking out this interview the National Science Foundation did with Dan Kahan about research into how attitudes and cultural alliances feed into vaccination paranoia. He’s talking about HPV vaccines, so unfortunately the results are going to be skewed by prejudices about female sexuality, but he also makes some important points about accepting that you already probably have a good idea on who the opposition is when it comes to any version of this struggle.

Though the flu shot doesn’t have the sexuality aspect to get up right wing fears, there is still a lot of resistance from both right wingers who immediately reject anything perceived as done for the common good, and from the more stereotypical anti-vaxxers, who are ostensibly liberal but tend towards an individualistic framework.  (You know, like the people whose environmentalist tendencies are expressed more in worrying about the toxins in non-organic food than the pollution in low income communities they don’t live in.) Kahan has a very immediate way to deal with science education on a case-by-case basis, which is to rely on tribal loyalties and authority.  For right wingers, get James Dobson to push it.  For yuppies, get Oprah.  God, if Oprah actually had a show promoting mass immunization of children against the flu, that would change this debate overnight.

In the long term, we really have to change the culture.  And not just because of resistance to public health initiatives that trip up the American loathing of having to think of themselves as members of a community instead of lone wolves triumphing over a cruel world.  The continued existence of libertarianism is reason enough.  I’m an optimist enough to think that people can continue to respect individuality while not being individualistic.  In fact, it’s becoming increasingly obvious in our culture that individualistic thinking is correlated with a high degree of conformity, and if you don’t think that’s true, go to a teabagger rally and check out the clones. And on the flip side, check out cities that manage to have both diversity and a sense of the common good.

by Amanda Marcotte

Courtney praised this new book out called A Little Bit Married: How to Know When It’s Time to Walk Down the Aisle or Out the Door by Hannah Seligson, and I put my skeptical assumption that this just more backlash stuff on hold because of it.  Even thought the cover is offensive, painting the essentialist, misogynist picture of women eager to marry while men are eager to ignore to avoid it.  But then Seligson went on Sex, Really, and now I’m going to have to protest for real. Seligson doesn’t fall into the trap that Laura Sessions Stepp lays out for her---no way is she going to get into that “don’t let him have the milk for free, ladies!” narrative that Sessions Stepp promotes---but the interview still paints this misleading picture of marriage as something women want and men have to be pushed towards. 

There you have the marital readiness gap, where women are ready to get married before men. It used to be that men had to get married because it was too dangerous to have sex outside of marriage and women needed a base of economic support, and those factors are no longer there. I heard from a lot of women that they were ready to get married before the men were.

This is the same narrative as the hand-wringing about the “hook-up culture”, just moved a few years into the future.  But the image is always, always of women chasing and desperate and men running away.  And it’s always, always contrasted with this past where men supposedly didn’t run away, because marriage was the only access to sex they had.  (At least without paying for it, though the enormous decline in prostitution that occurred as women became more sexually liberated is rarely noticed or remarked upon in these pieces.) However, it’s way more complicated than that.  I had trouble finding the statistics online, but if I recall correctly, marriage rates in the 19th century were incredibly low.  Right now, the marriage rate in England and Wales is getting as low as it was in 1862, but that’s only because (as is noted in this interview) that Western Europeans in general are rejecting marriage in ever-higher numbers. The U.S. isn’t even close to touching how low the rate of marriage was 100+ years ago for us.

But I digress.  The image of women chasing and men running away makes intuitive sense, because men enjoy a higher social ranking than women.  Which means that marriage means that she gets validated as a worthy person chosen by her social superior when she marries (or for the younger set, obtains a boyfriend), but all he gets at best is having to reduce his sexual options and at worst, he feels the emasculating pain of having people think he cares about girly stuff like commitment.  That’s not what I think is actually happening, but it’s the underlying narrative of this assumption that women are eager for commitment and men aren’t.  And I do think in some circles, there’s probably truth to that, especially if young men are getting a lot of “bros before hos” social pressure.  But as I’ve noted before, that fades as you age, so suggesting that couples that are living together are generally stuck in the she’s chasing/he’s running mode doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. 

Indeed, I pick up a whiff of fudging in the suggestion that because men marry an average of two years later in life than women, that means women are “ready” sooner---that women are chasing and men are running until they apparently collapse from exhaustion.  Likelier to me is that these numbers simply reflect the fact that men are more likely to marry someone younger than women.  Again, the stats are hard to find on Google, but if I recall correctly, Susan Faludi talked in Backlash about how there were all these horror stories about eager women and disinterested men, but the actual statistics showed that men were more, not less, likely to express a desire to get married.  Which makes sense---marriage is correlated strongly for men with better mental and physical health and higher salaries, whereas women don’t get these benefits and sometimes even see a decline after marriage.  And even when it comes to housework, married women do more of it than those of us who live in sin.

I don’t doubt that Seligson is right in looking around and seeing her female friends wanting marriage with guys who are whistling and pretending they don’t know what this “proposal” thing is or why anyone would want to hear one.  Selection bias could be a huge factor, though---you’re not going to hear complaints from women whose boyfriends didn’t make them do the humiliating “just propose already” wait. Also, women have a little more social space to want a wedding for itself, whereas men have very little reason to speak out loud about their desire to get married until they meet the one.  It’s not men who are encouraged to buy bridal magazines just to fantasize over them.  It’s not men who have stereotypes of themselves as single and desperate littering every romantic comedy. These things distort our perceptions.

More feminist analysis about why women are constantly being coaxed to dream about the big white wedding dress validation would be nice, instead of less worrying that women aren’t getting that big white wedding dress validation as soon as humanly possible.  I honestly do think a lot of women probably feel like losers if they aren’t married, and they are eager to get that validation checked off so that stigma is erased.  And that’s because there’s a shit ton of money involved in drumming it into women’s heads that you’re nothing without a man publicly choosing you, preferably in the gaudiest way possible.  The party you throw after a man validates you with a wedding ring is still the biggest party thrown in a woman’s life to honor her---and even couples who try to make it about both of them and their love and all that jazz tend to bend over for the fact that it’s All About The Bride.  She gets the bigger cake, the better clothes, the march down the aisle.  My feeling is that it’s because he doesn’t need a public display of social validation, since he’s the one bestowing it.  I can’t blame women for wanting that validation, but those of us who take on the role of cultural critics probably shouldn’t just be rolling over and acting like there isn’t something fishy going on here. 

And that’s why I have such an annoyed reaction at phrases like “a little bit married”.  No matter how you moderate it, the implication is that women are doing the hard work of relationship maintenance and not even getting the pay-off of the diamond ring and the wedding dress.  I don’t like that men have that much power, to take single women and validate them socially by choosing them in a big public display.  It’s so very Victorian.  I’m at a loss of what to do about it, of course.  I’m not interested in bullying women and telling them they’re bad if they recognize that power and want to bask in it and enjoy the rise in status that comes with being chosen.  And of course, I don’t think that’s all there is to marriage---the idea of a public commitment and declaration of love is compelling in and of itself, and can appeal to women who also feel weirded out like I do by the whole ‘OMG SOMEONE CHOSE ME I’M A HUMAN BEING NOW” wedding culture.  All I can do is just point out the underlying assumptions and narratives, and explain how I personally find the idea of being chosen in such a public manner as mildly degrading, because it makes me feel like the other things I’ve done with my life count less than the judgment that a man finds me good enough to marry.

by Amanda Marcotte

My first question upon reading about how non-nutbar home schoolers are having trouble getting decent science books for their kids is this: Why are you giving a single dime to the Christian right?  How could you not know that when you buy a science textbook from a “Christian” publisher, it’s going to be a diatribe against the theory of evolution? 

That a whole market for home schooling textbooks exists isn’t surprising in the slightest, of course.  83% of home schoolers report that they pulled their kids out of school to give them “religious or moral” instruction, i.e. that they’re fanatical Christians who want to exert firm control over their children until they’re sure that they’re brainwashed enough that they won’t stray from the path.  (That this system ensures that wives have no interests or time outside of the family is just a bonus.) What’s going on with the other 17% is probably a grab bag of stuff---bad school districts (or the perception of that), resentment towards the training-you-to-be-compliant aspects of public education, general hippiness---but what I find interesting and sometimes amusing about the other home schoolers is that they seem, to outsiders, way too interested in looking at the religious wackos with a forgiving eye.  Is it just that fundies so dominate home schooling that the everyone else home schoolers feel they either create those alliances or languish in loneliness? 

I’m surprised they found a woman who was willing to go on the record with a story about how she bought a biology textbook from Bob Jones University, and was shocked and appalled that it denied the reality of evolution.  And in a proper twee flourish, gave her small child all the credit for catching the error, as if the child was somehow so brilliant she was born knowing the theory of evolution.  I’m surprised, because I’d be too humiliated by this mistake to talk about it, especially if I was interested in selling the idea that I was all my child needs in terms of pre-university instruction, since admitting to that kind of mistake really undermines your credibility.  Adding the detail that implies that you might have missed it if it weren’t for your child’s intervention doesn’t help matters.  I realize the woman is just participating in that common but annoying cultural trope of, “Me? I’m just a mom, nothing special.  Except that I produced these brilliant offspring!”, but still.  It’s a little over the top. 

Part of me wishes that fundie home schoolers found that raising children to deny basic reality will have a long-term detriment to those kids’ futures, but unfortunately, going to public school is no guard against believing that everything out of your limited understanding must be magic.  And so having one more magical belief doesn’t really make much difference in our society.  We are all swirling down the drain of ignorance about science.  Take for instance, the appallingly magical view a lot of young people have about contraception.  Honestly, estimating that the pill fails half the time is straight up magical thinking, assuming that the pill works like wishes and superstitions, which probably work out half the time on average because most wishes and superstitions are addressing a binary situation that involves chance.  (Like what team is going to win in tonight’s big game.) It may not feel like magical thinking---I’m sure there’s a haphazard line of made-up reasoning to explain where they got this idea---but that’s what it is.  Even a rudimentary understanding of human biology would go a long way to helping people understand things like how contraception works.  (I’m not trying to dog on anyone here; I know a lot of smart people who haven’t managed to get past the incorrect idea that the pill “tricks” your body into thinking it’s pregnant.  It actually just maintains your hormones at a level that isn’t the one required to ovulate.) Fundies are just pushing us further down the path we were already on, where scientific ignorance is normal and practically expected.

So I guess I shouldn’t be too hard on home schoolers who get duped by these textbooks.  I think a lot of people defend evolutionary theory for the wrong reasons---not because they understand it, but because they (correctly) perceive the pro-ignorance, patriarchal bent of fundamentalists who oppose evolutionary theory.  But you definitely see really smart people buy into incorrect tropes about science that are ones that the fundies are promoting.  For instance, the concept of “Darwinism”, as if Darwin created a religion or ideology that people “believe” in.  But that’s not how scientific theories work.  Darwin is an interesting historical figure, but the theory itself has morphed and expanded and diversified and dare I say evolved.  But most people struggle with understanding how a scientist criticizing one aspect of natural selection as an all-encompassing theory isn’t actually trying to bring down the whole thing like a house of cards.  As such, we’re in a poor position to defend ourselves and science, even if we mean well. 

by Amanda Marcotte

When there’s no new episode of Rachel Maddow to watch when I go to the gym, I’ve been biding my time on the hamster wheel recently by watching the TED talks that are available online for free on iTunes.  Hey, got to work that cocktail party chatter gathering in somewhere.  One I watched today is a year old, but I thought it was fascinating.  Stefana Broadbent presented her research on how social networking and technology are creating little pockets of intimacy in people’s work lives.  It’s 11 minutes long, but well worth watching.

There’s a lot of hand-wringing these days about how modern people are lonely and isolated, and I agree with a lot of that hand-wringing.  But where I draw up short is the desire to blame technology.  I think the “blame technology” tendency has a lot to do with resentments and fears people have about things they don’t necessarily understand.  (Which is one reason I think a lot of people have contradictory, weird ideas about contraception technology, because the “magical” aspects of technology mix with sexual fears to create a potpourri of bullshit.) But technology’s ability to shape human behavior can’t be understood without the context of culture and power.  In this case, I think Broadbent makes a convincing case that the technological developments blamed for people’s isolation---namely the car and the television set---probably had less impact on their loneliness than an entire culture built around the idea that the worker’s personal life is an imposition on their ability to work. Not to say that the car and the TV set don’t exacerbate the problem of lack of community, but the problem originates with a culture that wants you to forget your family and friends the second you walk in the door at work, and try to squeeze time with those people in at the margins.

What Broadbent recorded was that the explosion in communications technologies are instead restoring a little bit of what was simply part of life 150 years ago---constant contact with your intimates during your work day.  If you’re over 30, you’ve probably marveled at how much the work day has changed because of this, and as Broadbent notes, it’s extremely different from the era when even personal phone calls were not part of life at work.  (And still aren’t in many blue collar jobs.) It used to be that once you were in the office, the outside world simply didn’t exist.  Huge news events could happen and you wouldn’t find out, and you were mostly ignorant about what your friends and relatives were up to during the day.  Now, between text messaging, cell phones, IM, and social networking, we spend huge portions of our days keeping lines of communication with our intimates open. 

But of course, since the isolation was the product of culture, we can’t expect culture not to strike back.  Broadbent notes how people who work in many low status occupations, like bus drivers and factor workers, are facing increasingly punitive monitoring to make sure they don’t check in with family and friends during the day.  Broadbent treats this like a human rights violation, and I’m inclined to agree. If people are getting their work done, monitoring them to make sure they don’t use their downtime to talk to people they love is only going on in order to debase them and suggest that their personal lives don’t count.  I’ll go a step further and argue that the monitoring is valuing debasement and control of working class people over actual economic concerns like profit and saving money.  It uses resources to monitor workers, after all.  But more than that, I’m skeptical of the idea that unhappy people are better workers.  People who can’t communicate with loved ones often spend a lot of their mental energies worrying about those loved ones, in my experience.  Communication that you can control doesn’t offer nearly the distraction that your colleagues can offer by barging in and demanding your attention whenever they want, too. 

A lot of attention is paid to the struggles people have with making friends in our isolating society, and I think that focus is important, but it’s also important to ask if the other part of the equation is that people aren’t keeping the relationships they do have healthy.  A culture that expects people to use down time at work to update Facebook and text message their partners and friends is one where people are probably going to have that many real relationships to keep them buoyed.  I’ll add that touching base with loved ones during the day can make a person feel less lonely overall; merely having someone at home isn’t enough if you feel like a lot of their life is mysterious to you. 

by Amanda Marcotte

Steve Benen has a post up expressing amazement that Republicans have decided to make “starve the unemployed” a talking point. Not that it’s surprising that many Republicans believe that unemployment benefits are wrong because they give people who live paycheck to paycheck the occasional opportunity to avoid taking extremely shitty, underpaid work that makes it difficult to look for another job with any potential at all.  Just surprising that they’d say that in an era of 10% unemployment, when it seems politically unwise to tell people that it’s their own fault that they can’t get a good job in the worst economy since the Great Depression, and implying they’re lazy.  Clearly, the teabaggers are emboldening a lot of dipshits in the Republican party to say stupid shit they’d otherwise think twice about.  Most people find these statements appalling, but teabaggers hear nothing but ego-stroking---the underlying argument they hear is that hard times could never fall on them, because they’re good people.  Wishful thinking goes far with right wing populists.

I realize Democrats are smart enough to use this to their political advantage in fund-raising and getting votes, but there’s so much more that you can do with this.  After all, here’s your major argument for why they’re against universal health care.  They cannot stand the idea that someone who has to work for a living might have options, that you may be able to hold out for a better job because you don’t have the threat of death or homelessness hanging over your head.  Universal health care means being able to have insurance that’s meaningful at all between jobs, after all.  If you have a pre-existing condition, for instance, you basically have to take any job that’s out there, no matter how shitty, as long as it has benefits.  Yes, they’re trying to build a society where 90% of people work themselves to death so the other 10% can live lives of unbelievable sloth and luxury.  There’s ways that Democrats can weave that truth into a larger narrative in campaign ads.

I wish I could say I feel sanguine now that the Republicans are running around telling Americans that they’re lazy people who don’t deserve to live, and that we only exist to work our fingers to the bone to enrich others.  Unfortunately, I’m not resting easy.  That message puts off most people, but it energizes a wacky minority, and an energized minority often can wield a lot of power in a democracy.  (Look at the anti-choice movement, for instance---they’ve made huge gains while basically standing for the principle that the way 95-98% of Americans live should be severely restricted and punishable by law).  We should be very afraid, especially when the Democrats often are so afraid of their own shadows, they’re always making a bunch of random concessions to conservative craziness to exactly no electoral or political benefit.  I, for instance, can’t wait until Republicans start claiming on TV that KSM got the civilian trial that Obama nixed, and the hosts don’t bother to correct them.