Feminist Classic Censored by Copyright Laws

Posted by Ampersand | December 16th, 2005

Chances are, if you're an American feminist, you've never read Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. Even if you're a highly educated feminist who takes pride in having read at least a sample of all the important first- and second-wave feminists, you probably haven't read her. Neither have I, even though I thought I had (it was assigned reading back when I was a Women's Studies student).

You see, the real Simone de Beauvoir isn't available in English - only in the original French. The English version I and many other English-reading feminists have read, is translated so badly that at times it says the exact opposite of what de Beauvoir intended. From a New York Times op-ed by Sarah Glazer:

Alfred Knopf, who thought the book ''capable of making a very wide appeal indeed'' among ''young ladies in places like Smith,'' sought out Howard Madison Parshley, a retired professor of zoology who had written a book on human reproduction and regularly reviewed books on sex for The New York Herald Tribune, to translate Beauvoir's book. Parshley knew French only from his years as a student at Boston Latin School and Harvard, and had no training in philosophy — certainly not in the new movement known as existentialism, of which Beauvoir was an adherent.

''Parshley didn't read anything about existentialism until he'd finished translating the whole book and thought he should find out something about it to write his introduction,'' says Margaret A. Simons, professor of philosophy at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, and author of ''Beauvoir and 'The Second Sex' '' (1999).

A close student of Hegel and Heidegger, Beauvoir often referred to their work using specific terms French philosophers would have recognized, but that Parshley did not. Toril Moi, who has made a detailed analysis of the translation, noted for example that the word ''subject'' generally refers in existentialism to a person who exercises freedom of choice, whereas Parshley understood ''subjective'' in its everyday English sense to mean ''personal'' or ''not objective.'' In his hands, Beauvoir's discussions of woman's assertion of herself as a subject become platitudes implying women are incapable of being objective.

More damning, when Parshley encountered existentialist terms for existence — such as pour-soi, or ''being-for-itself'' — vis-à-vis women's lives, he often rendered them as woman's ''true nature'' or feminine ''essence,'' notions that would have been anathema to Beauvoir, according to Moi. ''The idea of existentialism is 'experience precedes essence.' Existentialism means 'You are what you do,' '' she says.

In addition, about 150 pages of The Second Sex is cut out of the English language edition.

There are qualified translators who'd love to take on the project; there are publishers, such as Harvard University Press, eager to publish a better-translated, complete Second Sex.

But the publishing house Knopf has the exclusive English-language rights locked up until The Second Sex goes into the public domain - in 2056. Knopf refuses to do an updated transation themselves, and they refuse to allow anyone else to publish one, either.

So, it appears, that ends the matter. Translating The Second Sex is too big a job for anyone to do for free. The marketplace would pay someone to translate it - but our ridiculous copyright law won't allow the free market to function.

Posted by Ampersand in Feminism, sexism, etc | 30 Comments »

Contact your Congress Critters TODAY To Support VAWA

Posted by Ampersand | December 15th, 2005

The Violence Against Women Act will come up for reauthorization any day now. So please, today is the day to contact your congresscritter's and ask them to support VAWA. Here's a link that makes it easy for you.

And if you're a blogger, please consider putting the link up on your own blog.

Posted by Ampersand in Rape, intimate violence, & related issues | 5 Comments »

Bigotry Against Men In Childcare

Posted by Ampersand | December 15th, 2005

There's been a bit of a fuss recently about seating of children on airplanes in New Zealand. A man who was seated next to a child travelling alone was asked to change his seat, because the airline has a policy against men sitting next to unaccompanied minors. The man objected, the fuss reached the press, the airline claimed that it was only doing what most airlines do on international flights. (Why not domestic flights?) In the fallout, there have been many cogent objections to the policy:

Clinical psychologist Nigel Latta, from Dunedin, described the policy as "insane".

Mr Latta agreed studies of sexual offenders showed somewhere between 70 and 90 percent were male but the airlines' policy would not help protect children.

"In 15 years of working with thousands of sexual offenders I've never treated or heard of a man who sexually offended against a child on a plane."

New Zealand's Green Party says the airlines policy banning men from sitting next to unaccompanied children is discriminatory and will take the matter to the Human Rights Commissioner.

Green MP Keith Locke said the policy was an example of moral panic about men posing as potential threats to children.

They're all quite correct: It is a stupid policy, it won't help children, it's discrimination, and it's moral panic.

It's also an extremely common and widespread bigotry, although not one usually codified in policy.

Reading about the New Zealand flap, I was reminded of a study by anthropologist Susan Murray that was published in the academic journal Gender and Society. The study's subject was men who work in child care in the U.S.. From Murray's article:

When men choose child care, their motives for making such a choice are questioned. In child care settings, this questioning occurs most often on those occasions when men get judged negatively for engaging in the same behaviors as their caregiving counterparts whoa re women - when they are suspect just for doing their jobs.

In my study, many workers, both men and women, talked about how the men who are child care workers are subject to different unwritten rules regarding their physical access ot children. Specifically, in many centers, men are more restricted in their freedom to touch, cuddle, nap, and change diapers for children. As one worker who I surveyed stated, "I have worked in centers that employ male caregivers. Parents have on occasion been hesitant to accept them. One parent explicitly asked that a male caregiver not rub her daughter's back at naptime." […]

…My data clearly showed numerous cases in which parents clearly did not want their children taken care of by a man at all. Sometimes parents requested another caregiver for their children; at other times, parents refused to enroll their children or withdrew them once they discovered a man was working at the center.

The article goes on to recount many other examples of male childcare workers being discriminated against in this exact way - men are not supposed to be in physical contact with children. Murray, in a discussion of the implications of this, suggests that the bigotry against male caregivers is rooted in sexism and in bigotry against gay men (even if the caregiver isn't gay).

Men, both gay and straight, who work in child care challenge our culture's dichotomous normative conceptions associated with "essential" manly and womanly "natures." The claim that child care is "women's work" may appear an oversimplification of reality; yet, when that boundary is crossed, consequences - as I have just demonstrated - are apparent. […]

In the case of men in child care, just the act of their caring for children calls into question their heterosexuality. The fact of their sexuality, whether gay or straight, need not ever be confirmed. It is their choice to do child care that arouses suspicion and leaves them vulnerable to homophobic reactions. Men's actions become suspect because they are choosing to do something that women do and, even worse, because child care is undervalued employment for women. Gay is a sexualized identity. When a man admits to being, is discovered to be, or is suspected of being gay, his gay identity may come to define everything else. He is, then, seen as someone who is guided by sexual practices, thoughts, and feelings in all else he undertakes. Within the child care setting, anything having to do with adult sexuality is strictly off-limits. So, when a person's identity as a gay person is discovered or even suspected (as may be the case with straight men doing "women's work"), that person's competence as a teacher/caregiver gets called into question. To the extent that being gay is viewed as a perversion, it is linked with other perversions, such as child sexual abuse.

Murray also discusses the "glass elevator" effect, in which men in childcare professions are promoted to administrative positions more often and more easily - an advantage to men who want to be administrators, but a disadvantage to ambitious women caregivers who'd like to advance, and to men who'd rather stay in direct childcare positions. The overall effect is to turn many child care centers into places where traditional gender roles are enforced.

Restricting men worker's access to children (by comparison to the access for women workers) implies that men's desire for access to children is pathological. In these and other ways, the organization of child care… systematically push men away from nurturing responsibilities and bind these responsibilities to women workers.[…]

["Jeff," a male childcare worker Murray interviewed, said:] "You just need to be ultracareful. In San Francisco the men Early Childhood Education teachers can't have a child on their lap, the women can, but the men can't. I'm thinking, what kind of a message does this send to the children?"

Murray concludes with the speculation that child care centers may be teaching children traditional gender roles: men as administrators and playmates, women as nurturers. This discrimination is bad for the men being discriminated against, and also bad for the girls and boys who are subjected to gender-discriminatory childcare.

Posted by Ampersand in Feminism, sexism, etc | 83 Comments »

Jack Balkin on defending Roe v Wade

Posted by Ampersand | December 15th, 2005

Two pro-choice law professors, Jack Balkin and Sanford Levinson, debate the question "Should Liberals Stop Defending Roe?" Balkin's opening case, in favor of defending Roe, is a must-read:

View content

Posted by Ampersand in Abortion & reproductive rights, Supreme Court Issues | 8 Comments »

Lies About Lies The ACLU (didn’t) Tell

Posted by Ampersand | December 14th, 2005

This piece by David Tell in the Weekly Standard has been getting a lot of play in the right blogosphere. The bit the conservatives are focusing on? Tell's accusation that the ACLU has told terrible lies which the mainstream press has uncritically repeated.

A frequent complaint of conservative blogs is that the mainstream media didn't factcheck the ACLU before releasing its report. For instance, Media Lies writes:

None of these facts will keep the ACLU from trumpeting their lies, nor will it keep the media from "frontpaging" those lies. Both groups of liars believe that the American people will never check their "facts".

But as far as I can tell, none of the conservative bloggers bothered to check David Tell's "facts." If they had, they might have known that this story is not as clear-cut as they believe.

From Tell's article:

On October 24, the ACLU made public an analysis of several dozen autopsy reports and related documents obtained from the Pentagon by means of a Freedom of Information Act request for records concerning foreigners detained in Afghanistan and Iraq. The deaths-in-custody of 44 such detainees were detailed in those documents, according to the ACLU’s press release and accompanying explanatory chart. According to the original documents themselves—which are posted on the ACLU’s website—the actual number of deaths involved appears to be only 43. But never mind about that. More to the point—the intended point being, in the words of the press release, that “U.S. operatives tortured detainees to death during interrogation”—was the contention that the Pentagon itself had labeled 21 of these 43 deaths “homicide.”

That number wasn’t even close to accurate. The documents show that military medical examiners attributed 19 of the 43 deaths to natural causes, 2 others to factors as yet “undetermined,” called one further death an “accident,” and left the “manner of death” box in 8 case files entirely blank. There were 13 official “homicides,” not 21. And documents associated with at most 5 of those homicides contain even the vaguest hint of possible wrongdoing by American personnel. The other 8 appear to have been “homicides” only in the technical sense that mortuary physicians use the term—to indicate any nonaccidental death resulting from human agency, whether sinister or innocent.

And what would an entirely innocent homicide look like, you ask? Innocence is in the eye of the beholder, of course, but try this on for size: Two of the very same “homicides” the ACLU has for two months now been content to cite as evidence of “widespread” human rights abuses involve wounded Iraqi insurgents captured after armed engagements with American troops. Both men were evacuated to U.S. hospitals where surgeons attempted to save their lives. But neither man survived his injuries.

Not the sort of thing they investigate on “Law and Order.”

And not the sort of thing that American newspapers and television networks any longer investigate either, apparently. The ACLU’s October 24 press release was extensively covered in the press. And its “21 homicides, many under questionable circumstances” datum has since become a “fact,” inevitably cited in an endless stream of stories about our current government’s peculiar propensity for torture and other such subhuman activities. No one seems to have noticed that the whole thing is bogus.

Let's take Tell's last paragraph first - was the ACLU press release "extensively covered in the press"? I did a Lexis search for stories in major newspapers since October 20 with the words "ACLU" and "detainees" anywhere in the text. I found one full story reporting on the ACLU's claim ("Autopsies Support Abuse Allegations," LA Times, 10/25/2005), and three other mentions ("21 die from interrogation," The Advertiser, 10/26/2005; "National Briefs," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 10/26/2005; "Controversy grows over legal status of detainees," Financial Times, 10/27/2005). Contrary to Tell's narrative, it's clear that that mainstream newspapers virtually all ignored this story.

(I want to point out that The Advertiser's headline is egregiously wrong, although the story below the headline was accurate. But since I've never heard of The Advertiser before today's Lexis search, I doubt it's a major media organ.)

Furthermore, every one of those four stories prominently mentions an important fact that Tell left out. Here's the first paragraph of the LA Times story:

Autopsy reports on 44 prisoners who died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan indicate that 21 were victims of homicide, including eight who appear to have been fatally abused by their captors, the American Civil Liberties Union reported Monday.

Here's the second paragraph of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazzette's coverage:

The analysis, released yesterday, looked at 44 deaths described in records obtained by the ACLU. Of those, the group characterized 21 as homicides, and said at least eight resulted from abusive techniques by military or intelligence officers, such as strangulation or "blunt force injuries," as noted in the autopsy reports.

The other two reported it the same way - "The ACLU said eight detainees appeared to have died during or after interrogation by Navy Seals, Military Intelligence and OGA," as The Financial Times put it, and "the group characterised 21 as homicides, and said at least eight resulted from abusive techniques by military or intelligence officers," as The Advertiser put it.

So every story I could find in the press mentions that the ACLU claimed that eight - not 21 - died from being tortured or abused by U.S. personnel. And that's what the ACLU's press release says, too:

According to the documents, 21 of the 44 deaths were homicides. Eight of the homicides appear to have resulted from abusive techniques used on detainees, in some instances, by the CIA, Navy Seals and Military Intelligence personnel.

So, in fact, the ACLU and the press have only claimed that "at least eight" of the deaths are attributable to abuse by U.S. personnel. If the ACLU's documents contain "at least eight" such deaths - and as we'll see, they do - then the accusations that the ACLU has lied are unfounded.

But first, let's look at another of Tell's claims. Tell writes:

More to the point—the intended point being, in the words of the press release, that “U.S. operatives tortured detainees to death during interrogation”—was the contention that the Pentagon itself had labeled 21 of these 43 deaths “homicide.”

That number wasn’t even close to accurate. […] There were 13 official “homicides,” not 21.

But hold on a moment - the ACLU's press release never claims that "the Pentagon itself had labeled 21… deaths 'homicide.'" The ACLU report never refers to "official homicides." But you'd never know that from Tell's account.

The truth is, both Tell and the ACLU are being squirrley here. The ACLU claims that "according to the documents," there are 21 homicides - but, technically, it never says that the Pentagon itself has officially labeled all them as homicides. Still, the phrasing could easily be read that way. 3 of the 4 newspaper reports I found didn't get misled - all three attribute the 21 homicide count to the ACLU, not to the government - but one paper, The Financial Times, got it wrong.

The ACLU press release gives details about some of the deaths they classified as "homicide." The first death they describe is this one:

A 27-year-old Iraqi male died while being interrogated by Navy Seals on April 5, 2004, in Mosul, Iraq. During his confinement he was hooded, flex-cuffed, sleep deprived and subjected to hot and cold environmental conditions, including the use of cold water on his body and hood. The exact cause of death was "undetermined" although the autopsy stated that hypothermia may have contributed to his death. Notes say he "struggled/ interrogated/ died sleeping."

Note that cause of death is "undetermined," not "homicide." So despite a single misleading phrase, the ACLU's press release didn't hide the fact that their homicide count includes deaths not classified as "homicide" by the government.

I do agree with Tell that the ACLU appears to be counting some ambiguous cases as "homicide," merely because the government has officially labeled them homicides (for an example, a case of a prisoner suffering fatal injuries during an escape attempt). So a point goes to Mr. Tell there.

Finally, let's look at the most important, substantive point: Are there, in fact, 8 deaths described in the ACLU documents that could reasonably be described as caused by abuse or torture by U.S. personnel? Yes, there are.

The ACLU press release lists the following four cases in enough detail to convince me, and I think most reasonable people, that we're talking about homicide due to actions by US personnel.

A 27-year-old Iraqi male died while being interrogated by Navy Seals on April 5, 2004, in Mosul, Iraq. During his confinement he was hooded, flex-cuffed, sleep deprived and subjected to hot and cold environmental conditions, including the use of cold water on his body and hood. […]

An Iraqi detainee (also described as a white male) died on January 9, 2004, in Al Asad, Iraq, while being interrogated by "OGA." He was standing, shackled to the top of a door frame with a gag in his mouth at the time he died. The cause of death was asphyxia and blunt force injuries. […]

A detainee was smothered to death during an interrogation by Military Intelligence on November 26, 2003, in Al Qaim, Iraq.[…]

A detainee at Abu Ghraib Prison, captured by Navy Seal Team number seven, died on November 4, 2003, during an interrogation by Navy Seals and "OGA." A previously released autopsy report, that appears to be of Manadel Al Jamadi, shows that the cause of his death was "blunt force injury complicated by compromised respiration." […]

The other four deaths aren't described in much detail in the ACLU press release - but reading the documents and researching the names has convinced me that the ACLU's assessment is certainly defensible, and probably correct. From the ACLU's press release:

An Afghan civilian died from "multiple blunt force injuries to head, torso and extremities" on November 6, 2003, at a Forward Operating Base in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. (Facts in the autopsy report appear to match the previously reported case of Abdul Wahid.)

The autopsy report (pdf link) indicates that his beaten-to-death body was found "under guard by the Afghanistan Militia Forces." So why is the ACLU blaming this one on the US Military? Because this appears to be Abdul Wahid's autopsy, and the US Military has admitted that Abdul Wahid died in American custody (see this CBS news report).

To me, this seems like the only one of the 8 deaths the ACLU refers to that can reasonably be questioned; and even here, the only question is if he was beaten to death by us or by our allies, and the US military appears to believe that it's us.

Then there's this case:

A 52-year-old male Iraqi was strangled to death at the Whitehorse detainment facility on June 6, 2003, in Nasiriyah, Iraq.

The ACLU's press release should have mentioned that he was strangled to death while "in isolation," according to the autopsy report (pdf link). I guess Tell would say that we don't really know who killed this man; however, it doesn't seem plausible that anyone who wasn't part of the US military could manage to murder a prisoner in isolation in a US military prison.

Finally, there are the cases of Mullah Habibullah, a 30-year-old beaten to death in a U.S. prison "with his arms shackled and tied to a beam in the ceiling”; and Dilawar, who was "beaten by guards and interrogators, some of whom stood with their full weight on top of him, concentrating on his groin." Although neither case was described in detail by the ACLU's press release, both are in the ACLU's document collection, and both are certainly cases of homicide by US personnel.

Total score: Six clear-cut cases of deaths caused by abuse and torture by American personnel, plus two likely but somewhat ambiguous cases. Tell's claim that "at most 5 of those homicides contain even the vaguest hint of possible wrongdoing by American personnel" is not only nonsense, it's reprehensible nonsense. By characterising six fairly clear-cut cases of prisoners being beaten and/or tortured to death as just "the vaguest hint of possible wrongdoing," Tell is in effect minimizing and excusing murder and torture. Shame on him.

On the whole, neither the ACLU nor The Weekly Standard's Tell looks perfect - but from what I can tell, the ACLU has much less reason for shame than The Weekly Standard.

1) On the anti-ACLU side, the ACLU may have messed up its count of homicides; its press release contained one sentence which could be read as saying that the "homicide" count was according to the US military's official designations (the press release as a whole clearly discussed homicides regardless of official designation); and its count included some officially-designated homicides that I think are actually ambiguous. Finally, the ACLU's primary claim was that 8 detainees have been murdered by American personnel; however, it seems to me that only 6 of the 8 cases are certain.

2) On the anti-Weekly Standard side, the Weekly Standard failed to mention that the ACLU's primary claim was that 8 detainees have been murdered by American personnel, and that this was how the ACLU's claim was reported in the mainstream press. Judging from a Lexis search of major newspapers, the Weekly Standard also vastly exaggerated the coverage the ACLU press release received; in fact, this story was overwhelmingly ignored by mainstream media. Finally, and most inexcusably, the Weekly Standard characterized clear-cut cases of detainee death due to inexcusable abuse by American personnel as containing only "the vaguest hint of possible wrongdoing."

In the ensuing discussion, let's not forget that quibbling over how many documented torture deaths there are in this report (six? eight?) shouldn't become an excuse for brushing aside the real moral point: even one such death, let alone six or eight, is entirely inexcusable.

* * *

By the way, check out the comments following this post on Protein Wisdom, in which several of the participants are discussing, in apparent seriousness, "Is there anyway the government could have [the ACLU] shut down once and for all?" Nothing at all fascist about that…

Posted by Ampersand in International issues, Iraq | 11 Comments »

Gee, maybe taking steroids isn’t so bad

Posted by Ampersand | December 14th, 2005

Randy Radley Balko questions if Congress really has any business preaching fairness to pro ball players:

Representative Davis and fellow baseball antagonists say steroids and amphetamines give athletes an "unfair advantage" over the competition. Never mind that after the 2000 census, Davis led efforts to gerrymander his own congressional district to ensure he'd never need to worry about re-election. Due to gerrymandering, Davis ran unopposed in 2002, as did one in five of his congressional colleagues.

Davis also recently sneaked a provision into federal legislation that prevented an apartment complex from going up in his district because, according to the Washington Post, he feared it would bring too many Democrats into the area.

Via Hit and Run.

Posted by Ampersand in Elections and politics | 7 Comments »

What Other People Are Saying

Posted by Ampersand | December 13th, 2005

By the way, if you have a link you'd like other "Alas" readers to see, or just something you'd like to say that isn't on-topic in one of the other threads, please feel free to post it in these "link farm" posts.

What do people think of these big "link farm" posts? Do you like them? Would you like them better if I split each one up into a whole bunch of one-item posts instead?

Anyway, here's some stuff I've read today and really liked. Note that the stuff in quote marks is written by the people I'm linking to, not by me.

View content

Posted by Ampersand in Link farms, Gender and the Economy, Anti-Contraceptives/EC zaniness, douchebag pharmacists, Choice for Men | 20 Comments »

Choice For Men: Do Feminists and Pro-Lifers Make The Same Argument?

Posted by Ampersand | December 13th, 2005

Quite a while ago, regarding the "Choice for Men" debate, Cathy Young asked me:

I'm sure you're aware that your arguments about the choices that men do have echo with an uncanny precision the arguments made by abortion rights opponents — that women have the choice not to get pregnant.

Yes, but the comparison is misleading; it implies that the disparity is caused by hypocrisy in the feminist position, when the disparity is actually caused by differences in male and female anatomy. (No pro-choicer would deny men the right to abortion, if men were physically capable of pregnancy.)

When pro-lifers say women's chance to decide about parenthood is before pregnancy happens, what they really mean is, "I want to deny you one of your medically viable options." There's no reason, except for pro-life laws, that women can't get an abortion after pregnancy begins.

In contrast, when I say men's chance to decide about parenthood is before pregnancy happens, that's a statement of biological fact. It's not an argument in favor of denying men viable medical options; it's an observation that men physically lack those options.

Although the statements look similar on the surface, the substantive difference between the two positions is enormous, and can't fairly be overlooked.

Posted by Ampersand in Choice for Men | 91 Comments »

Being While Black

Posted by Ampersand | December 12th, 2005

Via BlueOregon, a cop in Washington state was apparently fired for "Policing While Black."

Attorney Trumble's brief also includes excerpts from a deposition given by Ridgefield resident Jaclyn Emter, who said City Manager Fox told her Oct. 2 that he fired Mealing the previous week.

"I said, 'Well, why did you fire him?' " Emter said in her deposition, according to Trumble's legal brief. "And he said, 'Because he's black.' "

Meanwhile, Pam at Pandagon reports on a WalMart customer who was harassed for buying gift cards while black.

two Hillsborough County sheriff's deputies appeared. One grabbed Pitts by the arm. He objected to the rough handling and asked if he was being arrested. "We need to talk with you about this forged check that you brought in here," Pitts quoted one as deputy saying. The deputy said later Wal-Mart had called and reported that Pitts had committed a felony.

But there was no forged check, and no felony - apparently, just some WalMart folks who couldn't believe that a black man was paying for a large order with a corporate check.

Of course, these things - such as driving while black, shopping while black, biking while black, walking while black - are all commonplace enough so it's no longer even news. They're all subcatagories of what Derek Jennings calls Being While Black.

A while ago, I commented that judging by infant and maternal mortality statistics, Blacks and whites in the US live in different countries; whites live in a first-world country, Blacks in a developing country.

When I lived in a predominantly Black area of Portland (of which there aren't many), I noticed the same sort of thing. I'd walk the streets unharassed, but I'd be walking past police stopping and questioning Black folks every day. As a white person, I live in the USA, land of the free and home of the slogan. But a lot of blacks in effect live in a totalitarian state "behind the iron curtain" in a cold war movie - you know, the sort of movie where police constantly stop ordinary citizens and demand to see their papers.

Posted by Ampersand in Race, racism and related issues | 18 Comments »

Monday Baby Blogging - Geek Edition

Posted by Ampersand | December 12th, 2005

One of the great things about two year olds is that they don't yet realize that Mommy and Daddy dress you like a geek because they think it's funny.
Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by Ampersand in Baby blogging | 13 Comments »

“The Boy Crisis” part 2: Boy Brains and Girl Brains

Posted by Ampersand | December 11th, 2005

More from Michael Gurian's Washington Post article (hat tip: Family Scholars Blog) on men's alleged disappearance from higher education. Mr. Gurian writes:

Now we're seeing what's wrong with the system for millions of boys. Beginning in very early grades, the sit-still, read-your-book, raise-your-hand-quietly, don't-learn-by-doing-but-by-taking-notes classroom is a worse fit for more boys than it is for most girls. This was always the case, but we couldn't see it 100 years ago.

Actually, a century ago the newspapers and magazines were filled with anxious experts worrying about exactly this - that school was somehow too feminine and tame for boys. In particular, Americans 100 years ago were worried about the negative effects of female teachers - would boys possibly become men if they lacked male role model teachers, or would they grow up to be wimps?

I mention this because what Mr Gurian sees as a new phenomenon, I see as a very old one - the tendency of some social conservatives to view boys as fragile and easily broken or corrupted by exposure to the feminine. Both a century ago and today, even mundane experiences - such as having a female teacher, or being made to sit in a classroom - are seen by some folks as damaging boys' potential to become successful adult men.

For example, consider this quote from Herman Scheffauer, from Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in 1908:

The results of the effeminization of our schools are at last evident enough - lax discipline, lack of reverence for rules and consequently for law, inefficiency among the scholars, and helplessness among the teachers. But far worse is the utter absence of all that goes to instill ideas of honor and the higher conduct of life into the fallow ground of the young man's mind….

It is not the making of the physical "mollycoddle" we need fear, but of the mental and moral one. It is weaklings of this sort, unreinforced with the proper stamina of soul, that have brought about the hideous reign of graft and crime that seems to devastate our land.

Mr. Gurian argues that in the past, boys classroom deficiencies were covered up by greater parental involvement, unlike today. And I have to say: huh? Is there any evidence that parents are less involved with their children's educations today than in the past? If anything, parents are more hyper-involved than ever before - which is probably one reason more kids than ever go on to college after high school.

Mr. Gurian argues that the problem is that boys have brains which don't do well in a classroom learning environment:

Boys have a lot of Huck Finn in them — they don't, on average, learn as well as girls by sitting still, concentrating, multitasking, listening to words. For 20 years, I have been taking brain research into homes and classrooms to show teachers, parents and others how differently boys and girls learn. Once a person sees a PET or SPECT scan of a boy's brain and a girl's brain, showing the different ways these brains learn, they understand. As one teacher put it to me, "Wow, no wonder we're having so many problems with boys."

Uh-huh. It's worth noting that the majority of empirical research has found that mentally, the sexes are far more alike than different (for a recent review, see Janet Hyde’s meta-analysis: “The Gender Similarities Hypothesis,” American Psychologist, Sept. 2005, p 581-592) . Even the famous math and language differences have shrunk to very minor differences over the years.

Take a look at this table (originally printed in the Chronicle of Higher Education, from US Department of Education numbers, and with thanks to Rachel's Tavern).

Undergraduate enrollment by income, sex, and race/ethnicity

If boys have brains that leave them less able to handle schooling than girls, then why is the effect so inconsistant? Why aren't these base biological differences showing up in middle class white boys, or in asian boys of any class - aren't they boys too?

What Mr. Gurian sees as a matter of universal differences in brains, looks to me a lot more like a complicated intersection of sex, race, and class.

Of course, it's still possible that the "boy brains" thesis is true. Perhaps all boys have this "boy brain" defect, but that at some intersections of class and race parents and schools are systematically rescuing boys from their own brains. For instance, perhaps schools - due to racism and classism - are more willing to write off low-income black boys as a loss the first time they fall behind, but attempt to rescue middle-income white and asian boys.[*] And perhaps such "rescue attempts" given boys in the right income and racial classes enough of a boost to overcome the academic disadvantage of having boy brains.

[*] Actually, I have no doubt that this does happen.

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. Certainly explanations can be concocted. But if Mr. Gurian's "boy brain" theory can only be rescued by resorting to explanations which take into account the effects of discrimination, sexism, class and race, we have to ask: what's left over that we need the "boy brain" theory to explain? What explanatory power does it have, when it seems to fit the data much less well than the theory that if we could overcome the barriers of racism and classism, boys are as capable of flourishing in classrooms as girls are?

Wouldn't it be simpler, given the differences we see, to start out by assuming that if middle-income white boys are capable of doing as well as middle-income white girls, then boys from other racial and income classes are, too?

It's clear there is a real crisis going on here. There are way too many boys from indian, black, hispanic and low-income families who are not benefitting from school, and whose future is needlessly dim; it's a tragedy for those boys and for our entire society if things keep going the way they've been. I wish I had the solution, but I don't. Nonetheless, I'm convinced that wrong analysis will lead us to wrong solutions. The people who are focusing on boy's brains, and pretty much ignoring class and race, are coming up with solutions that will be expensive and unhelpful at best, and actually harmful at worst.

UPDATE: EL at "My Amusement Park" comments.

Posted by Ampersand in Feminism, sexism, etc, Race, racism and related issues | 57 Comments »

The World Becomes Less Interesting

Posted by Ampersand | December 11th, 2005

Robert Sheckley has died.

"My Lord," the computer said, "I can explain all the apparent discrepancies in the story. But do you understand the special terminology of the theory of provisional reality frames?"

"Never mind," Dramocles said.

–From Dramocles, An Intergalactic Soap Opera, by Robert Sheckley.

(I just checked Amazon, and I see Dramocles is out of print. That sucks. But pick it up used, if you can.)

Posted by Ampersand in Popular (and unpopular) culture | 4 Comments »

Links? We Got Links!

Posted by Ampersand | December 10th, 2005

Time for another link farm…

View content

Posted by Ampersand in Anti-feminist zaniness, Link farms, Choice for Men, Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Trans and Queer issues, Iraq | 4 Comments »

The “Boy Crisis” In Education

Posted by Ampersand | December 9th, 2005

I don't mean to be picking on Brad Wilcox, but I can't resist commenting on this post. Bouncing off a Washington Post article entitled "Disappearing Act," about the alleged decline of male college enrollment, Brad writes:

View content

Posted by Ampersand in Feminism, sexism, etc, Race, racism and related issues, Gender and the Economy | 28 Comments »

The Fourth Carnival of Feminists

Posted by Ampersand | December 8th, 2005

Happy Feminist is hosting The Fourth Carnival of Feminists. Lots of good links there, so go check it out.

Posted by Ampersand in Link farms | No Comments »

False Rape Convictions Without False Accusations

Posted by Ampersand | December 8th, 2005

With all the discussion of false rape convictions on this blog lately, I thought it could be worth pointing out that one form of false rape conviction doesn't involve false accusations at all. Many false rape convictions now being discovered due to DNA analysis involve genuine rape victims who make good-faith, but mistaken, IDs.

One disturbing thing is the apparent connection between false IDs and race:

Some 90 percent of false convictions in the rape cases involved misidentification by witnesses, very often across races. In particular, the study said black men made up a disproportionate number of exonerated rape defendants.

The racial mix of those exonerated, in general, mirrored that of the prison population, and the mix of those exonerated of murder mirrored the mix of those convicted of murder. But while 29 percent of those in prison for rape are black, 65 percent of those exonerated of the crime are.

Interracial rapes are, moreover, uncommon. Rapes of white women by black men, for instance, represent less than 10 percent of all rapes, according to the Justice Department. But in half of the rape exonerations where racial data was available, black men were falsely convicted of raping white women.

"The most obvious explanation for this racial disparity is probably also the most powerful," the study says. "White Americans are much more likely to mistake one black person for another than to do the same for members of their own race."

On the other hand, the study found that the leading causes of wrongful convictions for murder were false confessions and perjury by co- defendants, informants, police officers or forensic scientists.

One thing that may reduce false IDs is changing police proceedures for IDs by victims; the methods used by police too often send unspoken messages to the victim that "this guy here! He's the one!" The Innocence Blog has an interesting post about methods of making the ID less subject to police bias.

Posted by Ampersand in Rape, intimate violence, & related issues, Race, racism and related issues | 30 Comments »

Donor-Conceived Children and Well-Being of Children

Posted by Ampersand | December 8th, 2005

Over on the Family Scholars Blog, quoting from his own article in the Weekly Standard, Brad Wilcox writes:

Until recently, virtually no attention was paid to how the children of donor fathers make sense of their experience. Nor has the public debate acknowledged the moral and social ramifications of deliberately creating a whole class of children without identifiable fathers.

But there are good reasons to worry about this latest manifestation of fatherlessness. Listening directly to the voices of donor-conceived children should give us pause. Kyle Pruett, a psychiatrist working at the Yale Child Study Center, reports in a recent book that such children have an unmet “hunger for an abiding paternal presence.” He quotes one girl as saying, “Mommy, what did you do with my daddy? You know I need a daddy or I can’t be a child.” […]

But there is an even more basic reason to worry about the deliberate creation of fatherless children. The best evidence from the social sciences shows that fatherless children as a group fare less well than children reared in intact, married families…. Take crime. One study of 6,403 boys carried out by scholars at Princeton and the University of California at San Francisco found that boys raised in single-parent homes are twice as likely as others to end up in prison. Or teenage pregnancy. University of Arizona psychologist Bruce Ellis, who studied 762 girls in the United States and New Zealand, found that girls who saw their father leave the family before age six were more than six times as likely to have a teenage pregnancy as girls whose fathers stuck around through their entire childhood. Or suicide. A study of all Swedish children between 1991 and 1998 found that those in single-parent families were twice as likely to attempt suicide and 50 percent more likely to succeed in committing suicide than children in two-parent families. Note that these studies control for factors like race, education, and poverty that might otherwise distort the relationship between family structure and child well-being.

But those studies don't control for the most important factor of all, for the argument Brad is making: whether or not a child is donor-conceived.

Although it's certainly true that being raised by a single parent (not just single mothers) has been shown by legitimate research to worsen the odds for children, the research also shows that some children raised by single parents turn out fine. The question is, are studies about the experiences of children of single parents in general really representative of donor-conceived children of single mothers in particular? Or are those children perhaps especially likely to wind up in the "doing fine" population?

It certainly seems possible that donor-conceived children may do better than many children of single parents. Although they have only one parent, that parent - because her pregnancy had to be carefully planned - is likely to be older than the average single mother, with more resources and a better support network. And, perhaps, an on-average higher enthusiasm for being a parent.

Or perhaps not. There's no way of knowing for sure. However, Brad's article should have acknowledged this limitation in the data he cites.

Looking around, I found only one study focused on donor-conceived children of single mothers. Contrary to Brad's expectations, that study found that "this route to parenthood does not necessarily seem to have an adverse effect on mothers' parenting ability or the psychological adjustment of the child." Of course, since that study is a long-term study that has just barely begun (the kids were only two years old at the time the most recent report was written), it's hardly certain, either. (UPDATE: In comments, Dianne pointed out another study with similar findings, this time looking at seven year olds).

I also had a problem with Brad's point about "listening directly to the voices of donor-conceived children." The evidence Brad quotes appears anecdotal, and so cannot tell us how the typical donor-conceived child feels (I've read anecdotal accounts of donor-conceived children who said they had no problem with it). We'd need surveys of donor-conceived children before concluding that the quotes Brad provides are or are not representative.

Reproductive freedom is not a minor part of life. Before even considering a ban on donor conception, we should have solid evidence of harm. So far, that evidence is lacking.

Posted by Ampersand in Abortion & reproductive rights, Families structures, etc | 72 Comments »

Update on the “Guilty of Insufficiently Traumatized Behavior” Case

Posted by Ampersand | December 7th, 2005

Preemptive Karma provides this interesting update to the "Insufficiently Traumatized Behavior" case.

[The alleged false reporter's attorney] is filing an appeal in the next few days. Due to the arcane system in the City of Beaverton, there is no court transcript or audio recording of the court proceedings. Beaverton is not a "court of record". Therefore the girl is entitled to an appeal and the case will be tried over again from square one, in Washington County court.

It's disappointing, from a I-want-to-know-the-truth perspective, that there are no recordings or transcripts. But under the circumstances, a completely new trial seems like the best thing. Unless there's a lot more to this case than The Oregonian reported, I don't see how a fair court could possibly find guilt "beyond a reasonable doubt."

I've repeated my original post (edited somewhat) on Blue Oregon, a blog for lefty (but not necessarily feminist) Oregon bloggers. It'll be interesting to see what the reaction is there, compared to the mostly feminist blogs on which this story has played so far.

Also, I've sent a letter to the Oregonian (text below). If you'd like to send a letter to the big "O" (and I encourage everyone to! Let's flood the op-ed page, if we can!), the instructions are here - basically, be polite and keep it under 150 words.

View content

Posted by Ampersand in Rape, intimate violence, & related issues | 20 Comments »

Treating Porn Like Every Other Media

Posted by Ampersand | December 7th, 2005

On Z Magazine's website, Gail Dines and Robert Jensen are criticizing the left's attitude towards pornography:

Pornography is fantasy, of a sort. Just as television cop shows that assert the inherent nobility of police and prosecutors as protectors of the people are fantasy. Just as the Horatio Alger stories about hard work's rewards in capitalism are fantasy. Just as films that cast Arabs only as terrorists are fantasy.

All those media products are critiqued by leftists precisely because the fantasy world they create is a distortion of the actual world in which we live. Police and prosecutors do sometimes seek justice, but they also enforce the rule of the powerful. Individuals in capitalism do sometimes prosper as a result of their hard work, but the system does not provide everyone who works hard with a decent living. Some tiny number of Arabs are terrorists, but that obscures both the terrorism of the powerful in white America and the humanity of the vast majority of Arabs.

Such fantasies also reflect how those in power want subordinated people to feel. Images of happy blacks on the plantations made whites feels more secure and self-righteous in their oppression of slaves. Images of contented workers allay capitalists' fears of revolution. And men deal with their complex feelings about contemporary masculinity's toxic mix of sex and aggression by seeking images of women who enjoy pain and humiliation.

I think they make a good point. Partly, perhaps, as a result of the polarization caused by the "porn wars" in the 1980s, and the desire to avoid even a hint of censorship, lefty defenses of porn sometimes seem more knee-jerk than thoughtful. But you don't have to endorse censorship to critique the sexism, misogyny and racism found in a lot of porn.

Where Dines and Jensen fall down, in my opinion, is in not providing a working definition of what pornography means. The truth is, porn - like "partial birth abortion" - is one of those terms that is used so loosely, it has become impossible to be sure what any particular author means unless they explicitly define their terms.

For myself, I think "pornography" is any media produced with the intention of being used as a masturbatory aid by the audience. But my definition of porn includes material that contains no violence and is not degrading in any obvious way (for example, Colleen Coover's comic Small Favors), while Dines and Jensen's analysis doesn't even seem to acknowledge that there could be such a thing as non-degrading, non-violent pornography. Does this mean that they see all sexually explicit materials - even something like Small Favors - as degrading and implicitly violent? Or are they not counting such material as "pornography" at all?

Two cover-my-behind points. First of all, I'm not denying that there's a lot of porn out there that is disgustingly violent, and disgustingly misogynistic. Just clearing out my spam makes it clear to me that porn makers believe they can generate a lot of business by appealing to misogyny: "come see this bitch get nailed!" is if anything a mild example of the misogynistic language typical of much porn advertising. Assuming that market incentives work, the high prevalence of this sort of advertising indicates that there is considerable profit for porn producers who make direct appeals to woman-hatred. And there seems to be a similar, although perhaps slightly smaller, market for overtly racist porn.

Secondly, just because a piece of porn is not overtly misogynist or overtly degrading, doesn't place it beyond feminist criticism. For instance, a lot of porn (such as Playboy-style naked posing) endorses not only very traditional ideas of what is or isn't attractive, but also implicitly endorses the idea that sexuality is something possessed by women, which men must pry out of women. To me these ideas are problematic; they support a narrow and limiting idea of sexuality, which I think is harmful to society. However, this isn't a problem with porn qua porn; the same harmful ideas I dislike in even "non-violent" porn, are also found in abundance in non-porn media like "women's magazines," "men's magazines" and popular sit-coms. So although I think this is a legitimate critique of a lot of porn, it doesn't make sense to single out porn in general for this critique, since these flaws are evident in virtually all of pop culture.

Regardless of what definition of porn Dines and Jensen are using, or if they're overlooking the existence of non-degrading porn, it's clear that their critique is applicable to a lot of the porn out there - and that there's no reason that leftists should give racist and misogynistic porn a pass, when we don't give racism and misogyny in non-porn media a pass.

UPDATE: Tiffany at blackfeminism.org weighs in, and also discusses "the virgin-victim-whore trichotomy."

Posted by Ampersand in Prostitution, Porn and Sex Work | 108 Comments »

Goodbye to one of the Greats: Constance Baker Motley, 1921-2005

Posted by Ampersand | December 6th, 2005

If you don't read any other post today, go and read this remembrance of Judge Constance Baker Motley, written by one of her former clerks.

Judge Motley, among many other accomplishments, was the first Black woman to be accepted at Columbia University Law School; the only woman on the legal team that won Brown v. Board of Education; the first Black woman elected to the New York State Senate; and the first Black woman to serve as a federal judge.

Posted by Ampersand in Feminism, sexism, etc, Race, racism and related issues | 1 Comment »

« Previous Entries