Today in "No shit, Sherlock"

According to a report from the Pew Research Center, as reported in the NYTimes:

Over all, the evidence shows that the shifts within marriages — men taking on more housework and women earning more outside the home — have had a positive effect, contributing to lower divorce rates and happier unions.

And:

Sociologists and economists say that financially independent women can be more selective in marrying, and they also have more negotiating power within the marriage. But it’s not just women who win. The net result tends to be a marriage that is more fair and equitable to husbands and wives.

 

Yahoo! Data to support my lifelong belief that feminism would make things better for men and women.
But count on the Times to find a way to make women sound petty and controlling and men to sound entitled:

Men, for instance, sometimes have a hard time adjusting to a woman’s equal or greater earning power. Women, meanwhile, struggle with giving up their power at home and controlling tasks like how to dress the children or load the dishwasher.

Because, like, resenting your wife's work is so very completely balanced by her being picky about the dishwasher.

Also, this:

Even among dual-earning couples, women still do about two-thirds of the housework, on average, according to the University of Wisconsin National Survey of Families and Households. But men do contribute far more than they used to. Studies show that since the 1960s, men’s contributions to housework have doubled, while the amount of time spent caring for children has tripled. 

I'm not sure you should use "doubled" and "tripled" when starting with the 1960s as a base. Because when you multiply zero by 2 or 3, you still get zero. Or is this one of those jokes about women not understanding math? 

But it all has a happy ending, in the words of this stay-at-home dad:

Mothers tend to shower him with praise. “I get the same reaction from all the moms,” he said. “They say, ‘That’s great, my husband wouldn’t be able to do it.’ I think they’re selling their husbands short. All guys could do it, just like all women can be the breadwinners.”

Indeed.

 

Coakley/Brown, Women, Politics, etc.

What I'm thinking this morning is that Coakley's failure, especially in light of the semi-controversial brain-hurt from Clay Shirky, really demonstrates how good a politician Hillary Clinton turned out to be. Okay, she didn't make it all the way to president, but she did manage to win a senate seat in a state whose electorate, contrary to popular belief, is not entirely made up of the mythical Manhattan liberal elite. (Manhattan's real elite is not all that liberal anyway. Viz, Mayor Bloomberg, (R-Finance).)

I am not sure yet whether I think this, but it could be that both these women failed when they approached a race like Margaret from Dennis-the-Menace: "Hey! I did my homework. I'm smarter than you. It's my turn!" Except this is not a mistake made only by women -- it's also the campaign strategy that relegated Bob Dole to hawking Viagra.

So: One lesson from Coakley/Brown: "It's my turn" = still a sucky campaign strategy.

The thing that scares me this morning, and that I hadn't thought through last night, is that the Republicans did find a way to exploit voter resentment and cast themselves as some kind of party of anti-establishment change. I still think they harnessed a particular Massachusetts kink on the issue, because Massachusetts is so often a one-party state and has been one for so long that it is relatively easy here to portray Republicans as outsiders with respect to the Democratic machine. That's how you get Mitt Romney as governor. But there are, alas, clear national ramifications which I just plain did not want to credit last night. Because although the tactics will have to be tailored to the individual states and individual seats, in fact, yes, there is enough resentment abroad in the land, and Republicans can find candidates who will play as "outsiders" to tap it. I don't know if the Democrats need to do more to give people less to resent or if they need to ally themselves with resentment. I mean, I would prefer that the Dems start kicking ass, taking names, and pushing through some legislation that did some actual good. But even so, it bears noting that somehow the Bush administration was particularly good at blaming "government" even while they were the government. Maybe it's time to figure out how they did that.

So, second lesson: Republicans will continue to push their identity as the party of resentment.

Third lesson is the lesson Howard Dean tried to teach the party: Take no state for granted.

Fourth lesson  may be that the Republicans are better liars than we are, and we need to find candidates who make honesty look better than Martha Coakley managed to do. It may be true that if you are the kind of devout Catholic -- or the kind of devout Protestant, for that matter -- who can't bear to give emergency contraception to rape victims then perhaps you should not work in that part of the emergency room, but it made a lousy and unnecessarily polarizing sound bite. One of the great things about Obama as a speaker is that he speaks in carefully considered complete sentences, with the result being that he is hard to take fully out of context. He structures those sentences so that at the very least the sound-bite nearly has to contain the whole thing. He needs to spend his next vacation teaching public speaking at Young Legislators Camp (TM).

And I think the inevitable fifth lesson is that progressives are way tired of being played. There is always the danger of losing us again to a Ralph-Nader-like candidate, who may read as a mere "spoiler" to the Dem establishment, but gives us the relief of honestly voting for the policies we actually want. We wouldn't be squabbling about whether the health insurance reform bill that can be passed is worth passing if it were a stronger bill, with a real public option, etc. Compromise wears everybody down, and that whole world-weary pragmatism thing seems particularly stale coming from Mr. Change-You-Can-Believe-In. He's got the most vicious enforcer in Democratic politics today, Rahm Emanuel, and he's using him to shut up liberals? What a waste. If you want us to come out in the freezing rain, you have to give us something more than party affiliation once in a while. (See lessons 1 and 3 above.)

OK. Now I'm going to go focus on my personal life. Or at least, crawl back under the bed for a few more days.

Salon's weird sniplet on feminist road trips

I'm not ready to write about this yet--seems like, for instance, I should probably read the book--but I do have to say that it strikes me as something other than coincidental that one of the two "20-something" authors should have killed herself less than two years after this cross-country drive "redefining feminism".
I guess I keep thinking somebody should warn young people that life is hard, and that the answers we have not yet found are sometimes missing not because old people are stupid but because some of the questions defy solution.
Oh, and that there might well be a few barriers to becoming the feminist Kerouac and Cassady besides not knowing how to have fun.

Thinking too much

You know, in thinking some more about the issue of comments it has occurred to me that it's an example of exactly the power imbalance described in Schrodinger's Rapist. That is, that my friend's (Hi, Dave*) complaint, that he couldn't comment on my blog, treads on the idea that I get to set my own risk tolerance, ignores a signal I might have been sending by limiting the sources from which I want to receive comments, and is to some extent or another, kind of the electron version of this one, that his desire to interact trumps my right to be left alone -- or, in this case, my right to feel safe.

"So if you speak to a woman who is otherwise occupied, you’re sending a subtle message. It is that your desire to interact trumps her right to be left alone. If you pursue a conversation when she’s tried to cut it off, you send a message. It is that your desire to speak trumps her right to be left alone. And each of those messages indicates that you believe your desires are a legitimate reason to override her rights."

So I have to think about this. Dave's a little older than me, and has always considered himself a feminist in the sense that he likes strong, smart women, encourages them in the workplace, and doesn't infantilize them. He's my friend because he's encouraged my career since the 1980s, and because he helped me move out of the apartment I shared with a physically abusive mate. Not, you know, one of the bad guys. Without wanting to make his argument for him -- after all, I opened the blog to comments so he could make his own arguments here if he wants -- I think his relatively unprotective ideology has to do with the idea that treating women like delicate flowers is likely to limit their opportunities and is its own form of disrespect. But, oh, you know, there are shades of gray in here that don't lend themselves to polemicizing. I tried for a very long time to be as strong and tough as men, to compete in the world without special accommodations for girliness; but it hasn't protected me from violence, sexual and otherwise; and weirdly enough it has gotten in my way professionally, where people really wanted something a bit more deferential and conventional. Something in heeled pumps.

Nonetheless, there are also the issues framed in Schrodinger's Rapist, the Kathy Sierra case, and elsewhere. I do, actually, appreciate that it is not very nice, if you are trying to be a Nice Man, to feel that you must always be under suspicion. But it is something worse than not very nice, if you are trying to be a responsible, self-sufficient woman, to know that some significant percentage of people are going to see nothing about you but your sexual availability or lack thereof. What I have carried with me ever since I was raped is the sense that nothing I had achieved, created, felt, thought, made of myself, or inherently simply was, none of it mattered. For me, that was what was soul-killing about rape -- that no matter what, I was just nothing but a thing that could be fucked. I had tried for ideological reasons to imagine that rape was not a big deal, as the only way I could think of (forgive me, I was young) to actually protect myself from the psychological damage. It didn't work. I felt erased. And because of the circumstances -- but it's hard to imagine a rape without equivalent circumstances -- it was also impossible to avoid the fact that the rapist might just as easily have killed me. I was obviously not human by reason of being female; he had demonstrated control of my body and the complete irrelevance of everything else about me; and so the difference between rape and murder was, like the rape itself, merely a matter of the direction his whim took. And I didn't know I wasn't going to be killed until I wasn't. I always try to honor that experience by reminding people that rape isn't just unwanted sex; it's unwanted sex with the threat of murder.

Now, I know that admitting I've been raped will be grounds for a certain percentage of readers to just discount this post -- oh, she is damaged, her reactions are extreme. But if 1/6 of women will be raped in their lifetimes, um, that's a lot of women whose thoughts on the issue -- of women's safety -- would be discounted. They are also, logically speaking, the women whose thoughts might be the most pertinent, since they have direct experience of sex-based violence. Instead of dismissing survivors of violence as outliers, maybe they should be embraced as experts. And instead of feeling falsely accused, perhaps Nice Men could feel enjoined to help create a climate of increased safety for women, both the twitchy ones who have already experienced sexual violence, and the others who don't know if or when or how they may be fated to join that sorority.

And, you know, if you can e-mail me to complain that there's no way to comment on the blog, um, couldn't you say what you have to say in the e-mail?

By the way, this is an attempt at irony, like, if there's no harm in being publicly identified, then no problem with using your name, eh? And yet, not really, as "David" was the sixth most frequent male name given in the decade 1940-1949. Some 22,257 Social Security records from the age cohort sport this given name.

Introducing comments

I am a big chicken, and when I first started this blog, I didn't want to deal with comments. Too many horror stories out there about women bloggers being harrassed, not for their ideas, but for their looks, and, well, I am notoriously plain and old. I figured that approximately one person was reading it anyway, and she writes me almost every day. A second person has now looked at the blog and is somewhat fumfered that it does not allow comments. It had not occurred to me that this person, or anyone else non-hostile, would want to comment. But I suppose I ought to allow comments and see what happens. For now I am moderating them, to limit the damage to innocent civilians. After a few weeks of inactivity, I'll probably take down the moderating. Or the comments.
In the meantime, I have been reminded of a discussion I once had with this second person (Hi, Dave!) about Margaret Atwood's story of asking a classroom of undergraduates what their greatest fear was in going on a date. The men said, "being laughed at." The women said, "being murdered." In honor of which, I must link to the delightful this: Schrodinger's Rapist.

Sexuality, feminism, and ambivalence

At the end of last month, a news item reawakened my ongoing ambivalence about feminism and sexuality.

Salon's Broadsheet has a good summary of the current event, which basically began with Naomi Wolf's op-ed for the Sydney Morning Herald, "Behind the veil lives a thriving Muslim sexuality", followed by Phyllis Chesler's spirited rejoinder "The Burqa: Ultimate Feminist Choice?" followed by about 500 reader comments, and David Horowitz and several conservative pundits piling on.

So, to address the original essay: I find it pretty hard to believe that anyone, even Naomi Wolf, seriously considers the main problem with veiling women in Muslim societies is that it impairs their sexuality. I thought it was pretty obvious that veiling is all about defining women in terms of their sexuality. It is because their sexuality is so all-encompassing that their entire lives must be lived "appropriate[ly] channeling" it. That, it seems to me, is the problem: it would be nice if their lives could be about something beyond sexuality.

Also, about Wolf's insipid adventure wearing a salwaar kameez to the market in Morocco -- I have a few salwaar kameez outfits, and wear them in the summer because they are comfortable. But it's basically a long tunic with baggy pants and a scarf. It's just not that different from the other summer clothes I wear as a person who sunburns easily. If Wolf got a novel sense of freedom from wearing a salwaar, I have to wonder what the hell she is sporting the rest of the time. Salwaar kameez is not niqab, burqa or chador. It's a fricking pantsuit. If you feel exploited in the clothes you choose, should you be writing about choice at all?

But the main issue that Wolf's essay and the subsequent discussion brought into focus for me is this: When something is used in the vast majority of instances as an integral element of a system that dehumanizes, exploits, deprives, and abuses women, celebrating it as a feminist "choice" is dangerous. Eliding the exceptional occasions when its adoption truly is a "choice" with the much larger system of oppression provides political cover for a host of abuses, and risks blaming the victims of that system for their own exploitation -- their "choice".

My discomfort with celebrating the veil has given me some insight into my trés un-chic discomfort with celebrating pornography and sex work. For every Jenna Jameson who controls her own career and becomes a millionaire, there are hundreds of girls and women worldwide kidnapped into sexual slavery. And as simplistic and old-fashioned as it is for me to equate pornography in the US to the larger sex trade, it is also simplistic to pretend that a few dozen Jenna Jamesons mean sex work is an empowering, feminist "choice". Mostly, it isn't.

And I'll confess that it's this context that gives me the creeps about some aspects of sex-positive feminism. If for the most part women's sexuality is still used to victimize them, to limit their choices in education, vocation, reproduction, and even movement, then it is, at the very least, short-sighted and self-centered to adopt the symbols of sexual exploitation as if they were merely another option for self-expression.

It is true that women should be free to express their sexuality and not be exploited for it; but is adopting the frank symbols of exploitation really the expression of our own sexuality? It makes me wonder if we will ever know what a real expression of our own sexuality might be. I think not in my lifetime.

I turned 13 in 1970, and as far as sexuality and feminism go, that was more or less the moment when being treated as a combination of support staff for, and spoils of, "the revolution" awoke social-activist women to the necessity for second-wave feminism. I ended up with a mix of leftover 60s pro-sexuality and a feminist belief that I should not allow myself to be treated any differently than a man. I wrote letters to the editor of the local newspaper asking to get drafted so I could flee to Canada.

When I was a teenager, I trotted myself off to Planned Parenthood and got an IUD because I wanted to believe that women's sexuality would be the same as men's if it weren't for the risk of pregnancy. (This was before the AIDS epidemic, and the known STDs appeared to have been well-controlled by antibiotics. The Golden Age.) And then I really tried to match the sexual opportunism of my male friends. I felt an obligation to the ideals of both feminism and freedom to set aside squeamishness and romantic illusions.

What I found was that this left me vulnerable to other kinds of exploitation; despite having taken care of the risk of pregnancy, it wasn't that much fun to have sex just because it was offered. Being naked with another person was some kind of personal, and it turned out there were people I didn't want to get that personal with.

In college, I was exposed to the argument that heterosexuality is bad feminism because "it attempts to convert men one at a time." I objected, because I felt, and still do, that sexual attraction is not innately ideological. (What I said then was that it is about "who makes your socks roll up and down.") We have come to accept this argument about homosexuality; it doesn't seem like that big a stretch to extend it to heterosexuality.

But I will be the first to admit that conducting feminist heterosexuality in practice is not always easy. I appreciate the sexual jolt of the forbidden, of the secret, of the transgressive -- and I appreciate that as social conventions shift, what is forbidden, or secret, or transgressive becomes a moving target. Indeed I worry that the normalization and mainstreaming of so much sexual activity will take all the fun out of it.

But I also think, in choosing our playthings, we who are rich and well-fed and well-educated and well-protected have two competing responsibilities. One is, without doubt, that we should use our position to take greater risks, to play artistically at the edges of danger. I assume that's what Wolf was doing in her essay, and what my friends who write erotic fiction or perform in burlesque shows are doing -- raising the intellectual challenge that we consider what is sexy about these things and why. But that kind of artistic challenge to convention seems to me a relatively rarefied act, something that can lose its meaning, as well as its artistic edge, when it becomes commonplace. Worse, it can cause us to forget the larger world in which women's sexuality is still used against them -- and to forget that at any moment, that "larger world" may include the very place where we are standing.

For me, the responsibility that seems more appropriate to everyday use is the second one. In choosing our playthings, I think we have an obligation to be careful not to make toys of what are still first and foremost weapons. It will be time to treat the the veil (and other symbols of sexual repression) and prostitution (and other symbols of sexual exploitation) as toothless toys only when women are no longer their daily victims.

Is this a good which or a bad which?

Women police officers issued with uniform hijab

From Times Online, July 28, 2009:

The £13 headscarves are embroidered with the West Country force's name and logo, and come in two colours — black for police officers and blue for community support officers. A spokeswoman insisted that they were not intended purely to cater for Muslim cultural sensibilities but were multi-faith.
"They are designed to be used in any place of worship and can be used to cover the head or the shoulders. For example, plain clothes officers could use them to cover their shoulders in a Catholic Church, or they can be used to cover the head in synagogues," she said.