Below Brad Delong’s blog entry about Larry Lessig, if you scroll past the speech, there are reader comments. Here’s one from Jim Glass that, for obvious reasons, caught my interest:

Say that without copyright you came up with a great, clever cartoon and put it on your web site. What would prevent the scouts from Disney or Fox from just taking it as their own, putting $1 million behind it, making $100 million, and saying screw you. Would you go on to make another cartoon then?

Jim’s comment is a red herring, since Lessig doesn’t propose eliminating copyright altogether. But it does illustrate a common misconception: that the value of an piece of art is the idea, rather than the artist’s development of the idea. (When I ran a site for aspiring cartoonists like myself, I’d get emails from comic strip creators who were scared to submit their idea to cartoon syndicates, "because what if they steal it?" Those cartoonists had the same misconception.)

Consider Calvin and Hobbes - certainly one of the most valuable cartoons of the last twenty years (how many millions of dollars did Bill Watterson turn down by refusing to license merchandise?). Is the value of Calvin in the idea? No, because frankly, the idea - "a boy and his imaginary pal" - is banal. Variants on that idea have been done dozens of times, sometimes well, sometimes not.

The value of the work is that Bill Watterson, Calivn’s creator, is a fucking cartoon genius. It’s what Watterson did with the idea that has value - which is why the syndicate, which was drooling over the idea of Calvin and Hobbes merchandise, did not fire Watterson and hire a more cooperative cartoonist. In the end they gave Calvin and Hobbes, which was their legal property, to Watterson, rather than lose Watterson’s services on the strip.

Why on earth would any business give away something so valuable?

Because they knew - and it’s unusual for a corporation to be this perceptive, frankly - that the idea for Calvin and Hobbes wasn’t as valuable as it seemed. The real value of Calvin was Bill Watterson’s talent. If they had let Watterson go, they could have found a hack to keep the strip going - but it would quickly have become just another comic strip, a waste of space indistinguishable from Dennis the Menace or Marmaduke.

Of course, there are exceptions - sometimes it really is the idea that’s valuable. Superman is the classic example - an billion-dollar idea from cartoonists who did not have world-shaking talent, but who had the right talent for the right idea at the right time.

But Superman brings up another important point (one that is made by Zitka on Brad Delong’s page). Copyright laws do not protect creators of million-dollar ideas. They protect copyright owners.

Copyright certainly didn’t protect Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman.

In the half-century between the creation of Superman and the creation of Calvin and Hobbes, very little changed for cartoonists. The ownership of Superman was signed away for the same reason the ownership of Calvin was signed away decades later: the cartoonists were young, hungry, unpublished and desperate to do comics. And if unknown cartoonists won’t publish the bosses’ way - which means signing away all rights - they won’t get published.

Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster might have been better off had Superman never been copyrighted - at least they would have had the right to continue making Superman comics and selling Superman drawings into old age. (As it is, they ended up penniless, until bad publicity convinced Superman’s owner to give them pensions). The in-practice effect of copyright - and of the overwhelming imbalance of power between a young creator and a huge publisher - is protection of the publisher’s interests, not the creator’s.

Here’s something the brilliant Canadian cartoonist Dave Sim said, in a speech to a roomful of cartoonists, about dealing with publishers:

The myth of course, is that if they violate the terms of the contract you can sue them. It is a myth because it takes a lot of money to sue an individual successfully and a ton of money to sue a company successfully and that brings me to the second hard truth about companies. No company is ever going to pay you enough money to sue them successfully. They might pay you enough to retain the services of a competent lawyer for a few weeks or a few months or a year or two, but they know you will eventually run out of money and when you do you are going to have to settle out of court. Your settlement might cover your legal expenses but this is not likely.

A lot of people in this room are currently working on material for which they have not received a contract. A lot have completed work for which they have not received a contract. There are even people in this room who have had work published for which they have not received a contract. Companies do this to limit any possibility of negotiation. By the time you get the contract, you have already done so much work and need money so badly that you will sign it whatever you might think of the terms.

For the vast majority of working cartoonists - and, I suspect, working musicians as well (if you haven’t done so already, read this article by Janis Ian, and this one (pdf link) too) - that is the reality. Copyright law, in its current incarnation, is not about protecting my interests. Those who say that copyright must not be changed, because cartoonists like me need the protection… well, at best, they’re not familiar with the facts on the ground.

My goodness, this "choice for men" debate just doesn’t end, does it?

Avedon Carol writes:
Women should certainly have a unilateral right to decide whether to carry to term, but I can see no good argument for also allowing us the unilateral right to impose a decision made solely by the woman on a man who, at that point, becomes an innocent bystander. You can’t claim that his responsibility for having sex is any greater than hers unless it’s either rape or you really think women are too stupid to live (and never initiate sex). They both did it, and if you argue that the resulting pregnancy is his responsibility for the next 18 years just because he happened to have sex with her, you’re going to have to work pretty hard to explain why she didn’t take on the same responsibility when she chose to engage in the same sex act.

Avedon is one of my favorite bloggers, but she’s mistaken about this.

Avedon claims that after sex a man "becomes an innocent bystander," and therefore he has no responsibility for what happens. This is "hot potato" morality; instead of splitting responsibility between all decision-makers, the last person to make a decision gets 100% of the responsibility.

To see why hot potato morality doesn’t work, consider the meat industry. Bob’s meat plant sells Jane’s meat shop unsafe meat - even though Bob knows it’s unsafe. Jane’s meat shop then sells the meat, even though Jane also knows it’s unsafe. Then, several consumers eat the meat and go blind. According to Avedon’s hot potato morality, only Jane is responsible for that outcome, and those blinded folks may sue Jane but not Bob. After all, the decision to sell the meat to consumers was "made solely by Jane"; once the meat had passed out of Bob’s hands, Bob "becomes an innocent bystander."

But that’s ridiculous - Bob made a choice, why shouldn’t he have any responsibility for it? Both Bob and Jane are legally and morally responsible for the choices they knowingly made; that Jane’s decision came later doesn’t let Bob off the hook. We don’t ask "did Bob choose first or second," because that’s not relevant. Instead, we as "did Bob make a choice? Should he have known the possible consequences of his choice?" If the answer to both those questions is "yes," then Bob shares responsibility for what happens.

Furthermore, hot potato morality creates what economists call a "moral hazard," which means that when people aren’t held responsible for the risks they take, they’ll take dangerous risks. Hot potato morality encourages Bob to sell tainted meat, because Bob would know that he can’t be held responsible for the consequences.

So what happens if Bob and Jane are lovers? Similar logic applies. Although Jane makes her final decision later than Bob does, both of them freely choose. The only difference is that the final choice comes later for women than for men. I admit that’s not absolutely fair, but as Avedon herself wrote, "Yes. So? Look, that’s just a fact of biology." The bottom line is that as long as Bob wasn’t raped - as long as he freely chose to risk becoming a father - then Bob bears some of the responsibility for his child.

Furthermore, Avedon’s proposal creates a "moral hazard" for fathers. Since men won’t be held responsible for their choices, men will have less motive to reduce the risk of pregnancy. The result would be increased single motherhood, increased poverty, and increased social problems. This isn’t speculation on my part - statistically, states with weaker child support laws have higher rates of single motherhood. If mandatory child support were eliminated, as Avedon suggests, then presumably the increase in single motherhood would be even larger.

Finally, any discussion of what’s fair has to consider all parties - not just the father. I agree, it’s unfair that Bob can be forced to pay child support for a child he didn’t want (it almost happened to me once, and I still get chills thinking about it). But it’s also unfair to Jane that, even with child support payments, she’s probably paying most of the cost of child-rearing - and definitely doing all the work. And finally, it’s unfair for the child that she or he doesn’t have two loving, voluntary parents.

Well, life is unfair. Deal with it. But Avedon’s solution doesn’t relieve unfairness, it just transfers it. Rather than all three parties sharing the burden equally, the father is relieved of all unfairness while the child’s and mother’s burdens are increased. How is that fair?

Update: After I wrote and posted the above, I come across Ginger Stampley’s blog, where she says pretty much the same thing, but she says it better. Here’s a sample:

Once the woman has declined to exercise her right to terminate a pregnancy–and the fact that it terminates parental responsibility in the future is a byproduct of that right–the question stops being about the rights of the parents, and becomes about their responsibilities, and the rights of the child they’re (both) bringing into the world. The child’s rights include the right to care from both its parents, male and female. […]

I’ve heard a number of friends complain bitterly about women who got pregnant and forced the man involved to support the kid, normally complete with tales of how the mother is terrible to the kid and how the father is the only one who really loves the kid. I have yet to figure out how the life of the kids in question would be better if the men who love them had been legally permitted to ditch them because their mothers were lousy human beings.

Further update: Avedon replied to Ginger, but seems to be missing the point. According to Avedon, “If responsibility doesn’t include taking the father’s willingness to parent into account, it’s a meaningless concept.”

Say what?

Avedon has a really unique idea of what “responsibility” means. If I drove my car over my neighbor’s mailbox, my “willingness” to perform repairs doesn’t change the fact that I’m responsible for the damage. If I break a contract with Al, Al’s ability to sue me for damages isn’t dependant on how “willing” I am to pay those damages.

It comes down to two simple questions: did I freely make my choice, and should I have been aware of the possible consequences of that choice? That - not how willing I am to pry open my wallet - is what determines responsibility.

Avedon wrote:
A child neither has nor needs the “right” to a father who has no desire to be part of that child’s life, who may be seething with so much resentment (even hatred) of the mother that their every encounter is poisonous, and who may project that resentment onto the child and even demonstrate it in very visible and very hurtful ways.

If the father doesn’t want to have contact with the kid, no one should (or can) force him to; but he should still be required to pay child support, because the consequences of poverty for children are at least as bad as everything Avedon just described. (And if he does want to see and love the child, then so much the better for everyone!)

Avedon correctly points out that being a biological father won’t magically make someone into a great father. But - especially considering the problems of child poverty, something that may be a more pressing issue in the U.S. than the U.K. - an unwilling father may be better than no father at all.

Richard Bennett posted a response to me, but I’m putting off replying until I can borrow a copy of a book he cites. Meanwhile, Tony at the Rant Factory (whose permalink isn’t working, so you may have to scroll down to find it) has been responding to an unwilling Meryl Yourish, arguing that “real choice” includes the right of men to decide whether or not women have abortions.

Bizarrely, Tony cites the Supreme Court to support his position. He emphasizes Skinner v. Oklahoma (which he mistakenly calls a state supreme court decision) to argue that “procreation is a basic human right available to women AND men.” But Skinner, which established that the government can’t punish criminals by sterilizing them (or, at least, that it’s unconstitutional to do so if sterilization is applied unevenly), doesn’t say that anyone is required to give up their rights to facilitate other people’s reproduction. Tony is arguing that he has a constitutional right to force his wife to bear children, and that proposition is not supported by Skinner.

If you’re having trouble seeing why Skinner doesn’t help Tony’s argument, think of the First Amendment. I have a First Amendment right to free speech, but not a First Amendment right to make Tony publish my opinions. In fact, Tony has a free speech right to not publish me, if he doesn’t want to (see Miami Herald v. Tornillo).

Just as my right to free speech doesn’t force Tony to publish my speech, Tony’s right to reproduce doesn’t force his wife to bear his child. On the contrary, Mrs. Tony has a constitutional right not to reproduce, if she doesn’t want to (see Eisenstadt v. Baird - “If the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.”).

If we’re going to look at Supreme Court cases, let’s look at relevant ones. Skinner isn’t the relevant legal precedent; Planned Parenthood v. Danforth is. In this case, the court addressed Tony’s question - should husbands have a legal right to prevent a wife’s abortion? - directly. “The obvious fact is that when the wife and the husband disagree on this decision, the view of only one of the two marriage partners can prevail. Inasmuch as it is the woman who physically bears the child and who is the more directly and immediately affected by the pregnancy, as between the two, the balance weighs in her favor.” (Notice this is just what Meryl Yourish said - “my body, my choice”).

* * *

So all of Tony’s constitutional and Supreme Court arguments can be thrown out. What about Tony’s other arguments? They all boil down to this:

All Rights have responsibilities. If you want the sole decision-making power in all cases, you need to take the sole responsibility in all cases. Your body, your decision? That’s incomplete; how about Your Body, Your Decision, Your Problem. If men have no reproductive control and no procreative rights, they should have no responsibilities for the result of procreation, whether it’s an abortion or a baby. Personally, I don’t want to live in a society where the man’s responsibility defaults to non-existence.

Tony is attacking a collection of straw men. Women don’t have the sole power in all decisions; women cannot legally rape men to get sperm, for instance. Women have sole power to make the abortion decision, but women and men share the power to decide on reproduction. Tony’s claim that “men have no reproductive control and no procreative rights” is blatantly false; men decide to have sex (or not), to wear a triple layer of condoms (or not), to have a vasectomy (or not), to refuse to have sex unless she uses a diaphragm and spermacide (or not), and so on. It’s true that only the woman can decide to have an abortion; but it’s equally true that only the man can decide to provide sperm. Each sex has the ability to unilaterally prevent reproduction.

Since women don’t have sole reproductive choice, there’s no reason, under Tony’s argument, for women to bear sole responsibility. (I’ve previously addressed arguments similar to Tony’s here and here).

(Cliché watch: This isn’t important to my argument, but the claim that “all rights have responsibilities” ain’t true. A one-year-old infant has some legal rights, but no legal responsibilities. Even for adults, there are some rights so fundamental that no behavior, no matter how irresponsible or antisocial, can take them away. Even Charles Manson has a right not to be dipped in boiling oil by police.)

Several days ago I posted an essay about “Choice for Men.” Turns out I’m not the only blogger stuck on Men’s Rights. A bit of a four-way debate is going on between Diane E, Richard Bennett, Win Fitzpatrick, and Meryl Yourish. Mr. Fitzpatrick has already posted a good reply to Diane E.’s most recent contribution, but I have a few thoughts to add.

Diane E writes:
If you believe that the woman should have 100% of the life and death power over the fetus, then you cannot believe that the man has 50% of the responsibility of the free choice she has made.

Why on earth can’t I believe that? The process as a whole requires two decision-makers (ignoring, for the purposes of this discussion, the possibility of rape); why should the end result be only one person’s responsibility? In Diane’s argument, responsibility is like a game of “hot potato”; whoever is the last one to make a decision gets saddled with 100% of the responsibility. But we don’t use “hot potato” logic to allocate responsibility in any other area of life, so why should child-rearing be the exception?

For example, imagine that I and my partner purchased a house together. Although we initiated the process together, an inconveniently timed bat-signal called me away and the transaction was all-but-closed in my absence, requiring only my final signature on the papers to be completed. Once the papers are in my hands, a curious situation has been created - the others, having signed the papers, are locked in to their decision. But I could still close the purchase (by signing the papers) or cancel it utterly (by ripping them up). I have 100% of the life and death power over this house purchase. If Diane’s logic held true, then once I made the sole decision to sign the papers, my partner would be morally justified in saddling me with 100% of the house payments.

So what makes a house different from a baby? One difference Diane E. might focus on is legalities; the law requires my partner, having signed an agreement to pay half, to actually pay half. But the same thing applies to a baby: the law requires a non-custodial parent to provide support for his (or her) children. It’s not as if the possibility of sex leading to childbirth is a secret that men don’t know going in.

(There is, of course, one enormous difference - the baby is a person, not a thing, and therefore has some rights. I’ve discussed the importance of this in my previous essay.).

Diane E:
Laws that make unmarried “dads” responsible for their kids obscures the differences between marriage and shacking up, a difference which I believe to be crucial to the maintenance of society. Why get married if the state forces Daddy to pay without marriage? You see, I really believe that women have brains and understand the consequences of their actions, actually, more than men do. Especially with regard to sex and reproduction.

So in Diane E.’s theory, child support payments reduce the incentive for women to marry before having children.. Why get married if you can get child support without a ring? (Diane doesn’t appear to be a romantic!)

Diane has apparently forgotten that women aren’t the only ones whose incentives are altered by child support laws; what about men? Well, the stronger and better-enforced child support laws are, the greater men’s incentive to avoid becoming unmarried fathers. In fact, child support laws probably have a larger impact on men’s incentives than women’s. Without child support laws, a man could potentially pay none of the costs of child-rearing, giving him very little reason to avoid single fatherhood. However, with child support laws in place, a single mother will still pay most child-rearing costs (plus the work involved), and so with or without child support she still has a strong incentive to avoid single motherhood. Given those incentives, we’d expect well-enforced child support laws to reduce single parenthood, not increase it.

Unsurprisingly, that’s what the data shows. According to a study by Chien-Chung Huang (Social Service Review, June 2002, p 275-301), data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth shows that states with strong child support enforcement have lower non-marital birthrates, even after controlling for differences in income, religion, schooling, family structures, etc. “Improved child-support enforcement reduces nonmarital births by 9.9 percent and increases marital births by 7.2 percent. The estimated proportional improvement in nonmarital birthrates for women age 20 or older, white women, and African-American women is 17.4, 3.8, and 13.4 percent, respectively. The increase in marital birthrates for these groups is 7.4, 6.9, and 3.8 percent, respectively.” (This is a much larger measured effect on the unmarried/married birthrate than welfare has, by the way).

Diane E. seems to say that her primary goal is preserving the traditional, married family. If that’s really the case, she ought to reverse her position and support strong, well-enforced child support laws.

Richard Bennett and I actually agree on some things, which might cause anyone who regularly reads both our blogs to die of shock (fortunately, I doubt such a reader exists). Political discourse has focused too much on the so-called “deadbeat dad”; in fact, when non-custodial parents (of either sex; there are nonpaying moms, too) don’t pay up, it’s often because they are legitimately too poor to pay, or because a needlessly complicated state bureaucracy has made paying child support difficult. But just when it seemed there’d be nothing to fight over, Richard wrote this:

The amount due is calculated according to a rigid formula that yields numbers way too high; it’s hard to get the number changed when employment circumstances change, and the payer has no guarantee that it’s actually spent on the child.

Ideally, the noncustodial parent should be paying half or more of the costs of raising a child. (After all, the noncustodial parent, not having to raise the kid(s), has more time to devote to a career). There’s certainly no reason for him or her (but let’s face it, usually him) to pay less than half; the custodial parent is already doing nearly all of the work, so it’s unfair to have her (or him, etc) pick up most of the costs as well.

But that’s exactly what typically happens. According to the U.S. Census (warning - it’s an acrobat file), the average child support award due a custodial parent in 1997 was $4200, or $350 per month. However, even the most optimistic estimates suggest that only 80% of that actually gets paid - so the real average figure may be $3360 a year or lower. In comparison, an average middle-income family spends $8,500 a year taking care of an infant - and the expense goes up as the child grows older. (See “Expenditures on Children by Families” in Family Economics and Nutrition Review vol 12 1999 p. 56-74). So in the best-case scenario - full payment, only one infant - slightly under half of the custodial parent’s direct expenses will be covered by child support.

Of course, in real life, it’s not always the best-case scenario. What if a middle-income couple had three children? In that case, child support payments - if paid in full - will only cover one-quarter of expenses. (see “Do child support awards cover the cost of raising children?,” in Family Economics & Nutrition Review, v11 1998 p29-40).

So it’s hard for me to buy that noncustodial parents are paying too much - if anything, they’re not paying enough.

Richard wants to streamline the process for adjusting child support levels as the non-custodial parents’ income changes, and I agree. However, non-custodial parents should actually be losing a higher percentage of income (although a lower real amount) to child support as their income drops; otherwise, non-custodial parents could lose the incentive to pursue a higher income.

As for making sure “it’s actually spent on the child” - since less than half the expense of parenting is covered by an average child support award, obviously the money is spent on the child. Noncustodial parents don’t have any right to monitor or control the custodial parent’s budgeting, and the sooner they quit trying the better.

Finally, Richard claims that a book, He Works/She Works, shows that fathers and mothers spend equal time with their children. However, He Works/She Works isn’t peer-reviewed, and it shows; it does not have a representative sample; all the parents studied were from the same liberal Northeastern city, and two-thirds of them have a college education or higher. Furthermore, the methods used are poorly described. As the reviewer in Journal of Marriage & the Family wrote, “With limited or no information on the methodology of these studies, it is difficult to judge the validity of the generalizations.”

Overwhelmingly, peer-reviewed studies show that women on average do more of both the housework and the child care - even when both members of the couple work. For just a handful of dozens of examples, see American Sociological Review v59 p327-347; American Sociological Review v59 p 348-364; Social Science Research v25 p260-280; Journal of Family Issues v12 p158-180; Journal of Family Issues v11 p115-135; Journal of Marriage and Family v64 p743-755; Journal of Marriage and the Family v63 p1099-1112, Family Relations v50 p143-153, Journal of Marriage and Family v63 1134-1145, Social Forces v79 p191-229, etc, etc..

Maybe - maybe - Richard is able to come up with an argument for believing that the vast majority of research should be ignored. (If he does, I hope it’s better than a single reference to a non-peer-reviewed book). But it’s ridiculous (and condescending) of him to imply that anyone who disagrees with him is “not well-informed on… patterns of childcare among the American middle class,” when Richard’s own views contradict what nearly any informed scholar would say.

I shamelessly promoted my critique of “choice for men” on mensactivism.org, and got a very nice reply from “Larry” (as well as some less nice replies from my faithful anonymous cyber-stalker).

I had pointed out that the inequalities of “choice” - women can have abortions, but men cannot - are biological, not legal. Larry agrees with that as far as it goes, but claims that I “left out one legal reality:” - the fact that mothers, Larry says, already have the right to (in my phrase) “cut and run.” “In my state, Michigan, a woman now has 30 days from the birth of a child to drop it off at any hospital, church or police station, no questions asked. I may be wrong, but my understanding is that both adoption and legal abandonment relieve the mother of any further financial obligation.”

Larry is referring to Michigan’s “Safe Delivery of Newborns” law, but I’m betting he’s never read it. Contrary to Larry’s talk about “a woman” and “the mother,” the Safe Delivery act is scrupulously gender-neutral. Under the law, either parent can drop off a newborn within the first 3 days (not 30) of the infant’s birth. The parent then has 28 days for a change of heart before a publicly-announced custody hearing. During those 28 days, either biological parent can claim custody of the child with a simple DNA test; additionally, the child placement agency must use that time to search for the “parent who did not surrender the newborn.”

So what happens when a mother wants to give up the child under Michigan’s law, but the father takes custody instead? Then the father has every right to sue for child support - just as my earlier essay said. By exempting fathers but not mothers from child support, “choice for men” would actually create legal inequality where it didn’t exist before.

Larry claims that “the law works one way for men and another way for women” - but his only example of a discriminatory law, Michigan’s Safe Delivery law, is gender-neutral. He says “mothers often do have the right to sign away a child’s future right to support, both before and after birth” - but that’s not true. My guess is that Larry is thinking of adoption laws, but an adopted child hasn’t had their right to support signed away; the identity of the parents changes, but the right to parental support does not. And legally mothers and fathers have an equal right to give up children for adoption. (In practice, sometimes mothers give children up for adoption without informing the father - but that’s only because it’s not biologically possible for a father to have a child without the mother’s knowledge. The inequality is in biology, not the law. And the proposed “choice for men” law won’t change that in the slightest.)

Although Larry isn’t intentionally lying, his argument is deceptive. Larry believes that “choice for men” is about fairness and will give fathers equal rights. But the law doesn’t allow mothers to tell fathers “I give you all responsibilities and obligations of raising our child, and you don’t even have the right to sue me for child support!” “Choice for men,” as described by Sacks and Thompson’s article, would create that right for men and men alone. How is creating a new legal right for men alone “equality?” How can depriving a child of the right to parental support be fairness?

From yesterday’s London Times: Woman sacked for revealing UN links with sex trade.

During her time in Bosnia as an investigator, Ms Bolkovac, 41, uncovered evidence of girls who refused to have sex being beaten and raped in bars by their pimps while peacekeepers stood and watched. She discovered that one UN policeman who was supposed to be investigating the sex trade paid £700 to a bar owner for an underage girl who he kept captive in his apartment to use in his own prostitution racket.

She detailed her findings in a series of explicit e- mails to DynCorp, but after first being demoted and transferred from the investigation she was sacked for allegedly falsifying her timekeeping records.

Charles Twiss, the tribunal chairman, said: “We have considered DynCorp’s explanation of why they dismissed her and find it completely unbelievable. There is no doubt whatever that the reason for her dismissal was that she made a protected disclosure and was unfairly dismissed.”

It’s wonderful that Ms. Bolkovac has been vindicated. But the article doesn’t mention it if any steps are being taken to prevent this happening again, nor does it say if the UN is still subcontracting to DynCorp. Noted with grim amusement: the contrast between Richard Monk - the British head of the operation, who praised the British workers for being “on the whole” a great example - and Ms. Bolkovac, who went out of her way to say that the sleazebag rapists included some British workers.

An essential point that not everyone has yet absorbed: Sometimes there is no fair solution.

Case in point: This week in Newsday, Glenn Sacks and Dianna Thompson argue that life is unfair for fathers. Well, I agree; life is unfair for fathers. It’s not as unfair as Sacks and Thompson think it is - for instance when they claim “when a woman wants a child and a man does not, the woman can have the child anyway…” Of course, this isn’t strictly true - a man could insist on using birth control. Or get a vasectomy. Or even refuse to have sex with women. Sacks and Thompson are so eager to show that men are pure victims that they refuse to acknowledge any of the choices men do have.

What bothers Sacks and Thompson is that women have one choice men don’t - women can choose to have an abortion. This is unfair (although Sacks and Thompson don’t acknowledge the many ways in which this unfairness benefits men), but it’s an unfairness inherent in biology, not in law. So the question becomes, what can be done to remedy this unfairness? Well, according to Sacks and Thompson, the solution is giving unmarried men the right to walk away from all their parenting obligations. In other words, unmarried men shouldn’t pay child support unless they want to.

But their logic is shaky. According to Sacks and Thompson, “On average, every day 17 [U.S. workers] die - 16 of them male. Couldn’t men who work long hours or do hazardous jobs - and who suffer the concomitant physical ailments and injuries - argue that their bodies are on the line, too? Where is their choice?”

Well, unless they’re independently wealthy, they have no choice but to work. But although the news doesn’t seem to have reached Sacks and Thompson, nearly everyone in the US has to work. It’s not as if unmarried fathers are forced to work while childless or married men (or women for that matter) spend their days drinking brandy by the fire. Sacks and Thompson say that for unmarried fathers to need to work is a injustice, because it violates “my body, my choice” - but since when is it such a horrible violation of bodily integrity to have a job? And if it is a violation of bodily integrity for unmarried fathers, then why isn’t it a violation for all other workers, as well?

Sacks and Thompson are right that occupational injuries are too frequent - and too sex-biased - but workplace injuries aren’t caused by paying child support. It’s not as if 100% of mine shaft workers are unmarried men with children; nor is a mine worker magically safer on the job if he has no children. No feminist objects to protecting workers - but Sacks and Thompson seem to believe that workplace deaths are caused by inadequate father’s rights. The real problem is inadequate workplace safety - and the real solutions have nothing to do with eliminating child support payments for unmarried fathers.

Finally, although “16 deaths a day” sounds impressive, is this really a figure that tells us about the average working man’s life? Of the approximately 73 million American men who worked in 2000, 5,467 - which is to say, less than one-hundredth of one percent - died on the job. It’s tragic that they died, of course - but we can acknowledge that tragedy without pretending that men typically face such dangers in order to pay child support.

* * *

What all that really indicates, of course, is that Sacks and Thompson bend over backwards to perceive men as victims. So they say that men have absolutely no choice - ignoring that men aren’t being forced to have sex against their will. So when unmarried men get jobs, that’s a violation of “my body, my choice” equivalent to being forced to bear a child against one’s will - even though the rest of us have to get jobs too. So when one out of every 13,433 male workers dies, that becomes an example of typical male experience. Logical consistency takes a back seat as men-as-victims settles in behind the wheel.

But just because Sacks and Thompson are male-victimology junkies, that doesn’t show that they’re wrong about the larger issue - shouldn’t men get a choice equal to women’s? Contrary to Sacks and Thompson’s view of men as victims first and foremost, men have plenty of choices until pregnancy happens. But once a pregnancy has begun, Sacks and Thompson are right - in our legal system, for the first two trimesters of pregnancy, women have a choice and men don’t. And that, they say, is unfair.

Well, I agree. It is unfair. But their solution would actually make things worse, not better.

Any genuine discussion of “fairness” has to consider what’s best for all the parties involved - but Sacks and Thompson never consider anyone’s rights but the father’s. What about the other parties?

For instance, they propose giving fathers a right to cut and run - but they don’t propose giving mothers the same right. So let’s say I have a one-night stand and learn, eight months later, that the woman is pregnant with our child. Under Sacks and Thompson’s proposal, I - as the man - would have the right to sign away all my obligations to the child. But what if I want to keep the child, which the mother wants to give it up for adoption? Well, under the laws of most states, I’d automatically get custody - and the mother would be obligated to pay me child support (although Sacks and Thompson seemingly think only men ever pay child support, the truth is noncustodial parents of both sexes pay). So men get to cut and run, but women don’t. How is that fair?

My guess is that Sacks and Thompson would concede this point, and be willing to modify their proposal to give women and men equal rights to flee their obligations. But there’s still an important party whose rights haven’t been considered: what’s fair to the child?

There is an undeniable harm to noncustodial parents of forcing them to pay child support - they have to give up money that they’d otherwise spend as they want. But there’s also an undeniable harm of saying parents have no legal obligation to support their children. Child poverty is already a bigger problem in the US than in other wealthy nations; releasing noncustodial parents from the obligation to support their kids would make this worse.

Any honest appraisal of “choice for men” has to weigh both these elements. Which is the worse harm - the harm to noncustodial parents of having to pay child support, or the harm to children if child poverty is increased? “None of the above” isn’t on the menu; as a society, we have to choose one harm or the other to live with.

The moderate loss of financial freedom to noncustodial parents is obviously the lesser harm, and thus the harm we should choose. That is unfair; but increased child poverty is even more unfair. We can only choose which unfairness is easier for our society to live with.

Children have an unambiguous right to the material support of two parents. Under Sacks and Thompson’s theory, parents have the ability to sign away their children’s rights before the child is ever born - but that’s not the way the law works. Once the child is to be born, it has rights, regardless of what it’s parents signed before it was born. A parent can’t sign away a future child’s right to support, for the same reason that a parent can’t sign a contract selling his future child’s liver. The future child’s rights aren’t the parent’s to sign away.

There is no chance that “choice for men” will ever become law. It’s “fairer” only in the most facile analysis - an analysis that has eyes only for the rights of the father, ignoring mother and child entirely.

Is our current system unfair to noncustodial fathers? Yes, of course it is. It’s also unfair to custodial mothers that they have to do virtually all of the work and pay most of the expenses (child support payments typically cover less than half the child’s costs). And it’s terribly unfair that some children grow up without two parents who love each other and want to be together. Life is unfair.

But Sacks and Thompson’s solution doesn’t relieve unfairness, it just transfers it. Rather than all three parties sharing the burden equally, the father is relieved of all unfairness while the costs to mother and child are increased. How is that fair?

Update: I’ve taken the liberty of correcting a significant typo. The number of male workplace fatalities in 2000 was 5,467, but when I originally posted this blog entry I accidentally typed 3,467.

There’s been much snickering in blogdom regarding Andrea Dworkin’s essay on female suicide bombers. But Andrew Edwards of Sketch has taken it a step further, by claiming that Dworkin “thinks that mass murder is an appropriate response to ‘the stigma of being a woman’.” Note the deceptive use of a sentence fragment there; Dworkin’s essay in no way suggests that suicide bombing is “an appropriate response.” Edwards should distinguish between understanding motives behind terrorism - which is what Dworkin’s essay attempts - and saying that terrorism is appropriate.