[ In an earlier post, I wrote:

Not much of a post, I know, but I figured writing that would bait my housemate Bean into posting something more interesting and intelligent in the comments. Bean came through, and since I figure more people read the blog itself than the comments, I’m reposting what Bean wrote here. The rest of this post is Bean’s words. –Amp]

Re: FGM. Most global and multicultural feminists who speak about FGM and Western infiltration do not say that all African women are for FGM. No, no, no.

Anyone who has read seriously into the issues realizes that there is a vast difference between not wanting Western invasion and domination and submitting to such things as FGM. The point is not that Western feminists want to impose “banning FGM” on African women, it’s that Western women tend to think they are the ones who must save these women, and it must be done in the Western feminists deem appropriate, on a timeline that Western feminists deem necessary.

The fact is, there are (and have been for a long time) a great number of extremely motivated feminists who are fighting against FMG. They simply want to be the ones doing the fighting, not having Western women do it for them — at least partly because African feminists will be heard a lot clearer and a lot sooner by the people they are trying to change than Western women ever would.

Also, most Western women simply want to make a law banning all FGM (which obviously doesn’t work, as there are laws in almost every country, yet the practice remains), and they simply want it to stop right now.

Many (but not all — African feminists are as diverse, if not moreso, than Western feminists) see alternative solutions that most Western feminists oppose. For example, one successful strategy has been getting people to switch to symbolic FGM, wherein the ritual is still performed, but no actual cutting or sewing is done. There are a great number of Western feminists who scream that the underlying submission is still there — and I would agree. The thing is, for these feminists, this is a band-aid solution, not the solution. This is the solution that, at least, protects girls from being physically harmed and damaged RIGHT. NOW. — something that the Western way couldn’t offer, it takes generations to make the kind of changes that Western feminists want.

So, the point is not to keep FGM, the point is to support the African feminists without taking over.

More and more nowadays, we’re hearing the idea that we should invade Iraq in order to help the Iraqi people. The International Crisis Group did a study of attitudes about a US invasion among Iraqi people, and found that many Iraqis more-or-less favor such an invasion, although not for the reasons US hawks have suggested:

…the overwhelming sentiment among those interviewed was one of frustration and impatience with the status quo. Perhaps most widespread is a desire to return to “normalcy” and put an end to the abnormal domestic and international situation they have been living through. A significant number of those Iraqis interviewed, with surprising candour, expressed their view that, if such a change required an American-led attack, they would support it. […]

For the Iraqi people, who since 1980 have lived through a devastating conflict with Iran, Desert Storm, a decade of sanctions, international isolation and periodic U.S./UK aerial attacks, a state of war has existed for two decades already. The question is not whether a war will take place. It is whether a state of war finally will be ended.

However, Iraqi hopes for a US invasion might be based on assumptions that I doubt are true:

It should not be assumed from this that such support as might exist for a U.S. operation is unconditional. It appears to be premised on the belief both that any such military action would be quick and clean and that it would be followed by a robust international reconstruction effort. Should either of these prove untrue ““ if the war proved to be bloody and protracted or if Iraq lacked sufficient assistance afterwards ““ the support in question may well not be very long sustained.

How likely is the United States to make a real, long-term commitment to the well-being of the Iraqi people in a post-Saddam Iraq? My opinion hasn’t changed much since early December, when I drew this cartoon.

There’s very little reason to believe that the United States - which has done the very least it could get away with in Afghanistan - has any interest in improving Iraqi human rights. Even Iraqis who have spoken in favor of a US invasion seem to now be experiencing doubts. In an article called “Our Hopes Betrayed,” Iraqi exile Kanan Makiya, who is indisputably anti-Saddam, described the Bush plan for a post-Saddam Iraq:

Its driving force is appeasement of the existing bankrupt Arab order, and ultimately the retention under a different guise of the repressive institutions of the Baath and the army. Hence its point of departure is, and has got to be, use of direct military rule to deny Iraqis their legitimate right to self-determine their future. In particular it is a plan designed to humiliate the Kurdish people of Iraq and their experiment of self-rule in northern Iraq of the last 10 years, an experiment made possible by the protection granted to the Kurds by the United States itself. That protection is about to be lifted with the entry into northern Iraq of much-feared Turkish troops (apparently not under American command), infamous throughout the region for their decades-long hostility to Kurdish aspirations.

(And regarding our protection of the Kurds - that hasn’t prevented us from allowing Turkey to bomb Kurds in the “no-fly” zone.)

And from another article:

In an interview with The Observer, Kanan Makiya, an adviser to Iraq’s main opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress, said America now appeared to have dumped its commitment to bring Western-style democracy to Iraq. Instead, under pressure from Saudi Arabia and the Arab Gulf states, Washington was preparing to leave Iraq under the control of President Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.

‘This would be an unmitigated disaster for the long-term relationship between the US and the Iraqi people,’ he said. ‘The Iraqi opposition is going to become anti-American the day after liberation. It is a great irony.’

As Lying Media Bastards points out, there’s a real danger to the US in supporting true democracy and self-rule; what if they democratically decide to act against our interests? “From the U.S. point of view, democracy could be harmful, as the nation’s large Shi’a population could move Iraqi policy in a more Islamic direction, and independent Kurds in the north would worry Iraqi neighbor Turkey.”

If our goal was genuinely to encourage democracy and protect ordinary Iraqis, the Turks would not be allowed to move even a foot closer to Iraqi Kurdistan.

(For more on the Kurds, be sure to read this post on Body and Soul).

Part 2: About the Sanctions.

And yet….

I had this discussion with Charles the other day. The one reason I might favor war with Iraq, at this point, is the possibility of ending sanctions on Iraq. Those sanctions have needlessly killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians (the current “best estimate” seems to be that 350,000 Iraqi children under age 5 and an unknown number over age 5 have died due to the Gulf war, mostly due to sanctions). And according to Richard Garfield, the author of that estimate, “excess deaths should…be seen as the tip of the iceberg among damages to occur among under five-year-olds in Iraq in the 1990s….The humanitarian disaster which has occurred in Iraq far exceeds what may be any reasonable level of acceptable damages according to the principles of discrimination and proportionality used in warfare.”

Unfortunately, now that Bush and the American mass-media have convinced most Americans that the loathsome Saddam Hussain is Satan and Hitler rolled into one, there is no chance of ending sanctions without an invasion. Short of a deposed Saddam, suggesting an end to sanctions (or limiting sanctions only to imports of weapons and weapon parts) would get any politician tarred as “soft on Iraq.”

The Iraqi people are the rope in a tug-of-war between the US and Saddam. In that situation, the moral course of action for the US is to drop its end of the rope, but clearly that will never happen unless Saddam drops dead first. (And even Saddam’s death might not be enough, if his son took over). If we don’t want US-led sanctions to injure and kill hundreds and thousands more innocent Iraqis over the next two decades, maybe we should support a war now. As immoral and disgusting as this needless, aggressive invasion of Iraq is, endless sanctions could be worse.

We’ve effectively been continuously at war with Iraq for over a decade. If it takes escalating the war to end it, then so be it.

Of course, no sooner do I type this than I have doubts.

• It’s morally perverse to suggest that the US should invade Iraq to prevent the US from killing more Iraq civilians with sanctions. In effect, my logic rewards attacking civilians with sanctions.
• There’s no guarantee that a war wouldn’t do more damage than even another two decades of sanctions. If the war goes badly, if more nations are drawn in on both sides, if Israel is attacked… the potential harms of war are endless.
• It’s not even clear that war would end the sanctions. If, for example, costs of invasion became too high, the result might be a negotiated surrender leaving both Saddam and sanctions in place. Another, more likely alternative is that after Saddam’s defeat, a local, armed resistance to American and Turkish occupation would convince the US to leave the sanctions in place.
• If sanctions are not ended by war, they will certainly be made worse. The main way sanctions kill is by preventing Iraq from rebuilding a sufficient infrastructure, especially regarding the availability of clean drinking water. As bad as infrastructure in Iraq is now, war would make it much worse.

The more I think about Iraq, the more pounding this headache becomes….

Update: Matthew Yglesias comments.

I ran across this article from the Chicago Tribune, about a right-wing student group that invited anti-feminist feminist Christina Hoff Sommers to speak at the University of Chicago. The article says nothing that isn’t predictable, but I was amused by this passage, quoting campus conservative Sara Butler:

Butler was happy to provide the refreshment. She said she and conservative-minded friends have chafed at campus women’s groups that have been protesting agricultural working conditions at Taco Bell suppliers and opposing war in Iraq.

“I think the feminist movement is out of touch with average women,” she said. “The big feminist issue has been the controversy with the Augusta National Golf Club.”

So in one moment Ms. Butler slams campus feminist groups for their concern with labor issues and war in Iraq, and the next she’s complaining all feminists worry about is the Augusta National Golf Club. Truly, some people are never satisfied.

(By the way, Ms. Butler does go on to give her opinion of what a truly pressing issue for women on campus is: the “lack of any dating culture on campus.” Thank goodness feminists have right-wingers to tell us what’s really important…)

(While I’m on the subject of zany things Ms. Butler has said, let me point out this National Review article, in which Butler - I kid you not - criticizes feminists for judging people by their policies, rather than their sex: “We couldn’t understand why their bond of sisterhood didn’t extend to Priscilla Owen, but included Sen. Chuck Schumer and Ralph Neas. Perhaps the sisterhood has awarded each of these two men an honorary estrogen pack since their politics are so obviously feminine. After all, for feminists, ideology trumps biology…” Here’s a clue for Ms. Butler: Of course feminists judge people by their ideology, not their biology. To do otherwise is called “sexism,” and real feminists are against sexism.)

But the real reason I’m blogging this is the article’s comment that “Butler says she is a feminist of a different sort - a conservative feminist.”

I have trouble accepting the idea of a right-wing feminist.

1. Real feminists don’t attack feminism for a living.

Most of the examples of conservative so-called feminism I’ve come across - the IWF, Christina Hoff Sommers and ifeminism, for example - are so discouraging. It seems to me that to be a feminist, one ought be in favor of feminism. Therefore, it’s difficult for me to accept that these “right-wing feminists” - none of whom ever take the feminist side in current controversies, and all of whom make their livings doing nothing but slamming feminism - are feminists.

Of course, real feminists can - and do - criticize other feminists. When feminist Naomi Wolf released her book Fire with Fire - a book that mostly criticized feminists and dominant feminist ideology - Christina Hoff Sommers eagerly predicted Wolf’s forthcoming expulsion from the feminist fold (”Get used to this, Ms. Wolf. You’ll soon be finding out how it feels just to be called antifeminist simply because you refuse to regard men as the enemy and women as their hapless victims…. Susan Faludi will now classify you as just another backlasher”). Of course, none of this came to pass; some feminists criticized Wolf, some didn’t, and years later Wolf’s still one of the most popular feminist writers in America. So much for Ms. Sommers’ crystal ball.

The difference, of course, is that no matter how much Wolf criticizes feminists, that’s not all she does. She’s also found time, in her career, to support feminist issues now and again. But conservative feminists like Ms. Sommers have not.

But examples aside (after all, that’s just anecdotal evidence), as a matter of theory I think right-wing politics and feminism are fundamentally in conflict.

2. Real feminists don’t think a women’s only place is in the home.

As I understand it (and speaking in sweeping generalizations), there are two dominant brands of right-wingers in the US today: social conservatives and libertarians. Social conservatism is pretty obviously incompatible with feminism: social conservatives are anti-abortion, anti-lesbian, anti-women-in-the-workplace. Basically, they’re anti-women-being-anything-but-barefoot-and-pregnant. Do I even have to explain why this ain’t compatible with feminism?

Libertarianism is on the surface more compatible with feminism. Libertarians believe in equal legal rights for women, and frequently oppose laws which would have the government force childbirth on unwilling women. So why don’t I think libertarians can be feminists?

3. Real feminists are for real equality, not just legal equality

There’s more to feminism than disapproving of legal sexism and keeping abortion legal. The dictionary defines feminism as a movement for “the social, political and economic equality of the sexes.” But libertarians aren’t for any of that; all they favor is the legal equality of the sexes. As long as women are equal in the strict letter of the law, libertarians don’t care if women are hugely unequal in ways social, political and economic. They see no problem in a congress that is 87% male; although they perform statistical somersaults trying to deny that a wage gap exists between men and women, at a more fundamental level they don’t mind that women get paid less. Their alleged concern for equality begins and ends with legal equality. That’s fine - they can believe whatever they want - but it’s not feminism, not even by the conservative dictionary definition.

4. Real feminists don’t oppose every possible law to help women.

There’s a huge variety of feminisms out there, but there are a couple of things virtually all feminists believe. One is that feminists can, by taking collective action, change society in ways that improves the status of women-as-a-whole. Towards this end, feminists have lobbied for battered women’s shelters (and often lobbied for government funding), rape crisis lines (ditto), anti-discrimination laws, affirmative action, pay equity, state-funded day care, the family leave act, a higher minimum wage, government-funded research on violence against women, and so on.

But libertarians opposes most collective action: for libertarians, everything is about the individual. Strict libertarians opposes laws against discrimination; if an individual business owner wants to discriminate against women, he should have that freedom, because after all it’s his business and his money. Similarly, pay equity, affirmative action, minimum wage, sexual harassment laws, and family leave are bad, because government shouldn’t tell business owners what to do. Rape crisis lines and battered women’s shelters should be provided by private charity and markets, not by tax dollars “taken at gunpoint.” And so on, and so on.

Of course, I’m not saying that no feminist can disagree with welfare, or affirmative action, or family leave, or whatever. Feminists disagree on things like this all the time. But can someone be against virtually every policy that might help women and still be a feminist? After all, it’s not just that libertarians want to prevent new laws to help women: libertarians also want to repeal most of the current laws that help women.

Getting rid of Social Security would hurt women more than men; getting rid of the minimum wage would hurt women more than men (because more women are minimum-wage workers); getting rid of anti-discrimination laws would hurt women more; I could go on with examples like these all day. All these policies would hurt women’s interests, and all of them are favored by libertarians. If virtually all the policies a person favors would hurt women’s interests, and drive women far away from “social, political, and economic equality” with men, doesn’t that make it a contradiction to call that person a feminist?

And, of course, feminists believe in doing everything possible - including government aid - to help improve the status of women discriminated against abroad. But try mentioning “foreign aid” to a libertarian - it’s like mentioning garlic and crosses to a vampire.

5. Real feminists want justice for all, not just justice for the well-off and white.

There’s one other reason I think it’s unlikely that any coherent philosophy could be both right-wing and feminist. Feminism’s mandate is justice, and especially justice for women. But fighting for “justice” for women isn’t meaningful if it only applies to some women. Consider the feminist principle that “all women must have the freedom to choose abortion.” If we’re serious about that principle, it’s not enough that abortion remain legal; it also has to be meaningfully available to all women. That means feminism has to concern itself at least partly with class justice - if poor women can’t afford abortions, then poor women lack the freedom to choose abortion.

Similar arguments could be made about why feminism has to not only consider gender justice, but also the places where gender justice “intersects” with racial justice, economic justice, justice for lesbians, and so on. Certainly, there are many individual right-wingers who are personally anti-racist, concerned with the plight of the poor, and so on. But it is the left which is fighting for social justice on all these fronts; and insofar as feminism has to be concerned with social justice for all women (and not just white middle-class first-world heterosexual women) to be legitimate, it’s more natural for feminism to ally with the left than with the right.

So do I think that individual conservatives who call themselves feminists are insincere? No, probably not: probably they just like the label and don’t care what it means. Still, it’s a kick in the pants, ain’t it? I don’t wander around insisting I’m a “libertarian” despite my lack of faith in pro-market ideology; i don’t call myself a “fundamentalist Christian” even though I’m a Jewish atheist. Why is it that right-wing terms are understood to have meaning, but anyone - no matter how regressive and anti-feminist their views - feels free to label herself a “feminist”?

Update: Turns out that Sara Butler has a blog, and she’s responded to me here. (If the permalink is bloggered, just look for the February 18th entry).

Afghan women want “real, not just symbolic, rights.”
A Reuters report on a women’s rights conference held in Afghanistan, “a conference which would have been unthinkable under the rule of the fundamentalist Taliban, but nevertheless underlined how far women have to go to achieve equal rights.” The women are demanding input into a new constitution and a guarantee of equal rights:

In a final declaration, the meeting called on the government to end discrimination and violence against women, and to ensure their rights were enshrined in a new constitution, a first draft of which is expected this month.

It also called for projects to help reduce illiteracy among women and to provide equal employment opportunities, including within the government.

The declaration said that planned legal reform should ensure women’s rights to divorce and citizenship and grant them equal political and economic rights.

It said that a body should be established to report on violations of women’s rights and that the new constitution should be approved by a committee of women’s organisations before final ratification.

Zero tolerance for female genital mutilation
Opposition for female genital mutilation (FGM) is often caricatured as a western imposition on African and Muslim cultures. In fact, as far as I can tell, everywhere in the world where FGM is practiced there are local women questioning or protesting FGM. Of course, it’s true that western feminist organizations have sometimes been ham-handed; but it’s not true that opposing FGM is just a Western thing. From the UN Wire:

African leaders and international organizations open a three-day conference today in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to urge zero tolerance for female genital mutilation, which the World Health Organization says has been performed on up to 140 million women and girls.

U.N. Helps Sterilize Mexicans Against Their Will
Abortion is too-often the only reproductive right talked about, but the right to choose to have children is just as important. From the National Catholic Reporter (and via Eve Tushnet):

More than 400 cases like hers have moved Mexico’s National Commission for Human Rights to issue a harsh report Dec. 16 denouncing the fact that in all of Mexico’s 31 states health organizations have been imposing contraceptive devices on natives and peasants without their consent. The report mentions the United Nations and the Mexican Institute of Social Security in particular.

The commission’s report says it found that “medical personnel in public rural clinics force women to accept the use of intrauterine devices as a method of birth control” under threat of losing the help provided by government programs.

“This commission has also documented that medical and paramedic personnel of the ‘community health brigades’ working in areas of native population put pressure on the male population in order to obtain their consent for the application of irreversible methods [vasectomy] by promising them material goods and economic help…”

UN official: “Visiting brothels where women have been gang-raped into submission, into slavery, is not part of the UN’s mandate.”
This is an ongoing controversy (I blogged about this issue back in August), and I’m happy that it hasn’t faded away. Basically, UN human rights workers have too often been men who think of their occupation as a macho boy’s club, with every right to exploit non-first-world women. Thankfully, some UN folks - like Madeleine Rees, who is now officially my hero - don’t go along with it. From Scotland on Sunday:

Madeleine Rees, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Bosnia, has broken ranks to demand that UN officials, international peacekeepers and police who are involved in sex crimes be brought to justice in their home countries.

Speaking exclusively to Scotland on Sunday, the British lawyer has also launched an outspoken attack on her former boss. She accuses Jacques Paul Klein, the former head of the UN Mission in Bosnia, of not taking UN complicity in the country’s burgeoning sex trade seriously enough.

In recent years there has been a massive increase in the trafficking of women in Bosnia, including girls as young as 12. The women are taken from their homes in eastern Europe by organised criminal gangs and brought to Bosnia, where they are forced into prostitution.

The trade in these so-called ’sex slaves’ hardly existed until the mid-1990s. It was fuelled by the arrival of tens of thousands of predominantly male UN personnel in the wake of the signing of the Dayton Peace Accord by Bosnia, Croatia and Yugoslavia in 1995.

31 Palestinian Women murdered in “honor” killings in 2002
You can always rely on the UN Wire for depressing news.

At least 31 Palestinian women were murdered in so-called honor killings in the West Bank and Gaza Strip last year, according to statistics released by Palestinian police last week. The victims, most of whom were under the age of 18, were killed by family members for perceived sexual misconduct that brought shame to the family, although in most cases the girls had been sexually abused or raped by relatives.

I’m as pro-Palestine liberation as anyone, but that doesn’t change the fact that Palestinian culture is, by and large, misogynist, homophobic, anti-Semitic and basically deplorable.

Wal-Mart faces largest class action suit in history
The New York Times reports that plantiff’s lawyers in the Wal-Mart sex discrimination lawsuit “want the lawsuit to include all 700,000 women who worked at Wal-Mart from 1996 to 2001.”

In another expert’s report, William T. Bielby, a sociology professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, found that women make up 89.5 percent of Wal-Mart’s cashiers, 79 percent of department heads, 37.6 percent of its assistant store managers and 15.5 percent of its store managers. The lawsuit claims that among 20 other large retailers, 57 percent of the managers were women. Hourly jobs at Wal-Mart pay an average of about $18,000 a year, while the average managerial job pays $50,000.

“There are enormous disparities in the rate of promotion for men and women in management,” said Joseph Sellers, a lawyer for the plaintiffs. “There is strong evidence that the company is mistreating women because they are women.”

Remember the movie Forty Days and Forty Nights? I didn’t see it, but the premise was that there was something extraordinary about voluntarily going six weeks without having sex. I thought that was completely nuts, but apparently that’s normal thinking among some Americans. It’s certainly the norm on some TV shows I watch, like Friends and Sex and the City and Buffy and Scrubs and - and, well, virtually all of them except for Smallville. Feeling incredibly deprived if you’re not having frequent sex is normal.

So I was reading (via Eve Tushnet) this interview with David Biano, a once-gay writer who has recently decided that he can’t have sex with men anymore, because it contradicts “traditional Jewish observance.” He plans on starting a family with some nice (and apparently yet-to-be-met) Jewish woman, but despite that isn’t signing up with the “ex-gay” movement, thank goodness.

Anyhow, this exchange between Biano and his interviewer struck me:

Q: But what makes you think that this fundamental, core piece of who you are, regardless of how it got there, can be put away and sort of just ignored or not acted on? It’s not like you’re deciding not to eat Big Macs because you know that they’re bad for you. This is something much more central to who we are… This is sex.

A: And I believe that American culture and the gay community have overly glorified sex to the point that it’s expected to be the most important piece of our lives. And historically that never happened before the last couple hundred years. And I don’t accept that it’s natural for us or that it’s what God wants for us. I think it is Western culture that is out of whack, not me.

Although I’m not religious, I think Biano is on to something here. But then again, I’m pretty weird about sex. I mean, I like it. A good orgasm with another human being is astounding; the only experience I’ve had that rivals orgasm with another person for pure intensity is trippits (inhaling nitrous oxide while tripping on LSD).

I love trippits. But y’know, if I never have a trippit again, that’ll be okay by me. (It’s been years since my last one). It’s not the end of the world. It’s not even a big deal. There are better things in life than seeking intense momentary pleasure.

Folks who organize their lives around arranging their next drug trip, or making sure they have a steady supply of drugs, are seen as ludicrous or pathetic. But folks who organize their lives around arranging their next sexual encounter, or securing a steady supply of sexual encounters, are seen as normal. What’s the difference?

There’s a sort of fascism of desire in American society. In much the same way lesbians and gays are told they’re not normal, people who don’t want to have sex all the time - who don’t think sex is a “fundamental, core piece of who you are” - are understood to be weirdos, deviants, freakishly far from the norm. If someone goes to clubs five nights a week hoping to find a sex partner for the night, that’s normal; if someone completely throws over their friends and their goals in order to be more attractive to a steady sex partner, that’s normal; if someone sends letters to strangers who want to get married and said so in a classified ad, that’ s normal; but if someone doesn’t feel any particular need for sex, get them to a psychiatrist!

Not that I’ve got anything against people who want to have sex a lot. Hell, go for it. Have fun.(Although please don’t pretend that you’re being a rebel; nothing in the world is more mainstream and conventional than being interested in sex). I’ve also think personal ads are a good idea (some close friends have vastly improved their lives using the personals), and I’ve got nothing against heavy drug use, or going to clubs five nights a week. I still think that anti-gay groups like the Republican party are, for all their excuses, little more than exercises in legitimizing hatred.

But speaking for myself, I’ll be perfectly happy if I never have sex again. It’s simply not a vital issue in my life. Why should that be weird?

Update: Read as well this excellent post by Blueheron - he’s a much more conventional and ordinary thinker than I am on sexuality (I just said that to get his goat), but he and I think in very similar ways about the value - and devaluation - of deep friendships. “It’s very odd and deeply sad that partnerships (being defined here as close and lasting relationships based on serious friendship and shared common interests) have become so marginal in our society.”

Eric Sten (see previous blog entry) is the loudest person to complain about Portland Business Alliance CEO Kim Kimbrough since the city’s business outbid St. Louis’ for his services, but not the only one. From The Oregonian (6/25/02):

Former employee Bo Larsen, a supervisor in the street-cleaning program that hired the city’s homeless, said Kimbrough seemed intent on bringing in ideas from St. Louis that did not fit Portland’s needs.

“I just think he’s got a five-year mentality,” Larsen said. “What (the association) needs is someone who loves downtown Portland.”

Larson has a point - Kimbrough’s first action on arriving in Portland was to fire half his local staff (he brought in cronies from St. Louis shortly afterward). And many of his big ideas for Portland’s downtown appear to have been dug out of St. Louis’ recycling bins.

For example: At the heart of Portland’s downtown is Pioneer Square, a much-needed open, public space. Naturally, the Portland Business Alliance hates the Square (an inch of space dedicated to the public good, rather than profit? The horror!) and has quietly been pushing a new plan to erect a $10.3 million dollar ice skating rink on the site five months of the year. I did a search of St Louis papers, and what a surprise - a skating rink was Kimbrough’s big idea for helping downtown St. Louis, too. (AP wire story, 11/29/2000).

Portland residents shouldn’t trust developers who say the ice rink will only be up part of the year, either. In St. Louis, Kimbrough used the success of a “temporary” rink to justify plans to leave the rink in place year-round.

Via Alliance Watch (an interesting new blog specializing in news about the Portland Business Alliance), I came across an article in the Portland Mercury about the Portland Business Alliance. Here’s a passage from the article:

The Portland Business Alliance may not be widely recognized by name, but their actions are well known and maligned by many in social service and activism circles. Housed in two separate offices, the organization that represents downtown businesses is as big as a mid-sized business itself. Its intentions are broad: According to its mission statement, it is “the primary advocate for the business community and [is] active in all aspects of public policy which could adversely effect [sic] that community.”

Last spring, claiming that the homeless and street punks populating downtown were bad for business, the PBA drafted and lobbied for a sit-lie ordinance, a law allowing police to move along any person loitering on streets or sidewalks.

Over the course of several months, Mayor Katz sponsored roundtable discussions with representatives from both the Business Alliance and homeless advocacy groups like Sisters of the Road. Then, suddenly, in August, Mayor Katz swiftly enacted modifications to the city code…changes that reflected suggestions solely from the Business Alliance and rejected pleas from homeless advocates for compassion. Moreover, these changes to the city code were announced not in a public forum, but during a closed-door session; a meeting in which the mayor’s office failed to invite representatives from the Sisters of the Road. Members of the Business Alliance, however, were in attendance. […]

The Business Alliance has become so powerful that they are regarded as a de facto governmental agency. In December, without hesitation, a representative from the organization was guaranteed a seat on the board overseeing the newly formed Children’s Initiative, the $50-million fund generated by a voter-approved ballot measure last November. […]

This begs the question, “Why is a representative from an organization whose primary concern is invigorating downtown commerce, directing where and how $50 million in taxes are spent for local youth programs?” […]

Our tax dollars at work

The Business Alliance has two primary sources of income…they have the power to tax downtown businesses within a 212-block area; they also have a staggering $9 million contract with the city to manage the six Smart Parks and run a downtown marketing campaign.

Council member Sten calls the Smart Park and marketing contract a “sweetheart deal,” which essentially subsidizes the Business Alliance. “Literally, the government is sponsoring an organization to use those funds to ban homeless people and stop the council from taking on a peace resolution,” he says.

Portlanders should read the whole article - it’s pretty scary stuff.

Another Portland weekly paper, Willamette Week, has a profile of Portland Business Alliance head honcho Kim Kimbrough. Best bit:

Kimbrough’s public behavior is equally unusual. As president and CEO of the Portland Business Alliance, he’s supposed to market the city to the rest of the world, yet he has spent most of his two years here talking about what a terrible place Portland is to do business. “When you start a mantra that Portland is anti-business, you’re helping to make that reality,” says City Commissioner Erik Sten. “It’s a strange message for a group that we’re paying to market the city.” (More than 80 percent of Kimbrough’s $11 million budget is public money.)

I just got this email from a reader:

Re: Moseley-Braun

Amp:

For Christ’s sweet sake, why would you vote for her? Unlike Sharpton, she never led a race riot in which people were killed. However, she is a crook and a fool. I wouldn’t trust her with $10 of real money. What conceivable qualification other than skin color does she have for the Presidency? This isn’t a game, you know. When Presidents make mistakes, actual human beings die.

Honestly, dude, since I’m not a registered Democrat (and thus don’t get to vote in the primary), I don’t feel obliged to take the question of “which Dem candidate to vote for” seriously. (Right now, not having given the matter any serious thought, Moseley-Braun and Dean look the best to me.)

If I do register as a Democrat before the primary election, then I’ll take it more seriously.

Maybe.

Then again, maybe not. I live in Oregon; by the time the polls close here, the real race for the Democratic nomination will all-but-certainly be done. In that context, voting for the black woman simply because I’m tired of the Democrats offering all-white, all-male slates seems perfectly legitimate to me. That’s she’s relatively lefty and intending to run on a firm anti-war platform doesn’t hurt, either.

I don’t live in a meaningfully democratic system, when it comes to primary elections; the decision is made long before I cast my vote. Asking me to take that system in dead earnest is, in my opinion, treating politics like a game; as if it were only the play-acting of voting that mattered, rather than whether or not my vote had any consequences.

For what it’s worth, when I do think my vote has consequences, I agonize over the decision. I even sometimes vote for Democrats I hate (I voted for Oregon’s current governor, despite having campaigned against him in the primaries). But until the Democrats see fit to rearrange their primary schedule so that ALL Democrats have a chance to cast a meaningful vote, don’t ask me to take the ridiculous mockery of democracy that they call a “primary” seriously. I take democracy seriously, but judging from how they’ve designed their primary, I don’t think the Democrats do.

(Of course, the same could be said of the Republicans. And maybe even of the Greens. Feh.)

Yours,
Ampersand

Update: The same reader emailed again, arguing that I have influence on primaries that really do matter, insofar as what I write here influences my readers. I don’t think my readers would really vote for CMB based on an offhand comment I make here, but in general it’s a good point. I do think we should act as if our actions mattered, even if it’s likely they don’t matter. But on the other hand, if I started taking myself and what I write here too seriously, I’d freeze up entirely.

Over on The Oregon Blog, Emma is decrying the “blame Nader” security blanket that is still being clutched so firmly by many democrats. Here’s part of what Emma said:

We’re invading Iraq because nearly every donkey in Washington was waving a gun in the air and screaming that we needed to INVADE. Is that Nader’s fault? Is it Nader’s fault that the Dems, by virtue of fantastically weak leadership, managed to be the only group ever to LOSE the congress during the off-year elections? At some point–and reasonable people can draw this line–you gotta give up the Nader excuse.

Two: Nader didn’t lose the election for Gore. If you gotta finger someone, start with Gore. He ran the worst Presidential campaign in history, fighting at every turn to demonstrate that he wasn’t as exhilarating as his opponent–who had trouble with words and admitted not having any idea where foreign nations were or who led them.

I partly agree, partly disagree with Emma.

Part one: Blame the Democrats

Of course, I agree with Emma that the state of the country is in large measuret the Democrats’ fault. What the Dems have failed to understand for 20 years is that part of their job isn’t just bending themselves to the dominant discourse, but trying to set that discourse.

Whatever I think of Republican leaders, I can’t say that men like Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich and George W. Bush are cowards. On the contrary, they’ve got audacity leaking out of their asses; over years they’ve driven the Republican party much further to the right than anyone imagined possible. Meanwhile, the Democrats - led by the DLC - spent those years in dogged pursuit of “the center,” taking on Republican values and compromising whenever politically possible.

What happens when the Democratic party leadership (in the form of the DLC) and the Republicans move simultaneously rightward? The center moves right as well. The DLC Democrats, lacking any vision beyond chasing the center, abdicated setting a national agenda to the Republicans. It is only because the Democrats have capitulated on so many issues that the Republicans have had the political freedom to move so incredibly far to the right. Why shouldn’t they? Whether Republicans pursue a needless, pointless war with Iraq, or budget-busting tax giveaways for the wealthiest, they can be confident that resistance from important and powerful Democrats will be no more than token.

The Democrats, in short, are the Republican right’s enablers.

And what have the Democrats gotten for their lack of principle? Party loyalists claim we must chose between being principled losers or capitulating winners, but those aren’t the only alternatives. Paul Wellstone showed us that there can be principled winners. And as the Democrats demonstrated in 2002, sometimes all capitulation does is make us unprincipled losers.

Part two: Blame Nader

Emma, like many Greens, says that Nader shouldn’t be blamed for Gore’s defeat. And there are certainly more likely candidates: a press corps that loathed Gore and never hesitated to show it, Jeb Bush’s magic act (watch The Amazing Jeb makes black votes disappear!), five traitors to Democracy on the Supreme Court, and of course Gore himself, who was dealt a winning hand (great economy, popular administration) and still folded.

All of that is true.

But it’s also Nader’s fault, in the simple sense that if Nader hadn’t run, Gore would have won.

I’m not talking about comparing Nader’s vote total to Gore’s losery margin (which presumes, wrongly, that 100% of Nader voters would otherwise have voted for Gore). I’m talking about a neck-and-neck campaign in which Gore wasted advertising dollars and precious candidate appearances in Democratic “safe states” - or, rather, states that would have been safe if not for Nader. Suppose all those pro-Gore commercials broadcast in Oregon - not to mention Gore’s appearance here in the final weeks of his campaign - had been in Florida instead?

It probably would have made the difference.

But then again, wasn’t that the whole idea?

Seriously. By 2000, the Democratic Party had finally moved further to the right than many of us could stomach. In effect, the Democrats had decided that they no longer needed the left in their coalition. So a small part of the left - but the part that was good at organizing rallies and finding hundreds of volunteers in the pre-election months - threw their (our) support to Nader.

It was a desperate move, but one we felt we had to make, because we could see that the Democrats were blowing it. We could see that the Democrats - ever-compromising, ever-abdicating - were enabling the Republicans to move the national discourse further and further to the right with each national election. As I wrote in 2000:

A vote for Gore isn’t just a vote against Bush. A vote for Gore is a vote for the Democrats to continue moving further and further to the right. Liberals who vote for Gore/Lieberman are sending a message that, no matter how awful Democrats get, liberals will vote for them, so there’s no need for the Democrats to take liberal views into account.

Bush and the Republicans have been a horror - even worse than I expected. But that doesn’t prove to me I was wrong; that shows me I was righter than I knew. By refusing to take a stand, by compromising at every opportunity, and by being the party of no principles, the Democrats have enabled the Republicans to move further right than ever before.

Part three: 2004

It’s nice that left and liberal bloggers are getting along fairly well… for now. I wonder if it’s just temporary, though; the conflict between leftists and Democrats hasn’t gone away, it’s just submerged for a while. I remember in 2000 and 2001, it seemed to me that Democrats hated Greens far more than they hated Republicans. I suspect we’ll be in that place again 15 months from now. I suspect that I’ll be listed on many fewer blogrolls when November 2004 rolls around.

The basic conflict is that you Democrats think that we Greens are throwing away - oops, sorry, “spoiling” - elections in the name of abstract moral principles. And we Greens think you Democrats are trading the long-term viability of everything we believe in, in exchange for short-run electoral victories (victories that might not ever come about in reality).

Assuming the Greens run a presidential candidate, Is there any way Greens and Democrats can get through the 2004 elections without returning to our stations at each other’s throats?

Update: There’s a new Nathan Newman post criticizing the DLC.

Update 2: Mark Kleiman responds in a not-unexpected manner.

Update 3: Nathan Newman makes a solid argument in response to me and Emma.

Okay, for this post to make sense, you might want to first read this post by me (rebutting something said on Donahue by men’s rights activist Marc Angelucci), and then Marc’s reply to me, which I posted yesterday. This post, alas, is therefore a rebuttal to a rebuttal to a rebuttal.

First point: funding. Marc correctly points out that I didn’t discuss past funding; to tell you the truth, it didn’t occur to me to fact-check something someone said two months ago by looking up what the stats were in 1997. But I think that looking at the funding over time actually supports my point. Let’s look at some data, shall we? This table shows National Cancer Institute (NCI) funding for research on breast and prostate cancer. (NCI funding isn’t 100% of all federal spending on cancer research, but it’s the largest chunk of it, and as far as I can tell is fairly representative of the whole).

So what’s been happening? Breast cancer research gets funded much more than prostate cancer research does, just as Marc says. But the level of funding for prostate cancer has been going up a lot faster. Why the difference? My guess is that the higher level of funding for breast cancer is due to decades of work and activism by women’s groups. But in the past few years, men’s rights groups such as Mr. Angelucci’s have been getting active as well, resulting in a huge increase for prostate cancer funding.

If I understand him, Marc thinks any disparity in funding is unjust and sexist; the lack of even funding is, in Marc’s view, an example of discrimination against men. He feels the diseases are equally deadly (or perhaps prostate cancer is worse), and thus should get equal funding:

The figures I’m looking at published in Men’s Health from the American Cancer society show that in 1996, 317,000 men were diagnosed with prostate cancer and 184,000 women were diagnosed with breast cancer. But in any case, they both kill about the same number every year.

But in a world without sex discrimination, would breast and prostate cancer research really be evenly funded? I doubt it. Marc’s data is just plain wrong. Here are some correct figures (all of this data comes from the NCI Factbook 2002 (pdf)):

• According to the American Cancer Society, there are about the same number of new cases of breast and prostate cancer a year (193,700 vs 198,100 in 2001).
• In 2001, 40,600 people died of breast cancer, and 31,500 of prostate cancer.
• Five years after diagnosis, 97% of white prostate cancer patients will be alive, compared to 87% of white breast cancer patients. (For black patients, the survival numbers are worse: 92% and 72%).
• The average years of life lost to breast cancer is 19; for prostate cancer, 9.
• Breast cancer is the number one cancer killer of women age 15-54; prostate cancer is not the number one cancer killer of men at any age.

I think prostate cancer research was until recently underfunded, and perhaps still is; and I certainly don’t resent men’s rights groups lobbying for more research dollars. But given the many ways breast cancer is deadlier than prostate cancer, it’s just strange to call the funding disparity an example of discrimination against men. Breast cancer is deadlier and strikes younger; there probably should be a funding disparity.

And I think that Marc’s refusal to acknowledge the elephant in the living room - breast cancer is deadlier - is a classic example of what’s wrong in so much “men’s rights” thinking - the belief that everything is always worse for men. Marc’s ideology means that he has to always see men as “the worse victim” - and if that means bending statistics backwards until he can convince himself that prostate cancer is worse than breast cancer, then that’s what he’ll do.

There are some other minor points I disagree with, but I have limited time and energy. Let me thus skip over the many, many examples Marc comes up with (labor laws of the 1930s?) to concentrate on just one: disparities in prison sentencing.

Marc links to this article - also written by Marc - to make the point that female criminals tend to have an easier time than male criminals in our court system - the women tend to get sentenced less often and for fewer years, even for the same crime.

Now, I certainly could pick at Marc’s data; he admitted to me in email that the data on drunk driving came from The Washington Times, which is not exactly a reputable source of data. [Update:Marc made a mistake; he’s now clarified that the info came from the Post, not the Times. -&] And although Marc wrote the article in 2002, 3 of the 4 legitimate studies he cites are from the 1980s. Why? Because those studies are using sentencing data from the 1970s, when sentencing disparities peaked. Quoting from an article in The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology: (1994, vol 85 (1)):

…the “women and crime” literature… may describe sentencing patterns that no longer exist. Much of the research contained in these works is based on data collected in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1980s, however, significant efforts were made to reform sentencing systems at both the state and federal levels. These reforms were designed to substantially reduce judicial sentencing discretion, to reduce unwarranted sentencing disparities, and to reduce race, gender, and class discrimination.

Even if we stick to Marc’s preferred decade, the evidence isn’t nearly as clear-cut as Marc implies: some studies found no sentencing disparity at all (for example, see American Soc. Review vol 49 p541; Justice Quarterly v3 p516; Law and Society Review v8 p375). Nonetheless, although he exaggerates the scope of the problem, on the whole I think Marc is right - being a male criminal probably does tend to mean getting a longer prison sentence, all else held equal. What’s going on here?

Well, what’s going on is sexism screwing men over. As I’ve blogged before, it doesn’t only hurt women. Although in most ways our society reserves the material and political power for men, there are ways that men get screwed over: for example, by the draft, by on-the-job injuries, by lack of contact with their families, and - as Marc points out - by prison sentencing disparities.

The difference, I think, is that most men’s rightists think everything in society is like that. In fact, almost no men will ever be called upon to chivalrously give up a lifeboat seat and drown; most men go through life without being sentenced to felonies; and it’s been decades since there was a military draft. There’s another half of this picture: a half in which rape and spouse-battering happen mostly to women, in which 87% of Congress and 100% of U.S. Presidents are men, in which wage gaps and childcare gaps act against women’s interests, and in which the primary problem of reproductive rights isn’t that men have to pay child support against their will. And that’s a half of the picture that too many “men’s rights” activists seem unable to see.

As I’ve said before (quite recently), “I think feminism needs to be a movement fighting for the social, political, and material equality of the sexes - both sexes. Although sexism affects (and hurts) both women and men, in the end it’s almost always women who end up with the short end of the stick, politically, socially and materially (compared to men of the same race, class, etc.). So most of the time, when we fight for equality and justice, that means improving the status of women. But not always.” Sometimes it’s men who are getting hurt more - as in the case of sentencing disparities - and in those cases, the right feminist action is to oppose the sexist harms to men.

As far as Marc’s lawsuit against the state of California goes - asking for a department of men’s health to be a counterpart for the already-existing department of women’s health - I don’t know anything about the issue. But just at a glance, I think Marc’s right, and I hope his lawsuit is successful.

[This is an email I received from Marc Angelucci. I’ll respond to it in my next post. - &]

Dear Ampersand,

Someone recently showed me your criticism of the comment I made while on the Phil Donohue Show that the government spends four times more on breast cancer research than prostate cancer research. I would like to briefly respond.

First, you cite data showing that the government spends two times more on breast cancer research than prostate cancer research, rather than four times more. However, you left out data from the past decade. The government spent four times more on breast cancer research than prostate cancer research at least from 1991 through 1999, and probably even beyond those years. The September 1997 issue of Men’s Health Magazine exposed this same 4X disparity and even looked at different government agencies. For example, the Department of Defense spent $20M on prostate cancer and $455M on breast cancer from 1993 to 1996. How do you justify that?

For the future I will say “multiple times” instead of “four times. But any recent increase in prostate cancer spending does not in my opinion change the huge, lengthy disparity that has taken place. And the myth women were excluded from medical testing has not only been repeatedly refuted - but it wouldn’t justify the disparity that took place even if it did happen, especially with current mortality rates being equal.

Second, you mention other factors to explain the disparity, such a higher diagnosis rate for women, a younger average age of the victims for breast cancer, and less activism on the part of men.

On the diagnosis rate, I’m not sure who is right. The figures I’m looking at published in Men’s Health from the American Cancer society show that in 1996, 317,000 men were diagnosed with prostate cancer and 184,000 women were diagnosed with breast cancer.

In any case, the mortality rates are indeed about equal. Even if the diagnosis rate were higher for women, that would arguably indicate that prostate cancer has been a lot more deadly for men. And the argument about younger victims can be seen as a form of “ageism” whereby older people are assigned less value. Regardless, differences in diagnosis rates and victim’s ages may justify *some* disparity, but in no way does it justify the enormous disparity that has occurred, especially with equal mortality rates. The fact is that no difference is more marked than the gender difference. Men make only 1% of breast cancer victims and 100% of prostate cancer victims. That is the main reason behind the disparity.

The difference in activism rates is a good point. Men and the women who love them have been less active on men’s issues than women and the men who love them have been for women’s issues. That can be attributed to a number of things, such as the male breadwinner role, men working 17 hours more per week than women outside the home, men being taught to not complain and to be silent suffering, and the overall societal inattention to male issues. I believe this too reflects the societal belief that male lives are less valuable than women’s and that men need to protect women, letting women into the lifeboats first and addressing their own needs only after women’s have been met. Our efforts to create even one office of men’s health compared to the seven federal offices of women’s health have met a great deal of opposition, both subtle and overt, and from both feminist groups and from chivalrous, “protect-women” folks who think men don’t need any help. This problem does not refute my point. It supports it, especially since judges and politicians listen to their constituency groups and to money more than anything else.

Third, you put words in my mouth by saying that I claim the breast cancer vs. prostate cancer disparity proves that politicians and judges are biased against men. I did not say it proves it. I cited it as one example of it.

The “proof,” to me, is when you look at all the other disparities combined.

One example is criminal sentencing disparities. Males get much higher sentences than women for the same crime even when you make all other factors the same, including age, race, family situation and number of priors. The disparity persists even when you look only at the gender of the victim instead of the accused. A drunk driver who kills a female gets a three year higher sentence than a drunk driver who kills a male, even when all factors are the same. How do you explain that one, Amp?

Another example can be see by looking at a sample of the laws in California that discriminate against males. This has gone on for years with nobody challenging it. (Link to PDF file.)

Another example is the way the Forced Labour Convention of 1930 forbade forced labor and then, created an exception for “adult able-bodied males” between 18 and 45 years old. (Link) I quote it here:

Convention concerning Forced or Compulsory Labour; 01:05:1932; Convention: C029 Geneva Session of the Conference:14 Date of adoption: 28:06:1930 # (Link)

“Article 11. 1. Only adult able-bodied males who are of an apparent age of not less than 18 and not more than 45 years may be called upon for forced or compulsory labour.”

When you look at draft registration laws, forced labor laws, child custody decisions, and other discriminatory policies and anti-male disparities, often created by males, then the historically huge disparity in spending on prostate cancer versus breast cancer research does demonstrate our government’s devaluation of the well-being of the human male. In my opinion, it is quite obvious.

Marc Angelucci

Well, I’m sure publishing this will lose me any credibility I ever had among “serious” bloggers, but what the hell, someone emailed me this and it gave me biggie giggles.

Gas in car to go to groomers: $4.50

Cat carrier: $32.99

Grooming fee: $80.00

Getting the look from one seriously pissed off cat: Priceless.

On Donahue, Mike Angelucci of the National Coalition of Free Men argued that “male judges and male politicians” discriminate against men. One of his supporting examples struck me, because I’ve heard this meme passed around anti-feminist discussions so often:

“That’s why our government spends four times more on breast cancer research than prostate cancer research, even though they kill the same number every year.”

It’s true that breast cancer research gets more government funding than prostate cancer research - although not “four times more.” Breast cancer research receives about twice as much funding - $900 million annually for breast cancer compared to $438 million annually for prostate cancer, according to the National Prostate Cancer Coalition.

The greater spending on breast cancer is at least partly due to decades of activism and pressure on Congress from women’s groups. Since men’s groups haven’t organized as well or as long, I don’t think “breast cancer vs. prostate cancer” is really a good way to measure government’s alleged preference for women (when the government does something only because of outside pressure, that’s hardly an example of government bias). But even ignoring that, breast cancer research should get more funding, not because of sex, but because of differences in the diseases.

Mr. Angelucci claims breast cancer and prostate cancer “kill the same number every year.” In fact, according to the American Cancer Society, 40,200 people die of breast cancer annually, compared to 28,900 people - a substantial difference. (Put another way, 130 people die of breast cancer for each 100 people who die of prostate cancer). It’s not the mortality rate alone that makes breast cancer scarier, however: it’s also that breast cancer typically strikes at much younger ages.

We could argue back and forth about if it makes sense to spend more to reduce mortality among the young than among the elderly. On the one hand, one could argue that doing so implicitly suggests that elderly lives are worth less than younger lives, which (I assume) isn’t something anyone wants to claim; on the other hand, if the purpose of medical research is to extend life, then it’s utilitarian to put more resources into fighting diseases that strike younger ages (since we’ll get more additional years of life per dollar expended).

But no matter which side of that debate you come down on, it’s a debate about age, not sex. Given the real differences in mortality and age of onset, it’s a stretch to claim that the differences in federal funding for breast cancer and prostate cancer research is a sign of some government bias against men.

A postscriptal digression (but an important one): Something that breast and prostate cancer do have in common is that both of them kill disproportionate numbers of African-Americans compared to whites. From an ACS page on the subject:

About 132,700 new cancer cases and 63,100 deaths are expected among African Americans in 2003 according to the ACS guide, Cancer Facts & Figures 2003. Prostate cancer and breast cancer rates in black Americans provide the most dramatic evidence of the cancer gap.

• Black American men have the highest rate of prostate cancer and death in the world - more than twice the rates for white men in the US.
• African-American women are less likely than white women to develop breast cancer, but more likely to die from the disease.
• African Americans with cancer have shorter survival than white Americans at all stages of diagnosis.

From elsewhere on the same page:

Recently however, a landmark report called Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care concluded that racial discrimination within health care settings contributes to poor medical care for many blacks and other minorities. Time pressures on medical professionals and low-end health insurance plans were also cited as reasons why minorities were more likely to get substandard medical care. The end result is that more African Americans and other minorities die from serious diseases today than white Americans, according to study authors.

Lower quality medical care was found even when minority patients’ income, age, medical condition, and insurance coverage were similar to that of white patients.

The page linked to, discussing solutions, notes that “more minority health care providers are needed, especially since they are more likely to serve in minority and medically underserved communities.” If this is right, then eliminating affirmative action in medical school will cause more minorities to die needlessly for lack of doctors working in their communities.

UPDATE: There’s a followup post to this post.

I was reading a transcript of a Donahue show (via Ms Musings) themed around the question “are women getting a free ride?,” an episode devoted mainly to anti-feminists Warren Farrell, Marc Angelucci and Peter Allemano (Farrell is the author of the men’s rights classic The Myth of Male Power, Angelucci and Allemano help run the National Coalition of Free Men). Also present was Gloria Allred, there to provide feminist counterpoints, and several more anti-feminists to speak on specific anti-feminist issues (a pinch of bitter divorced men, a sprinkling of anti-Title-IX jocks). Plus some dude from Stuff magazine for comic relief.

As usual, a lot of factual claims got tossed around. Many of those claims are things I know nothing about, and so can’t comment on; but there’s quite a few I do know about and would like to comment on - I expect there will be a bunch of posts from me on this subject.

For the most part, I think Allred did a great job, speaking well and refusing to fit into the women vs. men mold the anti-feminists were trying to press her into. But while aruging that “women have a long way to go,” she said “one out of three [women] will be raped sometime in her lifetime.”

Quoting myself:

According to Dr. Mary Koss’ study (which was conducted in the early to mid eighties), about 15% of college women have been victims of completed rape at some point since age 14.

This result of Koss’ study has been frequently criticized by anti-feminists. But at least three other nationwide studies of lifetime rape prevalence came to similar conclusions; the National Women’s Study found 13% (not available online, sorry), the Centers for Disease Control study found 15%, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics study of college women found 10%.

I don’t think there will ever be a single number that people can point to and say “this is the right answer.” Unreported rape is inherently difficult to measure; there will never be a study that someone can’t find reason to doubt, and every new study will raise new questions. But from the best studies currently available, somewhere between 10% and 15% of American women will be raped in their lifetimes.

So the 33% figure Ms. Allred suggests is way out of line with current research.

Why does this matter? Normally, this isn’t the sort of fact-checking I’d bother posting, because it’s not important to the argument Allred is making: Whether 10% or 33% of women are raped in their lifetime, either way it’s way too high, and either way Allred’s point - that “women still have a long way to go” - is true. From a debate point of view, Ms. Allred’s error isn’t substantial, because correcting the error doesn’t undermine the point she was making.

But there’s more to life than debating. The real statistics, as far as I can make out, are that somewhere between 10% and 15% of American women are raped sometime in their life. That’s terrifying enough; using numbers that are even higher and scarier, especially on national TV, could needlessly frighten people, especially women. The truth is bad enough without exaggeration.

For years, I hung out on this online feminist discussion board, although lately I don’t hang out there much. On those boards, someone made up an expression: PHMT. It stands for “Patriarchy Hurts Men Too,” and it’s a way of quickly summing up - and dismissing - a common anti-feminist argument. Here’s a typical example:

Feminist: Rape is a horrible problem.
Anti-Feminist: It’s not just women suffering, you know. Look at how many men are killed while working dangerous jobs.
Feminist: Yeah, yeah, PHMT. Returning to what I was saying….

“PHMT” has become kinda a cliche on this particular feminist discussion board (and is spreading to other boards; I wonder if it will be a widespread term ten years from now). I think using PHMT as a dismissal is often justified - based on the correct perception that some anti-feminists bring up male problems not because they’re willing to change society to fix those problems, but because they’re trying to divert the conversation from discussing women’s problems.

But PHMT also points to a very real split in feminism: are men’s problems feminist problems? Should feminists care about the ways PHMT? Some feminists - in particular, some (not all) radical feminists - understandably argue that feminism is about women and women’s issues. In this view, including “men’s issues” - or agreeing that men can be feminists - will weaken feminism.

But I’m not convinced that a bright line between “women’s issues” and “men’s issues” exists, and pretending it does will prevent us from understanding how sexism in our culture works.

For instance, all feminists agree that violence against women is a feminist issue, but some say violence against men is not. But violence against men - both the threat of it and the reality of it - is how sexist cultural standards of “masculinity” are created and enforced (as any ten-year-old boy beaten up by his peers for being too girly could tell you). And those sexist ideas of “masculinity” are one essential element motivating a lot of violence against women, such as rape. Anyone who’s serious about fighting “the rape culture” must want to change (or eliminate) the sexist conception of “masculinity,” because it’s just two different words for the same damn thing.

This is the case with virtually all feminist issues (the only exception that occurs to me offhand is abortion). Sexist male norms and sexist female norms aren’t separate things in our culture, which can be fought separately and one-at-a-time; they are one and the same thing, codependent norms from hell, flip sides of the same poisonous coin.

Take the woman’s-place-is-in-the-home myth. It’s the flip side of the men-can’t-raise-children myth; you can’t have homemakers without breadwinners, and vice versa. To speak about eliminating one as if it’s a separate issue is not only mistaken, it’s counterproductive. It so totally fails to grasp the realities of sexism it’s guaranteed to fail. What we’ll end up with if we try to change only half a culture - what we have, in fact, ended up with - is a situation where women are now expected to be both breadwinners and homemakers, but men’s role hasn’t changed at all, so women are working twice as much overall and still not getting equal pay. Did that solve the problem? Is there any potential that looking only at women’s role in this codependent mess will solve the problem in the future?

(And note that any real solution to this problem would also solve the problem my made-up antifeminist brought up - the very real fact that men are a thousand times more likely to be killed on the job as women.)

Some feminists I know (not the majority) deride all this as “PHMT” - as an attempt to deflect attention from women’s very real problems and issues. Making feminism about men only would, I agree, totally warp feminism and limit its effectiveness. But as long as it’s true that sexist expectations and norms hurt men as well as women, making feminism about women only does the same thing.

You can’t unwarp only one side of a dented coin. Feminism can’t solve patriarchy by refusing to look at huge portions of the problem.

So am I saying feminism needs to be focused on men’s problems? No, of course not. I think feminism needs to be a movement fighting for the social, political, and material equality of the sexes - both sexes.

Although sexism affects (and hurts) both women and men, in the end it’s almost always women who end up with the short end of the stick, politically, socially and materially (compared to men of the same race, class, etc.). So most of the time, when we fight for equality and justice, that means improving the status of women.

But not always. When NOW argued, in a brief to the Supreme Court, that a male-only military draft discriminates against men and violates men’s equal protection rights, that was a feminist action too.

Most of feminism’s fights are, and should be, about women - about improving women’s status, about helping women get by in patriarchy. But that doesn’t make what NOW did unfeminist; and it doesn’t make being concerned about the ways men are hurt by sexism unfeminist.

Update:Jeanne recommends that, having read this post, you go on to read this one at The Watch I second the suggestion.

Update 2: Tish at Fatshadow has posted some thoughts on the same topic, which are well worth reading. (I’m having trouble figuring out the permalinks, so you may have to scroll down a little.)