So, Amp just posted a bit about whether it is offensive to breast-feed while in an interview for a new faculty member. I started to write a response in the comments section, but my response is a little too long to do so there.

It boggles the mind to think about breast-feeding being seen as “offensive.” It harkens back, somewhat, to that discussion a few weeks ago about fetishes. Western society (particularly US society) has sexualized, and yes, fetishized, the female breast to the point that many people find it impossible to see the breast as anything but a sexual object — which says a lot about our society (and none of it’s very good).

While I find it offensive that anyone would find a new mother breast-feeding her child while in a meeting offensive, the sad truth is, breast-feeding women are often treated much worse than simply being offended by them. Two recent cases are perfect examples of what I’m talking about here.

First is the case of Jacqueline Mercado and her boyfriend, Johnny Fernandez, who were charged with (and indicted on) “sexual performance of a child,” a second-degree felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison. While these charges were later dismissed, their children were also taken away and placed in foster care. One year later, they are still in foster care.

And what was it that brought about these actions? A picture of Mercado breast-feeding her one-year old son. After a one year separation, Fernandez had just emigrated from Lima, Peru, to Richardson, Texas, to be with Mercado, their one-year old son, and Mercado’s 4-year old son from a previous marriage.

Joyous in their reunion, they took a number of pictures of the family.

The photographs they took over several days in late October included pictures of Fernandez reunited with the family at their modest home in suburban Richardson. Others captured their 1-year-old son Rodrigo, and 4-year-old Pablizio, from Mercado’s earlier marriage, playing in a neighborhood park. Using the camera’s timer, they also took three snapshots of themselves, naked in their bed. They arranged their bodies in ways that showed less flesh than most freeway billboards.

A half-dozen others recorded the kids at bath time. Fernandez took several photos of the boys “playing around,” naked and innocent, with the oldest flashing a big smile. Mercado, who says she often bathed with the kids, is in several of the shots unclothed from the waist up, holding her arm modestly across her bare chest.

In one–the photo that would threaten to send Mercado and her boyfriend to prison–the infant Rodrigo is suckling her left breast.

After dropping off the film at the local Eckard to be developed, a technician decided they were suspicious, and reported them to the police. The police concurred with the technician and began an investigation. Although they have found absolutely nothing to implicate either Mercado or Fernandez as either abusive or users or makers of child pornography, Mercado and Fernandez were charged and indicted, and their children have been taken away.

The article is a long one, but I highly recommend reading it, as it provides quite a bit more description of exactly what happened that I have here.

Oh, and in case you were wondering — breast-feeding images are a second-degree felony in Richardson. I’m guessing they don’t have any major art museums in Richardson.

In another recent story, a Canadian woman was classified as a “foreign national in international airspace on an international flight during a time of war” on a flight between Houston and Vancouver. All because she refused to stop breast-feeding her child after a male passenger complained.

What did the American male passenger think they were - weapons of mass distraction?

This is just one more example of the ridiculous double-standards women are expected to live with. If they work outside the home, they are neglectful mothers. If they stay at home, they are lazy. They are told over and over that breast-feeding is best. But, if they do it, they are found to be “offensive” or even a “terrorist threat.” And if they take a picture of it to record for posterity, they will be classified as “child pornographers.”

When will Americans stop fetishizing the breast to the point that a breast-feeding mother is made into a sexual object?

Someone emailed me asking about this situation. A friend of hers - who works, I believe, in academia - has a colleague on maternity leave, “but insisted on attending the interviews of job candidates for a position in their department.” At the meeting, she nursed the entire time - the baby was hungry, and would have made noise otherwise.

So the person wondered - what do I think of this?

This was on a mailing list. Virtually everyone on the list agreed that it was wrong for her to bring a nursing infant into that meeting. One of the other folks suggested it was just as inappropriate to bring a nursing baby to a business meeting as it would have been to bring a dog or a gameboy.

But a baby is not comparable to a dog, or a gameboy, either of which can under ordinary circumstances be left unsupervised for an hour or two.

Under ordinary circumstances, an infant requires constant care. (Even when my six-month-old nephew is put to bed, one of his parents always has the sound monitor on hand.) Infants require caretakers, continuously. To say that an infant is inappropriate at a business meeting is to say, therefore, that people who care for infants are inappropriate at business meetings.

In my opinion, the no-babies-at-meetings ethic is leftover from an older and sexist world; one in which jobs (and notions of what is and isn’t “appropriate” at meetings) were created with the assumption that careers belonged to men who had wives at home to take care of all the childrearing stuff. We don’t live in that world any longer (and good riddance!).

There are already large barriers between being a caretaker and having a career, barriers that are a large part of what causes the wage gap between men and women. Some of those barriers we can’t do anything about (other than encourage men to take up a fair share of the caretaking burden). Non-caretakers will always have more spare time and energy to devote to their careers than caretakers; there are, after all, only so many hours in the day.

But the barriers we can do something about - such as an irrational belief that business cannot be conducted with a nursing infant in the room - we should get rid of. A meeting to hire a new faculty member is essential; who is hired determines a lot about the future direction of the department. Saying that a parent-with-infant cannot attend such a meeting is an unfair burden on parents, and - until we have a society in which men do an equal share of caretaking - de facto discrimination against women.

I do agree that having an infant in meetings will create a small discomfort for some co-workers. But that’s very tiny compared to the inconvenience suffered by parents of infants if caretakers are forbidden from attending essential meetings.

I anticipate some objections:

1) She could have hired a baby-sitter.

My answer: She’s already sacrificing her maternity leave time to attend this meeting, now she has to pay goodness-knows-how-much for babysitting? Most likely she’s already stretched her income to its limits - most maternity leave is either partial-pay or unpaid, after all, and new infants are expensive. Plus, for all we know she tried to hire a babysitter but was unable to find a reliable one - finding good babysitters is notoriously difficult.

2) It’s unfair to the job candidate, because he’s not getting the full attention of everyone present.

For all we know, the people there without infants have their minds on the lottery, or on Buffy, or on that ache in their knee. The job candidate will get as much of the attention of the audience as he can hold - and that’s always the case, whether or not an infant is present.

Anyway, I’ve had many meetings and conversations with parents of infants, including nursing moms. It’s simply not true that they’re so distracted that they cannot be expected to follow a presentation or conversation.

3) It’s unfair to the job candidate, because she might be thrown by the sight of an infant (or, worse, breastfeeding)!

Someone who can’t manage to give a good presentation while someone in the room nurses a baby will be a lousy professor anyhow. Being able to speak coherently and maintain concentration despite distracting people in the audience is part of the job (and I’ve seen students act in far ruder and more distracting ways than nursing!); and if one candidate is less able to overcome her distraction than another, then she’s less deserving of the position.

4) It’s rude to breast-feed in public.

No, it’s not.

(Posted by Ampersand, who will probably embarrass himself, because there are some serious Titanic buffs online who will probably catch him in lots of errors. But oh, well.)

In a typically well-written and reasoned post (how dull! Mark, you should experiment with bad writing and reasoning once in a while, just for variety’s sake!), Mark Kleiman discusses cost/benefit analysis and the Titanic:

The Titanic had enough lifeboats for first and second class passengers, but not for steerage. So the poor passengers almost all drowned, while the rich passengers mostly survived. Pretty disgusting, right? The company ought to be ashamed of itself, even after eighty years. There ought to be (ought to have been) a law!

Well, maybe not. It turns out that about half the passengers on the Titanic were traveling steerage (what United Airlines calls “coach”). But their total fares amounted to only 8% of the revenues for the voyage. A requirement of one lifeboat space per passenger might have made carrying steerage passengers unattractive to the lines — they could have carried cargo instead, as the Lusitania famously did. At least, it would have made the cost of carrying steerage passengers greater, since even a big liner has only so much space and weight-bearing capacity. If the steerage passengers were only paying 8% of the total fares, a small increase in the total costs of running the ship would have translated into a big increase in their fares.

So the well-intentioned regulation “one lifeboat space per passenger” might have had the consequence of making it much harder for poor people to emigrate from Europe. (Since all of my great-grandparents came over in steerage, and since there was no alternative way to get from Europe to America, I take this point rather personally.)

(My great-grandparents came over in steerage, as well; but this makes me more, not less, sympathetic to the idea that steerage passengers should have had their lives protected. I don’t take this point personally, and I encourage Mark not to either. :-p )

Mark’s analysis is based on some questionable assumptions; for instance, steerage passengers accounted for 8.7% of revenues if they paid about 3 pounds a head, but it’s not certain that’s how much they paid. Some sources say steerage tickets cost 8 pounds - in which case steerage would have accounted for 21.5% of revenues (more than second class accounted for). Probably the real number is somewhere between 8.7% and 21.5% - but in any case, Mark’s revenue estimate is definitely a lowball figure. (Source - warning, it’s a pdf file).

But it’s not even revenue that matters - it’s profit. Steerage passengers paid far less, but they also cost the shipping company far less; they required less space, less expensive food, less facilities, and less staff to see to their needs.

How much would adding 20 more lifeboats have decreased profit? It’s hard to say, but I’m not at all sure it would have been enough to force a significant rise in ticket price. (Remember, the Titanic was designed to hold enough lifeboats; the number of lifeboats were decreased so there’d be more promenade space.) But I can say that Mark is probably mistaken to suggest a strong connection between lifeboat space and immigration.

The Titanic’s dangerous passenger-to-lifeboat ratio was a result of a bug in British board of trade regulations; the applicable law, written in 1894, stated that “16 lifeboats shall be carried for ships 10,000 tons and over.” But in 1894 the largest ships were only about 12,000 tons (the Titanic, in comparison, was 46,000 tons); at the time that the British law was written, the effect of the regulation was to require that there be enough lifeboats to accommodate all passengers.

Not long after the 1912 Titanic disaster, all companies began providing enough lifeboats for all passengers. So the period in which there were routinely not enough lifeboats for steerage is a relatively brief one, from sometime in the early 1900s (when boats began being built that were much larger than the British board of trade anticipated) to 1913. But as far as I can tell, immigration from Europe to the US remained very high after 1913, and stayed high until congress changed immigration laws to make immigration more restrictive (around 1920). So although doubtless safety laws had some impact on ticket price - maybe immigrants needed an extra week or two to save up before they could leave - I don’t think there’s any support for Mark’s theory that regulations requiring sufficient lifeboats (like the ones US companies had to deal with in 1912) would have been a significant barrier to European immigration.

To sum up, contrary to Mark, I think it’s likely a significant increase in safety - and in the number of lives saved aboard the Titanic - could have been had in exchange for a very small decrease in the total number of poor immigrants.

Finally, it should be noted that lifeboat space wasn’t the only issue on the Titanic. Standards requiring all ships to monitor wireless communications twenty-four hours a day might have saved every life aboard the Titanic - the Californian, only ten miles away, might have heard the Titanic’s distress call and come to rescue passengers. A more southerly route in winter would also have saved the Titanic. Both these changes became standard practice after (and as a result of) the Titanic disaster.

Postscript: While reading up on the Titanic to write this post, I came across this hilarious page; Titanic history as written by holocaust revisionists.

(An alternative, Variety-style headline for this post, suggested by a reader: Flix by Chix Nixed cuz no Dix?!?)

The LA Times has an interesting article on the lack of female directors. For example, “‘Chasing Papi,’ a low-budget movie directed by Linda Mendoza now in theaters, is the first female-directed film released by 20th Century Fox in four years.”

The article suggests several possible causes for the lack of female directors, which makes it more interesting than most such articles.

• Vestiges of past inequalities. Given the huge amount of money at stake, producers and studios only want to work with established directors. “…Executives are loath to stray from lists of bankable filmmakers, where the only safe bets are directors who’ve had box-office hits or directed a reelful of hip Nike commercials or Jay-Z videos.”

• The extreme male dominance of the commercial-and-video-directing field. Commercials and video directing is the major route for breaking into studio film directing. “Since most of the biggest box-office material revolves around special-effects thrillers, executives seek out video boy wonders whose visual style is suited to action-oriented material.”
• This is especially true because of the dominance of action films. This is where the money is. And, it is suggested, women just don’t want to direct films that are marketed for teenage boys.
  

  “I’ve tried over and over to hire great young female directors like Sofia Coppola and Kimberly Peirce,” says Columbia Pictures chairwoman Amy Pascal. “But I’m making ‘Men in Black II’ and Adam Sandler movies, so I don’t have the material they want to do.”

• Another culprit is the choices women make in higher education. Women in film school are more likely to train to be screenwriters and animators, but less likely to train to be directors. (Even so, 30% of the applicants to the relevant department at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema are women, whereas nowhere near 30% of directors are women). But is this a cause or an effect? Women may be avoiding the directing major because they see so few women directors who are finding work:
  

  “A lot of young women look at movie credits and think, ‘I’m going to spend $100,000 on school and then where am I going to go?’ From our vantage point, there’s a red line around the studios and it’s hard for women to get past that.”

• Women turn down offers to do dumb films. Where female directors do get their start is directing independent films… and a woman who gets her start directing a sophisticated independent film may not be eager to direct mainstream studio fare - especially of the sort offered women.
  

  First-time director Catherine Hardwicke got rave reviews at this year’s Sundance Film Festival for “Thirteen,” a disturbing portrait of teenage girls. Her first studio offer? A film starring the Olsen twins.

• Structural barriers to being a mom and being a director. Directing is a 20-hour-a-day job. Male directors usually have wives at home who take care of the children; but very few women are willing to miss out on their children, or are married to a willing househusband. The peak child-rearing years are also the essential career-building years, and taking time off to raise children can be a career-killer.
• And let’s not forget the importance of plain old sexist discrimination.
  

  Most executives acknowledge that men get to fail more often than their female counterparts. And even when women make it onto the studio’s coveted A-list of potential directors, they still have to pass muster with the male stars who dominate the movie business, who often feel more comfortable working with a male authority figure.

So what do we make of all this? To me, it indicates how complex the job (and wage) gaps between women and men are. Simple, direct discrimination is part of the problem, but that’s not the whole thing. To a great extent, what we have here is a job category that came into being in a “Father Knows Best” world, and is still designed around the sexist assumptions of that world. Is that discrimination? No, but it is a kind of sexism.

For example, the reason that studios look down on a director who hasn’t had a hit in years is the assumption that they’ve spent those years directing flops (or, worse, films that never made it to theatrical release at all). But that assumption simply doesn’t apply to a woman (or, for that matter, a man) who had a successful movie, and then took several years off to raise children. But even though that assumption doesn’t make as much sense in today’s world as it did in Father Knows Best World, it can still ruin careers.

There’s a lot more to discuss in this article, but I have limited blogging time today… I may return to this in the future.

There’s been a lot of blogging about the Green/Democrat dispute lately, mostly from Democrats. Probably my favorite Dem-blogger piece is “a desultory phillipic” over at Sisyphus Shrugged, which slags me for something I said here, but is a good post nonetheless. Julia is trying to find ways that Democrats and Greens can talk to each other, rather than past each other.

Meanwhile, Fred at Rantavation (whom I’ve just added to my blogroll, in the Oregon blogs section) replies to this post of mine, in which I wrote:

The intent of the Greens isn’t to win by winning elections - I mean, that would be nice, but it ain’t happening soon (except, of course, for the many Greens who have won local elections, but that’s another subject). If anything, the Greens are attempting to do something like the Eugene Debs model. Debs, as you’ll recall, ran for president as the Socialist Party candidate in 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920 (running from inside a prison). He never came close to winning an election.

Arguably, though, Debs did affect policy. According to Debs, “the program of socialism” he was running on included “old-age pensions” (aka social security), “the minimum wage,” “industrial insurance” (also known as unemployment compensation), weekends, and “welfare of labor” (the welfare system). He also campaigned for laws against child labor, eight-hour work days, and “securing for every worker a rest period of not less than a day and a half in each week.”

Did Debs ever win an election? Not even close. Did he eventually get his favored policies enough attention so that the mainstream was forced to take some of them seriously? Arguably he did. It didn’t take winning an election - but it did take sticking with the program, decade after decade, until the Democrats co-opted parts of his platform to take the wind out of Socialist sails..

Rantavation’s response (permalink) is bloggered, look for the post entitled “The Limits of My Imagination” on April 21st) is mostly to just contradict me - “yes, your plan is so winning elections” is most of what Fred says. “That’s what it’s really all about, the winning. I think that Eugene Debs wanted to win as well, and not just influence the major parties.”

No, I disagree; the policy is what it’s all about. Winning is just a means to achieving that end. And that particular means, at the national level, isn’t available to Greens right now. And of course Debs wanted to win; but it wasn’t all he wanted, and I doubt he felt his runs for the Presidency were pointless merely because he never won.

Fred continues:

Does the influence come quicker or slower than it would if you took your progressive views inside of the party? If you were to elect a very environmentally conscious Democrat (or hell, Republican for that matter), or two, or ten, someone that actually made policy at a national level (who cares if I take care of my yard if if everyone else uses theirs for strip-mining), wouldn’t that institute the change more rapidly?

Yes, it would. And if spoons were BMWs, then it would be faster to drive a spoon to work than to take the bus. But so what?

In 2000, as I’ve discussed before, the most important issue for me was the sanctions against Iraq, which had killed at least 350,000 Iraqi children age 5 and under. And those 350,000 were only “the tip of the iceberg“; damage done by the sanctions included deaths of countless Iraqi civilians who were over age five, and non-killing damages that will linger for decades to come. In my view, no U.S. policy in my lifetime has done as much damage - or been as plainly evil - as sanctions; there were no American policy issues as important in 2000.

And guess what? Al Gore supported the sanctions. So did Bill Bradley. If there had been a serious Democratic candidate who opposed the sanctions, I would certainly have supported her (or him); but no such candidate existed. So Fred’s question - which presupposes that an electable Democrat whose views are compatible with my own - ignores the reality.

Amp is absolutely correct that there is a valid place for “mid-majors” in the American Political System. And he’s right that they do, eventually, influence “mainstream” politics. He’s also correct that they aren’t very likely to win national elections. But I think he’s incorrect that their energies are best served outside of the mainstream, because somehow they create more positive change than they would inside. There’s this big Mack Truck of a party system out there just idling along, and all it needs is someone to come along and drive it.

Let me ask you a personal question: How much volunteer work did you do for Bev Stein’s run for governor, Fred? (Bev, for those folks who aren’t Oregonians, is a progressive Democrat who ran for the Democratic nomination for Governor, but lost - and lost badly - to Ted Kulongoski, the most right-wing of the Democrats who ran). I did a fair amount of volunteer work for Stein, from stuffing envelopes to attending an out-of-town convention to campaign full-time for endorsements.

Fred, my guess is that you didn’t do much volunteering for Bev, because if you had you would have come smack up against the political reality you’re ignoring. Someone is already at the steering wheel. We didn’t spend the campaign being unwilling to take the steering wheel; we spent it unsuccessfully trying to wrestle the wheel away from the big-money interests that Ted Kulongoski represents. And those folks have the Democrat’s steering wheel locked in a deathgrip.

And when Bev Stein lost, do you know what she had accomplished? Nothing. Nada. Zip. She hadn’t driven Ted Kulongoski even slightly to his left; she didn’t open up the political process for progressives; because she “ran to the center,” she didn’t even bring progressive issues into the debate that would have otherwise been ignored. The idea that Greens like me will accomplish more by supporting the Bev Steins and Dennis Kucinichs in the primaries is a sick joke. I’ve done it, Fred, and I’ll do it again in the future, but you know what? It’s a stupid waste of my time. Progressive democrats can win congressional seats, but when it comes to the big offices - senators, governors, the White House - candidates who don’t appeal to the big-money interests controlling the Democratic party might as well not run at all. (See Dennis Kucinich for a perfect example of how impossible it is for a progressive Democrat running for President to get taken seriously).

If taking control of the Democratic party is so easy, why the heck haven’t progressive Democrats like Fred done it already? The answer is, it’s not that easy, and Fred knows it.

What about Nader - did his running accomplish anything? Well, it certainly put the Green Party on the map, and helped many Greens running for local offices. But in the long run, asking what the Greens accomplished in 2000 is as meaningless as asking what Eugene Debs accomplished in 1900. Third-party achievements happen over the course of decades; our wins or losses cannot be meaningfully judged based on the outcome of just one or two election cycles.

Don’t get me wrong - I don’t think that the Greens are likely to accomplish much, in the long run. It’s a desperation strategy, I admit. But at the point where it is impossible for a viable major-party candidate to oppose the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, I think desperation strategies are called for. The alternative to desperation strategies is to vote for a candidate like Al Gore, who favored the worse, most evil American policy of my lifetime. And that, to me, is worse than desperation. That is despair.

…And it would have been cartoon day, too, if I hadn’t been out of town. But here it is, a couple of days late…

(This cartoon will make no sense if you’re not familiar with the classic Monty Python sketch “The Spanish Inquisition.”)

In The Nation, Katha Pollitt recently explained the deal with “partial-birth” abortion bans:

That gets to the heart of the issue - although if you want a more detailed (and, well, gross) description of exactly what this legislation banned, I went over it several weeks ago.

Over on Diotima, Shonda writes:

Once again, an anti-feminist criticizes feminists for not being sexist. To do as Shonda suggests - to be more interested in gender than ideology - would be sexist. NOW is absolutely right to oppose Owen based on Owen’s ideology, rather than support her based on her sex.

Second, there’s no hypocrisy in NOW simultaneously wanting Bush to generally appoint more women, while opposing particular Bush appointments (male and female) that NOW thinks will be more-than-usually harmful. It’s called “pursing multiple goals,” and all political actors do it; but strangely enough, only feminists are criticized for it.

Meanwhile, at the Insolvent Republic of Blogistan, Justin writes:

This is a good example of how totally clueless conservatives are about feminism. “Equity feminism” and “gender feminism” are terms made up by Christina Hoff Sommers; an “equity feminist” is a right-wing feminist, a “gender feminist” is any other kind of feminist.

The problem is, using those terms leads to people spouting absolute nonsense. Countless feminists who are “gender feminists” in Christina Hoff Sommers’ terms have defended sex work and sex workers; indeed, the 1980s split in feminism over this issue (called the “sex wars” by many feminists) is the most significant intra-feminist debate of the last twenty years.

It takes a stunning level of ignorance to claim that no feminists other than “equity” (aka conservative) feminists advocate for the right of “hookers and strippers” to work. But that level of ignorance is pretty much the norm among conservative critics of feminism.

J. at Silver Rights (aka Mac Diva - how does she manage to write so much?) has a must-read post about race, sex, and Pfc. Jessica Lynch. (If the permalink is bloggered, look for the entry on April 3 2003 entitled “Good for Pfc. Lynch, but…”).

I can’t find a quote that works well out-of-context, and I don’t really have anything to add to what J. says, so just go and read the post, kay?

Somewhat related to J.’s point is this New York Times article - which is very typical in how it approaches coverage of female deaths. Here’s the first two sentences of the article:

What’s wrong with this picture?

A Melissa Morrison article in the current issue of Bitch Magazine, “Women and Children First!,” by Melissa Morrison, puts it very well:

“Women and children” is a phrase that we’ve seen too much of. Women are not children, and should not be grouped with children; men are not natural casualties, and men’s deaths shouldn’t be reported as if less notable.

(Here’s a bit of “Alas, a Blog” trivia: did you know the main reason I started this blog was to get more feedback on my cartoons?)

I blogged about this a month ago, and not much has changed since then. A new report from Women’s ENews sums up the issue nicely:

I recommend reading the whole thing.

The essence of misogyny is considering women’s suffering irrelevant or trivial. There is no legitimate reason to deny women facing battery and death threats the asylum they need to survive; that the Bush administration is even considering taking asylum away is appalling.

The Lawyer’s Committee for Human Rights has set up a very easy and quick form page for sending a letter to Secretary Ridge of the Department of Homeland Security, urging him to make the right decision. Please go ahead and send a letter right now (this is a different one than the one I linked to last month, so go ahead and click on the link even if you did it last month).

(Of course, the administration hasn’t officially made it’s decision yet; it could be that they’ll decide to be humane, in which case this cartoon will be wrongheaded and a bit embarrassing. But that’s some egg I’d be pleased to have to wipe off my face.)