A few people in the “various open pages” thread have suggested that they’d like a separate thread to discuss the question of civility on “Alas,” and perhaps other topics as well.

It’s tempting to attempt to sum up the discussion so far, but it would be too easy for me to mess up trying to sum up other folks’ views. If other folks would like to attempt a summary, or to quote extensively from the other thread, feel free.

Two notes about this thread: First of all, whatever “civility rules” normally apply on “Alas” are not in effect for this thread, since some of the people who have requested this discussion space may find the civility rules constraining.

Second of all, I think this is a conversation that has to take place between feminists and feminist allies. Feminists, pro-feminists and feminist-friendly posters of any sex are welcome to post; but if that doesn’t describe you, then please don’t post on this particular thread.

I don’t buy women’s magazines very often. But I recently bought the two latest issues of Elle, to find out what the magazine is all about. My initial impression was one of shock. All these women in the photographs appear to be ready to orgasm! Half-closed eyes, swollen half-open lips. Indeed, almost every one of the models pictured was portrayed in a sexually appealing manner. This is interesting, given that the presumed readers of the magazine are mostly women. I wonder if women in our society learn to have a certain kind of self-eroticism? Is what turns us on, whether gay or straight, the pictures of our own sexuality?

Probably not, but it’s fun to think about the reason for this style. The orgasmic women are also very thin, of course, some so thin that no way would they have anything sexual on their minds. When one gets adequately anorexic sexual feelings are an extravagance that the body sheds in order to stay alive.

What the magazine sells is clothes and cosmetics. The clothes are very expensive; T-shirts for nine hundred dollars and itsy-bitsy evening bags (made out of crocheted wool) for a thousand or two. The jewelry is by Cartier and so on. Given that the average woman doesn’t earn very much it’s likely that most of Elle’s readers don’t in fact buy what is shown in its pages. So why would such readers buy the magazine in the first place?

For the advice, I guess. The advice which tells us how to be a desirable woman in this world, which tells us how to repair our bodies and faces so that they comply with the unwritten rules. Also for the opportunity to visit this imaginary world where women might worry about which nine hundred dollar T-shirt to buy, or whether to go for gold or silver in bracelets this year. And for relaxation, you might say. Yes, but why does what Elle contains make us relax? That is the really interesting question.

I was pleasantly surprised by the articles, though. They are quite interestingly written and often informative. Some of them were even what I would call feminist in tone, though the word itself is not mentioned in the Elle world. The most recent issue, for example, contains an interesting take on the American myths of motherhood. On the other side, the issue preceding that one had a story about a woman making her peace with her husband’s internet porn addiction.

I come across very snooty and condescending here; as if I was somehow above those poor benighted women who read Elle or other similar magazines. Hmmm. How to rewrite it all so that my points remain but the arrogance is removed? Can’t be done within the time frame available. In any case, I want to get back to my Elle.

The 1970’s porn movie Deep Throat is coming to movie theaters near you:

Deep Throat,” the infamous 1972 adult film that led to a government crackdown on pornography, is being re-released in theaters as a new generation of lawmakers wages a renewed assault on smut, trade paper Daily Variety reported in its Tuesday edition.

The release of the Linda Lovelace opus, which was banned at the time in 23 states, coincides with the premiere of the documentary “Inside Deep Throat,” which hits theaters in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Boston on Friday.

The original film, which was made in six days for $25,000 and has grossed over $600 million, will not be ready until at least Feb. 18, the paper said. Las Vegas-based Arrow Prods., which owns the rights to the mob-funded “Deep Throat,” started striking 10 prints on Monday, it added. Five of the prints will be edited to garner an “R” rating, which allows admission to children aged under 17 if accompanied by an adult.

The media reports I have read seem to present the relaunch as yet another battle between the freedom of expression gang and those who want to ban pornography, and every one of them so far has taken the side of the freedom of expression. This is not that surprising. Porn is everywhere today and things which were seen as shocking in the early 1970’s are no longer so. That porn, and especially violent and misogynistic porn, might directly or indirectly hurt some women is not a hot topic in the mainstream media, and neither is the possibility that plentiful supply of porn geared towards the sexual desires of mostly men might lead to a distorted view of women’s sexual needs and the expected sexual behavior of women. Instead, when something sexual provokes wider outrage this tends to be about the consequences of porn to its unintended viewers, such as children. The Janet Jackson breast episode is a good example of what the media might address.

All this explains the treatment of Catherine McKinnon’s comments about the movie. She participated in a panel discussion at the New York premiere of Inside the Deep Throat, a documentary about the movie, and she appears to have been the one on the panel who was most vigorously arguing the unpopular points about porn’s possible effects. This is how she was written up later on:

Mitchell looked on helplessly as McKinnon did her thing, claiming that the film we had just watched was promoting the acceptance of rape. At one point, however, her righteous zeal became unhinged when she claimed that it was not possible to do deep throat safely, that it was a dangerous act that could only be done under hypnosis. “What’s so funny?” she snapped as the audience rippled with mirth. Todd Graff’s hand shot up - “I can do it,” he said, and the room echoed with a chorus of gay men going “me too!” (Gigi Grazer - wife of Brian - later told Graff to stop bragging and that she could do it better than him and had the rocks on her fingers to prove it. Touché). But La McKinnon was not to be discouraged; she claimed that emergency rooms were filled with women victims of throat rape, not to mention the ones who hadnt even made it that far and had died in the act.

And:

Former New York Times movie critic Elvis Mitchell moderated, and the group consisted of HarperCollins publisher and controversy lightning rod Judith Regan, journalist Peter Boyer, famed criminal defense attorney Alan Dershowitz and feminist professor Catherine McKinnon.

The latter, who turned out be quite mad, I thought, immediately coined the phrase “throat rape” about what happened on screen to the movie’s late star, Linda Lovelace.

That declaration produced hissing, and a few laughs, from the audience.

McKinnon, infamously known in intellectual circles as the “feminist censor,” does not often appear before mainstream audiences. Her “partner in crime” is the militant feminist Andrea Dworkin, who was not among us.

“Inside Deep Throat” producer Brian Grazer’s hair was already standing straight up. More of McKinnon’s theories might have made it curl.

And so on. In other words, Catherine McKinnon is viewed as an extremist, someone quite removed from mainstream ideas, someone who is a safe object for general ridicule. Yet I could list many current commentators whose views are more extremist in some other directions and who still get accorded both respect and a place in public debate. Consider Ann Coulter’s proposal to nuke Islamic countries and to convert them to Christianity or Michelle Malkin’s views on detention camps as a good way to prevent terrorism. To name the men whose ideas are even more outrageous would take me the rest of this post. Clearly, some extreme views are more acceptable than others.

But what does McKinnon really say? The anti-feminist websites tend to have a field day picking out isolated comments from her writings, all of which are intended to show how unreasonable McKinnon is, and sometimes her name is used in debates to tar all feminists with the same brush of freakiness. This is partly McKinnon’s own fault. She likes to use strong statements as a rhetorical device, and they do work to draw attention to what she is saying. But they tend to do this only in a superficial sense and seldom lead to an extended discussion of what her actual arguments are. Or this is what I believe. Though using careful phrazing is not as exciting to begin with, it tends to turn fewer listeners off and ultimately results in a more fruitful discussion.

Consider the often heard argument that McKinnon compares all heterosexual sex to rape. I read the book in which this idea is discussed before I was aware of McKinnon’s mythological proportions among the anti-feminists, and this let me interpret her arguments quite differently. Not necessarily agree with them, but to see what her point might be, and to me it was that if sexuality is defined by purely patriarchal standards women living in patriarchy are unaware of their true sexual desires and needs and therefore cannot in a fundamental sense make free choices to engage in sex. This may not be the reading that McKinnon intends, but it’s quite a different reading from the one which equates voluntary sex with rape. Even more generally, McKinnon writes theory and to understand her arguments one must understand the way she defines the concepts. Not that this excuses her use of the terms in public debates without proper definitions.

All this is background for my argument that when McKinnon called the events in the Deep Throat “throat rape” what she said was quite different from what the audience heard. Linda Lovelace, the actress performing in the movie, stated in her autobiography that swallowing a penis so deeply did not come naturally to her but needed a lot of practice. She also revealed that her then-partner and manager had used physical violence to control her during the making of the movie:

Unlike two earlier autobiographies, Ordeal was not a titillating affair, and the liberation Lovelace talked about was not sexual but deeply personal. Chuck Traynor was not her ‘creator’ as she had previously announced, but her abuser. She claimed that she had made Deep Throat under threat of physical harm, and explained that Traynor would use guns and knives to get his way. There was also a confession that some found ironic: on the set of the movie, Lovelace felt less threatened than she had before; the movie people were a creative family, and she drew strength from her new relationships. Traynor observed this, and would double his beatings.

The generous reading of McKinnon’s comments would take all this into account. But feminists seldom receive generous readings these days and radical feminists practically never, even when the point they are making is one that deserves wider discussion.

This entertaining Alternet article explains what Popeye has stuffed in his pipe:

…is the spinach which gives Popeye his super-strength really a metaphor for another magical herb? Have children around the world been adoring a hero who is really a heavy consumer of the forbidden weed — marijuana?

The evidence is circumstantial, but it is there, and when added together it presents a compelling picture that, for many readers at least, Popeye’s strength-giving spinach is meant as a clear metaphor for the miraculous powers of marijuana.

Via Pen-Elayne.

I sleep on a bunk bed, about six feet off the ground. Under the bed is my computer desk; next to the bed is an extra-tall stepladder, which I use to get in and out of bed.

Sydney - who is, like a lot of children, physically fearless - really loves the ladder.

(There are lots of photos with this entry, so for the benefit of folks with slow connections, the rest is below the fold).
Read the rest of this entry »

He has deigned to give a few carefully formed comments on the hullabaloo that ensued from the careless statements of Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard University, at a conference about how to get more women into the hard sciences. I blogged about this earlier if you are interested in the details. For now I want to talk to Professor Pinker, because he is an interesting man to talk to.

He’s a warrior on President Summer’s term, a warrior who wields his keyboard deftly and smartly. Listen to this:

Summers did not, of course, say that women are “natively inferior,” that “they just can’t cut it,” that they suffer “an inherent cognitive deficit in the sciences,” or that men have “a monopoly on basic math ability,” as many academics and journalists assumed. Only a madman could believe such things.

I remember hearing a radio interview with Pinker when his book The Blank Slate came out, and he used the same madman-argument to clear the deck of any accusation that he might be an essentialist. As few researchers would call themselves madmen, this clever trick means that we can now dispense with any exploration of Professor Pinker’s own possible biases, and can go on to study the biases of his opponents. Like this:

Conservative columnists have had a field day pointing to the Harvard hullabaloo as a sign of runaway political correctness at elite universities. Indeed, the quality of discussion among the nation’s leading scholars and pundits is not a pretty sight. Summers’s critics have repeatedly mangled his suggestion that innate differences might be one cause of gender disparities (a suggestion that he drew partly from a literature review in my book, The Blank Slate) into the claim that they must be the only cause. And they have converted his suggestion that the statistical distributions of men’s and women’s abilities are not identical to the claim that all men are talented and all women are not–as if someone heard that women typically live longer than men and concluded that every woman lives longer than every man. Just as depressing is an apparent unfamiliarity with the rationale behind political equality, as when Hopkins sarcastically remarked that, if Summers were right, Harvard should amend its admissions policy, presumably to accept fewer women. This is a classic confusion between the factual claim that men and women are not indistinguishable and the moral claim that we ought to judge people by their individual merits rather than the statistics of their group.

Conservative columnists always have a field day. If there is no reason for one, they invent it. But Pinker’s summary of the issues is partial: he fails to address all the reasoned responses from feminists and progressives, and he fails to mention the truly outrageous statements on many of the anti-feminist and conservative websites and blogs. This makes the unreasonableness appear solely something that takes place among the liberals and feminists, not something that might even infect careful researchers such as Professor Pinker.

In any case, our careful researcher then goes on to summarize various studies which demonstrate gender differences on the average. He doesn’t summarize the studies which don’t support these findings or the studies which address the whole question of what we are actually trying to measure with the various tests. All this reads “biased” in my book.

Pinker’s supporting examples of evidence are interesting. Take this one, for instance:

Anyone who has fled a cluster of men at a party debating the fine points of flat-screen televisions can appreciate that fewer women than men might choose engineering, even in the absence of arbitrary barriers. (As one female social scientist noted in Science Magazine, “Reinventing the curriculum will not make me more interested in learning how my dishwasher works.”) To what degree these and other differences originate in biology must be determined by research, not fatwa. History tells us that how much we want to believe a proposition is not a reliable guide as to whether it is true.

Here we are to replace scientific evidence with anecdotes about what people talk about in parties or with one person’s confessions. I know of a six-year old girl who took the family iron apart to find out how it works, and then couldn’t put it back together. Who knows how many other things she had examined before she was caught in the act? But this is anecdotal evidence, and not to be admitted if it comes from my side of the aisle, the unreasonable one, the one which believes (despite all evidence to the contrary) that women and men are exactly identical at birth.

This is all rubbish, of course. There are no feminists who believe that women and men are biologically exactly the same, though there seem to be a very large number of anti-feminists who never see the most obvious difference between the two sexes which is the fact that women give birth. Anti-feminists want to have more science to find out what really distinguishes the sexes, all the while letting their eyes glide over the pregnant bellies of their coworkers or the countless young women pushing prams outside.

The reason for this bias is of course the political importance of gender differences. Anyone who believes that men and women should not be treated equally must base this belief on some form of innate differences. Feminists know this, and that is why the history of biased Victorian gender science is important to keep in mind. Pinker gives a nod to this argument, but then goes on glibly to place total trust in the newer generation of findings. Nobody, but nobody can be impartial in this field, and Pinker is not the sole exception here. He has an axe to grind, and that is to protect the views on which he has based his own research and writing. I also have an axe, of course, but you can see what it is and how sharply honed it always stays.

The differences that gender science may find are going to be put to political uses pretty fast. Even if the results are based on faulty methods and data, the harm the political applications will do is real. This is the reason why it is so important to insist on transparency and high methodical competency from all practitioners of gender science, and why it is very important not to have a value bias among this group towards one sex or the other. Currently there is such a general bias, as even a cursory reading of the studies reveals, and that is one of slight misogyny. In other words, not all science is somehow above politics or even above cheating, and all science should be approached with a very critical mind.

But Pinker is not too concerned about this. He does hint that he would love the world to be fairer and more equal if only facts would let that be the case, and he repeatedly reminds us how wrong discrimination is, before he goes on to tell us about the dangers of reverse discrimination if we ignore gender science.

Actually, I agree with Pinker on one of his arguments: that we should encourage good science on innate gender differences. The real question is how to do this. How would Pinker create a study which would tell us, for once and for all, what the real cognitive differences between men and women are? We actually don’t have the tools to do this today, and this is the main reason why I find Pinker’s elegant impartiality so insulting. He’s willing to settle for JustSo stories from evolutionary psychology in lieue of proper genetic biology:

Since most sex differences are small and many favor women, they don’t necessarily give an advantage to men in school or on the job. But Summers invoked yet another difference that may be more consequential. In many traits, men show greater variance than women, and are disproportionately found at both the low and high ends of the distribution. Boys are more likely to be learning disabled or retarded but also more likely to reach the top percentiles in assessments of mathematical ability, even though boys and girls are similar in the bulk of the bell curve. The pattern is readily explained by evolutionary biology. Since a male can have more offspring than a female–but also has a greater chance of being childless (the victims of other males who impregnate the available females)–natural selection favors a slightly more conservative and reliable baby-building process for females and a slightly more ambitious and error-prone process for males. That is because the advantage of an exceptional daughter (who still can have only as many children as a female can bear and nurse in a lifetime) would be canceled out by her unexceptional sisters, whereas an exceptional son who might sire several dozen grandchildren can more than make up for his dull childless brothers. One doesn’t have to accept the evolutionary explanation to appreciate how greater male variability could explain, in part, why more men end up with extreme levels of achievement.

I’m not an evolutionary psychologist, only a goddess, but I have trouble with this myth of our prehistory. It’s a very popular myth these days, this idea of the happy male who casts around buckets of high-quality sperm while the careful and coy females tend their one or two babies with great care. For one thing, a fertilized egg is not the same as a child brought to a point where that child can himself or herself breed further. Prehistory must not have been an easy life for pregnant women, and I find it very hard to believe that the buckets of sperm all took so easily as this myth explains. It’s at least worth considering whether the men who stuck around one or two women got a greater yield by providing food, protection, sex, childcare and friendship. They also would have kept some of the bucket brigade away.

For another thing, this myth doesn’t explain what Pinker seems to think it should. If indeed only the most technically minded men somehow managed to procreate, the men who do so poorly in mathematical tests that they are at the other end of the distribution should not exist. How come did their genes sneak in, too? No, for Pinker’s explanation to be correct we should not observe greater male variability at both tails of the distribution.

I could go on, but I hope that the gist of my complaints is visible by now. What angers me about Pinker’s approach is his “holier-than-thou” pretense combined with some very sneaky biases. At least I actually am holier than any of you thous out there and my biases are all goddess-sized.
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(This is a cross-posting from my blog. I am going to give you something more unique later this week.)

Pro-lifer John (link via Hugo, I think) notices something about pro-choicers:

At the protest outside the Hospital, we were counter-marched by a dozen or so pro-choicers. I looked at them, curious. And in their eyes, I saw the same hatred, the same deadness, the same fear…

Ah, the infamous “dead eye” condition! We pro-choicers may pretend to be regular human beings; but our dead eyes give us away every time. Curses, foiled again! Damn our dead eyes!

To be fair, I was struck by the similarity to this comment by a pro-choicer, quoted on After Abortion:

Standing there with their “My abortion hurt me” and “I regret my abortion” signs, eyes glazed over, cheering their glorious leader….They look absolutely dead, inside and out.

Is it just me, or is this sort of thing becoming pro forma in the abortion debates? No matter which side of the debate you’re on, it’s just expected that if you write about abortion you should include the ritualistic mean-spirited attack on the characters of everyone who disagrees with you. No one even takes these comments seriously anymore (the comments to John’s post include several respectful replies by pro-choicers); it’s the equivalent of, I don’t know what. Pro-wrestlers trash-talking each other?

What was most interesting about John’s post was his analogy between pro-choice sentiment and anti-disabled bigotry:

I was born with cerebral palsy. I didn’t learn to walk until I was 4. I fell over a lot, and even now, after several surgeries and bouts of physio, I walk badly, lopsidedly. [...]

People were afraid of me because I was a reminder. They hated me because I demonstrated something they tried very hard to forget. They are not in control. A car crash, ten minutes without Oxygen, a natural disaster, and as I am, thou shalt be. That’s an uncomfortable thought. We like our lives controllable, in little boxes, safe, and comfortable.[...]

At the protest outside the Hospital, we were counter-marched by a dozen or so pro-choicers. I looked at them, curious. And in their eyes, I saw the same hatred, the same deadness, the same fear, that stares out at me from people on the street. We were a reminder. An inconvenience. They wanted us, and the unborn child who had wrecked their lives by existing, to go away. Why? Because, like the weak everywhere, the unborn child bears witness to our lack of control. “It’s a woman’s right” Pro-choicers say. A woman’s right “to control her own body”. Some things aren’t controllable. Some things just happen. Some things are graces, miracles.

I highly recommend reading the entire post.

The problem with John’s logic is that there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with wanting to control things. Having open-heart surgery rather than dying of clogged arteries is trying to control something; is it therefore wrong to have heart surgery? Is having heart surgery the equivalent of anti-disabled bigotry? How about taking medicine that makes heart attacks less likely?

Wanting to control things - even things which, ultimately, can never be fully controlled - is not always a bad thing.

I think that John’s right that fear and disdain of disabled folks is rooted in fear of what we can’t control. Having an abortion is also related to control - a woman’s desire to control if and when she has children. That, however, is where John’s analogy falls flat - just because they’re both about control doesn’t mean they have anything else in common.

Bigotry against the disabled is wrong because it’s harmful to people who are disabled. Abortion, if it’s wrong at all, is wrong because it’s harmful to people who are zygotes, embryos and fetuses. But that’s a big “if”; there is legitimate, good-faith disagreement over whether a zygote or embryo or fetus is a person.

If I’m right, and there is no person to be harmed when a zygote or embryo or fetus is killed, then John’s comparison between abortion and anti-disabled bigotry is specious.

But that means that - as always - the argument over abortion isn’t really an argument about control, or about the rights of the disabled, at all. The argument over abortion is an argument over what rights women have to control their own bodies, and what rights zygotes, embryos and fetuses have at all. Talking about dead eyes and control issues and all the rest is really just a red herring.

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What’s below the fold is just a slightly-edited reprint of what I said yesterday; so if you read it yesterday, skip it today, is my advice.
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• Pilgrim’s Progress, a well-written “progressive pro-life” blog. And another progressive pro-lifer, LAmom. I try to read pro-life views pretty regularly, and it’s a change to read some pro-lifers who aren’t right-wing on other issues.
• Bitch, Ph.D. Yet another excellent feminist blog.
• Sceadugenga. Chock-full of thoughtful lefty goodness.
• The Washington Note. Intelligent “insiders” blog by a mainstream liberal.
• Pam’s House Blend. “American. Female. Lesbian. Ethnically diverse. Opinionated. Proud member of the Reality-Based Community.”

“Libservative” Demi at Pilgrim’s Progress doesn’t appreciate it when pro-choicers say “every birth should be a wanted birth.”

Am I “wanted” now? Was my life worth having?

I wonder if people realize how very devastating these “arguments for choice” can be to someone like myself, someone who so narrowly escaped the butcher knife almost 46 years ago? No, they don’t get it. Maybe they were “wanted children.” So I guess that means that their lives are somehow more appropriate than mine.

Sometimes I feel like I should apologize for even being here.

Look! My husband loves me, and he thinks I’m the best thing that ever happened to him!

Look! My students benefit from my knowledge and expertise, and my principal reeeally likes the way I do lesson plans on Excel spreadsheets (complete with automatic date-stamp on the tab code in the header!! I figured that one out all by myself!)

So now… may I stay? Am I “useful” enough? Am I “wanted” enough? May I stay?

That’s just a small sample of a very eloquent post. There’s a lot there that’s disturbing to pro-choice ears; most of us don’t want to think of ourselves as insensitive or hurtful. (Then again, since Demi suggests that Nazis during the Holocaust were on “higher moral ground” than pro-choicers today, perhaps she shouldn’t be quick to criticize other people’s insensitivity.)

I’m also disturbed about Demi using her position as a high-school teacher to preach pro-life thought to her students, which she does “every chance I get,” but I suppose that’s okay as long as she’s teaching at a private school.

The traditional abortion debate boils down, I think, to two questions. First, what kinds of self-sacrifice can be legally forced on parents for their children? (I seldom hear pro-lifers suggest that parents be legally forced to donate their lungs if their born child requires it to live. But logically, a born child of a father who refuses to donate his lung will be no less dead than a ten-week embryo whose mother gets an abortion; if we’re willing to legally force the latter, we should be willing to legally force the former).

The other question - which is more relevant to Demi’s post - is this: Is there an important moral distinction between preborn humans (zygotes, embryos and fetuses), and a born person such as Dani or myself? Or - to put it in short form - are zygotes, embryos and fetuses people?

Demi’s post uses a rhetorical trick that pro-lifers are fond of: Pretend that the “personhood” question is, rather than a major disagreement between people of good will, already settled. Assume that there is no difference between a zygote and Demi herself. And then - because pro-choicers say that zygotes have no right to life - Demi pretends we’ve said that Demi herself has no right to life.

It makes for a very stirring post - but lousy logic. Demi isn’t even debating the question; instead, she skips arguing the key question, assumes an answer, and based on that assumed answer pats herself on the back for being so very morally superior compared to us worse-even-than-the-Nazis pro-choicers.

Yes, it’s true; if we assume that pro-lifers are right about everything, then pro-choice thought is terribly immoral. (But then again, if we assume that pro-choicers are right about everything, then pro-life thought is likewise terribly immoral.) I don’t think it gets us anywhere to point this out over and over again - and that’s really all Demi’s post does.

* * *

Here’s my concern: Why are pro-lifers so uninterested in asking “in the real world, what policies are associated with the world’s lowest abortion rates?” You’d think this would be an essential question for anyone who thinks abortion is a terrible moral wrong. Yet I’ve almost never seen a pro-lifer consider the question.

I’ve said this before. It deserves being said again. Without exception, every country in the world with a very low abortion rate has either legal abortion, or bans so toothless that abortion is effectively legal. But what those countries (Belgium, West Germany, The Netherlands, etc) also have are cultures that strongly promote effective use of birth control, and that have strong social support programs that support poor parents - not just before birth and in the first year of infancy, but for life.

The abortion debate in the US can go on forever. We can have yet another round of clever, heartfelt essays like Demi’s, implying that the other side is immoral; or, if we want a better debate than that, we could argue for the millionth time about how to define personhood. But that will never get us anywhere. I will never, ever convince Demi that there is a fundimental moral difference between herself and a seven-day-old embryos; Demi will never convince me that it is sane, when running into a burning building and having a choice between saving a three-year-old child or a petri dish containing 10 seven-day-old embryos, to rescue the petri dish instead of the child.

Rather than rehash those questions, I’d like to ask Demi: Will there ever be an abortion ban in the United States that vastly lowers our abortion rate?

Can Demi point to a single case, anywhere in the world, where banning abortion has turned a country with a high abortion rate into an abortion rate comparable to Belgium’s?

If the primary purpose of the pro-life movement is to punish women who get abortions, then the pro-life strategy we’ve seen in this country makes sense. But if the primary purpose is to make the US abortion rate as low as possible, then it would make a lot more sense to look instead at strategies that have actually worked in the real world. And the pro-lifers, by and large, have demonstrated no interest in that.

Demi and I have common ground here. Demi’s a Kerry-voting, gay-marriage-favoring, pro-welfare pro-life liberal. She’s more open to solutions that will actually lower the abortion rate than most pro-lifers are. Nonetheless, it’s hard not to notice, reading through her blog, that she seems to loathe pro-choicers (especially pro-choice men) a lot more than she loathes right-wing pro-lifers.

Now, I’d rather not loathe anyone, but I’m not perfect in that regard, so I can’t expect Demi to be either. But I would point out that pro-choice lefties like me are not the people standing between the USA and a low abortion rate. Banning abortion does not, in practice, lower abortion rates by a large degree. What would lower abortion rates to a large degree would be free birth control, high-quality, high-quantity education about birth control, and generous state support of single and poor parents. And what’s standing between the US and these steps to a much lower abortion rate are Demi’s pro-life allies, most of whom would rather have a high abortion rate than take effective steps to reduce it.

Frankly, the game itself doesn’t interest me, but I was a little sad to miss out on the ads (I was out seeing “The Life Aquatic”).. But what with this new wacky “internet” technology, I can see all the superbowl ads! (How sad is it that I’m paying an ISP so I can watch commercials?)

Via Pen-Elayne, who particularly recommends the FedEx commercial.

Demi at Pilgrim’s Progress links to LA Mom, who in turn links to this photo-essay (with music) of the working environment at Motherhood magazine.

As Demi writes:

There is no reason whatsoever to think that every office couldn’t look something like that. The babies would be a “distraction”? No more so than the usual, trite sexual tensions, politics and “banter” in the “ordinary” office. Breasts showing during feedings? Why not? That’s what they’re there for, what they were made for. Cleavage is distracting, too, and serves no purpose *but* to distract. After some time, you won’t even notice the little bit of boobage flashing now and then.

Our economy - and, in particular, our workplaces - are still modeled on the “Father Knows Best” model, in which all workers are implicitly assumed to have wives at home, taking care of the babies. This model of the workplace is costly to women who’d like (or need) careers but are economically punished for being mothers, and also costly to men who’d like (or need) careers but wind up being alienated from a family they barely ever see.

Some individuals successfully opt out of the “Father Knows Best” economy, of course. But most don’t. The workplace makes default assumptions about family life that haven’t been true for decades. We should change that default assumption to something more suited for the 21st century.

You should go over to Crooked Timber and read “Ask a Nineteenth Century Whaling Expert,” in which Ted asks an expert (Kenneth Gardner) how it is that whales were so valuable.:

I’m baffled at the economics of nineteenth-century whaling. In Moby-Dick, Herman Melville says that a whaling expedition would be a success if a crew of 40 men captured the oil from 40 whales in 48 months. Each whale produced about 40-50 barrels of oil. Presumably this oil had to be cover the approximate costs of four years’ labor, plus the costs of operating the ship, plus a sizeable profit for the investors in these risky ventures.

How could whale-oil have been so valuable? I understand that it was scarce, that illumination is highly desirable, and apparently it smelled nice. But there were substitutes, weren’t there?

Gardner’s answer is interesting. However, I might not have gotten around to linking to this had it not been for the following post from the comments, by Dsquared:

My latest column at “Whale Central Station”? is up, exposing the leftist myth of finite whale supplies.

1. Whales breed. Therefore, the potential supply of whales is unlimited.

2. As whaling technology improves, our ability to exploit this limited supply of whales becomes ever-greater. A few years ago, 40 whales in a four year trip was regarded as good going. Modern Norwegian whalers capture and process 40 whales a month. All of the estimates of the “sustainability”? of the whale-based economy were put together before such inventions as exploding harpoons. And remember that the supply of whales is self-replenishing. Leftists seem not to understand that whales have sex.

3. Reducing whaling would cost vast amounts of money and destroy our economy; credible estimates would suggest that without whale-oil lamps we would all sit around in the dark until we die. This money would better be spent on providing aid to the Inuit.

4. We can’t give the Inuit property rights over their whales to help them manage the speed of whaling, because that’s just politically impractical.

5. Arrrrr!

Ronald Bailey, at Reason Online, writes:

John Opitz, a professor of pediatrics, human genetics, and obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Utah, testified before the President’s Council on Bioethics that between 60 and 80 percent of all naturally conceived embryos are simply flushed out in women’s normal menstrual flows unnoticed. This is not miscarriage we’re talking about. The women and their husbands or partners never even know that conception has taken place; the embryos disappear from their wombs in their menstrual flows. In fact, according to Opitz, embryologists estimate that the rate of natural loss for embryos that have developed for seven days or more is 60 percent. The total rate of natural loss of human embryos increases to at least 80 percent if one counts from the moment of conception. About half of the embryos lost are abnormal, but half are not, and had they implanted they would probably have developed into healthy babies.

So millions of viable human embryos each year produced via normal conception fail to implant and never develop further. Does this mean America is suffering a veritable holocaust of innocent human life annihilated? Consider the claim made by right-to-life apologists like Robert George, a Princeton University professor of jurisprudence and a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, that every embryo is “already a human being.” Does that mean that if we could detect such unimplanted embryos as they leave the womb, we would have a duty to rescue them and try to implant them anyway?

“If the embryo loss that accompanies natural procreation were the moral equivalent of infant death, then pregnancy would have to be regarded as a public health crisis of epidemic proportions: Alleviating natural embryo loss would be a more urgent moral cause than abortion, in vitro fertilization, and stem-cell research combined…”

It seems to me that pro-lifers have gotten more extreme about this in recent years. At one time, most pro-lifers seemed to acknowledge that there was some sort of difference between a newly fertilized egg and, say, Julia Roberts; nowadays it seems few would make that concession. Bailey asks:

A fire breaks out in a fertility clinic and you have a choice: You can save a three-year-old child or a Petri dish containing 10 seven-day old embryos. Which do you choose to rescue?

I would rescue the child. I assume most of my readers would, as well. But I bet there are some pro-lifers who would say that they’d have no moral choice but to rescue the Petri dish and let the three-year-old burn.

Bailey goes on:

Stepping onto dangerous theological ground, it seems that if human embryos consisting of one hundred cells or less are the moral equivalents of a normal adult, then religious believers must accept that such embryos share all of the attributes of a human being, including the possession of an immortal soul. So even if we generously exclude all of the naturally conceived abnormal embryos…presuming, for the sake of theological argument, that imperfections in their gene expression have somehow blocked the installation of a soul…that would still mean that perhaps 40 percent of all the residents of Heaven were never born, never developed brains, and never had thoughts, emotions, experiences, hopes, dreams, or desires.

Heaven must be an odd place.

This is actually a real debate among some pro-lifers - do aborted embryos go to Heaven?

As far as I can tell, most say that they do - which begs the question, what’s so terrible about abortion? When you kill a born person - even a child - there’s the possibility that the victim will burn in Hell as a result, a horrible outcome. But if “babies” aborted before birth go straight to Heaven, then they haven’t been harmed so much as they’ve been relocated. Some pro-lifers argue that saying aborted “babies” go to Heaven is a pro-choice lie intended to make abortion seem less terrible. Other pro-lifers disagree. (Hat tip: After Abortion.)

If you look way at the bottom of my sidebar, you’ll notice a new heading, “google bombing for choice,” with links for roe v. wade and abortion. This is Rad Geek’s idea. The idea is to try and get useful information - the actual text of Roe v. Wade, and help in finding abortion providers - at the top of Google’s rankings, when people search for those terms. (Right now, a Google search for Roe v. Wade brings up a pro-life site as the top match).

Visit Rad Geek’s site for a more detailed explanation, and directions for how to participate. If you’re a blogger, I recommend sticking the links on your sidebar - that way, they won’t wear out and will have (I hope) more lasting impact.

UPDATE: Here’s the full text of Judge Ling-Cohan’s decision. Thanks, Karpad! Her arguments are pretty much what you’d expect, but still a pleasure to read. Of particular note to feminists: she points out that the logic of “you can’t change traditional marriage,” if taken seriously, would have prevented courts from outlawing marital rape.

From 365gay.com:

(New York City) A New York State court ruled Friday that same-sex couples must be allowed to marry.

State Supreme Court Judge Doris Ling-Cohan said that the New York State Constitution guarantees basic freedoms to lesbian and gay people, and that those rights are violated when same-sex couples are not allowed to marry.

The ruling said the state Constitution requires same-sex couples to have equal access to marriage, and that the couples represented by Lambda Legal must be given marriage licenses.

Note that in New York, “State Supreme Courts” are not actually the highest state courts, so this isn’t a settled matter at all. A different New York court had already ruled against marriage equality, so (if I understand things correctly) the next step is for the issue to be resolved by the highest-level New York State courts, which is the New York Court of Appeals (I think).

Also, Judge Ling-Cohan stayed her decision for 30 days to allow for an appeal. Since there’s sure to be an appeal, the decision will not take effect anytime soon. Still, it’s good news. Thanks to “Alas” reader Zuzu for the tip.

Irony update: Judge Ling-Cohan noted that “one plaintiff in the case, Curtis Woolbright, is the son of an interracial couple who moved to California in 1966 to marry. She said California then was the only state whose courts had ruled that interracial marriage prohibitions were unconstitutional.”

And yet another update: Happily, New York’s constitution is hard to amend, so if the homophobes want to cut lesbians and gays out of equal protection, they’ll have a harder time doing so in NY than in many other states.

Any amendment or amendments to this constitution may be proposed in the senate and assembly whereupon such amendment or amendments shall be referred to the attorney-general whose duty it shall be within twenty days thereafter to render an opinion in writing to the senate and assembly as to the effect of such amendment or amendments upon other provisions of the constitution. Upon receiving such opinion, if the amendment or amendments as proposed or as amended shall be agreed to by a majority of the members elected to each of the two houses, such proposed amendment or amendments shall be entered on their journals, and the ayes and noes taken thereon, and referred to the next regular legislative session convening after the succeeding general election of members of the assembly, and shall be published for three months previous to the time of making such choice; and if in such legislative session, such proposed amendment or amendments shall be agreed to by a majority of all the members elected to each house, then it shall be the duty of the legislature to submit each proposed amendment or amendments to the people for approval in such manner and at such times as the legislature shall prescribe; and if the people shall approve and ratify such amendment or amendments by a majority of the electors voting thereon, such amendment or amendments shall become a part of the constitution on the first day of January next after such approval. Neither the failure of the attorney-general to render an opinion concerning such a proposed amendment nor his or her failure to do so timely shall affect th [sic] validity of such proposed amendment or legislative action thereon.

In other words, an amendment has to pass through both legislative houses twice - that’s a total of four chances to block it - and then be approved by a majority of voters before the NY state constitution can be amended to exclude queers from having civil rights. In most states, that would be easy, but the queer-bashing, bigoted campaigns the anti-SSM folks ran in states like Oregon and Ohio this past election won’t play very well in a lot of New York. If the anti-SSM folks don’t defeat this in the courts, they might not be able to defeat it at all. (Info via reader comments in Kos).

Steve at SoVo Blog points out the possible political significance of this decision:

A victory on same-sex marriage is crucial to the marriage equality movement. In order to demonstrate to the rest of the country that the sky won’t fall with legalization of gay marriages, we need states with large gay populations to serve as experiments. Putting New York in the gay marriage column will immediately benefit gay New Yorkers and go a long way in spreading it, even to those of us residing in the red states, eventually.

While this is a positive step, it’s a long way before gay couples can begin getting married in New York. There will be many appeals and no doubt legislative debate on the issue. Unlike most states, the New York State Supreme Court is not the final word in judicial matters.

(I should have mentioned this earlier, but I spaced on it.)

A page from Hereville is on display in the Pushdot Studio gallery this month, part of a show of comics created (at least partly) on computer organized by Jenn Manley Lee.

I don’t see anything about the current show on Pushdot’s web page, but there are a bunch of images from last year’s show (including several comics by me and a couple by Jenn).

Anyhow, there will be food and drink and cartoonists (myself included) at the gallery tonight; I believe the hours are 6pm to 9pm. If you attend, please come and say “hi” to me; I’ll be the fat guy in the paisley shirt.

Hereville page 27 is… well, not yet done. But the black-and-white art is finished, so I’ve posted that for now. I’ll put the color art up at the same link sometime this afternoon. (UPDATE: Color art is now online.)

CDs played while drawing page 27: 1776 cast recording (1997 revival, starring Brent Spiner); Batboy, the Musical, original cast album (played twice); Bounce, original cast album, Parade, original cast recording (played twice); Wicked, original cast recording (played three times - I imagine my housemates are getting a bit tired of that one). And also a documentary about Thelonius (sp?) Monk, which one of my housemates watched but which made very nice background noise.

I really shouldn’t take the time to post today, but I’ve got to clear some of these links off my desktop! Some of them I’ve lost the source of; my apologizes to anyone who I should have hat-tipped but didn’t.

By the way, if there are any links you’d like to post, or anything you’d like to discuss, that doesn’t fit into the other threads on “Alas,” then feel free to post it in the comments here.

In no particular order:

• Ex-Gay Watch has some interesting information about the swell folks behind Defend Maryland Marriage (who I posted about yesterday).

• Hey, cool, Jill at Third Wave Agenda just called “Alas” one of her favorite blogs. Thanks, Jill! The only problem is, now adding Third Wave Agenda to the “Alas” blogroll may look like payback for flattery, when actually I’ve been meaning to add it since I first noticed it a couple of days ago. Well-reasoned and passionate - a recipe for kick-ass feminist blogging. I recommend that y’all check Jill’s blog out.

• A mini-debate between me and Elizabeth Marquardt at Family Scholars Blog about her famous “hooking up” study.

• Heart, who is like me a veteran of the Ms Boards, has been posting to disagree with me and other skeptics regarding the “become a prostitute or lose unemployment benefits” story on this “Alas” thread. It’s an interesting discussion. There’s also some discussion of it on Heart’s website (Note: Heart’s website is women-only. Any male “Alas” poster who posts on Heart’s website will no longer be welcome to post on “Alas”).

• RadGeek argues, persuasively, that the Founding Fathers did so intend a separation between church and state.

• Natalie at Philobiblon discusses “the school slut” and the book Fast Girls: Teenage Tribes and the Myth of the Slut by Emily White.

• Bouncing off a comment Kip left on “Alas,” Pinko Feminist Hellcat discusses classism and “personal responsibility.”

• A good Ellen Goodman article points out that finding “common ground” in the abortion debate, as the mainstream presents it, usually means pro-choicers giving up on our principles in exchange for no compromise at all from pro-lifers. Via Jill at Third Wave Agenda, who adds good comments as well.

• Amanda at Mouse Words argues that porn is not inherently degrading to women (although many specific examples of porn are). I pretty much agree with Amanda’s views, although I do think some kinds of porn - rape porn and child porn, specifically - should be censored. (I’m not assuming that Amanda disagrees with me on that).

• In the news: “A National Institutes of Health study suggests that the region of the brain that inhibits risky behavior is not fully formed until age 25, a finding with implications for a host of policies, including the nation’s driving laws.” And whether or not people should get married young, I’d add. (Unfortunately, I don’t remember where I found this story - sorry, whoever I’m not crediting!)

• I’m planning to order my next batch of checks from these people. I’m torn between the variety pack, the anatomical theme, and the insect theme.

• College paper article about a recent bell hooks lecture

• The Bush administration has pressured PBS into pulling an episode of “Postcards from Buster,” because the episode included some children whose parents are lesbians. The article describes some past episodes of the series: “One episode featured a family with five children, living in a trailer in Virginia, all sharing one room. In another, Buster visits a Mormon family in Utah. He has dropped in on fundamentalist Christians and Muslims as well as American Indians and Hmong. He has shown the lives of children who have only one parent, and those who live with grandparents.” So apparently queers, and queers alone, are the only people Bush considers beyond the pale to show as part of a family on TV. Via Jack Bog’s blog.

• Basic Rights Oregon is suing to prevent Measure 36 - the voter-approved Constitutional Amendment preventing Oregon from recognizing same-sex marriages - from being put into the Oregon Constitution. I’ll be blogging more about this in the future, but for now I’m posting it here to preserve the link.

• Another terrific feminist blog added to the blogroll: Pseudo-Adrienne’s Liberal-Feminist Bias.

• The New York Times describes some of the ways folks in Chile preserved their freedom before divorce was legalized last week: “The most creative schemes involved civil annulment, which required the separating couple to persuade a court that the original marriage had not met legal requirements. So marrying couples frequently left an escape hatch, in case things didn’t work out. Witnesses to a wedding, for example, would sometimes deliberately misspell their names or give an incorrect address. Or a couple might marry in a jurisdiction in which neither lived. More than 5,000 annulments were granted annually; the beneficiaries included President Ricardo Lagos.”

• A CLASP policy brief (pdf file) sums up the social science research regarding if married parents are really better for kids. (Short summary: Yes, kids of married parents tend to have better outcomes, but not 100% of the time, and there are other essential factors too). Both this and the previous link were via Family Scholars Blog, by the way.

• Another totally excellent Ornicus post defending hate crime laws. He harps on something that always bugs me - 90% of hate crime law critics clearly have no idea what hate crime laws are or how they work.

• Jeremy Wagstaff provides an interesting statistic on spam email: “The index goes back to November 2002, with a value of 66.67 — i.e. about 67 spam messages for every 100 valid emails. Now the index is at 782.12. That’s 800 spam messages for every 100 valid ones.” Hat tip: Kip.

• Damnum Absque Injuria, an anti-feminist blogger, reviews the “male privilege checklist.” What a shock - he don’t like it.

• This student’s paper on the Morning After Pill is good reading, especially if you’re looking for a basic summary of the scientific issues involved.

• Someone on a men’s rights forum suggested this link as a one-stop summary of what men’s rights activists are complaining about. So, in case you were wondering…

• This pamphlet written by Mary Schweitzer in the run-up to the 2004 election is still very worth reading, especially for her thoughts on the economic situation in the US. (Mary Schweitzer wrote this recent “Alas” guest post).

• Very interesting debate about affirmative action and black law students.

• Have you heard of this guy? He saved the world.

Ah… the desktop looks much cleaner now.

Tom at Family Scholars Blog links approvingly to this New Republic piece by Jeffrey Friedman:

We’ve heard a lot recently about how red-state residents favor smaller government while benefiting disproportionately from federal largesse; and how they value the sanctity of heterosexual marriage while divorcing more often than the residents of blue states. To be sure, these arguments also suffer from the fallacy of composition: Red-state divorcees may not be Bush voters; and those areas of the red states that consume the largest portions of federal tax money may in fact be liberal enclaves in otherwise conservative regions. But put aside those details and assume that red-state voters really are hypocrites. Even if true, it is still a lousy line of argument for liberals to indulge.

Rather than attacking the specific policies promoted by values voters”“policies that can, and should, be fought on their merits”“the charge of hypocrisy attacks the voters themselves. But it’s an elementary point of logic that a claim’s validity is independent of the character of those who advocate it. A truth is a truth, no more or less true because of who believes it. The whole issue of hypocrisy, then, for all the importance it routinely assumes in political discourse, is a red herring.

If a professed atheist secretly worships God “just in case,’? we’re entitled to say that he lacks the courage of his convictions. But we aren’t entitled to say that those convictions are false. God exists, or doesn’t exist, regardless of what any atheist secretly believes. The same goes for the beliefs of values voters…

As a general point of logic, Friedman is of course correct. But I think he’s missing the point of the discussion about the divorce statistics. Divorce statistics - and also teen pregnancy statistics - are interesting not only because they show that red-staters are hypocrites, but because they are solid evidence in an important policy question.

Conservatives claim, again and again, that if too many people recognize same-sex marriage, and also have liberal attitudes towards divorce, that will lead to higher divorce rates. They use this “fact” to support anti-woman, anti-queer policies, such as eliminating no-fault divorce (screw battered women who can’t prove battery in a court of law!) and opposing same-sex marriage and even civil unions. In the face of that claim, it’s logically relevant that Connecticut and Massachusetts - probably the queer-friendliest states in the union - are also the two states whose divorce rates are lowest.

Similarly, considering all the claims we hear about abstinence-only education, it’s relevant that abstinence-only is apparently a big, fat failure in Texas, whereas Berkeley - where sex ed teaches both abstinance and birth control - has seen teen pregnancies drop.

I admit, there is some joy in seeing red-state moralists - many (not all) of whom are the most condesending, arrogant people I’ve ever dealt with, the kind of people who only pause in patting their own backs to declare their superiority to immoral, queer-hugging godless blue-staters like me - proved wrong. And if I was a better person, I wouldn’t take any pleasure in seeing egg on their smug, “I’m-so-much-better-than-thou” faces.

So I’m not as good a person as I should be. That doesn’t change the fact that what’s being discussed here is a policy question. Which kind of culture should our policy encourage? What kind of culture leads to more divorce, and more teen pregnancy? And if we don’t forget about the policy question - as Mr. Friedman apparently did, in the above-quoted passage - then logically, it’s not at all a red herring to notice that Massachusetts and Connecticut have the lowest divorce rates and the lowest teen pregnancy rates in the country.

* * *

About that smugness: I’d be remiss not to acknowledge that red-state moralists see things just the opposite way. They think that they’re humble, nice people who aren’t at all judgmental prigs, and that the only smug moralists in this debate are blue-staters like me. Such is the human condition.

(By the way, I use the term “red-staters” and “blue-staters” to refer more to states of mind than to states of residence. There are plenty of red-staters living in blue states, and vice versa.)

Is there anything we can do about this? I doubt it. Obviously, when I say that there’s nothing wrong with same-sex relationships, and furthermore that bigotry against same-sexers is evil and should be opposed, I’m striking at the heart of the red-stater belief system. My experience is that no matter how hard I try to sugarcoat that, red-staters tend to take the message that their belief system is horribly wrong a bit personally (not exactly a surprising reaction). And the same is true in reverse, of course.

Yesterday I posted a Telegraph article about a woman in Germany being forced to choose between losing unemployment benefits and taking a job in a brothel. It now seems likely that the Telegraph article is not true.

In the comments to yesterday’s post, Alison points to this Reuters article, which says:

A spokesman for the Federal Labour Office said that if job seekers said they were prepared to work as, for example, dancers in strip bars, advisers could put them in touch with any suitable employers, but vacancies would not be displayed in job centres.

He also stressed job centres would not look for prostitutes on behalf of brothels, nor offer sex industry jobs to people who hadn’t specifically mentioned it as an area of interest.

Also, according to Alison, “Germany has special laws about sex work, including a prohibition of coercing people into sex work, and provision that sex workers can quit at any time for any reason, without working (for example) a period of notice.”

Finally, Snopes has been looking in the German press without finding any confirmation of the “be a prostitute or lose your benefits” story (hat tip: Heliologue.)

It’s impossible to say for certain, but it looks likely that the Telegraph story is false. Which is good news, of course. Thanks, Alison!