Lindsay Beyerstein at Majikthise and I have been debating about the new JAMA study of fat and mortality. Here is Lindsay’s response to my critique of her earlier post. I hope to find time to respond to Lindsay sometime in the next week.

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Glenn Sacks sent me an email about my response to his San Francisco Chronicle article claiming that men and women are equal victims of intimate homicide. First of all, he pointed me to this longer version of his argument, in which he describes his reasoning in more detail than the Chronicle’s space limitations permitted.

Secondly, Glenn took issue with my opinion that he and other men’s rights activists are “motivated to make arguments like this by their denial that sexism ever harms women more than men. In their view, men are always greater victims and women have nothing to complain about…” Here’s how Glenn describes his own view:

I don’t believe that men are oppressed and women are privileged or the other way around. I think both genders have advantages and disadvantages. But, what I have come to believe is that the disadvantages women face are in the public domain. Everyone knows about them. But few understand men’s. That is what I want to shine light upon.

Fair enough. However, I still think my original statement was a good description of how many MRAs think, even accepting that Glenn is an exception. Over on this thread on the MRA discussion board “Stand Your Ground,” when I asked a poster for an example of sexism or discrimination that harmed women, he responded “Bathrooms. There aren’t enough women’s bathrooms to meet the demand. That’s about all I can see…” And then another MRA poster responded that he didn’t even agree that bathrooms were a legitimate problem.

That’s anecdotal, of course, but I’ve debated with hundreds of MRAs over the years (mostly online), and the “women have no serious problems, not compared to what men suffer” attitude appears to be pervasive.

Amanda at Pandagon has posted the first of a promised series of posts providing “an overview of the men’s rights movement.” It looks to be a terrific series - I’m all a-quiver with anticipation.

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I’ve deactivated some of the images for a couple of days, because “Alas” is near its monthly bandwidth limit. The images will return on Sunday.

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This post was removed by request of the author.

This post was removed by request of the author.

Men’s Rights radio host Glenn Sacks has an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle which argues that “there are actually as many wives and girlfriends who murder their male partners as vice versa.” Offhand, this seems like an odd claim; federal government numbers show that in 2002 (the most recent year available), 388 men and 1,202 women were killed by spouses or boyfriends/girlfriends - a ratio of about 3 women killed by an intimate for every man.

My impression is that Glenn (who is, for the record, a heck of a nice guy), and other MRAs (Men’s Rights Activists) are motivated to make arguments like this by their denial that sexism ever harms women more than men. In their view, men are always greater victims and women have nothing to complain about - even thought that ideology causes them to make factually ridiculous arguments, such as Glenn’s argument here. (It would be as if feminists tried arguing that as many women as men are murdered each year overall, despite the clear evidence that overall most murder victims are male.)

Anyhow, back to the fisking…

DOJ statistics show that roughly 1,300 women are murdered by intimates each year. Yet domestic homicide is hardly a one-way street. The DOJ reports that 500 men are murdered each year by female intimates (excluding those killings deemed to be in self-defense). Moreover, evidence suggests that there are actually as many wives and girlfriends who murder their male partners as vice versa.

So Glenn, to his credit, acknowledges the DOJ statistics (his statistics and mine don’t quite match because Glenn’s data is from 1998). But although he says “evidence suggests” the numbers are equal, he doesn’t go on to present any evidence - just speculation and wistful thinking.

Warren Farrell, a high-profile expert witness in domestic violence cases and author of “The Myth of Male Power,” has delineated a number of “blinders” which have served to disguise the murder of male intimates. For one, women generally use less detectable methods to murder intimates than men do, including poisonings, which are often mistakenly recorded as “heart attacks” or “accidents.”

So according to this theory, women are committing hundreds of undetected murders of their intimates each year, which if accounted for would bring the murder rates close to even. What I’m confused by is, how on earth could there be “evidence” of how many undetected murders there are, who the undetected murderers are, and what undetected method they used? If there was such evidence, then the murders wouldn’t be undetected anymore.

I looked for the solution to this mystery in the Warren Farrell book Glenn cites. No dice - Farrell has no evidence to back up his claim that “a woman is more likely to poison a man than shoot him, and poisoning is often recorded as a heart attack or accident” (Myth of Male Power, page 281). Farrell does mention two anecdotes - a female serial killer who used poison to kill several relations, and a woman who poisoned Tylenol bottles to kill her husband and a stranger. But for the male/female intimate homicide ration to be even, as Glenn claims it is, there would have to be around eight hundred undetected husband-murders a year. To leap from two unusual cases, which took place many years apart, to the speculation that 800 such cases occur annually without detection, is silly and unwarranted.

Also, women are much more likely than men to convince their extramarital intimates to do the killing, or to use contract killers, who often disguise murders as accidents or suicides, according to Farrell. If the surrogate killer is caught, the murder is categorized as a “multiple offender” killing instead of as an intimate partner murder.

There is some statistical evidence about multiple offender killings - although that evidence is absent from Glenn’s article. Mercy and Saltzman (American Journal of Public Health, May 1989, v79, p595-599) examined every known spouse homicide in the US over a decade - including multiple-offender killings. According to their study, there are an average of 15 multiple-offender spouse killings of husbands each year, and 5 multiple-offender spouse killings of wives each year.

Of course, that was back in the 1980s - spouse murder rates have dropped since then, especially for male victims. So maybe the real numbers now are lower than 15 and 5 per year. On the other hand, Mercy and Saltzman didn’t include boyfriend and girlfriend murders, so maybe the numbers are a bit higher. It doesn’t matter, because no matter how you slice it, multiple-offender intimate killings aren’t even close to common enough to make a significant difference. Remember, currently there are about 400 men and 1,200 killed by intimates each year; adding another 20 or 40 murders to that doesn’t change the overall picture significantly, and cannot justify Glenn’s claim that the numbers are even.

In addition, there are five times as many unsolved murders of men as of women. If only a small percentage of these murders are really intimate-partner homicides, men would comprise over 40 percent of all intimate murder victims.

Really? Let’s do the math.

In 2002, there were 12,410 male murder victims, of which 36.3% - that is, about 4,505 - were unsolved. In comparison, in 2002 there were 3,764 female murder victims, of which 27.7% - about 1,043 - were unsolved. (That’s a total of over 5,500 unsolved murders in 2002 alone - kind of depressing, if you think about it).

Currently, men are about 24 percent of all known intimate murder victims. To be 40% of all intimate murder victims, we’d have to assume that beyond the 388 known male intimate murder victims, there are an additional 513 unsolved male intimate murders - and there isn’t even a single case of an unknown female intimate murder. In other words, to believe Glenn, we have to believe that a solid majority of women who murder intimates are never caught, whereas every single man who murders an intimate is caught.

That’s ridiculous.

Of course, we could instead assume that not every man gets away with murder, and make up for it by increasing our assumed number of uncaught women. For instance, what if we assume that there are a thousand woman a year who get away with murdering intimates, but only 880 men who get away with it. That gives us Glenn’s claimed “40%” figure, and we don’t have to assume that women and only women ever get away with murdering an intimate.

However, we do have to assume that 22% of all unsolved murders of men were really intimate murders (for comparison’s sake, consider that among solved murders of men, fewer than 5% are intimate murders) - which destroys Glenn’s claim that “only a small percentage of these murders [would need to be] intimate-partner homicides” to make his 40% figure come true. We also have to assume that out of 1043 unsolved murders of women, 880 - that’s 83% - were really intimate murders.

No matter how you do the math, there’s no way to reach Glenn’s claimed 40% figure - let alone the 50% figure he implied earlier in the article - without making genuinely ridiculous assumptions.

Glenn’s continues:

This is consistent with the DOJ’s 1994 survey Murder in Families, which analyzed 10,000 cases and found that women make up over 40 percent of those charged in familial murders.

I recently discussed the problem with Glenn’s data source in detail. But in a nutshell: Before 1988 black men were more likely to be killed by an intimate than black women. Since then, the number of male victims per year has dropped hugely. The source Glenn chose uses data from 1988, and since it considers only 33 urban counties it has more blacks in its sample than a nationally representative sample would.

So by using out-of-date urban data, Glenn is taking a historic anomaly - the high rate of husband-murder among blacks before 1988 - and treating it as if it represents the norm.

So what’s left after we brush aside all the unlikely suppositions, the unfounded speculations, and the cherry-picked data sources? We have the data that opened this post: In the US, currently, around 400 men and 1,200 women are known to be killed by spouses or boyfriends/girlfriends each year. That’s a pretty simple and hard to deny fact; but it doesn’t fit in with the MRA ideology, which says that men must always be equal or greater victims.

Two weeks in a row! Incredible!

Actually, only the black-and-white art of page 28 is up now. But I’ll replace it with the color art as soon as it’s done, probably by tomorrow morning. (UPDATE: Color art is now online.)

By the way, Saturday, May 7th is “Free Comics Day.” It means just what it sounds like - lots of comics retailers will be giving away comics. In addition, on May 7th every page of Hereville and all the other Girlamatic comics can be viewed for free.

Faith drives a wedge between ethics and suffering. Where certain actions cause no suffering at all, religious dogmatists still maintain that they are evil and worthy of punishment (sodomy, marijuana use, homosexuality, the killing of blastocysts, etc.). And yet, where suffering and death are found in abundance their causes are often deemed to be good (withholding funds for family planning in the third world, prosecuting nonviolent drug offenders, preventing stem-cell research, etc.). This inversion of priorities not only victimizes innocent people and squanders scarce resources; it completely falsifies our ethics. It is time we found a more reasonable approach to answering questions of right and wrong.

From The End of Faith, by Sam Harris
Via Michael Bérubé

“Alas” is currently the number one google result for “prostitution porn.”

Via Prometheus 6, an article on TomPaine.com points out that Wal-Mart - praised by Republicans like Dick Cheney as an ideal example of the free market at work - could never exist in a genuinely free market.

Putting aside the morality of forcing people to work in slave-like conditions, the so-called free market does not exist in China when it comes to wages. China artificially suppresses wages by anywhere from 47 to 85 percent below what they should be, according to the AFL-CIO’s complaint about China’s labor policies filed with the United States Trade Representative last year. With Wal-Mart as its willing customer, an authoritarian regime ruthlessly warps the market for wages by enforcing a system that controls where people can work and imprisons and tortures people who attempt to organize real unions or strike. Maybe the rock-bottom labor costs are really behind Wal-Mart’s slogan “always low prices,” but the company is certainly not an example of how to win in a free market economy.

It’s easy to see why Wal-Mart and its conservative defenders discard ideology: money. By ignoring free market principles, the left-wing Harvard Business School estimates that Wal-Mart reduces its procurement costs by 10-20 percent, primarily by taking advantage of the artificially suppressed labor market in China. One can’t help note the delicious irony that Wal-Mart’s “free market” leadership is powered by an authoritarian regime that still refers to itself as communist.

Back at home, Wal-Mart’s free market mantra stops at the water’s edge of the public till. By one estimate, Wal-Mart has pulled in $1.5 billion dollars in taxpayer funded subsidies (see www.walmartwatch.com) . And that’s at the low end, because subsidies are sometimes hard to track based on the lack of public reporting requirements. Wal-Mart is happy to cash in on government largess like property tax abatements, infrastructure support, free land and just straight-out cold cash…all of which are the antithesis of “free market” ideology. [...]

Truth is, Wal-Mart could not survive in a real free market: It would, for example, have to pay Chinese workers more (which would ruin its low-wage business model) and spurn any offers of government subsidies. Indeed, it’s fitting that Wal-Mart, the business model fawned over by free-marketeers, exposes the so-called “free market” as a lie, no more than a crude…albeit effective…marketing phrase. By offering the seductive promise of prosperity through something “free,” we’re told we have to hand over control of our communities to some mystical “market” force. But that’s just an illusion conjured up to hide from us real-life actors who exploit the sweat of our brows, deplete our natural resources to make huge profits and take handouts funded by our hard-earned incomes.

The article has more, including a look at how Republican commitment to “local control” evaporates when local control conflicts with Wal-Mart’s goals. The article doesn’t discuss another way Wal-Mart depends on the public dole to get by: Wal-Mart relies on welfare and food stamps to subsidize its ultra-low wages.

I’m late posting this story, but Pseudo-Adrianne’s post earlier today reminded me of it.

Earlier this month, Colorado Governor Bill Owens vetoed a bill that would have required hospitals to tell rape victims about emergency contraception.

The bill would not have required hospitals to perform abortions; the bill would not have required hospitals to dispense drugs they found morally objectionable; the bill would have given health care professionals the right to refuse to participate in procedures they found morally objectionable. The bill would only have required hospitals to let rape victims know that the option exists, so that rape victims would have the freedom to decide for themselves.

Amazingly, Governor Owens had the gall to claim that he vetoed this bill to protect people being “coerced by government to engage in activities” they don’t approve of.

The Moral of the Story: When a pharmacist is “coerced” into doing his job by letting people know of their options, that’s facism. But when rapists and right-wing zealot hospitals collaborate to coerce women into unwanted pregnancies, that’s cool.

They really don’t think of women as anything but incubation machines, do they?

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Majikthise is worried that this recent JAMA study (.pdf link), which found that deaths-per-year attributed to “overweight” and obesity were much lower than previously reported - and which even found that the “overweight” tend to live a bit longer than people of “normal” weight - is being misunderstood. She points to this New York Times column by John Tierney, and also to this press release from The Center for Consumer Freedom (which I think is supported by the fast-food industry in some way).

Much of Tierney’s article is tongue in cheek (like the suggestion of picketing gyms, as if the JAMA study had found working out to be unhealthy). He also repeats some anti-fat stereotypes, like the assumption that fat people never exercise. But Tierney’s right on target when he says “the crusade against fat was never just about science.”

Majikthise dismisses the Center for Consumer Freedom’s critique of the CDC:

In the press release, the Center for Consumer Freedom basically accuses the CDC and the authors of the earlier study of propagandizing the public, if not of outright scientific malpractice. The data were there in the Center’s computers all along, they press release claims. Well, yes. Of course data sets used by Flegal and her colleagues [authors of the JAMA study] have been around for awhile. They’re the three National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES) compiled by the Department of Health and Human Services and used for countless studies over the years. But that doesn’t mean that it should have occurred to the scientists who made the earlier estimates of obesity-related mortality to use the same statistical methods as the Flegal team.

I don’t think Majikthise has fairly dealt with most of the CCF’s critique. The CCF is critiquing, I think, not just the flawed “400,000 fat deaths per year” study, but also the anti-fat ideology that made it seem appropriate to the CDC to take an obviously questionable study and trumpet it all over the media. From the CCF’s press release’s “timeline”:

March 2004 The CDC releases its report during a highly publicized news conference saying obesity kills 400,000 Americans a year and is poised to become America’s number one preventable death, resulting in alarming front page headlines across the nation.

May 2004 Science magazine reports on the 400,000 deaths figure: “Some researchers, including a few at the CDC, dismiss this prediction, saying the underlying data are weak. They argue that the paper’s compatibility with a new anti-obesity theme in government public health pronouncements — rather than sound analysis — propelled it into print.”

November 2004 The Wall Street Journal publishes a front-page story on errors in the 400,000-deaths study. The paper notes the study “inflated the impact of obesity on the annual death toll by tens of thousands due to statistical errors … Dr. Pechacek wrote to colleagues that he had warned two of the paper’s authors, as well as another senior scientist, ‘I would never clear this paper if I had been given the opportunity to provide a formal review.

The point is, the “400,000″ study did not get an enormous P.R. push because of scientific merit. There was an idealogical need to trumpet a study proving that fat is “the new tobacco”; and by serving the needs of ideology rather than science, the CDC put itself in a position where it deserved criticism. (Nor can the criticism be dismissed as solely coming from fast-food industry flacks; independent fat activists have been making the same criticisms since the study came out.)

The huge publicity given the “400,000″ did have a scaremongering effect; it encouraged a level of anti-fat hysteria unjustified by sound science. (”Hysteria” is the correct word; the director of the CDC called fat worse than the black plague.) The CDC made itself a leader of the “fat=bad” mentality that emphases bathroom scales and self-loathing for the fat, rather than emphasizing healthy eating and exercise for everybody. Isn’t that something that merits criticism?

Majikthise then goes on to discuss the JAMA article itself. The article made two findings: First, that being overweight is actually associated with a longer lifespan than being “normal” weight. And second, that being obese (rather than just overweight) contributes to about 112,000 deaths a year.

It’s telling how different Majikthise’s approach is, when considering each finding. When it comes to the idea that “overweight” people might be healthier than “normal” weight people, Majikthise is skeptical, suggesting several alternative explanations.

Being overweight is good for you, the flacks insist. Well, not exactly… (Being overweight is probably healthier than yo-yo dieting, eating disorders, or extreme bariatric surgery, but this study doesn’t bear on those important issues.) [...] The effects of being overweight are uncertain [...] But does being slightly overweight actually improve people’s health? Or is this finding some kind of artifact? [...] It certainly doesn’t follow that it’s better to be overweight throughout one’s life, rather than just during the critical years. [...] Brooks, Tierney, and the restaurateurs also overlook the fact that being overweight is itself a risk factor for future obesity. [...]

(Gee, being overweight is “probably” healthier than having an eating disorder? Thanks.)

There’s nothing wrong with skepticism, of course. But I can’t help but notice that, when it comes to the harms of obesity, suddenly Majikthise’s skepticism vanishes, and alternative ideas aren’t even mentioned:

…There is no doubt that obesity increases the risk of death and ill-health. [...] this study suggests that if obesity rates increase, excess deaths will increase as well.

In fact, Majikthise sounds more certain about the obesity/death association than the JAMA authors themselves do. From the JAMA article:

Other factors associated with body weight, such as physical activity, body composition, visceral adiposity, physical fitness, or dietary intake, might be responsible for some or all of the apparent associations of weight with mortality…. Obesity is associated with a modestly increased relative risk of mortality, often in the range of 1 to 2. In this range, estimates of attributable fractions, and thus numbers of deaths, are very sensitive to minor changes in relative risk estimates.

Many of the factors that Majikthise suggests might confuse the findings regarding “normal” weight people - yo-yo dieting, weight-loss surgery, etc - seem if anything more likely to be an issue with obese people. So why aren’t those factors also reason to question the findings about obesity? Majikthise, like all of us, lives in a culture with an anti-fat ideology. It’s anti-fat ideology, not sound logic, which says that findings that “overweight is healthier” should be treated skeptically but “obesity = death” findings from the exact same study, arrived at with the exact same methodology uncritically accepted.

That same ideology also dictates that, even if being overweight might not kill you early, it’s important to bring up the possibility that it’ll ruin your life in other ways. As Majikthise writes:

The study didn’t even attempt to measure the detrimental effects of excess weight on general health or quality of life.

Well, no, it didn’t; that’s outside the scope of a mortality study. To be fair to Majikthise, the study authors themselves brought up this concern. Curious, isn’t it, that the study authors didn’t feel obligated to suggest that there might be detrimental effects of underweight on general health or quality of life?

Imagine for a moment that a new study found the “male early death” factor isn’t as large as once believed. Would people feel the same need to temper this good news by reminding us that maybe men will be living longer, but their quality of life might still suck? Would people still be objecting if newspaper columnists treated such a finding as the good news it is? I doubt it.

Even if obesity “only” kills 100,000-odd people per year, that’s still a lot of preventable death.

There’s probably no word I’m less fond of, in the fat-mortality debates, than the word “preventable.”

What does that mean? “Preventable” how?

Majikthise seems to be thinking of weight-loss diets (i.e., “Maybe relatively modest weight loss will also turn out to be a huge benefit for people who are already obese.”) I’d point out that there are virtually no studies that show that obese people can either 1) reliably become non-obese over the long term through weight-loss dieting, or 2) improve longevity by losing weight. As the JAMA article writers say, “Even if body weights were reduced to the reference level, risks might not return to the level of the reference category.”

Given the incredibly high failure rate of weight-loss diets over the long run - and the damage done by failed weight-loss diets not only to physical well-being, but also to self-esteem and mental health - I don’t believe that pushing weight-loss as a remedy is justified. Weight-loss fanatics have dominated the conversation about fat for over half a century; what can they show for their efforts? Are Americans now less fat? Are we happier about our weights and our bodies?

Pressuring Americans to be thinner has a record of utter failure for longer than most of us have been alive. If people were capable of thinking reasonably about weight, that would be enough to convince most of us that it’s time to try a different approach. But anti-fat ideology is too powerful, much more powerful than logic. It doesn’t matter how much the new data differs from the old: the remedy is always the same. Diet, diet, diet, weight, weight, weight.

Tierney and others imply that if mere overweight is good for people, then our public health programs must be misguided. But if being overweight really extends people’s lives, then we should redouble our public health efforts to stop millions of overweight Americans from drifting into obesity. For these people, even a small weight gain could have dire consequences.

The study actually found no consistent connection between weight and mortality until BMIs of 35 and over. (”The majority of deaths associated with obesity were associated with BMI 35 and above”). Since “overweight” was defined as BMI 25-30, it would actually take a very substantial weight gain to put an “overweight” person into the high-risk category; this study does not support the idea that “a small weight gain could have dire consequences.”

Maybe relatively modest weight loss will also turn out to be a huge benefit for people who are already obese. Even preventing further weight gain in obese people might save many lives. If so, perhaps obesity interventions are even more cost-effective than we thought.

There’s a lot of “maybes” and “perhapses” going on there, and no actual evidence. But in our society, no one is expected to question the ideology that says fat people must be pressured to worry about weight (since we’re so unpressured already!). In our society - in anti-fat ideology - all unfounded speculation seems reasonable so long as it endorses losing weight as the solution.

Again - and I know I repeat this a lot, but it needs repeating - there has never been a diet that’s been shown in a peer-reviewed study to lead to healthy, sustainable weight loss in most fat people over the long run. Much more often than not, weight loss dieting leads to depression, damaged self-esteem, moodiness, long-term weight gain, and in some cases the ill effects of weight cycling - but not to long-term weight loss.

So Majikthise is arguing for an “intervention” that fails to work around 95% of time; that has nasty side effects; that makes the condition it addresses worse at least as often as it makes it “better”; and all of this is to address “modestly” higher risks that may be attributable, in significant degree, to other factors. If the “condition” being treated was anything but fat, we’d think that was crazy. But in our society, it’s difficult to even see irrationality, because anti-fat ideology has clouded everybody’s vision.

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There are probably a lot of preventable deaths in that 111,909 figure. Fat people, due to the enormous pressure to not be fat, are more likely to have tried diet after diet, leading to yo-yo dieting - and, quite possibly, to a higher weight in the end. A lot of obese people would be healthier and live longer if they remained steadily obese, rather than weight cycling. Similarly, extreme weight-loss surgeries - liposuction, stapling, etc - could easily be shortening fat lives. (For one thing, those interventions are sometimes fatal.)

Second of all, the belief that fat is the most important barometer of health discourages fat people from steady, lifelong exercise and healthful eating. A lot of fat people try exercise and better eating for a while, but then quit because it “failed” to make them non-fat.

More appropriate definitions of “success” - such as being able to walk a treadmill longer without losing breath - would prevent many deaths. Unlike weight loss, the empirical data on the benefits for fat people of regular exercise is very strong, and the negative side effects almost non-existent. (I think Majikthise agrees with me that it’s better to emphasize health than weight.)

Majikthise begins her post by criticizing John Tierney’s Times article. This may be the only time I’ll ever agree with John Tierney rather than Majikthise, but I think Tierney has a better grasp on the real problem. The main message Tierney suggests isn’t “eat all the big macs you want!” but “anti-fat hysteria needs to be mocked.” The main message Majikthise conveys, despite her good intentions, is “possibly overweight people are healthy, although maybe that’s just a statistical artifact, but we must not lay off the obesity-equals-death message.”

Fat lives would be both better and longer if we could spread the former message widely, while burying the latter message as deeply as possible.

I thought this comparison between right-wing Christians and Sin City’s Frank Miller was curiously apt:

At first glance, it may seem unlikely, but the makers of Sin City and theocrats in Washington and elsewhere share certain core beliefs: in the advanced moral decay and anarchy of modern society, the worthlessness of the existing democratic political forms to stem this decay and anarchy and, underlying everything, the essential rottenness of human nature (after all, this is Sin City). Of course, the former apparently wallow happily in these facts of life while the latter deplore them.

Via Andreas, posting in the comments at TalkLeft. TalkLeft, by the way, hated Sin City. I enjoyed it - it’s a character flaw, I guess, that I enjoy “violence ballet” movies - but it wasn’t anything special.

It did convey the feel of the comic books very accurately, and for far less money (I think the three graphic novels the movie was based on cost something like $15 to $20 each), so from that perspective I guess the movie is a bargain.

And what about the Mo Movie Measure?

(What’s the Mo Movie Measure, you ask? It’s and idea from an old Dykes to Watch Out For cartoon. The character “Mo” explains that she only watches movies in which 1) there are at least two female characters with names, who 2) talk to each other sometime in the course of the movie, about 3) something other than a man. It’s amazing how few movies can pass the Mo Movie Measure.)

Ironically, this movie, unlike most, passes the Mo Movie Measure - the prostitutes talk with each other about politics and saving their area of town from the mob. I say it’s “ironic” since Sin City doesn’t imagine women as being much more than pin-ups and prostitutes. Yes, the prostitutes are deadly killers, but Sin City treats this more as a fetish (oooooh, lingerie and weapons together!) than as a serious belief that women can ever be powerful in their own right.

Via Mark Kleiman, this very readable six-part series about a wealthy businessman and pillar of the community, Dick Dasen, who over the years paid “hundreds” of women to have sex with him. At first, he met the women through abusing his position as a volunteer credit counselor. Later, he quit doing the credit counseling and instead paid women who were already taking money for sex from him “referral fees” for finding new recruits.

Unsurprisingly, this turned out to be an especially tempting deal for young, female meth addicts.

At some point in the last few years, the appointments had gotten out of hand. Huge sums of money… estimated between $1 and $5 million total … were flowing out. Dasen told police that he had paid some women as much as $100,000. The women involved referred to themselves as “Dasen girls,”? and they recruited among their friends, taking payments of as much as $2,000 just for bringing in anyone new who was young, thin, reasonably good-looking, and down on their luck. Since methamphetamine is perhaps the greatest luck-destroyer on earth, many of the girls came into the circle by way of using the drug. So much of the cash flowed directly back into the methamphetamine trade, law enforcement officials say, that Kalispell, population 15,000, experienced a big-city style epidemic of addiction and all that goes with it — crime, domestic abuse and violent conflicts over drug deals and money.

Dasen used the money to play power-trips with the women. And it doesn’t appear that the women were able to use the money to improve their lives much:

Another part of the power, Jenna and Summer said, was to stop payment on the checks that were written to the women for sex. “You’d go to cash the check, and the bank teller would say there was no money in that account, and then you’d go call Dick, and he’d be out of town,”? Summer says, “and it would be right when you needed the money the most.”? And then they would wait, as long as it took, for him to call them back and tell them the money had been deposited to cover the check. “That’s how I finally lost my trailer,”? Jenna said. “The money didn’t come through in time, and they foreclosed on it.”?

There is little doubt that the flow of money, when it did come — and it usually did, eventually — was not the lifesaver that everyone imagined it would be. It seemed like just another trick, kind of like the meth they all bought with it, that seemed like it would make everything alright, but actually it just disappeared, wrecking your life in the process.

“I don’t know of anybody who did anything positive with the money,”? Connie said. Thousands and thousands of dollars went into local keno and poker machines, hours and hours spent sitting, high on meth, staring at the blinking lights, smoking.

The end result? Some of the women who came forward have been arrested for prostitution, or for recruiting. Dasin himself is facing a trial, and it’s possible he’ll be able to wiggle out with a slap on the wrist - it’s a safe bet that he’ll have the best legal defense available. The most serious charges involves sexual encounters with underage girls. Maybe Dasin will spend a long time inside a prison - I think he deserves it.

But what if Dasin had been smart enough to avoid involvement with underage girls? Then he’d be facing virtually no serious charges. That disturbs me. The power dynamic between a broke meth addict and a sober millionaire is like a boxing match between Mike Tyson and Woody Allen; taking advantage of that power dynamic to negotiate for sex is despicable. I’m not sure that the resulting sex in that situation is rape, but I can’t call it fully consensual, either. We call sex between an adult and a 14-year-old statutory rape because a 14-year-old is not able to genuinely consent to sex, even if she thinks she wants to. By that standard, can a meth addict be said to genuinely consent to prostitution?

On the other hand, at least one of Dasen’s “victims” would be pissed off by my view:

You know, everybody’s talking about Dick, how he gave us all this money and made us victims, like we can’t take any responsibility for ourselves. I don’t buy that. I’m a grown woman and I’m responsible for what I do, and for what I did with the money. You ask if I’m pro-Dick Dasen, and yes, I am. Dick for Mayor! I notice nobody is asking if just maybe Dick is a victim of all of us. How come nobody’s asking that?

So what kind of punishment should men like Dasen get?

The legal penalties for sex crimes with underage girls are fairly clear, and severe. But what should be the sanction, legal or otherwise, for enabling addiction, for feeding the meth economy, for taking advantage of weak, desperate people for your own gratification, for abusing a position of trust?

My instinct is that men like Dasen deserve whatever punishment the law can make stick. But I’m skeptical about how “victimless” crimes are enforced in real life; there’s a lot of evidence that the people arrested for such crimes are disproportionately non-white and poor. (That’s one reason I don’t favor handgun bans). Dasen’s story is making the news because a rich, white man being charged with these crimes is a novelty.

Plus, is it really practical to make “enabling” a crime? In law, I think people should be responsible mainly for their own acts, not for acts by others.

I don’t have answers. But anyone who (like me) favors drug legalization or prostitution decriminalization should be willing to think hard about this story. As the reporter asks, “what’s the lesson of a case in which a long series of ‘victimless’ crimes somehow resulted in a lot of victims?”

Lots and lots and lots of links….

I think this photo Bean took of Sydney is simply fantastic.

Click on the image to see a larger version.