This past Wednesday, JAMA published a review of research into fetal pain. The researchers concluded that fetuses are not physically capable of feeling pain until sometime after the 28th week. (No surprise there - you can’t feel pain if you don’t have a working cerebral cortex). The JAMA report conflicts with a proposed pro-life law, which would require women seeking abortion to be told that their fetuses will suffer pain, and would require anesthetic for the fetus (which can complicate the procedure).

Now it turns out that three of the article’s five authors had potential conflicts of interest.

The editor, Dr. Catherine D. DeAngelis, of The Journal of the American Medical Association, said in an interview that had she been aware of the activities, the journal most likely would have mentioned them. But she added that the disclosure would not have kept the article from being published, because editors and outside experts who had read the manuscript before publication had found it scientifically sound.

One author, Susan J. Lee, a medical student, is also a lawyer who for eight months from 1999 to 2000 worked in the legal department at Naral, an abortion rights group. Another author, Dr. Eleanor A. Drey, performs abortions and is medical director of an abortion clinic.

Neither tried to conceal those activities from reporters before the journal article was published. [...] Anti-abortion groups criticized the journal’s failure to mention the two authors’ work and said their backgrounds revealed a bias that cast doubt on their findings.

In addition, a third author, Mark Rosen, is a professor and vice-chair of the University of California - San Francisco’s department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences, which is affiliated with the women’s health clinic Dr. Drey runs. (That’s a very weak connection, but many pro-lifers seem to consider it a big deal, so I thought I should mention it.)

Pro-life blogger GrannyGrump comments:

So the results of this “study” boil down to the equivalent of research by R. J. Reynolds showing that cigarette smoke doesn’t have any effect on children.

A few points.

• The researchers didn’t think it was necessary to point out that an oby-gyn performs abortions (what a shock!), or that a student who worked on this study, also worked for NARAL for less than a year over five years ago. Clearly, the researchers were wrong. The researchers should have disclosed all their affiliations to JAMA, even ones that seemed obvious or minor, and let JAMA’s editors decide if they were relevant or not.
• GrannyGrump’s argument is an Ad Hominem. Logically, research is legitimate or not based on how well or poorly it is done; you can’t just look at the researcher’s affiliations and conclude that it must be bad research. (However, conflicts of interest can be a legitimate warning sign, letting us know to view the research methodology carefully.)
• Obviously some medical experts on abortion are going to be doctors who perform abortion, or medical professors who teach about abortion. It goes too far to imply, as GrannyGrump seems to, that experts writing about their own fields are as biased as a tobacco company study. Yes, it raises a legitimate question of conflict of interest; but so does having heart surgeons write articles about heart surgery.
• This particular article passed through JAMA’s peer review process. And it’s not original research - it’s a review of peer-reviewed medical research on the subject. Both these facts make the JAMA article completely different from the faux-research put out by tobacco companies - and make it likely that the findings are legitimate.
• Finally, the pro-life press is full of studies conducted and funded by professional pro-life advocates - and many of those studies are never published in legitimate peer-reviewed journals. It seems unlikely that pro-lifers would be willing to hold their own studies to the standards they’re holding this study to.

Bottom line: It’s no surprise that the pro-lifers have been attacking this study with ad hom attacks on some of the authors, rather than attacking it on the scientific merits.

Thanks to a commenter on the thread about feminism and the murder rate, I found some interesting discussion about Latoyia Figueroa’s murder (scroll down about two-thirds of the page). Criminologist Jack Levin addresses the horrifying fact that the most common cause of death among pregnant women and new mothers is murder by speculating about the cultural pressures that might drive men to kill women who are carrying their children:

We glorify, we romanticize fatherhood but there are many men who don’t want it. They see the baby as an obstacle to their success.

Of course, there’s more to it than that: some men who don’t want to be fathers take the responsibility for avoiding fatherhood onto themselves, while others expect their girlfriends to bear all the responsibility. The ones who think murdering your pregnant girlfriend is an appropriate response to an unwanted pregnancy push the sexist, women-are-to-blame thinking to its extreme, but the difference between believing you have the right to kill her and believing you have the right to compel her to have an abortion is one of degree and not kind.

It’s true that one of the ways our culture contributes to crimes like this is by putting pressure on men that some cannot live up to. But the other side of the coin is the image of motherhood and femininity as subservient to male control that makes these men consider their partners as objects for them to control and, if necessary, destroy. Both are cultural pressures, both are factors in crimes like that, and I’d prefer to see more attention paid to the one that directly affects women than to the one that could be read as excusing men.

But at least Levin is focussing on the actions of the criminal. Criminal profiler Pat Brown picks up this social pressure and runs with it into blame-the-victim territory:

I think we also have women out there who are not picking men who want to be fathers. It’s a simple solution for the women. Don’t get pregnant by men you do not trust and absolutely think want to be in a relationship and want to move into fatherhood.

Such a simple solution. Don’t want to be murdered? Don’t marry a murderer. Don’t want to be raped? Don’t let yourself be alone with a rapist. Don’t want to be used as a sexual object and then discarded? Don’t associate with sexist jerks. Not to say that victims of murder and rape are to blame for what happens to them, of course, but we know there are predators out there and it makes sense for women to take these few simple steps to protect themselves.

It falls to Levin to point out the flaw in this plan:

Not all of these guys…in fact some of them are the last person you’d suspect and that’s part of the secret of being a sociopath and getting away with murder. So you know sure, let’s use warning signs and common sense, but it doesn’t always work.

Until men who see women as expendable objects start wearing labels to distinguish them from the rest of the male population, “don’t get involved with a jerk or a sociopath” isn’t a solution at all. There are men who appear to be wonderful, caring people as eager for parenthood as the women who fall for them, but who, at the first sign of things not conforming to their fantasies, blame the women and expect them to fall immediately into line. When the man who is genuinely trustworthy and the man who is only trustworthy as long as he gets what he wants look the same to the naked eye, what’s a girl to do?

Whatever filters women set up to screen out the jerks and the sociopaths, they lose. No filter is perfect: it will either underblock and let undesirables through or overblock and screen desirables out. If the filter underblocks, you could end up with someone who thinks murder is an acceptable form of birth control, and the likes of Pat Brown will suggest that it’s your fault for not realising who you’d tangled with. And if it overblocks, you’re an evil misandrist who thinks all men are rapists and won’t give a nice guy a chance.

But given that the stakes are so high, why do “nice guys” deserve a chance before they’ve produced solid evidence, as opposed to unreliable assertion, of why they should be trusted? Outside of feminist discussions, I don’t think I’ve ever heard the question asked. Nice guys deserve a chance because they’re nice guys, and because deep down, a woman really needs a man and won’t be happy without one. Male privilege and the myth of subservient femininity, all packed into one unexamined assumption.

Monday baby blogging is a day late this week… sorry, I was really busy all day today.

Trust me, if you had one of these “baby” thingys around the house all the time, you’d be doing dumb things with it too.

An extradordinary post on Blue Girl, Red State describes the experience of a volunteer aid worker in Darfur, who posts on Kevin Drum’s blog under the name “Shameless Hussy.”

What she dealt with daily goes beyond the pale…beyond the nightmares of most people; Children with all four limbs hacked off right above the knee or below the elbow. Twelve year olds who died in childbirth after being gang-raped by the Janjaweed. Women who gave birth to rape-babies who were then cast out by their families for shaming the family name, leaving only one avenue of survival for themselves and their children after the camps: Prostitution.

What is fucking her up is the desperation, and the fact that she worked herself to death for over a month, and she still didn’t really save anyone. Now that she’s gone, it’s like she was never there. Even the ones she helped keep alive, she didn’t save. You try dealing with that reality.

And women are the preponderance of victims. Men do not leave the villages to go to the countryside to gather firewood and other necessary items of sustenance. Women venture out, even though every time they leave their villages, they are at horrific risk of being beaten and raped and disfigured. The reason they go instead of the men? The women are only attacked, the men are killed.

Blue Girl’s posts has more details, and also a number of links if you’d like to donate money - if you leave a post there, Blue Girl will make sure Shameless Hussy finds out about your donation.

This post was removed by request of the author.

This post was removed by request of the author.

For a change, this and several posts to follow (to be posted over the next few days) won’t directly discuss the situation of women in Iraq (although everything about Iraq relates to Iraqi women, of course). Instead, I wanted to recommend several articles and blog posts about the political and military situation in Iraq. Some of this will be very old hat to some readers, but for others it will hopefully be interesting.

First, David Corn very usefully posts an outline of the situation in Iraq, written by Larry Johnson, “a former CIA analyst and counterterrorism official at the State Department.” Johnson makes a convincing case that the US, as a matter of cold fact, lacks the political will or military ability to remake Iraq. Here’s a sample, but I recommend reading the whole thing.

We could potentially defeat the Sunni insurgents if we were willing and able to deploy sufficient troops to control the key infiltration routes that run along the Tigris and Euphrates River valleys. But we are neither willing nor able. It would require at least 380,000 troops devoted exclusively to that mission. Part of that mission would entail killing anyone who moved into controlled areas, such as roadways. In adopting those kinds of rules of engagement we would certainly increase the risk of killing innocent civilians. But, we would impose effective control over those routes. That is a prerequisite to gaining control over the insurgency.

We cannot meet the increased manpower requirements in Iraq without a draft. We do not currently have enough troops in the Army and the Marine Corps to supply and sustain that size of force in the field. But, even with a draft, we would be at least 15 months away from having the new batch of trained soldiers ready to deploy. More importantly, there is no political support for a draft. In other words, we’re unwilling to do what is required to even have a shot at winning.

While the insurgency is not likely to acquire sufficient strength to fight and defeat our forces directly in large set piece battles, they do have the wherewithal to destroy infrastructure and challenge our control of lines of communication. The ultimate test of a government’s legitimacy is whether or not it can protect its citizens from threats foreign and domestic. Thus far the Iraqi Government has made scant progress on this front.

I have to resist the impulse to quote Johnson’s entire article; it’s short, but it describes concisely the realities in Iraq that hawks have simply refused to acknowledge, let alone provide a realistic response to.

Too many hawks discuss our options in Iraq as if we’re choosing between withdrawal and victory in Iraq. What is “victory in Iraq”? I’d suggest that, at a minimum, victory requires the establishment of a stable democracy in which (to quote Johnson) “the average Iraqi can move around the country without fear of being killed or kidnapped.” (And remember, the average Iraqi is a woman). That doesn’t seem too much to ask for - but it’s far more than the American military or executive branch is realistically capable of offering.

Bottom line: It doesn’t matter how morally correct an outcome is if it’s not something that we can feasibly bring about in the real world.

As some of you may have noticed, when I moved “Alas” to DreamHost, the “Live Comment Preview” stopped functioning. Now it’s working again - due to helpful advice from Michael of Following Edge.com.

Thanks, Michael!

John McGowan, guest-posting at Michael Berube’s blog, is critiquing Martha Nussbaum’s critique of Judith Butler (part one and part two). I think readers who want to know a bit of what Judith Butler’s work is about, but have found Butler’s ultra-opaque prose unapproachable, might find McGowan’s discussion very helpful.

Amy of the 50 Minute Hour has an excellent post regarding the recent “doctor badgering fat women patients” controversy, and more broadly criticizing the entire weight-loss approach to health taken by too many doctors.

Dawn of The Dawn Patrol thinks that pro-choicers are uncaring meanies. I’ve been debating about various things with her and the other folks there in the comments. Amanda and Lauren have been posting there, too. Dawn enforces civility and on-topicness pretty strictly, so if you’re tempted to post there, be warned.

Dawn also has posted a list of guidelines for civil debate, written by a couple of high-school debaters, which I want to preserve the link to for future reference.

Kim Gandy (president of NOW) expresses horror at what’s happening to women’s rights in Iraq. Some stupid anti-feminist troll leaves a comment saying that she looks like Tom Hanks; I never noticed before, but (at least in this photo) (and without meaning it in the negative or insulting way the troll meant it) she actually kind of does.

Just to show that right-wingers aren’t always wrong, I should point out that this writer at World Net Daily is also outraged at the betrayal of Iraqi women.

Pro-lifers in Kansas are suing to prevent the government from paying for abortions in any circumstances at all - even when an abortion is necessary to save the mother’s life. Lovely. Lauren at Feministe has the story.

Res Ispa has two good posts criticizing the marriage movement’s indifference to the well-being of children growing up in non-traditional households, here and here. “There is a sense among the gay parenting opponents that if they just wish hard enough, gay parents are going to disappear. That just isn’t realistic and it’s appallingly bad public policy.”

Surprisingly, a study has found that watching Fox News doesn’t change who people vote for. Nice to know. Thanks to “Alas” reader Sara for the tip.

UPDATE: DreamHost has ordered me to take down the thing entirely. We’ll just have to do without it until a substitute is found.

Some “Alas” readers may have noticed that comments were down for a while a few days ago. That’s because the “Recently Commented Posts” list on the sidebar was eating too much server time, so the hosting company shut down the comments in self-defense.

I really think some sort of “recent comments” post is essential to the discussions we have on “Alas.” As a stopgap measure, I’ve put the recently commented posts list on a separate page - you can see the link to it near the top of the sidebar (just below the search box). If you want to see what posts have most recently been updated with new comments, click on that link.

Hopefully, since the “recently commented” query will now only be running every time someone goes out of there way to look at it, rather than every single time anyone loads “Alas” or any sub-page, this will reduce the server load and allow us to have a “recently commented” list while I look for a better solution. (On the other hand, maybe the server load will be too high and Dreamhost will shut the whole website down. It’s hard to know for sure.)

Several people have suggested to me a different sort of “recently commented posts” plug-in; one that, instead of doing searches of the (enourmous) comments table every time someone loads a page, automatically wrote to a small table every time a comment was posted, and also deleted the bottom row from the same table. Then the sidebar could just reprint the talble, rather than doing a search of the database. The table would only be updated when people posted new comments, and since it would never be more than 20 or 30 rows in size, it would be very light on the server.

That sounds like a logical solution to me; however, I don’t know anything about coding at all, so oh well.

Read below the fold if you want to see the recent correspondance about the problem between me and my host. If you understand these matters, please feel free to offer advice. If you know how to code and would be interested in taking a commission to write a better “recently commented” plug-in for alas, post or email me and let me know how much you’d charge. :-)

“Alas” reader Maureen sent me the link to this story in the Guardian, about an election in New Zealand:

Don Brash, the aptly named leader of the centre-right National party, faced Ms Clark in a televised debate last week, and came off second best. When asked why he had done so badly, Mr Brash suggested he had deliberately gone easy on Ms Clark. “I think it’s not entirely appropriate for a man to aggressively attack a woman and I restrained myself for that reason,” Mr Brash explained. “Had the other combatant been a man, my style might have been rather different.” Ms Clark herself offered a more plausible alternative explanation: “Sounds like an excuse for losing to me.”

Unhappily for Mr Brash, opinion polls show that a majority of voters regard Ms Clark as a stronger leader than him by a margin of two to one. But if we assume Mr Brash wasn’t merely trying to distract the electorate from his poor performance with a sexist remark, losing the election will surely come as a relief to him. Imagine the embarrassing situations being prime minster would involve. How could he, for example, argue forcefully with US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice? Or stare down Chinese vice-premier Wu Yi? Would he have to graciously give way to any demands made by Yulia Tymoshenko, Ukraine’s prime minister?

Luckily Mr Brash’s sense of chivalry is unlikely to endure such humiliations - his party lags Ms Clark’s by more than 9% in the latest polls.

Sweeeeet.

My super-cool friend Emily Care has a new role-playing game out, Breaking The Ice, which is (of course) super-cool.

Play out the ups and downs of a couple’s first three dates. From first bumbling attempts to get to know one another, to the stirrings of trust and desire. Watch the attraction flare, and see if the flame will light a fire that will last for a lifetime–or just burn brightly and flicker out.

Adding even more super-coolocity to the project, I did a bunch of illustrations for it, a couple of which can be seen here. The illustrations were fun to do; it’s the only time I’ve seen RPG illustrations which depict people playing a role-playing game.

I have a lot of open links about women’s rights in Iraq - or, more accurately, about the destruction of women’s rights in Iraq, brokered by the Bush administration. It’s amazing - they’ve actually managed to make Iraq, already a pit for human rights, even worse. It’s as if they rushed into a burning building screaming “mission of mercy! mission of mercy!” and then set an additional three floors on fire. And now that they’ve put misogynistic fascists into power in Iraq, they want a medal for a job well done.

Houzan Mahmoud, of The Organization for Women’s Freedom in Iraq, has a must-read article in the Independent, about women’s reality in Bush’s Iraq (link via Bitch PhD). Here’s a bit of Mahmoud’s essay:

More widely, professional women have been deliberately targeted and killed - notably in the city of Mosul - and, recently, anti-women fundamentalists in Baghdad have taken to throwing acid in women’s faces and on to their uncovered legs.

So-called “honour killings” are rife, as is the kidnapping and rape of women. Beheadings have occurred and women have been sold into sexual servitude. [...] This is a recipe for future gender enslavement, second-class citizenship and ignorance. Thousands of female university students have now given up their studies to protect themselves against Islamist threats.

Islamist hostility is contagious and echoed daily in high-level political debate. Currently there is a drive over the “right” of men to have four wives, to make divorce a male preserve and for custody of children to be given to men only. Even women on Iraq’s National Assembly - the country’s parliament - have been calling for resolutions to allow for the beating of women by their guardians (males relatives, such as husbands or fathers).

This is all the outcome of the occupation of Iraq. This has been pursued under the name of liberation, but what we actually see is women increasingly losing their freedom, while political Islamists feel free to terrorise them. [...]

The constitution is set to add to a growing fearfulness among Iraqi women, as their rights are passed over or signed away to Islamists hostile to Iraq’s entire female population. Women in Iraq face being dragged back into the dark ages. We need to stop this tragedy before it’s too late. A constitution based on enslaving women, religious sectarianism, and tribalism must be rejected.

The USA has replaced a brutal, relatively secular tyrant with thousands of brutal religious fundamentalist tyrants. Without ignoring or soft-pedaling what a monster Hussain was, it’s clear that the US’s invasion has made things worse for women in Iraq. To call this state of affairs “freedom” is a sick Orwellian joke. Echidne writes:

Nobody really cares about women’s rights in Iraq, certainly not within the U.S. government. Bush wouldn’t have attacked the country if he had cared about the rights of women. Iraq used to have one of the most egalitarian legal systems for women, and look what we have wrought! Oh, I forgot, no more rape rooms. Though, they don’t matter much as many women don’t dare to go out in any case, fearing kidnapping and rape.

So who wins? Amanda sharply observes:

If you look at it from that angle–that fundamentalist Muslims and fundamentalist Christians are just two flavors of the same patriarchal religion–then one thing becomes quite obvious. The winners of the Iraqi War are not the Americans and not the Iraqis, but the fundamentalists. On both sides of the conflict, fundamentalists have been able to use this war as leverage to make progress towards their ideal society–a strict hierarchy where the men on top of society have absolute power over other men and men have absolute power over women.

Click.

Like Amanda, I don’t believe this was a conspiracy. But I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that an administration headed by religious fundamentalists actively pushed for a “compromise” in which women’s rights are to be crushed by religious fundamentalists. The things you compromise on are the things that you consider disposable.

Too often, the question of leaving Iraq is framed as “abandoning” the Iraqis. I have sympathy for this view, I really do. Pam’s House Blend makes a strong, women-centered case for not “abandoning” Iraq.

But then I think, what activities would we be abandoning?

Should we abandon “helping” Iraqi women by using a fixed election to legitimize a government that is so consumed by women-hatred that if it were a person we’d have to put it in a rubber cell? Should we abandon putting into power people who see a woman’s face and their first thought is to splash acid into it?

Put another way, if we refuse to abandon our policy of destroying through horrible alliances and power-plays every part of Iraq we haven’t already destroyed with our boundless incompetence, are we really doing ordinary Iraqis a favor?

Digby writes:

I am now officially an isolationist. Not because I don’t think that Americans should spend its blood and treasure on foreigners. It’s because I don’t think the world can take much more of our “freedom and democracy.”

The “how can we abandon Iraqis” argument assumes that the US is capable of doing some good in Iraq. I don’t have faith in that anymore. It doesn’t matter if helping Iraqis is the right thing to do, because our government is either evil or incompetent. You can’t drain a thousand miles of acid-laced swamp when your only tool is a broken wacky straw.

Shakespeare’s Sister writes:

This is madness. In one fell swoop, they have turned back literally decades of women’s rights in Iraq.

When all other rationales for this war were proved devoid of substance, the Right yammered about a humanitarian intervention…and so did the hawkish Left. The last time I checked, women were humans, too, and they ought not to be left with less freedom than they had before we got there.

No, it ought not happen. And yes, it’s happening. And somehow we’ll continue thinking of ourselves as “the good guys,” the rescuers, the heroes, the force for freedom, as Iraqi women in fundy-ruled zones drop out of jobs, university, walks to the store and basically the entire public sphere, the entire ball of wax we call participating in society, for fear of state-sanctioned acid and rape and kidnapping and murder. This is how we’ve freed the women of Iraq. The American capacity for self-delusion is awesome; I sit before it and gape, open-mouthed, except perhaps my mouth is really open because I’m screaming. It doesn’t matter, anyway; it’s over, no one is listening, we’ve ruined the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi women, and we can’t or won’t fix the damage we’ve done. Time for the victory party.

Russel Sadler, writing on BlueOregon, describes a “takings” lawsuit:

In the Spring of 1998, a logging company named Coast Range Conifers acquired 40 acres of timber known as the Beaver Tract. Subsequently, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employee observed two bald eagles in the area and a nest on a 31-acre site the company wanted to log. The bald eagle is listed as a “threatened species” under the Endangered Species Act. Coast Range Conifers offered a logging plan that prohibited logging within 400 feet of the nest, leaving 50 percent of the neighboring trees, and received a logging permit from the Oregon Department of Forestry. The company logged the 31 acres.

Following the bald eagle nesting season, the company observed the nest was no longer occupied and offered a revised logging plan for the remaining nine acres of the Beaver Tract with larger buffer strips around the nest. The State Forester denied the permit. Coast Range Conifers filed suit complaining the government had taken their property by regulation and demanding compensation.

Assuming that market forces are still functioning, I don’t see what CRC has to complain about.

After all, it’s not exactly a secret that logging in Oregon can be limited by the discovery of endangered species - the spotted owl lives here, for example. Presumably, the additional risk that land-buyers face in Oregon is automatically factored into land prices by the marketplace, and resulted in CRC buying Beaver Tract for a cheaper price than they would have paid if there were no Endangered Species Act.

They bought Beaver Tract knowing full well that there was a risk - and the existence of that risk means that they paid less for the land than they would have if there was no risk. Since the marketplace already gave them a discount to compensate for their risk, how on Earth has the government “taken” the value of the land away from them?

(By the way, CRC lost their lawsuit - on legal grounds, not on the economic grounds I’m discussing here.)

I’ve been reading a lot of pregnancy and parenting magazines lately. The occasional piece of advice on what I can do now to make labour easier almost makes it worth wading through the rest: relentless pressure to buy Stuff and soft-focus images of a family life I know I can never achieve. Then I turn to the advice page and find a real slap in the face.

I’m six months pregnant and my partner refuses to be at the birth. I feel so let down - will I really have to go through labour on my own?

I’m not a trained advice columnist, but I do know a bit about how it feels to be facing labour without a partner’s full support. If this woman came to me for advice, I’d reassure her that she doesn’t need to go through it completely alone, but there’s something else it’s just as important for her to hear. She’s allowed to feel let down; she’s allowed to feel that her partner has left her to face what may well look like a terrifying ordeal with no support. If she hasn’t already done so, she should talk to her partner about how she feels - women often feel pressure to keep their feelings under wraps, to deny them in the interests of “avoiding conflict” or because asking to be listened to might be seen as “selfish”.

But what’s the first thing the trained advice columnist recommends? She suggests trying to see it from the partner’s point of view, followed by a string of reasons why fathers-to-be are afraid of labour. Some are valid, like the fear he’ll let his partner down by fainting when she needs him most; others less so, like the fear that witnessing the birth will put him off sex. All of them miss the point.

It makes no difference to this woman why her partner doesn’t want to be present. She’s the one going through labour, he won’t support her, she feels let down. That’s the problem she’s asked for advice about, and the advice to see things from his point of view is suspiciously close to telling her that her feelings aren’t as valid as his.

Chances are, she’s already tried to see it from his point of view. Women are schooled fairly hard at “seeing it from his point of view” - I managed to skip most of my female-socialisation modules, but empathy was one of the ones that stuck. A tendency to look for the other fellow’s motivations stood me in good stead when it came to creating characters in my novels, but it also led me to cut manipulative partners far more slack than they deserved and to make concessions to people who had no intention of making concessions in return.

Empathy is an essential ingredient in a healthy intimate relationship, but it has to come from both sides. If her partner tried looking at it from her point of view, he might behave differently. He might recognise that whatever fears he has about labour, hers are likely to be worse because it’s her body that’s involved. He might see that after everything she’s gone through already in the course of this pregnancy, supporting her during labour is the least he can do in return. And even if he concludes that he cannot face the delivery room, he can understand how let down she feels and possibly support her in other ways so she knows he’s still there for her.

But no. All these things are beyond him because he’s just a man. Men aren’t expected to show any empathy, especially not when there are women around to show enough for two. She has to see things from his point of view in order to relieve him of the burden of seeing things from hers.

When empathy is a one-way street, it becomes all about his feelings. He doesn’t want to be there when she gives birth, and she is expected to understand and respect that. She wants his support, but he is under no obligation to understand or respect that. In fact, she shouldn’t even mention how much she wants him there: “It’s better if you don’t put him under pressure.”

Why offer such lousy advice? I understand that the advice needs to concentrate on things the woman can do, rather than things her partner ought to be doing, but there’s still plenty of advice that can be offered that doesn’t involve making her feelings subordinate to his. Being honest about her feelings means risking conflict and cutting her losses to make birth plans that don’t include him may make him feel left out, but neither of these things will cause the same long-term harm as convincing herself that her feelings don’t matter and her only option is to understand and support his.

Or are women always responsible for looking after men’s feelings? Even when they’re pregnant, and even according to other women? If I wasn’t already a feminist, that would be enough to convert me.

Okay, not verbatim that, but just about. Here’s what I’m referring to:

A situation regarding the gratuitous ‘obesity’ commentary made by a doctor in New Hampshire has been causing quite a stir in both the media and in the blogosphere this week. I’ve been following the debate and commentary made about the situation and have been horrified at the sanctimonious bullshit people are spewing about the right of doctors to include inflammatory social commentary as part of their medical lecturing on the health risks of being overweight.

So here’s a bit of a rundown on what happened. Dr. Terry Bennett of Manchester, New Hampshire is being investigated for commentary he made to a patient that led to her filing a complaint against him with the New Hampshire Board of Medicine. According to MSNBC, Bennett is unapologetic and explains his actions as thus:

Dr. Terry Bennett, who practices in Rochester, said he has “an obesity lecture for women” that is a stark litany designed to get the attention of obese female patients.

He said he tells obese women they most likely will outlive an obese spouse and will have a difficult time establishing a new relationship because studies show most males are completely negative to obese women.

People have seemed to have a hard time grasping that not only is this charming doctor sizest, but he’s sexist to boot, and has a really poor concept of professional behavior.

A settlement was offered to Dr. Bennett by the New Hampshire Medical Board, but apparently Dr. Bennett feels that his actions were just fine and is in no need of changing his approach:

A settlement agreement was proposed that would have had Bennett attend a medical education course and acknowledge he made a mistake. He rejected the proposal.

“I’ve made many errors in my lifetime. Telling someone the truth is not one of them,” Bennett said.

The abrasive cacophony on web discussions is that being a doctor is a thankless job and the good doctor was being brave and kind for pointing out to the woman that she’s fat and that if her husband dies before her, she won’t be attractive to other men. I’m just boggling.

Everyone who has played role-playing games for a while has their “idiot” stories, about the worst role-playing they’ve ever seen. The wonderful thing about internet role-playing is that the idiocy can be recorded for posterity.

Which brings us to what may be the dumbest role playing in history. And, speaking as a man, let me say - damn!, some men are weird. Check it out.

Charles, Elkins and I watched “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” last week. This is the third time I’ve seen this movie, which I love - I love all the Charlie Kaufman movies I’ve seen - but the first time that I wasn’t totally exhausted and fighting not to doze off, so there was new material.

Some scattered thoughts:

• It’s a science fiction movie with no violence and no scenes in which any character is physically endangered. Watching this movie, you’d almost think that science fiction can be about playing with ideas, instead of about action scenes. Is that even legal?
• Yet another movie that can’t pass the Mo Movie Measure - at no point in this movie do two women talk to each other. (There is a brief moment when Kate Winslet’s character has a two-second exchange with Jim Carrey’s memory of his mother, but I don’t think that counts, since the mother isn’t a real character.)
• I think that if this selective-memory-wiping technology really existed, couples would use it to purposely do what the two main characters of Eternal Sunshine did accidentally - wipe the memory of each other out of their minds not to break up, but to be able to experience the giddy infatuation stage again. (I mentioned this to Elkins, who said that she thinks Robert Sheckley might have written that idea into a story at some point. It certainly sounds like a Sheckley idea).
• I really enjoyed Elijah Wood’s character, who is a type of misogynist creep you occasionally encounter in real life, but who isn’t usually presented as a creep in the movies - The Guy Who Believes The World Owes Him A Girlfriend.
• Favorite quote:
  Joel: Is there any risk of brain damage?
  Doctor: Well, technically speaking, the operation is brain damage.
• The movie producers made a website for Lacuna Inc. Cute.
• Both Kate Winslet and Tom Wilkinson are British but do perfect American accents. You see this a lot nowadays - I wonder if “American accent training” techniques have gotten much better in the last decade or so. I miss bad American accents - remember John Cleese’s American waiter in “The Meaning of Life”?
• Isn’t Kate Winslet the actress with the rep for being zaftig? That’s ridiculous - she’s a tiny thing.

The London Sunday Times reports on a new British study:

Danny Dorling, the report’s author and professor of human geography at Sheffield University, said that marked changes in the social status of women explained the shift.

“The decline in the female murder rate is probably due to women being more likely and able to walk out of violent relationships,” he said.

“People have both became aware of how dangerous domestic violence is and how fruitless it is to stay in a violent relationship. In addition, women have become economically better off and so, in increasing numbers, they can afford to walk out.”

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