In the comments to another thread, “Ed” - whose views are typical of many Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs), although I don’t know if Ed himself identifies as an MRA - writes:

It’s true that some women have “tricked” men into fatherhood and child support - for example, the 1997 case of State of Louisiana v. Frisard, in which a woman gave oral sex to a man wearing a condom, and then secretly used the sperm in the condom to get pregnant. (The courts decided that Mr. Frisard was liable for child support, a result I find appalling). (For more information about Frisard and some similar cases, see this article).

But even acknowledging that such cases happen, that still doesn’t support the idea that child support payments significantly motivate women to “trick” men into involuntary fatherhood. In the Frisard case, it appears the woman was motivated by a desire for motherhood, and so would probably have acted the same way even if no child support laws exist.

Do women seek pregnancy in order to get the financial benefits of child support, as David suggests?

And who has the most incentive to prevent pregnancy, women or men?

I’d say women do. Women, after all, face the risks and physical burdens of pregnancy, and (if they wind up collecting child support) face not only the financial expense but the enormous workload of raising a child - a workload that will make much more difficult, and possibly entirely derail, any other plans the woman had for her life. The workload, unlike the expense, is not split with another adult. On the other hand, for those women who want to be mothers, that could be an incentive in favor of getting pregnant.

Next to all that, the benefit of receiving child support is so minor that I wouldn’t expect it to have a significant effect on women’s incentives.

Many MRAs - and Ed, if I’ve understood him correctly - believe that child support laws give women a strong incentive to get pregnant and thus “trap” men into financially supporting them. Furthermore, many MRAs seem to believe that there is very little men can do to prevent pregnancy (hence the frequent claim made by MRAs supporting “choice for men” that all reproductive decisions are made by women).

This is a conflict, between what many MRAs believe and what many feminists believe. Is there any way we can settle this conflict empirically?

I believe there is.

Not all states have the same child support laws. In some states, the child support laws are relatively weak; noncustodial parents don’t pay much, and can relatively easily get away with defaulting on child support payments - or can depend on never being identified as the father at all. Other states have higher child support awards, laws that aggressively establish paternity, and collection techniques that make defaulting unlikely (such as garnishing child support from paychecks).

If the MRAs are correct, then states with strong child support laws will have higher rates of single motherhood, due to more women - tempted by the prospect of well-enforced child support awards - choosing to trick men into getting them pregnant.

If I’m correct, however, then states with weak child support laws will have higher rates of single motherhood, because while women’s incentives aren’t changed much by child support laws, a significant number of men are less motivated to avoid pregnancy if they think they can get off the hook.

So what do studies comparing how weak and strong child support laws effect single motherhood find? It’s men, not women, who have their incentives changed by child support laws. The stronger child support laws are, the lower the rate of single motherhood.

Robert Plotnick, of the University of Washington, published a study in 2005 which included a brief review of the literature.

Plotnick’s 2005 study (which is described, and available for download, here) replicated the earlier studies’ findings.

What does this mean?

It could mean, as I believe, that women already have such strong incentives to avoid pregnancy, that child support awards (which are, typically, not all that generous) don’t significantly alter the equation for most women.

However, it is also possible that Ed is correct, and that child support laws do strongly increase women’s incentive to get pregnant. However, this is only possible if we assume that men’s incentives to avoid pregnancy are even more strongly increased - so that even though women are trying harder to entrapt men into paying child support, men are nonetheless successful in preventing pregnancy, despite women’s increased efforts. So the MRA belief that women are motivated by child support payments into trapping men, ironically can only be rescued by giving up the MRA belief that men are not able to prevent pregnancy from happening.

The empirical evidence is clear: the net effect of child support laws isn’t that women get pregnant more often to collect on child support. Rather, the stronger child support laws are, the more men work at avoiding pregnancy.

The British government has set out a new prostitution strategy. It seems to consist of helping sex workers, for instance by allowing them to work in pairs away from the street and offering them help with any drug or alcohol problems that might have forced them into prostitution, raising awareness among johns and pursuing exploitative pimps and people traffickers.

Changes like this don’t always produce the desired effect when they’re implemented, but it looks reasonable on paper.

Over at The Debate Link, David links to a news story about an upcoming conference on the Holocaust, sponsored by the Iranian government. Since the president of Iran has called the Holocaust a “myth,” David quite reasonably predicts that the conference will be an appalling morass of anti-semitism.

So far, so good. David then goes on to say:

My goodness.

David Irving is a flat-out Holocaust denier. But to put Chomsky - or activists who organize a boycott - on the same level as Irving is unsupportable.

The primary evidence linking Chomsky to Holocaust denial is that he once wrote an essay defending the free-speech rights of Robert Faurisson, a Frenchman who has been (justifiably, as it turns out) accused of Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism. Chomsky’s essay was later reprinted, without his knowledge, as the introduction to one of Faurisson’s books.

Nearly all of Chomsky’s essay was a well-worn argument for free speech. A single paragraph addressed Faurisson himself. Here’s the most controversial passage in Chomsky’s introduction:

In retrospect, this is a stupid thing for Chomsky to have written; under the circumstances, if Chomsky wasn’t willing to undertake a thorough review of all of Faurisson’s writings, he should have simply said “I don’t know his work well enough to comment on the matter” and left it at that. Instead, Chomskey concluded from the weakness of the evidence presented to him, that Faurisson probably wasn’t an anti-semite. That conclusion is wrong, I believe, but the error is understandable; there is no need to say “Chomsky supports Holocaust denial” in order to plausibly explain Chomsky’s error.

Chomsky also argued that, in principle, it was possible to doubt the facts of the Holocaust without being motivated by hatred of Jews:

I think Chomsky’s argument here is disingenuous. Logically, he is correct - it is possible for an ignorant schmuck (such as myself, when I was about 17) to take Holocaust denial seriously without hating Jews. But while Holocaust denial is not, in and of itself, absolute proof of anti-semitism, it’s certainly grounds for a very strong suspicion. The real-world association between Holocaust denial and anti-semitism is too obvious to be reasonably ignored.

On the other side of the equation, it is clear that Chomsky does not doubt the existence of the Holocaust. In 1969, he wrote:

Chomsky has returned to this formulation several times, applying it not only to Nazis but to Holocaust deniers. So in 1992, he wrote:

Chomsky does arguably revise history a little - discussing that 1969 comment as if it were referring to Holocaust deniers, rather than to the Nazis themselves - but that’s a little besides the point. Chomsky simply cannot be fairly accused of advocating Holocaust denial. The suggestion that he’d endorse the Iranian conference is unwarranted.

I won’t discuss the British petition to academically boycott two Israeli Universities, which I assume is what David is referring to. Instead, I’ll refer readers to this link; Ilan Pappe’s and Henri Picciotto’s essays demonstrate by example that it is possible to support boycotts and divestment campaigns against Israel without being anti-semitic or supporting Holocaust denial.

Is something missing from Bean’s purse? Maybe reading this blog entry will give her a clue!

It’s tragic, when delinquency strikes so young….

This has been going around… I got it from Shades of Grey.

Yesterday, I posted a rather doom-and-gloom post, arguing that if they get the chance, Republicans will not be content merely to allow the abortion decision to return to the states. Instead, as the nationwide “partial birth” abortion ban suggests, they will seek to chip away at abortion rights on the national level, stripping away the availability of abortion even in firmly “pro-choice” states like New York.

Nor do I expect Roe to be overturned, because they don’t need to overturn it. Especially if the Supreme Court decides that “the Salerno standard” should be used for abortion law, Roe could be turned into an empty, powerless decision without actually overturning it.

However, I should have also pointed out that even when Alito is confirmed, his anti-abortion views won’t dominate the Court. With Alito on the Court, the person replacing O’Connor as the swing vote will be Justice Kennedy. And although I think Kennedy is worse than O’Connor on abortion (most notably, he voted in favor of vague “partial birth” abortion bans), it doesn’t seem likely that Kennedy - who voted with O’Connor on the Casey decision - would want to eviscerate Roe.

So while it’s not impossible that my doomsday scenario will come about, I don’t expect it to come about just because Alito is confirmed. (But if Bush gets to replace a second pro-choice vote in the Court, and if Republicans keep control of Congress…)

My, did this crack me up. Fuller documentation on educe me.

Curtsy: Pandagon.

[Bumped to the top!]

I’m now taking submissions for the First Edition of The Big Fat Carnival. If you have a blog and you’re sympathetic to the cause, please consider linking to this post!

The Big Fat Carnival is a carnival for collecting some of the best blog posts regarding fat pride; fat acceptance; critiques of anti-fat bigotry, attitudes and research; celebration of images of fat people; practical difficulties of being fat; fat love (queer and otherwise); feminist views of fat and fat acceptance; the health at every size movement (HAES); and whatever else each edition’s editor feels fits into the theme.

(But please note, The Big Fat Carnival is not a place to advocate weight-loss diets, weight loss surgery (WLS), or feederism.)

The first edition of The Big Fat Carnival will be hosted by Ampersand on “Alas” on Tuesday, February 7th. Please read the call for submissions, and submit your posts to Ampersand via email or via this webform. The deadline for submissions is Sunday, February 5th.

Since this is the first edition, feel free to submit not only new posts, but also any old posts you’ve written - or that other folks have written - that you consider particularly loaded with merit.

And if you’d like to host a future edition of The Big Fat Carnival on your own blog, please email Ampersand and we’ll get you hooked up.

For those of you who are following the BDSM and Patriarchy discussion, be sure to read the comments to this post on Charles’ livejournal. Charles re-posted one of his comments on his livejournal, and the exchange between Charles, by Kip and Elkins is very interesting.

We got DVR (digital video recording - a lot like TIVO) last year, and it’s totally changed how I watch TV. I seldom have any idea what days the shows I watch are broadcast, and I never watch TV live or with commercials if I can avoid it. For me, being able to watch when I watch - and fast-forward past commercials - makes TV twice as enjoyable as it was.

But me, and others like me, are going to ruin free TV.

Once almost no one - and especially, no one with enough money to afford DVR or TIVO - watches commercials, the “commercial break” model of free-TV will be ruined. I think that this will lead to one of two possible outcomes:

1) The high-production-value, high-end TV I like - shows such as Battlestar Gallactica, West Wing and Buffy The Vampire Slayer - will cease to exist on free TV (although there will still be some of these shows on HBO and Showtime). Only extremely cheap to produce shows - such as reality TV and talk shows - will be available via free TV stations.

or

2) “Commercial breaks” will be supplemented by, and eventually completely replaced by, animated ads that run during shows at the bottom of the TV screen. There’s already a limited number of these ads run - usually brief promos for other shows on the same network - and they’re dreadful, distracting and dismaying. Some of them even have their own sound track, which makes it impossible to hear what characters on screen are saying.

Perhaps it won’t be one or the other - perhaps it’ll be a combination of the two. But that’s the future. All the fault of me and the “fast foward” button on my DVR remote.

Over on Pandagon, Amanda writes:

Via PZ, the likely outcome after Roe vs. Wade is overturned. I’ve written before about this, but it is really astonishing sometimes to really take a step back and look at how much of the country loathes and resents women who want our basic liberty.

It’s been the pet theory for many on the left that women’s rights aren’t really under threat, because the Republicans can’t afford to ban abortion and therefore lose the rallying point of their base. I think there’s some evidence for this, but it’s clear now that the Repubs are going to throw the base this bone and hope that the anti-contraception/anti-gay rallying keeps them going strong.

I’m convinced that this isn’t the way things are going to go. Roe is not going to be overturned. Abortion rights will not revert to the states. And the results will probably be worse than what Amanda is expecting.

If the Republicans get a new, more anti-legal-abortion Supreme Court (and I think they will), they won’t choose to overturn Roe. Instead, the process of whittling Roe down - already well begun by the Casey decision - will be put into overdrive.

Here’s three changes I’d expect to see (not the only three, by any means).

1. The remade Court will discover that “partial birth” abortion bans that aren’t limited to late term abortions, or indeed to identifiable specific medical procedures, and that provide no exceptions for cases in which a pregnancy has put a woman’s health in jeopardy, are Constitutional after all. The Federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban will become the law of the land.
2. Now that anti-abortion laws no longer have to make exceptions to protect women’s health, a bunch of of the standard laws will be passed in new versions that lack the health exception. (For instance, parental notification).
3. The Court will decide to apply the Salerno standard to abortion laws. What would this mean? Right now, if a state passes a new abortion law - for example, a law saying that before getting an abortion a woman has to pay for and take a six-week class in moral responsibility taught by her local anti-abortion “crisis” center - someone (probably Planned Parenthood or the ACLU) sues, and the state is not allowed to enforce that law until after the courts have determined if it’s Constitutional or not.

   With the Salerno standard, however, that law will be in effect until it is found unconstitutional - a process that could take many years. Furthermore, the same law would have to be sued many times; for instance, even if the law was found to create an “undue burden” on someone who lives 120 miles away from the nearest “crisis center,” that would just overturn the law for women in that particular situation. Women who couldn’t afford the crisis center would have to sue separately on those grounds; women whose job schedules wouldn’t permit a six-week class would have to sue separately on those grounds; and so on.

   But maybe after ten years and six lawsuits, the new “moral responsibility class” law would have finally have been overturned. No problem - the legislature would just pass some other ridiculous anti-abortion law, and the process begins anew. The Salerno standard would make it possible for Republicans to ban abortion through a series of dubiously Constitutional laws creating barriers between women and reproductive rights.

Without overturning Roe, they will attempt to pass new laws that will make it in practice impossible for many or most women to get abortions. And most of these laws will be “stealth” abortion bans, laws designed to seem moderate or reasonable on the surface (and therefore protecting Republican congressfolks from voter backlash) while actually banning a wide range of abortion procedures. (The Federal “partial birth” abortion (PBA) ban is a classic example of a “stealth” ban; they marketed it as applying only to a single uncommon procedure performed post-viability, but the PBA ban’s text could cover a wide range of procedures, mostly pre-viability).

And if the Republicans continue to control Congress, many of those laws will happen at the federal level, meaning that even abortion-rights meccas like New York state will be subject to the new regulations. Contrary to what many people say, the destruction of Roe (whether it’s actually overturned, as Amanda expects, or instead whittled down to a shell, as I expect) will not mean it’ll be up to the individual states to decide.

When was the last time you heard any powerful Republican object to the federal “partial-birth” abortion ban on federalist grounds - that is, on the grounds of the (alleged) conservative belief that such decisions should be left to the states? By passing the Federal PBA ban, the Republicans have made it clear that they consider abortion to be a matter for Federal law, not for federalism. New York, California, Oregon, and the other white-colored states on the map above are not safe.

For this reason, it’s essential that pro-choicers stop talking about Roe being overturned as if that’s the only worse-case scenario. As long as voters believe that Roe not being overturned means that reproductive rights are protected, pro-lifers will be able to hide behind Roe’s existence while quietly ripping practical reproductive rights to shreds.

As ever, please post links, thoughts, jokes, recipes, whatever in the comments. And you’re welcome to post links to your own stuff here too, if you like.

Here’s some of what I’ve read lately:

From MTV.com, an article about fatsuits inspired by the current movie Just Friends:

I ran into the MTV piece via Big Fat Blog. I was particularly struck by this dead-on comment by BFB reader “Shyly”:

Years ago, I went to see The Nutty Professor (Eddie Murphy version) with my friend Phil. After the movie, Phil and I ended up discussing fatphobia, and he remarked that during the worse of the fat jokes in that movie I was squirming in obvious discomfort. So there we were, watching the movie: Me uncomfortable with the anti-fat bigotry on screen, and Phil made uncomfortably aware of the fact that what was on screen was anti-fat bigotry by my presence.

It was a weird dynamic. Probably a bit like going to see a Farrelly Brothers movie with a disabled friend.

That’s two “comparison of oppressions” metaphors in this post: fatsuits and blackface (a comparison that a lot of comment-writers at BFB question), and fat and disability. I’ve already done fat and gay, a little over a year ago.

But of course, no two oppressions are really the same. It’s not even the case that any two fat people necessarily feel the same oppression from anti-fat bigotry. In the comments to another post, Reddecca commented that it had never even occurred to her that fat women and fat men are facing the same oppression; she had always thought of fat-phobia as a women’s issue.

She’s not right - after all, that legislator in Hawaii didn’t suggest that only female fat teachers should be weighed and “dealt with appropriately.” But she’s not wrong, either - a lot of the bigotry experienced by fat women is not merely a meaner form of what men experience, but qualitatively different, because of how fat and gender intersect. (For example, disgust at fatness harms both fat men and women; but it also functions as a way of socially controlling and limiting all women, fat or not. See Naomi Wolf’s wonderful polemic The Beauty Myth - or for that matter, Jill’s recent experiences (see especially Zuzu’s comment)). Both lenses - a feminist lens and a fat acceptance lens - are necessary.

Comparisons are onerous and difficult. On a different comments thread on Big Fat Blog, PCKim, herself both fat and Black, objected to the blackface/fatsuit comparison:

PCKim makes a great argument. At the same time, I’d hate to think that the civil rights struggle - surely one of the most important moral movemetns in American history - leaves no lessons that can be applied to other situations. Everything is different, but at the same time, every human life is different from every other life. It doesn’t mean that comparisons are always useless, or that fat people can’t learn anything about our own situation by considering the history of racism and sexism. No oppression is totally the same, but no oppression is totally different, either. (Later in her post, PCKim does seem to say that sometimes comparisons are appropriate).

(Postscript: Be sure to read this excellent post by Reddecca, too.)

Wow, is this disgusting.

No luck so far finding out what “appropriate measures” consist of, but I’ll keep looking.

This is a bit similar to a story a year ago, when a California legislator proposed including children’s BMIs on report cards, right under their grades. Because if there one thing California culture lacks, it’s people being judged by their weight.

Curtsy: Brutal Women.

This is a post where I’ll be discussing the Carnival of Fatty Goodness, a proposed blog carnival for highlighting posts written from a fat pride or fat acceptance point of view.

This came up in the discussion on this thread. Here, based on what we discussed and also on what I’ve been thinking, are my proposals. I’m putting these forward for discussion; they are by no means writ in stone.

Please let me know what y’all think. I realize that the bit about fat fetishism may be particularly controversial, so please don’t feel that you can’t argue against that if you don’t agree with it.

By the way, someone asked in comments why we’ve only seen Maddox a couple of times since she was born. Well, the first twelve months of Sydney’s life, I didn’t post many pictures of her, either; baby blogging didn’t become a regular feature until Syndey was over a year old.

Here’s a secret about very tiny babies: they don’t do much. Maddox eats. She cries. She sleeps. And yes, her brain is working like a fiend, absorbing new information at a rate terrifying to contemplate. Personally, I think that’s all adorable, but it doesn’t provide a big variety of photo-ops. For photogenic cutenetosity, the material becomes much better once the little parasites are mobile.

Or at least, that’s my experience. We’ll see if Nick’s experience is any different over the next year. :-)

Meanwhile, let’s talk about that most venerable and time-honored game: Peek-a-boo.

Step one: The game master (GM) initiates play by hiding her eyes. This renders her effectively invisible; other players must indicate this by saying things like “where’s Sydney? Where’d Sydney go? Have you seen Sydney?” [*] If the GM is peeking between her fingers, it may be helpful for the other players to visibly search for the GM under bowls, inside the toaster, and in their breast pockets.

[*] It is probably for the best if you substitute the name of your particular GM for “Sydney” when you attempt playing Peek-a-boo at home. Alternatively, you could convince your GM’s parents to legally change their child’s name to “Sydney.”
Read the rest of this entry »

A few posters have requested that I transfer this discussion of BDSM and patriarchy into its own thread (right now it’s taking place in the “root of all oppression” thread). So here are a couple of posts, to get this thread started; and then I’ll copy over a bunch of the comments, where appropriate.

Myca wrote:

Then, cicely wrote:

After that, Charles responded:

Interesting interview with Lance deHaven-Smith, a professor specializing in Florida election law and the author of a new book about the 2000 Florida election. From the interview:

I know that a lot of people are sick of hearing about ballot-counting in Florida in 2000. I’m not. To a great extent, my belief that the US has a working democracy was shattered in that election. So, also, was my belief that high-level Republicans ever act in good faith (before the 2000 election, I actually had some admiration for Scalia).

Not that I really beleive that Democrats as a whole would have acted better. (In the interview, deHaven-Smith argues that the specific Democrats who were an alternative to Jeb Bush in Florida in 2000 would have acted better, had they been in charge of vote counting; that may be the case, but I don’t believe we can generalize from those specific Democrats to Democrats in general).

DeHaven-Smith argues, persuasively, that the real problem in Florida wasn’t just bad technology; it was a system in which partisans with a strong stake in the outcome of elections, are in charge of administrating elections, and also in charge of investigating problems afterwards. This creates a strong bias against both fair elections, and very little motive for anyone to strive for absolute honesty in vote-counting.

Curtsy: Kevin Drum.

The Sixth Carnival of Feminists is up. As usual, lots of good reading there.

Also, Jenn at Reappropriate has announced a new blog carnival: The Radical Women of Color Carnival. “All bloggers, especially women of colour, are invited and encouraged to submit or nominate posts that highlight being a woman of colour and/or issues associated with this collective identity.” Click on over for the details.

And while I’m on the subject, Bitch | Lab has announced another new carnival, The Carnival of Sex Positive Feminism, and is taking submissions.

Hmmmn… I wonder if it’s time for a Carnival of Fat?