Via Riba Rambles, I see that last month, Northwestern University’s Anthony D’Amato suggested that more porn leads to less rape. D’Amato points out that rape prevalence (as measured by the federal government’s big National Crime Victimization Survey) has gone down in recent years (his comparison - he calls the decline in rape “steeper than the stock market crash that led to the Great Depression” - may be the single least relevant comparison I’ve ever read).

D’Amato points out that even as rape prevalence has declined, porn consumption has gone up:

There is, however, one social factor that correlates almost exactly with the rape statitistics [sic]. The American public is probably not ready to believe it. My theory is that the sharp rise in access to pornography accounts for the decline in rape. The correlation is inverse: the more pornography, the less rape. It is like the inverse correlation: the more police officers on the street, the less crime.

The pornographic movie “Deep Throat” which started the flood of X-rated VHS and later DVD films, was released in 1972. Movie rental shops at first catered primarily to the adult film trade. Pornographic magazines also sharply increased in numbers in the
1970s and 1980s. Then came a seismic change: pornography became available on the new internet. Today, purveyors of internet porn earn a combined annual income exceeding the total of the major networks ABC, CBS, and NBC.

(Okay, the “sic” was cheap of me. Whaddaya want? I’m running a blog here. G’way.)

Three problems with D’Amato’s theory:

1) During recent years, the NCVS has found a steep decline in all violent crime, not just rape. It seems likely that whatever’s causing the decline in all violent crime measured by the NCVS, is also causing the decline in rape measured by the NCVS; but it seems unlikely that pornography reduces all violent crime.

2) The NCVS measurement of rape prevalence is crap. Many other studies - including two major studies conducted by the Federal government - have found much higher rates of rape prevalence than the NCVS. Particularly notable is this study, by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which directly compared the NCVS’s methodology for measuring rape prevalence with modern “best practice” survey design - and found that the NCVS vastly undercounted rape.

(D’Amato does say that the decrease in rape is collaborated by other sources, but he doesn’t cite any specific sources other than the NCVS).

3) D’Amato has no measurement of porn prevalence other than internet access, nor does he do any real statistical analysis. In contrast, studies with sophisticated statistical analysis and more accurate measures of porn usage - such as the study published in Four Theories of Rape in American Society - tend to find that porn usage has little or no correlation with rape prevalence.

D’Amato has one good point; there is no evidence that the rise in internet access (and, presumably, in porn usage) has been accompanied by a rise in rape prevalence. That makes it seem unlikely that porn is a cause of rape, as some radical feminists have suggested.

My own belief is that whatever porn’s effects on rape prevalence are, they’re probably too small to be measured.

UPDATE: Abyss2Hope and Feminist Law Professors both have excellent posts critiquing D’Amato’s paper.

[Crossposted at Creative Destruction, where no mouse fears an elephant. If your comments aren’t being approved here, try there.]

Via Religious Left Online, I ran into Dignan’s post on “The Politics of Poverty.” Dignan criticizes both the right and left approaches to fighting poverty (although the solution he settles on is fairly right-wing), but in this post I’m gonig to concentrate on his critique of income transfer programs (also know as welfare).

1.) Is The Government Inefficient?

Dignan writes:

As it relates to poverty reduction, government fills the role of the middleman. And no middleman in all of history has created more friction and additional cost than the federal government. Non-profit charities are often rated by their ability to direct the highest percentage possible of donated funds to those in need. The higher the administrative costs are, the less money goes to those the charity intends to help.

If the federal government was rated in the same manner, it would fail tremendously. A tremendous portion of money raised (i.e. taxes) for those in need (i.e. welfare recipients) actually goes to pay the salaries of government employees, retirement accounts, an unreal amount of office space, etc. If the US federal government actually were a non-profit charity, it would be on the cover of Time magazine for defrauding its donors.

Dignan should take a look at the federal Earned Income Transfer Credit (EITC), the largest cash grant for poor families in the US. The EITC spends less than 1% of its budget on administrative costs¹ , a ratio that I doubt any private anti-poverty charity can match. (The EITC is probably even cheaper to run than it appears, since state EITC programs save money by “piggybacking” on the Federal program’s administration; if the impact of state programs could be included, the EITC’s adminstrative costs to benefits paid out ratio might be less than half a percent.)

Of course, the EITC has an exceptionally low administration-to-outlay ratio, but the percent of their budgets most federal income transfer programs spend on administration - 9% to 13%¹ - is excellent by the standards of nonprofit charities. Here’s the advice Daniel Borochoff (President of the American Institute of Philanthropy) gives people considering giving to private charities:

Ask how much of your donation goes for general administration and fund-raising expenses and how much is left for the program services you want to support. AIP’s Charity Rating Guide recommends that in most cases 60% or more of your charitable donation should go to program services. Less than 40% should be spent on general administration and fund-raising costs.

Dignan’s belief that private charities are far more efficient than government transfer programs has no basis in truth. In terms of bang for the buck, income transfer programs are as good as private charities, and in some cases - such as the EITC - ten or twenty or fifty times better than private charities.

2) Are Income Transfer Programs “Coercion, Not Charity”

Dignan writes:

…Government aid is not charity. It doesn’t even have the ability to be charity.

By its very nature, government is coercive. That it, it has the power of the sword to command people to action. Almost everything the government does comes with the implication that if one goes against the government, they will be forcibly made to do as the government requires. It doesn’t make sense for the Religious Left to speak of helping the poor by the country giving more. It is too easy to be generous with other people’s money.

Dignan’s reasoning is atrocious. Even if the government is coercive, how does it logically follow that “it doesn’t make sense… to speak of helping the poor” through the government spending more on income transfer programs? There’s no logical reason to suppose that coercive money will have less of a poverty-reduction effect than non-coercive money would.

Dignan’s logical incoherance aside, I take issue with his discussion of coercion. Dignan ignores the difference between the coercion of a dictatorship and the so-called “coercion” of a representative democracy. In a dictatorship, it’s true that no one has any choice. But unless Dignan sees no difference between democracy and dictatorship, he must realize that US taxpayers do have a choice - a choice at the voting booth.² We choose to elect legislators who choose to spend a certain amount on income transfer programs. And in states with ballot measure elections, we can sometimes vote directly for specific taxes and programs.³

Dignan’s argument, because it dishonestly pretends that electoral choice does not exist, is too inaccurate to have any merit.

3) Is Helping The Poor Really About Helping The Rich Feel Good?

Dignan asks:

But isn’t it fruitless to try to end poverty since Jesus said that we would always have poor among us?

This made me think that there is more to this than is on the surface. Why would Jesus ask people to do something that he knew they would fail at?

Maybe Jesus thinks that it’s self-evidently worthwhile to help those poor people we can help, even if that’s less than 100%. It’s quite possible to answer Dignan’s question while remaining focused on trying to improve the lives of people in need. Unfortunately, Dignan goes in another direction, saying that the purpose of charity is to help the rich feel good:

Ask anyone who has spent time working in a soup kitchen or building a house for the homeless and they will tell you how good it made them feel. I don’t think that we should be motivated by the promise of feeling good about ourselves, but I don’t think there is any denying that great good does come from helping those in need. There also tends to be a relationship between how close we get to those in need and how we feel about our works of charity. Spending time with an inner-city fatherless child can have a tremendous impact upon our lives in addition to the positive impact on the child’s life. However, in those cases where we simply give money to a charity (still a laudable action), the impact upon us and those in need is lessoned.

So how much are we missing when we delegate charity to the government? How easy does it then become to avoid the poor and avoid getting messy with other people’s lives? How easy do it become for the poor to resent those better off in society that they have little interaction with? How easy does it become for some to foment class warfare?

* Dignan says “I don’t think that we should be motivated by the promise of feeling good about ourselves,” but a paragraph later he says “how much are we missing when we delegate charity to the government?” So despite his disclaimer, Dignan uses the supposed lack of benefits to the wealthy as a reason to oppose welfare programs. But that’s nonsense - income transfer programs should be supported based on how much they help the poor, not based on how little they do to help Dignan.

* Dignan’s argument is an obviously false dichotomy. We can support income transfer programs and we can participate in programs that provide direct services or mentoring to poor people. An argument that implies we must choose one or the other is dishonest.

4) What Actually Works

In his post, Dignan fails to ask the most important question: Can income transfer programs actually reduce poverty in the real world?

The answer is, yes they can. Look at this table⁴ , comparing child poverty rates of various countries, before and after income transfer programs take effect.

If we ignore the effects of income transfer programs, child poverty in the US is comparable to that of many other wealthy nations - and less common than it is in some countries. But because other countries have much more generous income transfer programs, the child poverty problem in the US ends up being worse than the child poverty problem in any other rich country.

Some right-wingers claim that such international comparisons are unfair, because the poor in the US are richer than the poor in other countries.⁵ This is not true. When measured by purchasing power, the poor in other wealthy countries are generally better off than the poor in the U.S. According to international poverty scholar Timothy Smeeding⁶ :

…The real incomes of Germans at the 10th percentile are on average 2 percentage points higher than the real incomes of Americans at the 10th percentile. Low-income Canadians are even better off, with incomes 6 percentage points higher than low-income Americans. Only in Great Britain (whose GDP per person is less than 70 percent of that in the United States in Table A.1) were the living standards of low-income house holds measurably lower than in the United States (35 vs. 39 percent). Overall, lower-income Americans are no better off and often worse off than the low-income persons in other nations….

These real income measures are admittedly crude. They should be seen as measures of net spendable income rather than of total consumption, which would also include goods and services such as health care, education and child care that are provided at different prices and under different financing schemes in different nations. To the extent that low-income citizens elsewhere need to spend less out of pocket for such goods as these than do low-income Americans, the latter are at an even greater real income disadvantage.

If Dignan is really concerned with the poor, his primary question should stop being “is government in some academic sense coercive?,” or “what good does helping the poor do for non-poor people like me?” His primary question should instead be “what has been proved to work?”

By that standard, income transfer programs are an essential part of any serious poverty-reduction agenda. And that’s the choice - serious poverty reduction versus “free market” solutions that have never worked in the real world - that all voters, Christians and non-Christians, face in the voting booth. At the next election, I hope that Dignan decides to vote for what’s been proved to reduce poverty, rather than voting against helping the poor.

[Crossposted at Creative Destruction. If your comments aren’t being approved here, try there.]

1. Internal Revenue Service, “Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) Program Effectiveness and Program Management FY 2002 – FY 2003″ (pdf link) (back) (back)
2. As I’ve argued in the past, there’s more to freedom than the freedom to vote; a free vote is only meaningful in the context of other civil rights, such as free speech, the freedom to walk the streets, and so on. I stand by that, but I’m not going to discuss it in detail in this post because it would be too much of a digression. (back)
3. Dignan is inconsistent to object to coercion only when the government does it. What about God? Dignan says that Christians are commanded to help the poor. But isn’t a commandment from God - which always carries the implicit threat “do it or you’ll burn in hell” - at least as coercive as anything the IRS has to offer? Plus, I don’t get to vote for a different God if I don’t like this God’s policies, which makes God immeasurably more coercive than government. (back)
4. United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef), “A League Table of Child Poverty In Rich Nations.” (pdf link.) (back)
5. It’s also been claimed that such international comparisons are unfair because the US child poverty problem is linked to single parenthood. However, as figure 35 of this web page shows, income transfer programs in other countries are also better at helping single-parent families out of poverty. (back)
6. Smeeding, Timothy, 2004. “Public Policy and Economic Inequality: The United States in Comparative Perspective” (pdf link.) (back)

1. Tiffany over at Blackfeminism.org has a review of a special on AIDS in Black America, and accompanying links.

2. Any Christians in the house? This guys has a Christian blog, and he’s talking about racism. I think it might be useful for some of my readers to go over and comment. I personally don’t agree with the premise of some of the questions, but I’m not knowledgeable enough about Christian theology or scripture to give the type of answer I would like.

3. Autobiogrpahy of a Face has a good critique of how biracial and multiracial identities can be used to further racism.

4. Dork Nation is talking cultural appropriation, comparing Quentin Tarantino and Vanilla Ice. If you want to read Gandoff Mantooth’s whole series on cultural appropriation start here, then go here second, go here third, and finally go here.

5. The Think talks about his experience as a “diversity facilitator.”

6. Prof. Marc Lamont Hill takes on the MTV’s “Yo Momma” show. Now here is a good example of the kind of cultural appropriation that is dangerous. I have seen this show, and it is troubling.

7. C.N. Le has a post about a new program that allows people to see how common their surnames are.

8. Matt_Bishop at Crooked Timber wonders if we are seeing the end of carry on luggage.

9. Lester Spence asks why we keep putting stories about Black male politicians in the style section. This is a really good comentary on how the personal lives and styles of black male politicians become the more prominent features that reporters choose to highlight. I agree. Do I really need to know how big Kwame Kilpatrick’s earring is?? I think this phenomenon also happens to black women, but in a much different way. Black men are complimented on their allegedly “hip” “cool” clothes, while black women’s sense of style is scrutinized. Are people still talking about Cynthia McKinney’s hair?

Comments are working again! Apparently WordPress version 2.02 was a bit unstable and error-prone; “Alas” has now been updated to WordPress version 2..04, which has fixed the problems. Also, “Alas” pages are now loading noticeably faster then they have in ages. Basically, things are now un-fucked-up around here.

For this much improved state of affairs, I am very grateful to the one and only Sam Devol, who got under the “Alas” hood and put things into working order.

Thanks, Sam - I’m bowing in your presumed direction and muttering “I’m not worthy! I’m not worthy!” at you!

“Alas” is having a bunch of problems. I haven’t a clue what’s going on; if anyone could offer me some advice, I’d appreciate it.

For a description of the problems I’ve been having, read this thread and also this thread on the WordPress support forums. If you have any suggestions, you can leave replies there, or email me at barry@amptoons.com.

Michael Scheuer, a 22-year CIA vet who specialized in studying bin Laden, answers six questions for Harpers. The bit that will be quoted the most, I think, is this: “In the long run, we’re not safer because we’re still operating on the assumption that we’re hated because of our freedoms, when in fact we’re hated because of our actions in the Islamic world.”

I’m posting a couple of excerpts, but it’s worthwhile to read the whole thing.
Read the rest of this entry »

Comments aren’t working, and I understand some folks have been having other problems as well (mainly in Firefox). I’m looking into it - hopefully, it’ll be solved before too long.

[I've decided to start a series of reposted posts from 2002. These will all be posts that were accidentally lost from the archives at some point, and so haven't been online for many years. I'll be editing the posts as little as I can stand, apart from occasional footnotes added at the time of reposting.]

[The following was originally posted September 8, 2002, about 2 and a half years before Andrea Dworkin died in April of 2005.]

I noticed that someone had found my blog via a google search for "Dworkin liberal blog." Which wouldn’t be worth noting, except that the searcher turns out to have been Ted Barlow. Ted’s irritated that Glenn Reynolds used Andrea Dworkin to argue that the right is more fun: "I mean, which would you rather have, wild sex and high living or Andrea Dworkin and a spare lifestyle relieved only by an affected moral superiority?" Ted very capably points out how inane Glenn’s logic is (read Ted’s post to see it). In addition, Ted writes:

I am sick of being saddled with Andrea Dworkin. Andrea Dworkin serves two functions in modern political discourse: liberals either ignore her or denounce her, and conservatives either ignore her or use her to tar feminists/ liberals as anti-sex fundamentalists. To prove my point, I did a little experiment: I did a Google search for "Dworkin liberal blog" in an attempt to find one liberal blogger saying something nice about Andrea Dworkin.

To my surprise, the nicest thing Ted found was me, in this post, pointing out that Dworkin (for all her other faults) never said that terrorism was "an appropriate response," as another blogger had implied. As Ted accurately says, my post was neither a denouncement or an endorsement of Dworkin.

(Hey, have you ever noticed that Dworkin is a "leading feminist" whenever the righties and anti-feminists use her as a weapon against feminists; but conveniently forget her existence when claiming that no prominent feminist criticized Clinton? In any case, Dworkin is not a liberal, so using her to attack liberalism is just silly.)

As for Dworkin… I’m not a fan. When talking with other feminists, I’ve often criticized Dworkin, and in particular Dworkin’s proposed anti-porn law (written with law prof Catherine MacKinnon). But I have no desire to criticize Dwokin in a non-feminist space; what’s the point? As Ted correctly says, outside of feminist circles, no one agrees with Dworkin, and almost no one takes her seriously.

Which is a shame, because it reflects the marginalization of radical feminist thought. Radical feminists - and I’m not one - have done a lot of good for this culture. Without radical feminists, almost no one would know about domestic violence, and the nationwide network of shelters and resources to help victims would not exist. Without radical feminists, the government would still measure rape in their annual crime survey by asking "has anyone ever attacked you in any other way?," and spousal rape would be legal in most of the U.S.A.. Without radical feminists, sexual harassment would be acceptable. Without radical feminists, the nationwide network of resources to help rape victims would not exist, and date, acquaintance and spousal rape - which is to say, the majority of rapes - would be invisible. Radical feminists were the first to point out that equality before the law is a long way from substantive equality - an analysis that has spread through all of feminism, to such an extent that most feminists now forget that it was ever a radical feminist position.¹

Unfortunately - due, in part, to Andrea Dworkin’s leadership - radical feminism pushed itself into irrelevance in the 1980s, by focusing most of its activism and energy on an unconstitutional and divisive anti-porn law (radical feminist Susan Brownmiller, who is not a Dworkin fan, describes how this happened in her memoir In Our Time). As a result, although radical feminist thought remains active and relevant in academic feminist circles, no one outside of that group is paying much attention anymore. And the split in feminism - between "anti-porn feminists" and "free speech feminists" - is still lingering (and weakening feminism) today.

Hindsight’s always 20-20.

It’s too easy to focus on what Dworkin’s gotten wrong while ignoring what she’s gotten right. For example. I admire the currently-fashionable liberal critique of Saudi Arabia’s sexism, and I hope the concern for Saudi women’s rights is more than a pretext for partisan attacks on Bush (the way Bush’s concern for Afghan women was no more than a pretext for invading Afghanistan). But let’s remember that Andrea Dworkin got there 25 years before they did:

I hear on newscasts that Mr Carter was enchanted by Saudi Arabia, that he had a wonderful time. I remember that Mrs Carter used the back door. I remember that the use of contraceptives in Saudi Arabia is a capital crime. I remember that in Saudi Arabia, women are a despised and imprisoned caste, denied all civil rights, sold into marriage, imprisoned as sexual and domestic servants in harems. I remember that in Saudi Arabia women are forced to breed babies, who had better be boys, until they die.

I believe most liberals are sincere in their commitment to women’s rights and sex equality. But too many liberals now castigating Bush for US support of Saudi Arabia were silent when Clinton was in office. And too many liberals seem willing to support an anti-choice Democrat for President (hey, if the Dems nominate Kucinich, and if the Greens nominate McKinney, think of what a boost for the Green Party that would be!)² There are about a zillion ways I think Andrea Dworkin is wrong - but I know her passion for women’s rights and sex equality has nothing to do with partisan politics, and is not contingent or negotiable. I admire the hell out of that.

(UPDATE: Ted Barlow responds.)

1. In hindsight, I’m not sure it’s correct to say that radical feminists were the first to point out this distinction. Regardless, in my opinion radical feminists did more to develop and propagate this insight than any other group of feminists. (back)
2. Yes, I did later become a Kucinich supporter, but not until after he had switched to being pro-choice. (back)

Photo by Bean.

With a pseudonym like vegankid, i really haven’t written many letters regarding typical vegan ethics. Well, let’s go ahead and fill my quota for a while.

In response to a rabies outbreak, Chinese officials called for the mass killing of dogs in July. Within a few days, more than 50,000 dogs were killed. Many dogs, including those that had been vaccinated, were strangled, clubbed, and electrocuted to death while the dogs’ caretakers and passersby watched in horror. The plan was to kill hundreds of thousands of dogs in order to erradicate the rabies outbreak - a measure that is cruel and completely unneccessary. People in China organized to fight the government policy. They were able to stop the killings in Jining and possibly Mouding, but they are asking for help from those throughout the world to stop the unneccessary killing of their loved ones and the strays that roam about their neighborhoods. You can find more information and pictures, as well as an easy way to send an email to Ambassador Zhou Wenzhong, at the PETA Action Center (i know, i know, but just cuz i take issue with PETA doesn’t mean they don’t have a good campaign every now and then).

And since i missed last week’s letter, due to moving, i’ve chosen to go ahead and send a quick second. The next campaign entails millions of tax-payer dollars, cruel animal experiments, eugenics, and something so beyond homophobia that i’m having a hard time thinking of a word to describe it. Those of us that have been in the animal rights/lib community for awhile have come to know the infamous Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU). But now the facility has come to the attention of Queer activists, as well. Slated to foot the multi-million dollar bill until 2008, taxpayers are unknowingly supporting animal experiments at OHSU to identify the biological basis for homosexuality in sheep with the ultimate goal of being able to “cure” humyns of homosexuality. Stopanimaltests.com says the experiments are being carried out as follows:

OHSU experimenter Charles Roselli is killing scores of sheep and cutting open the brains of rams he calls “male-oriented” (homosexual) in an attempt to find the hormonal mechanisms behind homosexual tendencies, so that they can subsequently be changed.

You can find out more about the experiments and their link to Oregon State University (OSU) experimenter Frederick Stormshak at stopanimaltests.com, which asks that we write polite letters to OSU president Dr. Ed Ray and OHSU president-elect Dr. Joseph Roberston. You can find their email and snail-mail addresses below.

Dr. Ed Ray, President
Oregon State University
634 Kerr Administration Building
Corvallis, OR 97331-2128
ed.ray@oregonstate.edu

Joseph Robertson Jr., M.D., M.B.A., President-Elect
Oregon Health and Science University
3181 S.W. Sam Jackson Park Rd.
Portland, OR 97239-3098
Robertjo@ohsu.edu

I’ve added a fancy archives gizmo to the sidebar (inspired by how much I like the archive format at Capitalism Bad, Tree Pretty). I like it once it’s loaded, and it certainly makes the sidebar cleaner-looking, but it also slows down the load time (although on my browser, the rest of the page is readable while it loads, so it’s not so bad).

Also, I’ve added a “subscribe to comments” feature.

Like these add-ons? Hate them? Let me know, please.

UPDATE: “Fancy Archives” had to be deactivated - apparently the sucker was a real CPU hog. Oh, well.

It’s the latest, the greatest, the snappest and the happest!

Anyhow, please leave your comments about anything, and your links about anything, including stuff of your own that you’d like us to see. Link-whoring Blog-shilling is encouraged!

Here’s some stuff I’ve been reading:

The 2006 Black Weblog Award Nominations!
Lots of links to check out. Curtsy: Devious Diva.

Interview with RAWA member about the present state of women in Afghanistan

According to Afghanistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) 154 self-immolation cases involving women were reported from the western zone alone and 34 from the southern and eastern parts of the country in 2005. But the actual figures are much higher. Many of these women find all doors closed behind them and can’t think of any other way but to commit suicide to escape the horrible family and social problems they face. [Curtsy: Leiter Reports.]

cesarean-art.com” align=”right” class=”alignright” />Cesarean Art
Disturbing, maddening, extremely good series of illustrations by a woman who is infuriated - rightly! - because she was given no option but to have an unwanted second cesarean.

Shiny Ideas: Is Pre-Implantation Screening For Disabilities “Eugenics By Default”?
Interesting debate, in the posts and especially in the comments (including comments by a couple of my favorite bloggers), set off by the Elizabeth Schiltz article I linked to in the last link farm. Read this post and its comments first, and then read the follow-up post and its comments. And if you want still more, there’s some related discussion in the comments at Ballestexistenz, and another post at Shiny Ideas. (Phew, what a lot of links!)

Reappropriate on the Race-Based Survivor

Blackprof.com: Mark Lamont Hill on The Race-Based Survivor

The Debate Link on The Race-Based Survivor
This post features still more links on this subject…

SuperBabyMama: Life is a crippling trial that you have to bear because isn’t that what you do? (On being poor.)
I often see people imply that since some poor people own consumer durables (“cell phones, television, automobiles, etc”), they must not really be poor. It’s amazing how clueless some people are about how poverty works. Anyhow, SuperBabyMama’s post is the opposite of cluenessess.

Right now is the right time to hit SuperBabyMoma’s tip jar, if you’ve got even a few bucks you can spare.

BlackProf.com: New Study Finds Charter Schools No Better Than Regular Public Schools

Liz Conor: A Labour of Life
I like this post (about how difficult it is to work while taking care of young children) so much, I’m linking to it in two consecutive link farms. It’s very long, but the writing is excellent, and it has the best opening to any blog post I’ve ever read. Go, read, and leave Liz love in the comments so she’ll be tempted to return to blogging.

Pinko Feminist Hellcat: Cry Me A River, Rapist Scum
Regarding the “stress” excuse.

Feminist Reprise: The Crip And The Fat Chick
I’ve been meaning to write a post about the connections I see between the disabled rights and size acceptance movements, so when I read the title of this post I thought it would be about that. But it’s much better than that - it’s a biography of a romance, and wonderfully written, a well.

Feminist Reprise: Is Lesbian Land For You? Take the quiz and find out!

WilliamBruceWest.com: A Post About The Black Ghostbuster
Curtsy: Reappropriate.

New York Times: Does Poverty, Rather Than Ethnic Divisions, Cause Civil War?
Curtsy: Blackfeminism.org

Taking Steps: Cultural Appropriation (how to appreciate the fruits of someone else’s labors responsibly)
Again, via Reappropriate.

Hoyden-About-Town: Transparency In Pregnancy Counceling
Pro-Lifers think it would be a horrible imposition if “Crisis Pregnancy Centers” had to admit honestly and up-front what services they do and don’t provide. That these people pat themselves on their backs for their supposed moral superiority over the rest of us, even while wanting to retain the right to lie to and deceive their clients, is yet another example of how genuinely loathsome many enforced-childbirth activists are.

Vigilance: Female Sunday School Teacher Fired For Being Female
How dare she!

Boston Globe: Bush Says “Fuck You” To The Constitution’s Balance Of Powers

President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.

Pharyngula: No, A Fetus Can’t Feel Pain. Or Anything Else.

Pandagon: Money And Divorce Go Together Like A Horse And Carriage

Family Scholars: Debate About Single Fathers By Choice
In comments, I’m debating several folks on Family Scholars over if it’s inherently bad for children to be raised in motherless households.

Balkinization: Original Meaning And Original Application Are Not The Same Thing (Regarding Constitutional Interpretation)

[Crossposted at Creative Destruction. If your comments aren’t being approved here, try there.]

I was searching for bloggy critiques of Levy on bois, and was surprised by how little I found. The two best critiques I found were buried in comments; I’m reposting them here, in the hopes of making them easier for future searchers to find.

So what is a boi? For the purposes of this discussion, boi means “a female-born or female-bodied person…sometimes transsexual, transgendered, or intersexed, sometimes not…who generally does not identify wholly or at all as being feminine, female, a girl, or a woman, though some bois identify as one or more of these. Bois almost always identify as lesbians, dykes, or queers; many are also genderqueer or genderfucked. Bois can prefer a range of pronouns, including ‘he,’ ’she,’ or gender-neutral pronouns; it’s usually best to ask to avoid offence.” (Quoted from wikipedia).

This is a comment that Starfrosting left on the Gender Theory Livejournal, regarding an article Ariel Levy wrote for New York Magazine. Levy later used a slightly-rewritten version of her article as chapter four of her book Female Chauvinist Pigs.

I have read her article “Where the Bois Are” and as it’s one of the most offensive pieces I’ve read in a long time. I’d like to comment on it. Where to even begin. Levy doesn’t critique misogyny there; she simply interviews some bois who are misogynist and goes on to extrapolate that boi-hood is misogynistic. She writes that the ‘phenomenon’ of boi gender is about “young lesbians [going] beyond feminist politics, beyond androgyny, to explore a new generation of sex roles”; that “boihood has nothing to do with earth mothers or sisterhood or herbal tea, and everything to do with being young, hip, ‘sex positive,’ a little masculine, and ready to rock”–

I don’t want to unpack this endlessly, but to do it briefly:

1) All bois are lesbians? Hmm. Considering that Levy consistently mis-pronouns her subjects throughout the article, I’m a little wary of that judgement.

2) Teleological much? Evidently lesbianism used to be all about valuing and liberating womanhood, and now these ‘bois’ who of course are lesbians regardless of how they self-identify have moved into some wonderful apolitical postfeminist space.

3) Because, you know, being transmasculine means you’re antifeminist and misogynist.

4) Throughout the article there’s this really gross and classist set-up where ‘butch’ comes to figure archaic, working class, and piggish and boi comes to signify hip, new, upwardly mobile, and sexy. Again with the teleology.

5) Elsewhere Levy says that bois “have the luxury to prioritize play and pleasure in a different way [since] worrying about things like male privilege seems old-school and uncool.” This sort of facile ‘feminist’ analysis does not give me much faith in her book, or much of a desire to read it at all.

I know the points I’ve made have been somewhat disconnected and only relevant to a bit of the author’s work, but I just had to say something as I found her article not only incredibly transphobic, but not at all rigorous in its analysis of masculinity and sexuality, to put it mildly.

(To be fair, the identification of bois with lesbians is pretty common, not something unique to Levy; see, for example, the Wikipedia definition I quoted at the start of this post.)

The second comment I want to highlight is comment by one by Piny, which he left on “Alas” last year:

I read that chapter, and have read some of the book. I agree with her central premise–that sexualization is not sexual autonomy, and that some people seem confused on this point–and understand that ftms and bois make up a brief chapter in a book that’s about, y’know, women. Still, for fuck’s sake.

She claims that transitioning has become (I may be paraphrasing slightly) “so widespread as to be faddish.” She has a great deal of evidence to believe that people, queer women in particular, fear this and believe it to be true. It’s certainly true that transition is more common than it was when it was virtually impossible. She has no reason to believe that transition is a hot new trend, or any reason to believe that it’s _too_ common, and she doesn’t cite any numbers at all.

She also based her ideas about ftms on an interview with exactly one ftm, IIRC. That’s like using any given lesbian (possibly Susie Bright) to form opinions about all lesbians (including Sarah Hoagland). She took a very heteronormative view of bois, which was disappointing, and she accepted the lone transsexual’s statement that you can draw a thick black line between “boi” and “ftm,” which a lot of people in both groups dispute. She decided that “bois” became bois because they didn’t want to be adults. I also recall a discussion on an ftm livejournal community about her article, “Where the Bois Are,” much of which found its way into this book. Most of the commenters were extremely disappointed by her language and her limited portrayal. One commenter said that a friend of his who was interviewed in the article had done a snarky, sarcastic impression of a stereotypical boi that was then quoted as though in propria voce.

All in all, I wasn’t terribly happy with it.

I’ll just say that I know a lot of feminist ftms and bois. I know a lot of ftms and bois who don’t feel compelled to present that kind of stereotypical brittle masculinity, but I don’t think it’s fair to see that as an act of courage on their part. Basically, we’re like everyone else: when we feel safe and comfortable being gendervariant, we are. When we have role models that aren’t traditional, we feel no need to be traditional ourselves. When our community doesn’t condone woman-hating, we don’t.

Although I think that critiquing misogyny is always a good thing, I’m bothered by critiques that read sexism among bois, butches, and ftms as a special phenomenon or something especially related to transition–or a new thing, considering that butches have been around for a long time. It’s how people behave when they live under patriarchy. Their sexism isn’t much different from that of other men.

Jessant wrote: Levey bothered me because the impression you get from her portrayel of bois and trans-men was that these women were fleeing from their own gender to take on male privilege, and it’s even more damning if you look at it in the context of the book, which is basically arguing that some women are trying to take on more power by stepping on the backs of other women by accepting sexism and women-hating.

Yes, exactly! And don’t get me wrong, ftms get male privilege by transitioning. (There was a discussion of this on livejournal some months back, and one commenter wrote, “People assume I’m competent now!”) And bois _definitely_ receive a kind of male/masculine privilege in queer circles that are sexist. But that doesn’t mean either that we understand that when we do cost/benefit analyses, or that we transition because of it.

(Comment from elsewhere in the same thread: Lauren asking “When the hell are you getting your own blog, Piny?” Heh.)

[Crossposted at | Posted by Ampersand in Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Trans and Queer issues, Transsexual and Transgender related issues | 29 Comments »