Until the problems with my regular email addresses are resolved, I can be emailed at barryishere@gmail.com .

UPDATE: Problems resolved.

I found myself watching an episode of “Hell’s Kitchen,” which was reasonably entertaining. But I hated that a fat kitchen staffer was berated for being fat by the host, Gordon Ramsay: i.e., “get your lazy fat ass in gear,” “you fat jerk,” etc. (I’m paraphrasing, but I think I’ve got the gist right). I tried to imagine the popular revulsion if the host had berated a Jewish worker in the same way - “get your lazy Jewish ass in gear” and so forth. Is there any question that the host would have been fired?

Looking online a bit, I find that Ramsey also constantly referred to contestant Sara Horowitz (pictured) as “a fat cow,” “a bloody cow,” “a stupid mouthy cow,” etc. (Ramsay did this so often that another contestant bought Sara a toy cow as a gag gift). Unlike the fat man Ramsay berated, Sara isn’t fat. But she’s not skinny, and on TV all non-skinny women are considered fat.

(The final two contestants were both model-thin. If Ramsay had called Sara “a Jewish cow,” and if all Jewish contestants were cut before the final round, wouldn’t people be questioning whether or not Ramsay’s judgements were unbiased?)

Anyway, what the hell, at least fat people appeared. On TV, that’s a pretty rare thing.

In other news, I took this “Rate Your Life” quiz (via Melancholy Revolutionary). I understand that quizzes like this are just fluffy entertainment, not to be taken seriously. Nonetheless, I was struck by the fact that three of the opening questions asked me to put myself into categories that I just don’t fit clearly into.

Am I overweight, or healthy weight? The question implies a contradiction between being “overweight” and being “healthy.” And the answer to this one question made a very large difference in the results (see below).

Am I straight, or undecided? Nowadays I self-identify as a straight-leaning asexual, but that option isn’t included. There’s not even an “other” option - I’m either straight, gay, bi or undecided.

Am I married? Not legally, and not in the sense that the author intends. But I have two people I share lives with; we’ve lived together since the late 80s, and it’s a lifetime commitment. In terms of rating the quality of my life, my relationship with my life partners is as relevant as another person’s relationship with their legal spouse.

(There are other implicit assumptions in the quiz as well - for instance, the only choices for “sex” are male and female. But the above three were the ones that applied - or, rather, failed to apply - to me).

(Click below to see how my results changed depending on the above assumptions.)
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Feminism is a word that - to me - stands for the proposition that sexism sucks; that what’s between our legs doesn’t dictate who we are or what we can do; that women are unfairly disadvantaged in our society; and that we should be actively working to change all that. I’m not gonna back away from a word that means all that.

The reason that people object to “feminist” but not “equalist” isn’t that “equalist” is a better word. It’s that no one knows what equalism stands for.

But what would happen if all feminists decided that “feminist” was a bad word, and switched to “equalist”? Within a month, all the right-wingers who have worked so hard at making feminism a swear word would re-aim their guns at “equalist.” Whatever the word is that means “our status quo sucks, it hurts all of us but women especially, and it’s gotta change,” that word will be reviled.

Update: I think the problem is fixed now.

Read the rest of this entry »

In my first post on Alas I wrote about how racism and sexism shaped the definition of heroes in the wake of hurricane Katrina and 911. Here’s a quote:

In the days after 9/11 I was glued to my TV, watching what seemed to be the same cable news stories over and over and hoping that someone was going to tell me why this happened. The only refreshing new stories were the ones that followed heroes — the everyday folks who risked their lives to save others. Indeed there were many 9/11 heroes, but I quickly became frustrated at how few of those who were portrayed as heroes were white women or men and women of color. I just kept thinking; the rest of us are heroes too. Certainly, the firemen and police officers who died trying to save people in the World Trade Center were heroes, but the media and many average Americans seem to be much more content with white men as heroes. In fact, because of our race and gender stereotypes white men are constructed as brave, bold, dependable, powerful, righteous, and strong — all of the makings of a hero. Certainly the rest of us have many of those traits too, but what keeps our heroism out of sight? The contrast in the construction heroes in the aftermath of World Trade Center and Hurricane Katrina reveal how much racism and sexism shape our definition of heroism.

Well I guess Oliver Stone didn’t read my essay, and didn’t bother to accurately portray the race of at least one African American hero in his new 9/11 movie because one of the mystery heroes portrayed in Stone’s movie has come forward.

His name is Jason Thomas, and here is some of his story.

Thomas, who had been out of the Marine Corps about a year, was dropping his daughter off at his mother’s Long Island home when she told him planes had struck the towers.

He retrieved his Marine uniform from his truck, sped to Manhattan and had just parked his car when one of the towers collapsed. Thomas ran toward the center of the ash cloud.

“Someone needed help. It didn’t matter who,” he said. “I didn’t even have a plan. But I have all this training as a Marine, and all I could think was, ‘My city is in need.’”

Thomas bumped into another ex-Marine, Staff Sgt. David Karnes, and the pair decided to search for survivors.

Carrying little more than flashlights and an infantryman’s shovel, they climbed the mountain of debris, skirting dangerous crevasses and shards of red-hot metal, calling out “Is anyone down there? United States Marines!”

In Stone’s movie Thomas is portrayed as a white man. The movie producers claim the “mistake” was made after production began, which doesn’t seem like a legitimate excuse to me. I guess they didn’t bother to do their research. I’m all for cross racial casting when appropriate, but given the continuous subtle and not so subtle stream of of white male heroes anointed by the mainstream media, they could have at least gotten this hero right.

I spent the last 7 days at the Association of Black Sociologists and American Sociological Association conferences, so that is why you missed me(well I’m sure at least a few folks didn’t miss me LOL!). This trip was my first visit to Montreal, and it actually inspired me to write a post, which I hope to put up within the next couple days. This is an annual trip for me, so every year for a week in the first half of August I’ll be gone. These academic conferences always serve multiple purposes, so I am really busy. Besides getting another line on the resume (which we call curriculum vitae in academia–I don’t know why), networking with other sociologists, and checking out the latest books, it really is a good chance to catch up on old friends that I haven’t seen in a year. This year I also spent a great deal of time helping my school search for job candidates, which was an all day marathon. Even though I was busy, I had fun, and I have several posts in my mind that the trip inspired.

The other kind of interesting part of the conference for my is exploring the local culture. Local culture refers to norms, customs, beliefs, and the nonmaterial culture of a particular place. Nonmaterial culture could include the architecture, the roads, the cars, clothing, and any other sorts of tangible elements of the people in a particular area. Many people use the conference as an opportunity to explore the tourist locations, museums, and historical landmarks, but I like to people watch. I was initially worried that the French language of the Quebecois would be difficult to navigate, but that was not a problem because almost all of the people I needed to talk to spoke English. Plus, I was also reminded of how much of language is nonverbal anyways. Several cultural norms stood out to me, now keep in mind I’m not generalizing to everybody here, but I noticed somethings that I don’t see so much of in the cities I have lived in.

One of the first things I observed about Montreal was the incredible number of outdoor cafes. These cafes were full, too. It was almost like a requirement that you ate outdoors. That could be the French/European influence on the city. I’m not really sure. I also noticed how slow the pace seemed when I was at a cafe. People stayed for a really long period of time, and it took an eternity to get a bill unless you specifically requested it. In fact, I only saw one fast food place–Tim Horton’s. The eating culture there was really different, from the types of food, to the portions, to the price, and the fact that I could not get a free refill in on an iced tea.

The walking pace was also much slower. I found myself passing people routinely. I realized that the east coast of the US, especially the NYC area is really fast paced. I know people talk about “New York minutes” all the time, but I didn’t realize how much that sort of mentality had crept into me. I guess because I usually feel slow in New York.

I made several other observations–people wear really dark clothes, the city was more racially diverse than I expected, etc, but what stood out for me the most was the pace and the eating culture. So this long ramble leads me to my serious question of the week. If I came to your town or city, what aspects of the local culture would stand out? This is kind of a difficult question for people to answer, especially if they have not lived outside of their local area, primarily because almost all people tend to be at least somewhat ethnocentric. We tend to see our own cultural norms as normal, natural, and superior. So I’ll also extend this question. What are some of the local cultural norms that have stood out in the cities that you have visited?

Here. I know where I’m going to be finding my reading matter today….

“Chuckdarwin,” while criticizing the Male Privilege Checklist, wrote:

24. If I have sex with a lot of people, it won’t make me an object of contempt or derision.

Two words: Bill. Clinton.

Bill Clinton suffered derision for cheating on his wife while being president. Is Chuck seriously arguing this is an example of the typical male experience? Do typical men face an angry Republican party and thousands of scandal-hungry reporters?

A few books and many scholarly articles have documented the “slut” phenomenon in US high schools - two examples are Fast Girls and Slut! Growing Up Female With A Bad Reputation. If any genuine parallel to slut-bashing exists for boys, I’ve never encountered it, heard it spoken of, or read about it in any academic source. My conclusion is that “slut” represents a genuine double-standard.

(In his comments, Chuck suggested “rent-boy.” But rent-boy isn’t a male counterpart of “slut”; it’s a male counterpart of “hooker.” Not the same thing.)

Nonetheless, I wonder if I should reword #24, because it implies that the “slut” label is applied to a woman or girl based on how many people she chooses to sleep with. In real life, it’s not that simple. Research on slut-labeling in US high schools suggests that girls are labeled as sluts for reasons other than their own behavior. The girl labeled a “slut” isn’t necessarily having more sex than other girls; but she’s usually set apart from the other girls in some other way, such as less money, earlier puberty, or being a recent new arrival.

From a review of the book Fast Girls:

White presents her victims of the slut rumor as girls whose identity was chosen for them, as opposed to one they brought on themselves. “Being a slut is not a story about the body so much as all the things that have been spoken about the body” (50). She presents the “slut” as a universal character, inevitably found at all high schools. White first proves that the designated reputation of the slut is born from redundantly similar rumors and this character exists in every school. By universalizing the slut role, White depersonalizes this image and emphasizes the lack of autonomy that girls face when, through no control of their own, they are suddenly cursed with a scarlet letter of sorts. After reading this book, there can be no plausible argument that starts with, “well she must have done something to deserve it.”

In a lengthy and sometimes drifting explanation of the Jungian archetype, White presents the slut as an unconscious rendering of the fear of female sexuality. She describes teenagers in limbo, as they attempt to compromise between messages of excessive sex as bad and their raging hormones. White states that teenagers try to make sense of this contradiction by drawing lines of good and bad. “By turning one girl into the slut among them, the kids try to reassure themselves that they are on the right side of fate: they are good while she is evil… They have the right kind of desire while she has the wrong kind” (59).

I think I’ll rewrite #24 to say There is no chance that I will be seriously labeled a “slut,” nor is there any male counterpart to “slut-bashing.” But I’m open to suggestions, too - let me know what you think.

(This is one of a number of posts responding to Chuck’s critique. You can use the category archive to see all posts related to the Male Privilege Checklist.)

Asher from Dreams Into Lighting emailed me this article, from the Hartford Courant:

While black, Hispanic and low-income children again lagged far behind others on statewide mastery test scores, another group of students also remained mired in a chronic - though often less noticed - achievement gap.

Boys continued to trail girls by substantial margins in reading and writing on the annual Connecticut Mastery Test. The pattern has persisted since Connecticut first started keeping track of scores by gender in 2000, and is consistent with longstanding patterns on national tests. […]

In writing, “Boys of every ethnic and socioeconomic group are falling far behind girls of similar backgrounds,” Kleinfeld wrote in a recent paper for the White House Conference on Helping America’s Youth. […]

“It’s a huge problem,” Kleinfeld said. The literacy gap between girls and boys “has been very large since the beginning of time,” she said. “Think back to Tom Sawyer and Becky.”

So wait, which is it - are boys currently falling behind, or has it always been this way?

Also, as I’ll show below, the evidence from the Connecticut Mastery Test shows that the boy crisis does not exist among “boys of every ethnic and socioeconomic group.” On the contrary, the results are consistent with my belief that without racism and poverty holding them back, boys do just as well as girls.

Most boys develop verbal skills later than girls do and may not be ready for the intensive reading instruction that some schools are now demanding as early as kindergarten, she said.

For boys who lag, she said, one strategy would be to “keep them in kindergarten for two years, or keep them out of school until they’re ready.”

In addition, Kleinfeld and others say, boys’ reading habits are geared more toward non-fiction - subjects such as sports or adventure - while girls often prefer novels and short stories.

Three points:

1) Notice, once again, the boyhood-as-disability theme, which is common in “boy crisis” writings. This expert actually suggests that boys should be kept back a year or two - which means, except for those boys who manage to skip ahead at some point, boys wouldn’t graduate high school until they’re 19 or 20. That’s a pretty radical proposal. Has anyone considered that if boys have to wait until the age of 20 to graduate, the result might be more boys dropping out before graduation?

2) I don’t know what data Kleinfeld is using (and I doubt her work for the White House Conference on Helping America’s Youth was put through a rigourous peer-review process). But this is an article about the results from the Connecticut Mastery Test, and it’s not true that Connecticut Mastery Test found that “Boys of every ethnic and socioeconomic group are falling far behind girls of similar backgrounds.”

At this website, you can look at the Connecticut Mastery Test results for boys and girls from different towns. (To keep things simple for myself, I’m just going to report the results for 8th graders, but as far as I could tell by spot-checking things are similar at every grade level).

Let’s first check out Bridgeport, a town in which few families have much money, and the majority of students are either hispanic or black (or both). In Bridgeport, 45% of boys and 46% of girls are proficient in math, a basically identical result. But for reading, 45% of boys and 53% of girls are proficient. And in writing, 55% of boys and 75% of girls are proficient - a 20% difference. That’s pretty huge.

Poking around the site further, I can see that 88% of eighth graders in Bridgeport are black or hispanic, and 97% are poor enough to qualify for the discount lunch program.

Now let’s look at the results from Westport, a town in which 94% of eighth graders (or, at least, of eighth graders who took the Connecticut Mastery Test) are white, and less than 3% qualified for the discount lunch program.

In Westport, 97% of both boys and girls are proficient in math, 96% of boys and 97% of girls are proficient in reading, and 97% of boys and 99% of girls are proficient in writing. There is effectively no difference between Westport’s boys and girls, according to the Connecticut Mastery Test.

As it happened, I spent my 8th grade attending public school in Westport.¹ All the boys read fiction (we read To Kill A Mockingbird that year, I think), and I can’t imagine that has changed - because I think Westport parents would scream bloody murder if the schools tried to shortchange their boys’ education that way. What the “boy crisis” mavens are proposing would not only fail to help boys, it would deprive them of an education in literature.

3) As I wrote in an earlier post, it’s clear there is a real crisis going on here. But it’s not a “boy crisis,” and there’s nothing deficient in boy’s brains that makes them biologically incapable of doing as well as girls, or of reading fiction.

There are way too many boys from indian, black, hispanic and low-income families who are not benefiting enough from school, and whose future is needlessly dim; it’s a tragedy for those boys and for our entire society if things keep going the way they’ve been. I wish I had the solution, but I don’t. Nonetheless, wrong analysis leads to wrong solutions. The people who are focusing on nonexistent inherent deficiencies in how boys learn, and pretty much ignoring class and race, are coming up with solutions that will be expensive and unhelpful at best, and actually harmful to boys at worst.

4. Finally, as big as the 20% difference in reading achievement between Bridgeport boys and girls is, let’s not overlook the much larger differences in achievement between children in Bridgeport and children in Westport. That’s the real crisis, and that should be our main focus.

[Crossposted on Creative Destruction, a dark and forbidding place avoided by wise hobbits.]

1. Yes, I admit it, I grew up in Westport. The shame will follow me forever. (back)

Over on Moderately Insane, Sailorman - who has two daughters, ages 2 and 4 - writes:

I’m in a small new England community. We have a lot of well-minded liberal folks here. And that certainly helps. For example, their nursery school doesn’t permit any commercial images: No Barbie lunchboxes; no Dora shirts; no TV at all.

We also do our best to encourage things on our own. We don’t EVER show them broadcast TV–not at all–though we do let them watch winnie the pooh movies on occasion. We teach them to like bugs and mud.

But there are still plenty of confusing issues….

What do you do when your daughter’s good friend wants her to come over and watch TV?

What do I do about the fact the they always want to wear pretty dresses, not overalls? That they want to wear tutus? I *KNOW* they’re getting gender-socialized at school, but I don’t want to add to it if I can help things.

What do I do about the fact that their mom is, for the moment, a SAHM doing the vast majority of childcare? She’ll be back at work in a year or two, but (we’ve got a new infant and I often work 12 hour days) doesn’t want to go back until then.

Sailorman is particularly eager to hear specific advice, rather than general theory.

As far as the clothing issue goes, my advice is not to sweat it. There’s a perfectly reasonable, nonsexist reason Sailorman’s daughters might like pretty dresses: Pretty dresses are cool. Hell, I liked wearing dresses when I was a small boy (much to my grandfather’s horror, when he discovered me playing dress-up in my granny’s clothes!).

Raising girls to abhor the feminine isn’t really feminist. What’s feminist is allowing girls (and boys) to express their own tastes without regard to if their tastes are stereotypically girlish or boyish.

(Of course, as Sailorman points out, it’s not like his girls live in a vacuum; there’s no way, really, of knowing how much dress-preference is the girls expressing their individual tastes, and how much is gender conformity. I don’t know what the solution is to this, but I’m sure that feeling bad because many girls like dresses isn’t it.)

Anyhow, there’s more I could say, but I’d rather throw it to comments for now. Even if not all “Alas” readers are parents, probably at least half have been daughters at some point in your lives. What’s your advice?

From Media Matters:

On National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, reporter Jacqueline Froelich failed to challenge Arkansas Republican state Sen. Jim Holt’s assertion that “there are thousands of studies, actually … over 10,000″ that show “the homosexual family or the environment is problematic for the child.” Froelich did not address Holt’s dubious figure of 10,000 studies, which would be possible only if a new study reaching that conclusion had been released every day for the past 27 years.

In fact, the social science research overwhelmingly shows that there’s little or no significant difference between kids raised by same-sex and opposite-sex parents.

Curtsy: Echidne.

Time to start posting pictures from my recent trip to New York. I have pictures from dinner with various bloggers and blog-commenters, but first things first: If it’s Monday, it must be baby blogging time.

Instead of Sydney and Maddox, this week we have my sister Allison’s kids, Silas and Jemma. (Although he hasn’t been seen here as often as Sydney and Maddox, Silas was the star of the very first baby blogging post I ever did — October 16, 2002, when he was born. My goodness, I’ve been blogging a really long time.)

It was about a thousand degrees outside, so of course we went to a farmer’s market - no kidding, this is the sort of thing my relatives do for entertainment. It wasn’t just my sister Allie - my brother-in-law Tim, my parents, my aunt and uncle Myra and Tom - they were all like, “Yay! A chance to sweat while looking at vegetables in stalls - how cool is that?” What weirdos I’m related to. Why can’t they do something normal with their free time? You know, like hanging out in comic book stores, or writing a blog for four years. Stuff like that.

Anyway, there was a little jazz band there, and Silas and his mom (my sister) got to dancing. This is why I love digital cameras - my style of photography is to point the camera in what I hope is the right direction and then hit the shutter button as many times as I can. I took about 40 pictures of Silas and Allison dancing, and this is my favorite one.

More pics below the fold.
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This week i’m writing a letter that i don’t get to write very often - a thank you letter. As you may well be aware, on February 16, 2005 the Kyoto Protocol took effect in the 114 countries that ratified it. The US, as is well known, is not one of those countries. Many folks here in the US were pissed. After all, we have only 5% of the world’s population and yet we produce more than 25% of the world’s greenhouse gases.

One of the more notably pissed off citizens was Seattle’s Mayor Nickels. But rather than just hold a press conference to express his rage, he decided to organize. On March 30, 2005 Nickels and nine other mayors across the US, representing more than 3 million people, sent a letter to more than 400 US mayors asking them to take action to stop global climate change. On June 13, 2005 the Mayors Climate Protection Act was passed unanimously by the US Conference of Mayors. As of today, 279 mayors, representing 48.5 million people, have signed on to the agreement, including my own mayor, Mark Kruzan.

So today i’m taking the time to write a letter to the mayor thanking him for taking action to protect the planet that gives us life. If you would like to know if your mayor has signed the agreement, just enter your zipcode on stopglobalwarming.org. If your mayor has not signed the agreement, there is a button you can push that will send a pre-written email to them urging them to sign.

If you would like more information about global climate change, you can get started at OneWorld.net’s Climate Change 101. By the way, the most effective ways for you to take persynal action to stop global climate change are to drive less and bike more, eat locally grown foods, and go vegan. Stopglobalwarming.org has lots of other ways to help out (most are much easier, but not as effective). And if you want a very informative look at how your living choices effect the ecosystem, check out the Earth Day Footprint Quiz.

Right-wing groupie tank/magazine Human Events has published their picks for the ten most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries. The list lumps in Mao and Hitler with Betty Friedan and John Maynard Keynes. The entry explaining Keynes’ inclusion was particularly funny:

Keynes was a member of the British elite–educated at Eton and Cambridge–who as a liberal Cambridge economics professor wrote General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in the midst of the Great Depression. The book is a recipe for ever-expanding government. When the business cycle threatens a contraction of industry, and thus of jobs, he argued, the government should run up deficits, borrowing and spending money to spur economic activity. FDR adopted the idea as U.S. policy, and the U.S. government now has a $2.6-trillion annual budget and an $8-trillion dollar debt.

Riiiigght, the current deficit is FDR’s fault. It’s not like there are any other presidents who could more fairly be blamed.

What about the critique of Friedan, you’re wondering? It contains absolutely no content apart from red-baiting.

(Curtsy: Being Amber Rhea).

This is interesting. What the graph shows is the relative income of the top 1% of 400 earners in the US (that’s the tall green bar, all the way to the right) compared to the other 99.99% of us (that’s the tiny green bars all the way at the bottom - scroll down, and down, and down….).

Click on the image to see a larger version of same. Visit the source, this page at rationalrevolution.net, and scroll to near the bottom to see more info about the data. (The entire page is well worth reading, with a lot of information about income and who pays taxes).

Super Babymama presents The Carnival of Feminists
Lots of interesting posts about poverty. The next Carnival will be hosted by Being Amber Rhea .

Coaching4Lesbians presents The Carnival of Bent Attractions!

Big Fat Blog: Columnist Opposes Large Black Women Appearing Confident And Happy
Because when fat people are confident and happy, that promotes bad health!

Echidne: What Accounts For The High Divorce Rate Among Born-Again Christians?
Excellent post. The mechanism Echidne proposes (it’s well-known that marrying young makes divorce more likely; religious fundimentalists encourage early marriage to make pre-marital abstinance more viable; therefore…) is speculative, but plausible.

Sufficient Scruples: Care, Not Cures, For The Disabled

The Gimp Parade: Hooters is to Women, as Jerry Lewis is to Disabled People, Part One
Damn, she’s good. Check out part two, as well.

BitchPhd: Media Implies We Should Start Panicking About Fat Babies

Robert Newman’s History of Oil
This video lecture is fun, and will remind you how far left the British left is compared to the U.S. left. It’s also about 45 minutes long. I haven’t yet seen all of it, but what I have seen was entertaining and interesting.

Washington Post: HPV Vaccine Should Be Used On Girls And On Boys
I quite agree. Via Noli Irritare Leones.

Sugar, Spice, and a Can of Whoop-Ass: Men Do So Have A Choice

Ezra Klien: Republican Senator Thinks That People With $5 Million Dollars Are Middle Class Or Poor
How nice to work in a field in which being unbelievably stupid isn’t a barrier to advancement.

Daily Kos: Karen Minnis is Oregon’s Tom Delay

Alternet: On The Tragedy of Student Debt

Noli Irritare Leones: Is The Word “Neo-Con” Anti-Semitic?
Read the comments, too.

The Head Heeb: The Stupid Thing To Do

Military force can be used intelligently, in a way that combines with diplomacy to achieve political goals. It can also be used stupidly, causing pointless death and ultimately harming the attacker’s own objectives. It’s possible for force to be legal and proportionate, and still be stupid. The attack on Qana was stupid.

Majikthise: Robert Fisk on Israel and Lebanon

Obsidian Wings: Israel, Lebanon, And The Apparently Limitless Incompetance Of The Bush Administration

Hey, I didn’t know Barbara Ehenreich has a blog!

From Marginal Revolution:

The libertarian vice is to assume that the quality of government is fixed. […] If the quality of government is fixed, the battle is then “government vs. market.” Not everyone will agree with libertarian views, but libertarians are comfortable on this terrain.

But sometimes governments do a pretty good job, even if you like me are generally skeptical of government. The Finnish government has supported superb architecture. The Swedes have made a good go at a welfare state. The Interstate Highway System in the U.S. was a high-return investment. […]

The libertarian approach treats government vs. market as the central question. Another approach, promoted by many liberals, tries to improve the quality of government. This endeavor does not seem more utopian than most libertarian proposals. The libertarian cannot reject it on the grounds of excess utopianism, even though much government will remain wasteful, stupid, and venal. More parts of government could in fact be much better, and to significant human benefit and yes that includes more human liberty in the libertarian sense of the word. […]

It is possible to agree with the positive claims of libertarians about the virtues of markets but still think that improving the quality of government is the central task before us. One could love markets yet be some version of a modern liberal rather than a classical liberal. This possibility makes libertarians nervous…

Read, as they say, the whole thing.

Also, from another of Tyler’s posts:

The modern liberal vice is to think that everyone can be taken care of, and/or to rule out foreigners from the relevant moral universe. Too many issues are (incorrectly) framed as “taking care” vs. serving the avarice of the wealthy.

In turn, a conservative and libertarian vice is to get too obsessed with “desert.” Another conservative and libertarian vice is come up with some better means of helping people — usually involving markets — and if that doesn’t happen, to be content with doing nothing.

All of that seems very on-target to me, but I’d be curious to know what other folks think.

Curtsy: Crooked Timber.

[Crossposted at Creative Destruction, where libertarians play in the hay all day.]

From a news story about “single women choosing to become single moms”:

Elkins, like many women her age, felt the pressures of wanting a child but realized that in the modern age she didn’t need a relationship with a man to make her dream possible. So she turned to an anonymous sperm donor to make her a mom.

[…] Places like California Cryobank, one of the largest sperm banks in the country, reports that single women make up 32 percent of the clients who buy sperm from its bank.

Fertility centers like those at New York University were originally set up for infertile couples. Now doctors consult with a growing number of single women looking to tackle motherhood alone.

“We’re definitely seeing more single women,” said Dr. Shelley Lee, a clinical psychologist and director of psychological services at NYU. “And particularly women who are professional women[…]”

Elizabeth at Family Scholars responds:

A 46 year old woman: Since I was 20 or 30, I would see a baby and my heart would melt, and there needed to be a child in my life…

A child: Since I was 3 or 4, I would see a father and my heart would melt, and there needed to be a father — my father — in my life…

Elizabeth often seems to assume that the typical child raised without her or his biological father pines for contact with that father - not in a “mild curiosity” fashion, but in a “truly suffering due to existential angst” fashion. But I’m not at all sure that’s true.

The academic journal Human Reproduction published a study of adolescents who were conceived through donor insemination (DI; also know as sperm donation). (Scheib, Riordan and Rubin, “Adolescents with open-identity sperm donors,” Human Reproduction 2005 20(1), pages 239-252). All of the adolescents grew up knowing that they had been conceived via DI. 41% were raised in households headed by lesbian couples, 38% raised by single women, and 21% in households headed by heterosexual couples.

Put another way, 79% were raised in completely fatherless households, and 100% in households without their natural fathers. Yet although 80% said they were “moderately likely” to ever want contact with their biological fathers at all, only 7% reported wanting a father/child relationship.

(It’s important to note that all of these families were open with their DI children about their origins from a young age. Many scholars believe that families that keep their children’s DI origins a secret actually make things harder on the children in the long run, because of the shock and feelings of being deceived when someone discovers their DI origins later in life.)

Admittedly, this study has a very small sample size, and the 60% response rate isn’t ideal. But even if the Human Reproduction study isn’t perfect, at least it’s some evidence. Nor is it the only such study; for instance, a 1998 study of DI children in Child Development found that “reports from both the parents and teachers on standardized measures of adjustment indicated that the children were well-adjusted and no differences emerged across households headed by single women, lesbian couples and heterosexual couples.” (Chan RW, Raboy B and Patterson CJ (1998) Psychosocial adjustment among children conceived via donor insemination by lesbian and heterosexual mothers. Child Dev. 69, 443–457. Summary quoted from Scheib (2005).).

(Other studies showing that DI children are well-adjusted include: Brewaeys A (2001) Review: Parent-child relationships and child development in donor insemination families. Human Reproduction Update 7, 38–46; Golombok S, MacCallum F, Goodman E and Rutter M (2002a) Families with children conceived by donor insemination: A follow-up at age 12. Child Dev 73, 952–968; Vanfraussen K, Ponjaert-Kristoffersen I and Brewaeys A (2003) Family functioning in lesbian families created by donor insemination. Am J Orthopsychiatry 73, 78–90.)

In contrast, I haven’t seen any evidence at all indicating that a majority, or even a large minority, of DI children feel a strong need for a father/child relationship with their biological fathers. In fact, I haven’t seen a single study finding that DI children in open-donor families are less well-adjusted in any empirically measurable way. Elizabeth’s position seems based on ideology and anecdotes, not on evidence.

* * *

In the comments of Elizabeth’s post, Adele wrote:

The logic almost seems to go something like this, “…there will not be a suitable man to be a father but I’m not going to let that stop me! I’ll be both mother and father to my child!” The empirical evidence says that it does not usually work out in the best interest of the child.

The empirical evidence isn’t as clear-cut as Adele believes. A quick look turned up this study, which examined “a distinct subgroup of single parents, who, out of a strong desire for a child, have made the active choice to go it alone.” The study found that “this route to parenthood does not necessarily seem to have an adverse effect on mothers’ parenting ability or the psychological adjustment of the child.”

And this study, which found “The presence or absence of a father in the home from the outset does appear to have some influence on adolescents’ relationships with their mothers. However, being without a resident father from infancy does not seem to have negative consequences for children.”

Of course, some studies have found that children raised in fatherless households are more likely to be troubled than children raised from infancy in intact, married households with a mother and a father. But these studies often include children who went through divorce or other forms of family instability, who face economic insecurity, who have had to integrate stepparents or boyfriends into their households, who grow up in lousy neighborhoods with inferior schools, and whose mothers were extremely young and lacking in resources.

It’s not warranted to conclude that because lack of a father is apparently harmful in combination with other factors, that it must be harmful in and of itself. And studies of DI children seem to show that when these other factors are absent, the negative outcomes of fatherlessness are absent, too.

[Crossposted at Creative Destruction, where everyone has a security blanket.]

There’s a lot of negative response to this article in the blogosphere, mostly among Christian bloggers and some Mommybloggers. (And, of course, some Christian mommybloggers).

Sorry, but my children bore me to death!
by HELEN KIRWAN-TAYLOR, Daily Mail

[…]To be honest, I spent much of the early years of my children’s lives in a workaholic frenzy because the thought of spending time with them was more stressful than any journalistic assignment I could imagine.

Kids are supposed to be fulfilling, life-changing, life-enhancing fun: why was my attitude towards them so different?

While all my girlfriends were dropping important careers and occupying their afternoons with cake baking, I was begging the nanny to stay on, at least until she had read my two a bedtime story. What kind of mother hates reading bedtime stories? A bad mother, that’s who, and a mother who is bored rigid by her children.

I know this is one of the last taboos of modern society. To admit that you, a mother of the new millennium, don’t find your offspring thoroughly fascinating and enjoyable at all times is a state of affairs very few women are prepared to admit. We feel ashamed, and unfit to be mothers.

In a post at Princesses, Dogs, and Chaos, Jenn responds:

The moment I find my children boring, the moment I don’t take joy in watching their explorations and moments of learning, the moment I choose self-fulfillment over milestones in my child’s life, will be a sad, wasted day in my life.

Amazingly, Jenn wrote the above sentence in a post entitled “Balance is Key.” (By the way, I find these passage from Jenn’s self-description terrifying: “I am a saved-by-grace wife and mommy who strives to do things that will bring honor to both my family and to God. However, with my strong will and sassy mouth, I consistently fail to meet those goals.” With all due respect to Jenn, I’d hate to think God opposes women having strong wills and sassy mouths.)

It’s not just bloggers; The “Daily Mail,” which published the column, received hundreds of letters catigating “bored mommy.” “I’m the most vilified woman in Britain because I don’t find it interesting to change nappies,” Kirwan-Taylor later commented.

Although Kirwan-Taylor (at least as she describes herself in this article) is extreme, she’s also right: A lot of parents find hanging out with the kids boring. It’s a lot of fun to play “ghost” with Sydney the first few times, but Sydney is apt to want to play the game 20 or 30 times in a row. When I was a small child, someone who obviously hated my parents gave me a Parcheesi(tm) set; I wanted to play it all the time, even though Parcheesi(tm) has been proved by astrophysicists to be an immense black hole of galaxy-sucking dullness.

A parent’s obligation is to provide their children with a loving home, and to see that their physical and emotional needs are met. There’s no obligation not to have a life outside your children, however. That seems to be Kirwan-Taylor’s central point, and it’s one I entirely agree with:

Those of us who are not thoroughly ‘child-centric’, meaning we don’t put our children’s guitar practice before our own ambitions, are made to feel guilty. We’re not meant to have an adult life — at least, not one that doesn’t include them.

My primary criticism of Kirwan-Taylor is that she imagines that she’s got the formula for creating great kids, and criticizes those parents who don’t follow her formula:

All us bored mothers can take comfort from the fact that our children may yet turn out to be more balanced than those who are love-bombed from the day they are born.

Research increasingly shows that child-centred parenting is creating a generation of narcissistic children who cannot function independently.

‘Their demand for external support is enormous,’ says Kati St Clair. ‘They enter the real world totally ill-prepared. You damage a child just as much by giving them extreme attention as you do by ignoring them altogether. Both are forms of abuse.’

Blah, blah, blah. Experts never tire of trying to micro-manage how parents raise their children. Short of abuse, however, I’m not convinced that one style of parenting is better than another. Children who are well loved and well cared for are more likely to turn out well, but there is no One True Best Style of Parenting, nor is there any approach to parenting that will suit all families well.

Finally, it’s impossible to ignore the class issues bound up in all this. It’s all very well for Kirwan-Taylor to rely on nannies to relieve her of boredom (does Daddy do a share of the child-rearing, I wonder), but obviously most parents can’t afford nannies. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the criticism heaped on Kirwan-Taylor has focused on the nanny aspect.

Mythago makes this very interesting point (in the comments at Happy Feminist):

It’s not true that mothers are never supposed to pretend that childhood is boring. Moms complain to each other about having to read Green Eggs and Ham for the 9,295,284th time.

BUT–that’s not the case if you are in a social class and community where overachieving genius babies are de rigeur, and the mark of a good mother is how fast your kid rips through the milestones. You can’t be bored in that milieu, because boredom suggests that your kid is boring, and therefore isn’t a superbaby. It’s not “boring” when your child learns to read, or appreciates Mozart, or learns to walk early. “Boring” is when your kid does the same, non-super-intellectual thing over and over again. And to admit that is to admit that your child may not be ahead of all the others.

And, of course, the sexism aspect - that this sort of pressure to pretend that every minute spent with one’s child is happy happy joy joy is far more intensely felt by mothers than fathers - is almost too self-evident to be worth mentioning.

UPDATE: Further commentary at Pandagon.

[Curtsy to Elizabeth at Family Scholars. Crossposted at Creative Destruction, where all children are sent to boarding school until age forty-four.]

From the UK newspaper The Observer:

Hardline Islamic insurgent groups in Iraq are targeting a new type of victim with the full protection of Iraqi law, The Observer can reveal. The country is seeing a sudden escalation of brutal attacks on what are being called the ‘immorals’ - homosexual men and children as young as 11 who have been forced into same-sex prostitution.

There is growing evidence that Shia militias have been killing men suspected of being gay and children who have been sold to criminal gangs to be sexually abused. The threat has led to a rapid increase in the numbers of Iraqi homosexuals now seeking asylum in the UK because it has become impossible for them to live safely in their own country.[…]

Graphic photos obtained from Baghdad sources too frightened to identify themselves as having known a gay man, and seen by the Observer, show other gay Iraqis who have been executed. One shows two men, suspected of having a relationship, blindfolded with their hands tied behind their backs - guns at the ready behind their heads - awaiting execution. Another picture captured on a mobile phone shows a gay man being beaten to death. Yet another shows a corpse being dragged through the streets after his execution.

But it’s not just the insurgent groups killing off gays. It’s also our good friends and allies, the Iraqi government.

One photograph is of the mutilated, burnt body of 38-year-old Karar Oda from Sadr City. He was kidnapped by the Badr Brigade in mid-June. They work with the Ministry of Interior and are the informal armed wing of the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq, who make up the largest Shia bloc in the Iraq parliament. Oda’s family were given an arrest warrant signed by the Ministry of Interior which said their son deserved to be arrested and killed for immorality as a homosexual. His body was found ten days later.

Don’t get me wrong — queers were horribly abused under Saddam. That we are able to take a situation that bad and (if this Observer report is correct) make it worse is astonishing. At the very least, the U.S. (and the U.K.) should be offering asylum and citizenship to gay Iraqis who want (or, rather, need) to flee here.

[Crossposted at Creative Destruction, with the lovers, the dreamers, and me.]