One of the most recent controversies in the feminist blogosphere is over the photo-shopped picture that Amanda over at Pandagon posted. Apparently, the young women who was in the front of the picture, Jessica Valenti, was criticized by conservatives for her informal attire and her breasts and I’m sure some other completely irrelevant things (Elayne alerted me to this debate earlier.). The conservative commenters also seemed anti-Semitic, as well. In response Amanda photo-shopped the picture to make it seem like Jessica was in a burka.

Not everyone took kindly to the use of the burka as the ultimate symbol of patriarchy. Brownfemipower at Women of Color Blog, R. Mildred, at Punk Ass Blog, and Sly Civilian called Amanda out on her use of the burka as the ultimate symbol of oppression. R. Mildred was quick to point out the sort of Western imperialism associated with framing patriarchy as something that comes from “the third world” or the “Muslim world.”

You see, one of the ways the islamic patriarchy pushes hijab onto women who would otherwise prefer not to wear head scarfs or burkas or any of that stuff is to use the KultureKampf that western imperialists are waging against muslims as an excuse to guilt trip young muslim women into donning the patriarchy uniform that goes with the particular family’s cultural background.

And brownfemipower elaborates on how this sort of joking at the expense of women of color (in particular women living under a history of colonialism) is harmful.

Because it *is* pretty funny isn’t it? The comparing of an asshole to the Taliban. But in Pandagon’s rush to make a cheap joke at the expense of women of color (because good lord, the *real* problem with anti-sex feminists is that they want to turn white women into the OTHER), Pandagon forgot something small but very important: they are feminists from and blogging within a colonizing nation. A colonizing nation that is in the process of bombing the holy hell out of the very women that they find so easy to make fun of.

In defense of Amanda, she was quick to apologize, which I think is a relatively good response, considering many of the defensive reactions we have seen from liberal/progressive white bloggers lately.

This whole debate reminds me of an article I have my students read when I teach “Race, Ethnicity, and Gender.” The article is called “The Burka and the Bikini” and the authors are Joan Jacobs Brumberg and Jacqueline Jackson. The article was published in the Boston Globe just after the fall of the Taliban in 2001. In this article Bumberg and Jackson argue:

THE FEMALE BODY - covered in a burka or uncovered in a bikini - is a subtle subtext in the war against terrorism. The United States did not engage in this war to avenge women’s rights in Afghanistan. However, our war against the Taliban, a regime that does not allow a woman to go to school, walk alone on a city street, or show her face in public, highlights the need to more fully understand the ways in which our own cultural “uncovering” of the female body impacts the lives of girls and women everywhere.

Taliban rule has dictated that women be fully covered whenever they enter the public realm, while a recent US television commercial for “Temptation Island 2″ features near naked women. Although we seem to be winning the war against the Taliban, it is important to gain a better understanding of the Taliban’s hatred of American culture and how women’s behavior in our society is a particular locus of this hatred. The irony is that the images of sleek, bare women in our popular media that offend the Taliban also represent a major offensive against the health of American women and girls.

During the 20th century, American culture has dictated a nearly complete uncovering of the female form. In Victorian America, good works were a measure of female character, while today good looks reign supreme. From the hair removal products that hit the marketplace in the 1920s to today’s diet control measures that seek to eliminate even healthy fat from the female form, American girls and women have been stripped bare by a sexually expressive culture whose beauty dictates have exerted a major toll on their physical and emotional health.

The authors are by no means defending the burka, but they note how American and western ethnocentrism do not allow us to see our own oppressive symbols:

Whether it’s the dark, sad eyes of a woman in purdah or the anxious darkly circled eyes of a girl with anorexia nervosa, the woman trapped inside needs to be liberated from cultural confines in whatever form they take. The burka and the bikini represent opposite ends of the political spectrum but each can exert a noose-like grip on the psyche and physical health of girls and women.

In many ways the burka and the bikini have similar outcomes. They can both be seen as symbols of the oppression of women. Unfortunately, Brumberg and Jackson don’t talk much about how colonialism and capitalism intersect to place women in poorer countries in an vulnerable position compared to their counterparts in wealthy countries.

I struggle with this sort of ethnocentric thinking all the time in my classes. The ability to look inward at one’s own culture or group is very difficult, especially for those of us who live in the United States. The US has garnered such global domination that our norms are frequently understood and embraced by people in other countries.

The tension between feminism, cultural relativism, and ethnocentrism is real. Cultural relativism asserts that each culture should be judged by it’s own norms, and ethnocentrism is the idea that one’s own culture is normal, natural, and superior. On the one hand, as a feminist, I would like to be able to criticize the oppression of women everywhere, not just in my own culture, and cultural relativism in it’s most extreme form would not allow me to do that. On the other hand, I don’t want to be ethnocentric by ignoring the patriarchy in my own culture because it is so much more normalized to me. Beyond cultural relativism and ethnocentrism, I also need to be conscientious that as an American woman (and especially an American white woman) my ability to shape feminist discourse and ideology is much greater because of the current hegemonic position of the US. I think it is very important for women in a position like mine to avoid a patronizing “let’s help those poor women who can’t help themselves and save them from their evil patriarchal men” sort of attitude.

My sense is that this is all about a balancing act. If we find it easier to critique patriarchy in other cultures or are so self absorbed that we don’t even have a clue what issues women in poorer countries are facing, then our ethnocentrism needs to be put in check. On the other hand, if we stand back and say well that’s just their culture who am I to judge, then we really need to question our feminist credentials. I think one way for those of us in a more dominant position in the world system it is essential to avoid these traps is to listen to our fellow feminists in these countries and to ensure that leadership in our organizations is not dominated by western women. Additionally, (and I’m sure this is much more controversial) Western women also need to evaluate our position in relation to men in those poorer countries. The tendency to see ourselves as victims of patriarchy while ignoring or downplaying our nations’ dominant positions in the world system is a real problem. This is exacerbated when we fail to look inward at American patriarchy and global hegemony. Brownfemipower’s comments in the latter half of her post really exemplify a good critique of many of the types of problems that arise when we fail to balance relativism, feminism, and hegemony. (For clarity’s sake, I am not critcizing BFP here.  I am supporting her critiques.) She says, referring specifically to Amanda’s post,

So when you go back to that picture, the manufactured one that centers the “humor” of a veiled woman of color, you start to notice things:

Like the fact that a feminist has otherized a woman of color to “defend” the sexuality of a white woman.

Like the fact that a veiled woman is understood to be so inherantly asexual that she stands in no danger of being sexually advanced upon by the former head of a colonizing nation/state.

Like the fact that the greatest “danger” being read into the picture is that white women will someday be devoid of her sexuality.

Like the fact that Arab men are positioned as what white men are in danger of turning into.

Like the fact that a female who is in no danger of having her skin melted off by a colonizing country’s bombs is using the otherization of a woman of color who lives daily with the threat of bombs destroying not just her, but her family as well, to make a “feminist” point.

Like the fact that feminist bloggers who are blogging out of Afghanistan and Iraq right now are taking considerable fucking risks to their lives and the lives of their families to get their word out, and yet fellow “sister” bloggers are using imagery of their subjugation to have a good laugh.

Typically, I focus more on race, but in these sorts of situations I think both race and western imperialism intersect in the process of marginalizing women in poorer nations. When I teach about this subject, there is not a big divide between US born white people and US born people of color. The bigger gap is between students from immigrant backgrounds (where either they or their parents were born outside of the US) and those from nonimmigrant backgrounds. Moreover, people have to be very careful, when we are talking about imperialism not to enforce our American definitions of race on people in other countries. The notion of a white/non-white dichotomy” doesn’t necessarily exist in every country of the world. I’m not saying race doesn’t matter; I am saying that being a citizen of the US and having all of your relatives reared or living in the US does tend to encourage this sort of hegemonic (domineering) mentality that accompanies ethnocentrism.

So back to those bikinis and burkas, is it fair to say that they are both used to promote patriarchal images of women? I think the answer is yes, but I also wonder if there is anything inherent in either item that makes them oppressive. I’m not sure if it is the object itself or the ideology that these objects are used to promote. The manifestations of sexism often vary across cultures, and we (women in wealthy nations) need to continually remind ourselves that our culture’s sexism is hard for us to see because it is so normalized. it doesn’t mean we can’t critique other cultures, but it does mean we need to listen and incorporate the perspectives and experiences of women in other cultures, especially non-western cultures and poorer nations.

I don’t have any simple answer that solves this whole problem, but I just wanted to give some food for thought. (Plus, I need to practice my lecture for next semester’s “Race, Ethnicity, and Gender” class.) The tensions between US hegemony, ethnocentrism, cultural relativism, and feminism are very real.

Bibliography

Brumberg, J.J. and J. Jackson. 2003. “The Burka and the Bikini.” Pp. 212-214 in Estelle Disch (ed.) Reconstructing Gender: A Multicultural Anthology, 3rd. ed.

A recent US News & World Report column by Dr. Bernadine Healy claims:

Just last week, the Commonwealth Fund issued a score card that flunked U.S. health system performance with newborns. The reason? Our current infant mortality rate of 6.4 per 1,000 live births is high compared with the 3.2 to 3.6 per 1,000 estimated for the three top-scoring countries in the world-Iceland, Finland, and Japan. It’s also higher than the 6 deaths per 1,000 for the European community as a whole. Before putting on the hair shirt, let’s take a look behind these numbers as these comparisons have serious flaws. They also convey little about why we lose nearly 28,000 babies a year, a starting point if we want to bring universal health to our nation’s cradles.

First, it’s shaky ground to compare U.S. infant mortality with reports from other countries. The United States counts all births as live if they show any sign of life, regardless of prematurity or size. This includes what many other countries report as stillbirths. In Austria and Germany, fetal weight must be at least 500 grams (1 pound) to count as a live birth; in other parts of Europe, such as Switzerland, the fetus must be at least 30 centimeters (12 inches) long. In Belgium and France, births at less than 26 weeks of pregnancy are registered as lifeless. And some countries don’t reliably register babies who die within the first 24 hours of birth. Thus, the United States is sure to report higher infant mortality rates.

Here’s a graph I made back in May:

Even when stillbirth deaths are included, the US is still doing significantly worse than countries credited with low infant morality rates. It is therefore impossible that the US’s poor standing is caused entirely by the exclusion of stillborn children from infant mortality statistics (although this exclusion may be a contributing factor). The US’s terrible track record, compared to other wealthy countries, is an atrocity, and one that shouldn’t be swept under the rug.

Dr. Healy does claim that the US’s high infant mortality rate is linked to our greater “ethnic and cultural diversity.” I have to wonder about that - is there any evidence that minorities in other first world countries do far worse in infant mortality (and maternal mortality) than majority groups? Or that they do as badly as some minority groups here in the US do?

But it’s true that when it comes to infant and maternal mortality, the US is effectively two nations. As I wrote in 2003, how likely you are to die in birth - or childbirth - in the U.S. depends on race. According to the CDC, the U.S. infant mortality rate for whites is 5.7 per 1000, a rate comparable to Switzerland or Australia. The U.S. infant mortality rate for blacks is 14 per 1000, a rate comparable to Uruguay and Bulgaria. The differences in maternal mortality rates are even more stark - 5.5 per 100,000 for whites, compared to 23.3 per 100,000 for blacks. This means that as far as maternal mortality is concerned, American whites have nearly the best health care in the world - better than Sweden’s - while American blacks might as well be living in Bulgaria or Saudi Arabia. (I’m using 1995 World Health Organization data, available in word format here, to make this comparison).

Bottom line: If we judge by infant and maternal deaths, blacks in the US effectively live in the third world, rather than in the first world. (See this post for some information about infant mortality among other demographic groups in the US.)

Curtsy to Mick at Newsbadger (who seems to have entirely bought the US News & World Report spin, alas).

Eteraz has written a post outlining some easy actions (emails) that can be taken to object to, and hopefully help prevent, the executions of Iranian women who have been convicted of adultery, or of defending themselves against abusers.

According to Eteraz’s post, international pressure has been helpful in similar cases in the past, so this seems like an action worth taking. (Thanks to RonF for the tip.)

In this past Sunday’s New York Times, Robin Wilson writes:

What accounts for the new resistance to no-fault? Reasons include the growing evidence that divorce often hurts children, feminists’ renewed recognition of the importance of legal protection for mothers raising children, and concerns about the economic disparities created by differences in marriage rates. Gay marriage advocates have also played a role in this shift, by calling attention to “easy divorce,” which they say is the real threat to marriage, not same-sex unions.

Isn’t there a far more important group that Professor Wilson has forgotten to mention? It’s as if she hasn’t noticed that right-wing Christians, not feminists or same-sex marriage advocates, are the people running the government nowadays. Opposing divorce is a Christian right priority, not a feminist or a queer rights priority.

Lindsay at Majikthise, like me, is skeptical of the idea that feminism and gay rights “accounts for the new resistance to no-fault.” But she says she finds this argument of Professor Wilson’s more persuasive:

While I was living in Maryland, my husband, from whom I am now divorced, assaulted me (an assault for which he has since been convicted). On the whole, I had been impressed by how Maryland protects victims of domestic violence. But I also came to understand why the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women has opposed Judge Kaye’s unilateral divorce proposals.

When no-fault divorce advocates say that family law should pay no attention to the reasons why a marriage ends, what does this mean in practice for modern women like me who have careers and have built assets? We are told that we should in effect have to pay our batterers for the privilege of divorcing them. That seems to me, as to many other Americans, not only bad social policy, but deeply and profoundly wrong.

No law will ever be perfect for all abused women; but the harm to Professor Wilson, which is that her abuser got more money in their divorce than he would have in a fault system, is real but also relatively minor. Before we oppose no-fault divorce, we should also ask what opposing no-fault would mean for abused women who don’t have the economic or legal resources of a law professor, and who aren’t able to prove abuse in court. A “fault” law with teeth — for instance, a law that mandates a one-year delay before divorce can be granted, unless abuse is proved in a courtroom — would effectively of tie victims to their abusers, drawing out the process of separation for an extra year.

Furthermore, for many abused women, no-fault divorce seems to improve their “bargaining position” within a bad marriage. One study¹, published early this year in the Quarterly Journal of Economics² (pdf link), found that when states switched to no-fault divorce, there were substantial benefits for some women:

…Easy access to divorce redistributes marital power from the party interested in preserving the marriage to the partner who wants out. In most instances, this resulted in an increase in marital power for women, and a decrease in power for men.

Our analysis of US data revealed the legislative change [to no-fault divorce] had caused female suicide to decline by about a fifth, domestic violence to decline by about a third, and intimate femicide - the husband’s murder of his wife - to decline by about a tenth.

I can support attempts to reduce divorce rates by providing positive help to stay married (free marriage counseling, for example), although I’m skeptical about how effective such programs will be. But we should all be against attempts to reduce marriage divorce by disempowering people who want to leave marriage — proposals that, in effect, use the law to force people to remain married against their will. These laws will harm battered women most of all; having to prove abuse in court in order to be free of their abusers is a horribly unfair burden to place on victims of abuse. With all due respect, I’d ask both Lindsay and Professor Wilson to rethink their positions.

Hat tip: Feminist Law Professors.

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

1. Betsy Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, “Bargaining in the Shadow of the Law: Divorce Laws and Family Distress,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 121(1) February 2006 (back)
2. I posted more about these findings here. (back)

Amp wrote a post on restorative justice, and the rape/consent spectrum. A lot of the comments responded to the idea of rape and consent being a spectrum (really well outlined by biting beever). In particularly arguing to what extent it was appropriate to call acts in the grey area ‘rape’.

Now as I’ve said before I draw a strict line about consent. If a man is using any form of coercion* to make a woman sleep with him, then she cannot give meaningful consent, therefore if there’s any coercion then the sex is rape.

But why do I try and define rape? I’m not a lawyer, politician, judge, or policy analyst - my ability to change the legal definition of rape is non-existance. There is no chance that my definition of rape will be accepted across society, without us having a radically different society. At the moment you’ll probably get away with raping a woman you’re a police officer, if she’s 14 and drunk, if she invited you to spend the night in her bed and sometimes even if you video yourself. If we lived in a world where everyone would accept that those women had the right to refuse sex, and those cases were rape, then I think we’d actually be a long way to fighting rape culture and be living in a completely different society. Then we could talk about the ideal rape law and legal practice. But at the moment feminists don’t have any control over the law, or legal definition of rape.

I use my definition of rape to analyse the world I live in. Most importantly, I use it to respond to what my female friends say have be done to them, and other women they know.

If a woman came to me and told me this:

She’s 15 and she’s out on a date, her boyfriend’s parents are out of town and so he takes her to his place. She’s excited at the opportunity to spend time with him so she tells her parents that she’s staying at a girlfriend’s house. They arrive at the boyfriends house and the evening starts well, however, as the night progresses he becomes more and more pushy for sex. She feels trapped, she loves her boyfriend and she likes the way he touches her or kisses her but she’s uncomfortable with him pushing her harder. She tells him as much and he grows sullen for a time, withdrawing all affection from her. Soon, however, he apologizes and they kiss again, she likes his kiss, she likes the way he smells, she likes the way he feels, she doesn’t like the way his hand is trying to unzip her pants.

She says “No” again; he withdraws ALL affection, maybe even scooting to the end of the couch. He seems sullen and frustrated. He may even argue with her, “What’s the big deal?” he asks, “Why are you being a tease?” he says accusatorily. She begins to doubt herself and feels guilt about her actions. She apologizes to him, he kisses her again and soon he’s at her zipper once more. She flinches and sighs heavily, “I don’t know if I’m ready” she says plaintively, “What?” he asks her; “Don’t you love me?”

The girl bites her bottom lip, in a flash of anger and frustration she stands up to leave. He grabs her arm, “Oh baby, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you mad” he says. She looks at him again and quickly it goes through her mind that she doesn’t really know where she’d go anyway. She lied to her parents; they think she’s over at a friend’s house. She has no car, how is she going to get anywhere? She can’t tell her parents and she doesn’t want to try to call her girlfriend who may or may not have a car. She knows that she’ll just make her boyfriend angry at her even if she DID do that. What if he kicks her out? She lied to be there and if she goes back home she’ll get in trouble for lying. In a flash she decides to sit back down.

An hour later, after more approach and retreat and more pushing his hand away, she gives in.

She goes home the next day, troubled, depressed, and unable to concentrate. She has been raped and her emotions and reactions are the same as any other rape victim, but she has no recourse. She just had “bad judgment” and that’s all. She must deny her feelings, push them underfoot and ignore them; society will not allow her to grieve because society sees nothing wrong with the boy’s rape of this young girl.

The boy moves on to pressure all of his girlfriends and this girl moves on to deal with her own rape, alone and without aid of any support. Her next boyfriend does the same thing, and soon she comes to understand that this is the way that relationships work.

I would say that I thought it was rape.

I know women who have had experiences very similar to that - I join them in calling those experiences rape. I define rape in the way I do to support the women they do, and reiterate the idea they have the right to say no to sex.

I also define rape in the way I do as a protection against men who have sex with women who don’t want to have sex with them. I believe that one of the few forms of protection women have against rape is gossip - passing on information that we know about men who hurt women.

Women need to know who the men are who don’t notice, or don’t care, that the women they’re sleeping with don’t want to have sex with them. Calling those acts rape is both protection and resistance.

Why do you define rape in the way that you do?

* The important point about my definition of coercion is that it involves power - you can’t coerce someone to do anything unless you have some form of power over them.

Also posted at Capitalism Bad; Tree Pretty

Note: The comments on this post are open to people who identify as feminist, or pro-feminist only. Please bear in mind that I have referred to things that have happened to women I know.

Here. Full of excellent links, as always - please go check it out.

Amanda at Pandagon linked to my critique of the methodology used by anti-divorce researcher Elizabeth Marquardt. In comments, Pandagon reader “Bitter Scribe” wrote (emphasis added by me):

…The divorce rate was kept down through the mid-20th century by virtue of an oppressive patriarchy. Restrictive social mores and economic dependence kept countless women bound in bad marriages.

When those mores changed and economic opportunities for women grew, so did the divorce rate, for the simple reason that the bonds to bad marriages loosened or dissolved. In other words, people who decry the current divorce rate are missing the point; it is today at (or close to) its natural level. The lower divorce rates of the much-romanticized bygone years got that way because they were artifically depressed.

All this is by way of agreeing with Ms Kate: Divorce is not just necessary, it is inevitable. Allowing people never to make a mistake in choosing a life partner is an intolerably cruel restriction that a free society will never, should never, accept.

As for the children of divorce, they deserve the same sympathy as any other victims of an inevitable social-historical shift. We can take hope in the fact that the natural resilience of the young, combined with the love and best intentions of two parents who may no longer love each other, will succeed in giving the child of divorce a chance at a fulfilled life without robbing his parents of theirs.

It has taken me a while to write about the stupidest thing I read this week. But it hasn’t got any less stupid:

South Africa’s AIDS crisis is fuelling a second epidemic as obesity rates rise steadily, particularly among women eager to prove they don’t have the disease by packing on extra pounds.

Many in South Africa associate being thin with terminal illness due to AIDS, while valuing plumpness as a sign of wealth and good health.

The trend is most widespread amongst black women.

“(Patients) will say to you, ‘But I don’t want to lose this weight because (they) will think that I’m dying of AIDS,’”

Some background this was said at a South African obesity conference (sponsored by Roche), by Tessa Van Der Mer - the head of the countries first obesity clinic. So no disinterested parties were involved in the making of this news story. More than that - no actual research went into that statement either - it’s just one woman’s observation of what people said to her. Yet it is reported around the world the Independent in Britain and the Canadian National Post (and then reproduced in a Feminist Carnival - of all places).

I really don’t have time for the many levels of stupidity in Tessa Van Mer’s argument. But the breathless way it’s been reported that some people don’t want to be thin, is really disturbing. The world has always been the way it is right now among media circles in New York and London. The only reason people would see things any differently would be because of fear of a terrible disease, and we have to show them they’re wrong immediately.

Also posted at Capitalism Bad; Tree Pretty

In the post about the dangers of baby blogging, I alluded to a child protection conference that had thrown up several essay-worthy subjects, then lapsed back into silence. Now, over a month later, I’m finally organised enough to tackle some of those subjects.

The child allegedly being protected by the conference was, in case there was any doubt, my daughter. By all measures health professionals have devised, she’s thriving, but I’ve struggled to cope with single parenting on top of my long-standing depression and my rocky financial situation. There are days when I feel overwhelmed with guilt and say that my daughter would be better off in someone else’s care, or even that my fragile mental state will do some concrete harm to her; these comments have been interpreted by people with responsibility for child protection as evidence that my daughter is in danger.

At first, I was happy for social services to be involved. I knew I was coping badly on my own, and I thought they could help me cope better, especially as everyone I spoke to insisted they only wanted to give me the support I needed to look after my daughter on my own. But as they called meeting after meeting and produced reams of paperwork, that objective seemed to get lost in the noise.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve started watching Grey’s Anatomy really regularly (they’re repeating Season 1 in NZ), I’m not quite sure why - because I don’t really like it that much. I don’t think it’s well-written, by half-way through season two I hated almost all the characters. But watch it I do, if nothing else it gets things to blog about it.

Shonda Rhimes (Creator of the show) said that she wanted Grey’s Anatomy to look like America, and she did quite well. Of the four authority figures we see most regularly, three are african-american, and one of those is female. This is a world where you can live in a trailer park and grow up to be surgeon. Rich or poor, male of female, Korean, African-American or white - anyone can work at Seattle Grace.

Compare this to Scrubs, the authority figures are all white men, and while you can be a doctor and female or a doctor and African-American, the women of colour are all nurses.

There was this episode of Scrubs where all the main characters were speaking to the camera about their lives. I don’t remember the reason but Carla (the Latina Nurse) was telling a story about when she was a girl, and how she came to be in the job she was in. She was in a store and someone was injured in some way and a doctor came in and saved the patient. Her segment ended with her saying “That’s when I realised I wanted to be a doctor.”

The show didn’t have to tell us why Carla didn’t become a doctor, because it was really clear. What I loved about Scrubs is that it showed a society where racism, sexism, and the class system were all problems.

I don’t believe that individuals can overcome racism, sexism and their position in the class system by themselves, even if you do manage to achieve a position of power despite belonging to and oppressed group then there are going to be scars.

When Izzie told a girl from her trailer park to give up her baby, because Izzie had given up her baby and become a doctor - the show is arguing that anyone can make it. In our society it’s simply not true, and any show that pretends it is is lying to us.** Give me a show set in a world I can recognise.

*Or at least the first couple of seasons of Scrubs, I haven’t watched the show in years, and suspect it has gone downhill.

** Grace Paley, short story writer activist, said of writing that all your characters had to have blood and money. Meaning that everyone comes from somewhere, and where that is shapes who you are, and that everyone is also shaped by the way they meet their material needs . Most TV shows ignore the second rule, and the worlds they create are that much poorer because of it (and, Firefly excepted, Joss Whedon was unfortunately no exception).

Also posted on Capitalism Bad; Tree Pretty

Over at I Hate People. Go! Look! Link!

On the Family Scholars Blog, Brad Wilcox writes:

Linda Hirshman, call your office. A slew of books have been coming out from (mainly female) scholars discussing the way in which sex differences are linked to differences in social behavior and perceptions among men and women, with a big focus on the implications of sex differences for family life. Scholars who deny this biological reality are increasingly coming to look like fundamentalists who deny evolution.

As his sole example, Brad quotes a very favorable Washington Post review of Louann Brizendine’s The Female Brain. But - as Linda points out - The Female Brain is incredibly crappy science. Linda refers to this post from the right-wing blog Not Exactly Rocket Science, but relies mostly on an remarkable series of posts on Language Log. (Scroll to the bottom of this post for a list).

Mark Liberman, a blogger at Language Log (and a professor at Upenn) has been looking up all the citations Brizendine uses to support claims “that deal with speech, language and communication.” What he’s finding, more often than not, is that her supporting citations simply don’t support her claims. For example, Brizendine claims:

A huge testosterone surge beginning in the eighth week [of pregnancy] will turn this unisex brain male by killing off some cells in the communication centers and growing more cells in the sex and aggression centers.

Brizendine provides only one citation to support this claim: A 2005 article in Science entitled “Patterning and plasticity of the cerebral cortex,” which Liberman reads and finds to be “a fascinating review of recent research on cortical development.” However:

But there’s absolutely nothing in this article about sexual differentiation. Specifically, there’s no mention whatsoever of the concept that “[a] huge testosterone surge … will turn this unisex brain male by killing off some cells in the communication centers and growing more cells in the sex and aggression centers”. The terms “sex”, “male”, “female”, “testosterone”, “Y chromosome” don’t occur in this paper; and Brizendine offers no other support for this claim.

Liberman isn’t cherry-picking; he’s simply checking every one of Brizendine’s citations related to Liberman’s field. And problems like the above — Brizendine’s citations frequently don’t support her claims, and sometimes actually contradict her claims — crop up again and again. I really recommend reading the whole series.

In an email to Linda Hirshman, which Hirshman (I hope with permission) quotes on her blog, Brad Wilcox admits that Brizendine isn’t a reliable source:

I have to admit you win this battle. The more I hear about Brizendine the less I like. Too sloppy with the facts.

But as Hirshman correctly points out, Brad’s retraction belongs on his blog, where his readers will see it, not just in an email.

(More by Hirshman on Brizendine - including Brizendine’s extremely thin academic accomplishments - here).

UPDATE: Brad, to his credit, posts a retraction on Family Scholars.

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

I have to admit that for the most part I find the word “bitch” offensive. I have tried to purge it from my vocabulary, but lately for whatever reason I seem to be using it more (especially as a verb). I know there are some women who believe that we should try to reclaim the b-word, but I just don’t find reclaiming the word a project that I want to spend time on. I don’t have any sort of elaborate reasoning, but I just can’t get comfortable with it. What do you think?

One of the news stories that has really moved me over the past few weeks is the case of Jeffrey Deskovic. Thus far, the Deskovic story has been covered by the local media in depth, but it hasn’t received much national attention. Here’s a brief summary of the case from the Westchester Journal News:

Jeffrey Deskovic walked free for the first time in nearly 16 years yesterday after his conviction was thrown out in the rape and murder of a Peekskill High School classmate.

The 32-year-old was cleared in the death of Angela Correa because another man confessed to the crime after more sophisticated DNA testing linked him to the girl’s death. Authorities would not identify the suspect but said he is serving a life sentence for his conviction in an unrelated Westchester County homicide.

Typically when I think about DNA exoneration, I think about a case where there was no DNA testing available at the time of conviction. This case defies that stereotype. At the time of Deskovic’s conviction there was DNA testing; however, it was not as sophisticated as the current form of DNA analysis. But even the less accurate DNA technology was not the cause of Deskovic’s wrongful conviction. The first DNA analysis taken from semen at the scene excluded Deskovic (and so did the second more sophisticated test). The prosecutors assumed that this DNA came from semen of another high school classmate, who had consensual sex with the victim, but they never bothered to test the classmate’s DNA.

Deskovic was not only convicted based on shoddy investigative work; he also gave a false confession. I know many people are surprised that anyone would confess to a crime that they did not commit, but it happens more than many think. The Innocence Project researchers found that false confessions were given in 35 of the first 130 exoneration’s. Often defendants are deceived or coerced into giving these confessions, and in Deskovic’s case it’s important to remember that he was a teenager. I think the interrogation procedures for young people should be slightly different from those for adults. If teens can’t be interviewed by social researchers without parental permission and can’t consume alcohol, then we need to think about what sorts of protections can be given to teens interrogated by police. I wouldn’t be a fan of forcing police to get parental permission, but I do think that lawyers or other advocates should be more readily available to teens in the interrogation process whether they are charged with a crime of not.

Finally, after rejecting Deskovic in 1994, the Innocence Project decided to take up his case. They convinced the district attorney to retest the DNA, using the more sophisticated analysis, and entered it into the FBI’s CODIS system, which is a data bank of DNA for convicted criminals. Once the DNA was retested, not only was it inconsistent with Deskovic, but it matched a convicted felon in the CODIS system. The police interviewed the man whose DNA matched, and from what I can glean, they got a confession (his identity has not been revealed). At that point, the local DA decided to vacate Deskovic’s conviction.

This is such a tragic case for the Correa family and the Deskovic family, because nobody has gotten justice. As for Deskovic, he’s frustrated, and I can’t say I blame him. In an interview with the local media Deskovic elaborated on his frustration:

Deskovic then walked outside and spoke to the media for nearly two hours, seemingly offering all the things he wanted to say when reporters were ignoring his pleas from prison.

“I’m not standing here before you because the system worked. I’m standing here in front of you despite the system,” he said.

He expressed resentment at police who forced him to falsely confess, a prosecutor who did not drop the case when DNA results suggested he should, jurors who ignored the forensic evidence and the judge who could have set aside the verdict but didn’t. And he remained frustrated by the years of failure at the appellate level that ended only after the Innocence Project took on his case.

“I hit a wall and became very depressed,” he said.

He was asked if he was angry.

“The people I considered to be friends all left me. Prison is isolating. My family has become strangers to me,” he said, adding that he lost the chance to marry a woman he loved. “I don’t need to answer. Just answer yourself. Would any of you be angry?”

In a later interview with the Journal News, Deskovic described his first week of freedom.

After a whirlwind week of visiting relatives, talking to reporters and spending time at The Innocence Project, whose lawyers and students had won his release, Deskovic knows his life is starting over. It’s daunting for him, and he complains that the state does not do enough once the wrongfully convicted are freed.

“I didn’t even get the $40 they give parolees when they get out,” he said. “I definitely don’t want to be on parole. I’m done. I’m clear. I’m free. But there are no follow-up services to help me reintegrate.”

Deskovic hasn’t had much time for fun stuff — no movies or nights on the town — or the inclination to spend the little money he has. As a Muslim, he is fasting each day until sundown for the holy month of Ramadan.

He visited the grave of his grandmother, Betty, who died while he was in prison, and before leaving Assumption Cemetery he stopped at Correa’s grave after being reminded that she was buried there as well.

“I would not have felt right leaving the cemetery without seeing her, knowing she was a short distance from my grandmother,” he said. “It would have been an expression of disrespect to her memory.”

Last weekend, he reconnected by phone with boyhood friend Martin Burrett and plans to visit him in Indiana in the coming months.

“That was a blast from the past. We were best friends,” Deskovic said, adding that he struggled a bit through the conversation. “The feeling is, I’m very much frozen in time while others have moved forward. It’s like talking to a stranger with a familiar name.”

Just to get around, he has to be dependent on the good will of others, which he suspects, and uncomfortably fears, will dry up when he is out of the limelight.

He certainly has a good point about a social support system for exonerated criminals, not that the one we have for parolees is good, but the fact that he couldn’t even get the $40 is really pathetic.

While I’m highlighting the Deskovic case , it is important to note that he is just one of several people to be freed thanks to the Innocence Project. You can view all of the 183 people exonerated by the Innocence Project here. Unfortunately, the project doesn’t have enough money or people to do thorough investigations for all of the people who request their help. They are also not the only group trying to challenge wrongful convictions. The Center for Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University has helped with several exoneration’s. These organizations are able to take on a limited number of cases, and they tend to focus on only the most serious cases–usually rapes and murders, which makes me wonder about wrongful convictions for less serious times.

The Innocence Project highlights several causes of wrongful convictions–mistaken identity, official misconduct, false confessions, bad lawyering, junk science, snitches, and serology. They don’t go into detail about how race and class intersect to exacerbate these problems (a quick view of the photos reveals quite a few black men falsely convicted of rapes), but some of that information can be found in the links below.

Jeffrey Deskovic spent half of his life in prison. I certainly don’t blame him at all for being angry and bewildered. I just hope he’s able to get the amount of social support that will allow him to get an education and live the life that he should have been living all along, and I also hope we are able to fix the problems in the criminal justice system that lead to these sorts of cases.

What do you think should be done for someone wrongly convicted like Deskovic? What do you think is a just compensation? What do you think should be done to prevent these types of wrongful convictions? How common do you think they are?

Additional Links

Maine Activist Claudia Whitman Takes on Deskovic Case

Westchester DA Press Release For Deskovic Exoneration

Paul Craig Roberts on the Causes of Wrongful Convictions (PDF file)

The Wrongful Conviction Reading Room

The Race Effect in Wrongful Convictions (PDF file)

El of My Amusement Park agrees with me that it’s silly to criticize Garden State for using music to convey emotion:

If you are a filmmaker (or editor or music supervisor) and you have a weaker scene, or even just a scene that could be vastly improved by a masterful choice of music, your job is to put kickass music behind that scene. Duh. Music is one of a filmmaker’s tools.[…]

Garden State is a VERY interior film. While Braff could have gone the “Interiors” route of Woody Allen, using no music, and making an unwatchable film, he didn’t. He chose to use music to turn the film inward, to show an exterior landscape, but to allow the viewer to hear the interior landscape.

Of course, I’m utterly mad for the divine Ms. El. But then she has to go and show me up:

My adored Ampersand comments on the Pandagon post and notes:

In the comments of Pandagon, “The J Train” calls Natalie Portman’s character in Garden State a “vagina ex machina” character, which she defines as “the beautiful, together, inexplicably single woman who just seems to fall out of the sky in front of the protagonist.”

This reminds me of my student the other day who pretended to have viewed the film for class, but referred to the main character as a “he” though the protagonist was, in fact, unmistakably a woman, and a movie star to boot. I don’t know if “The J Train” saw or remembers Garden State. One thing Natalie Portman’s character is NOT is “together”. She’s a total mess. It completely understandable that she’s single. She’s a total mess. She doesn’t fall from the sky. She’s a total mess, he’s a total mess, they meet at the doctor’s office to take care of that.

(Also, shouldn’t feminists be a bit alarmed by a phrase like “inexplicably single”? Doesn’t it kind of indicate that the only reason a woman would be single is because she’s damaged goods?)

I haven’t seen Garden State since it was in theaters, so it’s very likely that I’m mistaken and El is correct on this point.

Also, Olive says that Garden State does pass The Alison Bechdel test : “Natalie Portman’s character and her mother discuss a dead hamster.” (But is the hamster male?)

Pinko Feminist Hellcat has a really interesting post about reproductive justice, and how it’s much more than the right to buy an abortion. Her starting point was Beyond Pro-Choice Versus Pro-Life by Andrea Smith.

Andrea Smith begins with some really interesting interviews she did with Native American women:

Once, while taking an informal survey of Native women in Chicago about their position on abortion—were they “pro-life” or “pro-choice”—I quickly found that their responses did not neatly match up with these media-mandated categories.

Example 1:
Me: Are you pro-choice or pro-life?
Respondent 1: Oh I am definitely pro-life.
Me: So you think abortion should be illegal?
Respondent 1: No, definitely not. People should be able to have an abortion if they want.
Me: Do you think then that there should not be federal funding for abortion services?
Respondent 1: No, there should be funding available so that anyone can afford to have one.
Example 2:
Me: Would you say you are pro-choice or pro-life?
Respondent 2: Well, I would say that I am pro-choice, but the most important thing to me is promoting life in Native communities.

This analysis is much more common than you’d think. Actual women having actual abortions aren’t generally making statements about the life-status of the fetus, but decisions about their own lives, and the reality that we live in.

Sheezlebub laid it all out in her post:

It isn’t about choice. It’s about power, it’s about basic civil and human rights. It’s about dignity. It’s about access to health care so that a woman can do what best for her and her child, instead of having no alternatives and then being thrown in the clink for being a dirty poor brown junkie or a lax bitch who didn’t get prenatal care. There be cooptation down this road of choice rhetoric–that dirty trashy slut made bad choices and should be punished for them! For the sake of the baby, dammit! And lo, she is, and because she’s not a wealthy or middle-class White woman, she’s invisible.

I agree that feminism isn’t about choices - feminism is about changing our society so women no longer have to constantly choose between shitty alternatives.

Despite that I think that there is strength in the slogan ‘a woman’s right to choose’ though (strength that gets lost in the watered down idea of being ‘pro-choice’). When I was going through the archives of an abortion rights group from the women’s liberation era, I found this fantastic leaflet that emphasised that the right to choose meant the right to bring an unplanned pregnancy to term and keep the baby. A right that we can’t have unless the work involved in child-rearing is recognised, and the costs involved in child-rearing is collectivised. To me that’s the (and the idea that women could have a right to choose when they can only have an abortion if they can pay for it is ridiculous).

I am an absolutist about a woman’s right to decide whether or not to end a pregnancy. I don’t think there are any circumstances where I’m a better judge than the pregnant woman about whether or not to continue either a pregnancy or this particular pregnancy. If a woman has had a sex test and decided to abort the pregnancy because the fetus is female, then who am I to say “no, you’re wrong, you can raise a baby girl”? The same is true if the fetus is going to be disabled, or if the father was of a different race.

But the problem in all those situations is that women may have very limited ability to exercise their right to continue their pregnancy and raise that child. You can’t have reproductive justice in a society where women can only have an abortion if they can pay, but equally well you can’t have reproductive justice in a society where women can only continue the pregnancy if they can pay. If we use the right to choose rhetoric, that has to mean that we’re working on both sides of the choice.

Also posted on Capitalism Bad; Tree Pretty

Meet Pirate Janey. Janey is manufactured by Fisher-Price, and she comes in a little set with a turtle, a raft, and a treasure chest. Fisher-Price didn’t name her Janey; I suggested to Sydney that she could be named Pirate Jenny (after the classic Kurt Weill song), but Sydney either misheard or mispronounced, and so the pirate became Pirate Janey.

Read the rest of this entry »

Amp has asked me to guest post again this month. Expect some posts on recent New Zealand union developments (we fought! and won! - it was very exciting), praise for the irony free, and the usual rants about feminism, bodies, capitalism, Joss Whedon and collective action.

But I thought I’d reintroduce myself by cross-posting two memories I have, that I wrote about yesteday.

I generally refer to my primary school (for non New Zealanders primary school generally goes from ages 5-12) as ‘my hippy school’. It was run as a parent co-operative; we all worked at our own pace; the entire school was thirty children; and every family had to do one half-day parent help each week. It was a gillion times better for me than my other primary school in New Zealand where I’d been bored and miserable. Although I don’t know how it would compare with the primary school I went to in London, where my Mum says I was really happy (my main memory from that school is not liking gravy, but being too shy to ask the school dinner people not to put any gravy on mine).

I was going to write a post about what my ideal primary school would be like (I’ve written it now, and it’s here). But as I was thinking about writing that post, I remembered something I hadn’t thought about in years. So I thought I’d write about that memory first. Otherwise I feel I’d have to go into it in great detail in a footnote in the other post, and that’d be a little bit distracting.

I don’t know how old I was at the time, I think I was ten or eleven, I certainly wasn’t older than that. I know because the main teacher of the school (and the one who taught us ‘big kids’) left before I turned 12. Anyway she decided that four of the girls around my age were getting fat, and therefore we had to go for walks (everyday? Once a week? I don’t remember). We were to go out of the school down to the park up a hill and come back again.

We didn’t always do it, of course (no adult came with us). Sometimes we’d go down to a creek bed instead. Sometimes we’d stop behind some bushes that was a fairy place (I was still young enough to like ‘fairy places’).

There were four girls my age who didn’t have to go on these walks, two of whom were reasonably serious gymnasts. I wonder, looking back, how much of it was that the teacher had forgotten how girls’ bodies change. We were the first older girls in the school for a number of years (the school always had more boys than girls), and we were all eldest daughters. Maybe puberty took them by surprise.

You see, it was only the girls they did this to. There had been fat boys about our age in earlier years, and no-one thought there was any need for intervention.

It makes me so angry, looking back. Not at the activity itself - it’d be sad if the great injustice of my life was having to go for a walk. If they’d decided that kids who weren’t particularly physically active needed to do more walking, I think that would have been cool (and I would certainly have been one of them, but so would some of the thin girls). I am really angry that an alternative school, where there was at least some feminist analysis among the people who ran it, dedicated time and energy into making sure pre-teen girls knew they should try and control their weight.

So tomorrow you’ll hear all about my plans for an alternative model for schools. But remember that individualised attention isn’t always a good thing, it can allow all sorts of individualised way for teachers to passed on fucked-up ideas.

Of course there is plenty of scope for this at normal secondary schools. In fourth form (fourteen) I was taught nutrition by a woman with anorexia. The thing I remember most about that was an exercise where we had to write down everything we ate over a certain period of time. We were told the number of calories we should eat each day, and everyone I knew in that class (it was an all girls school) worked really hard to make sure we ate less than that number of calories. To the extent that I thought that was the point of the exercise, to make sure we weren’t eating too much. Because the important thing to teach fourteen year old girls is to make sure that they eat less than the calories they need to live.

Also posted at Capitalism Bad; Tree Pretty