Houston Chronicle

Shifts in the legal system and public opinion have made it easier to prosecute women who molest boys in their pubescent years, experts say. And cases continue to draw public attention. But those who work closely with victims such as Diana’s grandson say rite-of-passage myths still make it hard for many, including jurors, to sympathize with older boys in such cases, who are also less likely to tell parents or police about abusive relationships with older women.

[...] Pam Hobbs, who heads the children’s court services program in Harris County district courts, said she’s seen police and prosecutors taking underage boys’ allegations more seriously in the past decade. Potential jurors, though, are another matter.

[...] When [Richard] Gartner [a psychologist who works with male sexual abuse survivors] started talking to fellow psychologists about the subject in the early 1990s, he said, he got a lot of “blank stares.” People thought he was exaggerating the problem. Now, there are national organizations, conferences and online listserves dedicated to the topic.

This continued belief in a dangerous myth is no surprise to me since the successful prosecution of any type of sex crime can be derailed by any number of dangerous myths which allow sexual predators to be seen as people who haven’t done anything clearly criminal. These myths are designed to prevent victims from speaking up and to prevent people from believing once the victim does speak up.

Besides being useful to sexual predators, these myths are useful to people who want the illusion that there isn’t a problem. If they refuse to see the problem then the problem doesn’t exist anywhere near them or theirs.

Only it doesn’t work that way.

(Crossposted at my blog, Abyss2hope)

This post is a feminist, pro-feminist and feminist-friendly only thread.

If you aren’t sure what that means, please read this before commenting.

My friend Besty and I were possibly the only people to refer to The Break Up as the new Peyton Reed movie. Ever since we watched Bring It On in a mostly empty cinema in the middle of the day, we have been big fans (don’t ask about the opening cheer unless you really want to know).

The great thing about Peyton Reed is that his movies have quite a mainstream sensibility, but with a different (and most importantly feminist) content. Betsy and I cracked up listening to his DVD commentary on Bring it On when he talked about the movie’s punk rock sensibility (punk cheerleaders!), but we knew what he meant. The ads made The Break Up look like an extended episode of friends (boys are like this, and girls are like this - isn’t that hilarious), but (and I should have had faith in Peyton Reed) instead it looked at the reality behind some of those ideas, and what they mean for the people involved.

It’s weird that we finally got around to watching the break-up tonight, just after I’d written about housework. Because the Break-up is a movie about the dishes. Brooke (Jennifer Aniston) and Gary (Vince Vaughn) have been together for two years and they’re holding a dinner party. When Brooke gets home from work she tidies up the whole place, does all the cooking (for the meal she’s shopped and planned for), sets the table, and so on. When Gary gets home he turns on the TV and watches the game, despite the fact that she’s still cooking dinner, and he’s not changed. Then after the dinner party he sits down and plays Playstation, and when she asks him to help her do the dishes he talks about how he needs to unwind (this is the fight where they break up).

More than anything else I found the movie terribly, terribly sad. Right throughout the movie Brooke, keeps trying to get him back, she’s doing more, and working harder in the hope that’ll make him notice the work she already does (which appears to be about 90% of the work in the relationship). There’s a scene near the end where she lists all the things she does for him, and doesn’t ask him to reciprocate, doesn’t ask for equality, just asks that he recognise what she’s doing.¹ When he finally began to understand what was upsetting her so much, it was too late, she felt entirely used up, and couldn’t keep trying any more.

It all felt so familiar. They’re not even particularly my issues, but I’ve listened, and I’ve given advice, and in the end there’s nothing I can do.

There were other bits I really like; the female relationships were very real and reminded me of the limits of solidarity without analysis. It was obvious, throughout the movie, that other women backed up Brooke because she was a woman. But the advice they gave was all slightly ridiculous and useless, and showed that her friends were also mired in this pit where it was impossible to relate to men on anything approaching equal footing, so all they could offer Brooke were suggestions on how to get around.

What I really do wonder is how much of this was intentional. I’m fairly certain that Peyton Reed brought out the feminist aspects of the movie on purpose. But on the DVD commentary Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston were implying that they thought this was a movie about two equally flawed people. I imagine if you’re used to being blind to power dynamics it might look like two equally flawed people. But there was a power imbalance in that relationship, whether it was intended by the creators or not.

It passes the Mo Movie Measure - but in quite a neat way - it’s only after that she’s decided that she has no more energy to give him that she is shown speaking to another woman about anything but Gary.

As a movie it definately worked for me, anything that felt that real definately would. There were also some absolutely hilarious moments (and some others that didn’t really work for me, but I don’t find Vince Vaughn particularly funny). I really do recomend you watch it, I’d like to know what other people thought.

1. I imagine that it’d actually be impossible to recognise that you were in a relationship where the other person was doing the vast majority of the work. It’s much easier to be blind, than to realise that you’re a parasite (or to do your share). (back)

I got a text from my friend Josie today: “According to the paper if women do housework there’s less chance of breast cancer.” So I got hold of the paper and read something like this

Women who keep their homes clean and tidy are less likely to develop breast cancer than those who let the dust and dishes pile up, according to a new report.

Researchers found regular moderate exercise such as housework provides greater protection from the disease than more strenuous but less frequent sporting activity.

Being active in the home cut the likelihood of pre-menopausal women developing breast cancer by 29 per cent compared with being inactive, and reduced the risk for post-menopausal women by 19 per cent.

What I find particularly amusing is that even though the research absolutely didn’t touch on whether or not the women’s houses were clean (rich women who have cleaners can have very clean houses without spending an hour on housework, whereas mother’s of several children could do 17.6 hours a week easy and still live in chaos), the various newspaper reports worked very hard to imply that it was the dust itself that was causing the cancer risk.

I always go into these stories outraged by the sexism, but by the end of the article, I’m often just as outraged by the scientific ignorance. It’s as if every health reporter on the planet needs to be locked in a room until they’ve written “Correlation Does Not Prove Causation” 1,000 times. If you actually want to read the study itself to find out what it does prove (not much), it’s available here as a pdf file.

But actually this study discovered something that I do find interesting. This was a survey of 218,169 women in 9 European countries and the average pre-menopausal woman spent 17.6 hours a week on housework.

I believe that the vast amount of unpaid, unvalued reproductive labour that women do, is central to our oppression. The women in that study averaged 10% of their life on housework (which appeared to leave out the actual reproduction). The solutions to the second shift: men taking on their share of unpaid work, and a socialisation of some labour that is currently unpaid, haven’t changed, but they don’t look any easier to put into place either.

MSNBC

THIBODAUX, La. - The man suspected of being a serial killer had been accused of rape on two occasions before the killing of his alleged first victim, but he never stood trial, newspapers reported Saturday. Ronald Dominique was indicted on nine counts of first-degree murder earlier this month. Held in lieu of a $9 million bond, he has yet to enter a plea.

In 1993, a Houma man told Thibodaux police that Dominique tied him up and raped him at gunpoint, but an officer chose not to make an arrest, the Daily Comet and the Courier newspapers reported. In 1996, a Thibodaux man went to the same police officer with an almost identical account, but while Dominique was arrested and jailed, he was released three months later without prosecution.

If men think that ineffective investigations of rape allegations never impact their own safety, this case shows how wrong they are. It also shows in stark terms that women rape victims aren’t the only ones who have reason to be reluctant to report what happened to them.

In both of the reported rapes, the alleged rapist claimed that the sexual contact was consensual and even explained away his brandishing of a gun.

This case makes me wonder how much getting away with certain acts of violence emboldens rapists while the inadequate criminal justice response reminds them that rape survivors pose some danger to their continued violence.

We must do better for all victims and in response to all types, ages and genders of perpetrators.

(Crossposted at my blog, Abyss2hope)

This post is a feminist, pro-feminist and feminist-friendly only thread.

If you aren’t sure what that means, please read this before commenting.

The Wellington inner-city bypass open yesterday. To non-Wellingtonians that won’t mean a lot. Those of us who live here it means a bit more than that. I learnt about the by-pass at age 8 when I went to a school outing to see the buildings that were going to be pulled down (it was a hippy school). My main objection has always been on historical grounds, and I’ll explore that in a litle more detail in another post, but I just want to talk briefly about the anti-bypass campaign and some of the issues around it.

The by-pass is part of a late 1970s motorway project where state highway 1 was brought into Wellington city (they dug up a cemetary to do it). There was some opposition to this road, and more opposition to the supposed by-pass that was going to be built next.

That road was delayed for thirty years. In this time there was on-going anti-bypass action, but it focused on two avenues - legal challenges and city council elections. Both strategies were ultimately useless.

Every three years we were told to vote for an anti bypass city council, and every three years this failed (the way the city council wards broke down it was always going to be difficult). T

The problem with these strategies is that there was no organising. There was an occasional public meeting and large march in September 2000, but the basic work of getting people who opposed the bypass together to take action, was not being done.

So come the end of 2004 the bypass started to be built and there was very little organised anti-bypass opposition, but quite a lot of anti-bypass feeling. A small group of people got together to try and do a direct action campaign to stop the bypass.

I want to make it clear that I was not someone who was prepared to step-up to oppose the by-pass (I just had a supporting role). So my reaction to those protests are not criticisms of the people involved (who were at least prepared to do work that I wasn’t), but just ideas that I have learned from watching this protest movement, and others (I plan to write a similar post on the problems of letting the media do our organising for us, about a couple of protest actions I was part of). I think by late 2004 it was probably too late to do the organising work necessary, and doubt things could have gone much differently at the time most of the anti-bypass protesters I know, got involved.

The strategy the 2004 anti-bypass group took, the strategy that I agree was most likely to succeed was to delay and disrupt the bypass and make it financially untenable for the sub-contractor. Most of the energy was put into people involved taking action, rather than getting new people involved (although there was some good organising going on throughout this time).

But I think it’s always problematic to only look about how you can win, without also looking at how you can make yourself stronger in the process. As it happened the group involved weren’t big enough to pull this strategy off. Most of the time we’re not strong enough to win right away. People who focus on the importance of winning each campaign¹ also appear to be most likely to burn-out, as they don’t win, and feel they’ve got nothing. We must see the fight for a better world as a marathon and not a sprint. Each protest movement must try and make active organised opposition to the society we live in just that little bit stronger.

The protests against the M11 in Britain show that organising against roading can be done, and even though those protests weren’t immediately successful they have had an impact on road-building in Britain (I have dial-up so I can’t guarantee the quality of this video - but if it’s the one I’m thinking of it’s well worth watching to see the level organising that is both possible, and necessary to make a difference).

1. A word I hate when referring to activism, it usually implies that a small group of people have got together in a room and decided how they can win a particular issue. Rather than focusing on organising, and allowing that no matter how smart a small group of people are they can’t predict what’ll happen when people get organised. (back)

My Planning and Assement Module¹
appeared to be going well; I really liked the guy who was running our first session he was giving us all this information about entitlements that I didn’t expect (non-beneficiary accomodation supplement, recoverable and non-recoverable grants, targetted assistance - he covered it all). I noticed a sign advertising courses WINZ²

So we went and sat down, it seemed relatively easy, until we got to the job-seeker part of the deal.

I think it is time for a little diversion. Once upon a time a man named Peter McCardle was working as a work-broker (or possible at Social Welfare it doesn’t really matter), he would see people looking for work (or possibly applying for the benefit) and think ‘why can’t there be a one stop shop where people can apply for the benefit and look for work’. Now this story wouldn’t matter that much if he didn’t end up on the NZ First Party List³ at the 1996 election, when the New Zealand public, showing a well-placed cynicism in all politicians (with unfortunate results), gave NZ First the balance of power. So National⁴ , who at this stage were prepared to raise the minimum wage to keep in power - they certainly weren’t going to object to some restructuring of the public service, announced that Soical Welfare was going to merge with the employment office, just like Peter McCardle wanted.

I swear that one of the pieces of paper had “Thank you for choosing WINZ for part of your work search” - obviously a new use of the term ‘choice’ previously only used by anti-abortion nut-jobs.

From my experience there are three really important reasons why having WINZ also offer employment services is a bad idea. One is straight incompetence, the case-managers are badly trained, and there’s extremely high turnover. The benefit side of WINZ is largely mechanical, job-matching less so - so job-matching looses out. My case-manager didn’t know what to do when ‘union organiser’ wasn’t in any of the databases. He couldn’t load that in either as the jobs I was looking for, or (more disturbingly) the last job I had. We spent a good ten minutes trying to find any job in there that in anyway matched ‘union organiser’ (Him: “What about HR Manager” Me: “Not so much”).

The other problem is that it makes it easier for social welfare to use the job-search as part of the ways it sanctions beneficiaries. Most people would argue that this was the point of loading WINZ up with employment in the first place (and that’s entirely possible), and I wouldn’t disagree, but I suspect it’s counter-productive.

One of the most ridiculous activities was looking at a list of fifteen skills and number my top ten. Several of them I had no idea what they meant (and I picked reading comprehension as one of my skills). “Co-ordination Adjusting actions in relation to other’s actions” - whether or not I’m good at that really does depend on the actions that are being talked about. Based on the ten I chose I had to be put into a talent pool (their words). The talent pools were a standard array of low-wage jobs. Many of the talent pools such as caregiver, retail and customer service are casualised industries that have little chance of delivering anyone full-time hours (which is supposed to be the goal of all this).

I want to make it really clear that I’m not arguing that caregiving, customer service, and retail are beneath me because I’m a middle-class white girl with an MA, and a professional job. That work is not beneath me, or anyone else - but the conditions that those jobs are done in: the part time casualised nature of the industries, with your hours of work at the whim of the employer - those conditions are bad for the vast majority of workers. It’s also not a solution to unemployment, because people cycle in and out of jobs and the dole, one week they earn enough the next they don’t. Taking the attitude that an on-call job (where you don’t actually get called) is better than nothing, does not keep people off the unemployment benefit long term. What does (apart from changing the monetary policy so that workers’ lives aren’t used to fight inflation) is making sure people are in jobs that will give them a livelihood. For most people pushing them into insecure employment makes secure employment further away, not closer.

The third reason why social welfare and employment should be two seperate areas was made clear to me during my session. My case manager wanted me to go on a course. Since my only goal of the entire session was ‘no WINZ courses’, I put up a strong case why that would be a bad idea.⁵ When he agreed not to send me on the course he said “I was just testing you, I wanted to see what you would say, I can see that your confident, and you know what to do so you don’t have to go.”

Now I’ve no idea if he really was, or whether he was trying to save face. But what he said was true, confidence is hugely important when you’re looking for jobs. It’s a completely confidence destroying business putting yourself out there for rejection. The more confidence you have in yourself, the more likely you are to be able to keep on going, the less likely you are to be depressed by the job hunt and unemployment.

WINZ does not give people confidence, because case-managers tend to treat every person who come through their doors as if they’ve done something wrong.⁶ This destroys people’s confidence and makes them feel like shit (not to mention the power WINZ has over people’s livihood). I think fighting this attitude towards beneficiaries is a very important project, but it’s a long term project. If Social Welfare and Employment had never merged, then the work search could be happening in . I think that’d be much more likely to get people into jobs with secure hours that match their skills and experience (putting people in other sorts of jobs as a stop-gap measure makes unemployment levels look good, but if anythign it adds to government costs as people are less likely to stay in their jobs, and getting people on the benefit is a long process).

1. That’s WINZ speak for applying for a benefit, it as euphamistically named as you might expect, there was little assessment and less planning. (back)
2. New Zealand social welfare system) provided that were run by privately owned companies - I made a little note to myself - thinking that I could write a nice little blog post about privatisation through sub-contracting.

   Then my casemanager came in. It was the guy who had run the previous seminar. The only consolation I had was that he was as worried about seeing me as I was at seeing him. As we walked over he told me that I wasn’t to interupt him to talk about the inaccuracies of his hypotheticals. ((I’ve realised since that he probably felt that I had shown him up at the previous seminar (I’d pointed out inaccuracies and argued, and other people had joined in). He appeared to be quite new and struggle a bit with the software and the forms. I’m worried that this is going to end badly. I suspect the combination of not knowing what to do, and not wanting to lose face is why he sent me home before the interview was finished. (back)

3. New Zealand First is a political party, the list is one of the ways we elect our representatives - all that really matters as that he ended up in parliament, and he was one of a block that had the balance of power (back)
4. the more right-wing of the two parties (back)
5. Unfortunately I missed the main argument, which was that he couldn’t send me on a course until my benefit started. I’m not entitled till the twelth, and the course he wanted me to go on started on the eighth. (back)
6. I’m going to meet with my case manager in six weeks if I haven’t find a job to, in his words, ‘find out what you’re doing wrong’. Maybe not finding a job in six weeks over the Christmas break isn’t anything that I’ve done wrong. (back)

You get a lot of forms after your WR4U seminar, all in a pretty orange folder. In fact that’s the reason you go to WRK4U seminars, because they won’t give you the form to apply for the unemployment benefit unless you go to a WRK4U seminar. Apparently they are currently on very dodgy legal ground in doing this, but the government is going to change the law to increase WINZ’s¹ surveillance of people with the audacity to want government support very soon. I knew I could probably get out of the seminar before I went, but I decided it wasn’t worth the effort, plus I wanted to write a blog post about it.²

About half the forms and random bits of paper they give you are about applying for the benefit, the other half are about looking for work.

My favourite form of the whole lot is the self-assessment form. In this form they give you a set of questions and you have to circle 1-5 depending on whether they apply ‘Not At All’ or ‘Always’. Some of the statements are really inane “I am a positive person” is the silliest. Although my personal favourite was: “I know y rights and obligations as an employee” after 4 years of being a union organiser I wanted to make a new category 6 or - ‘more than WINZ form-writers’.

You have to be careful with these evaluations though, because if you’re not you might come across as the sort of people who needs to go on a WINZ course. WINZ courses are boredom vortexes from which you may never recover, and while Straight2Work - Retail sounds bad, I’m sure it’s nothing compared to what they’ve got from someone who doesn’t know that they must circle at least 4 on every question about job interviews and CVs.

The forms about work are funny, and relatively easily ignored (although they expect you to keep a job lead diary of all the job-leads that you’ve gone after and followed up, isn’t surveillance fun). The bigger problem is the application form itself. Here’s what you need, besides the form:

Verification of bank account details (easy enough for me, harder for people who don’t have a bank account).

Original of birth certificate or passport (I have my birth certificate filed under ‘D’ for documents in my filing box - people with a bad relationship with their parents might find it harder to get hold of, and it costs time and money to get a replacement - even more so if you were born overseas).

Another form of identification such as driver’s licence (which is problematic if you don’t have a driver’s licence)

A letter from Inland Revenue showing your tax number (I saved one of these under ‘T’ - otherwise I’d have had to make a special trip down to inland revenue. Not that big a deal for someone with a car and without a child).

Gross income details for the last year (I did this by getting my ex-employer to fill out a form. It was easy enough to do, because we have a really good relationship. But an ex-employer could really screw you over, particularly if they hadn’t provided pay-slips. It would also be that much harder if you had two jobs, casual or part-time work).

Verification of accomodation costs (filed under ‘F’ for flat - and relatively easy for most people although harder if you don’t have a tenancy agreement).

Verification of assets (just a trip to the bank away - although the bank will probably charge you).

There’s a whole bunch of other things you may have to verify, names changes, evidence of citizenship/residency status and children’s birth certificates Then if you were silly enough to admit you were in a relationship in the nature of marriage you have to provide all the same information for your partner. For any supplementary allowances there’s more documentation; if you want a disability allowance you have to go to the doctor (at your own expense) and provide receipts of everything you’ve ever bought.

If you know what you need in advance it may not be that hard making sure you have all this stuff when the time comes. But if you don’t, then it’s a lot of time and expense, when you’re probably least able to provide it.

Which comes back to the theme of these posts - it’s not the ones who need help least who are kept out by bureaucracy - it’s those who need it most.

1. New Zealand’s social welfare department (back)
2. I’m 28, the fact that I can treat dealing with WINZ as a strange venture into a foreign land is both weird and a sign of my priviledge. (back)

An interesting, short (12 pages) .pdf paper , from a liberal think tank, argues that there would be significant environmental benefits if Americans lowered our work hours to match that of the wealthy European countries. From the paper’s conclusion:

If Americans chose to take advantage of their high level of productivity by shortening the workweek or taking longer vacations rather than producing more, there would follow a number of benefits.

Specifically, if the U.S. followed the EU-15 in terms of work hours, then:

• Employed workers would find themselves with seven additional weeks of time off.
• The United States would consume some 20 percent less energy.
• If a 20 percent energy savings had been directly translated into lower carbon emissions, then the U.S. would have emitted 3 percent less carbon dioxide in 2002 than it did in 1990.9 This level of emissions is only 4 percent above the negotiated target of the Kyoto Protocol.

On the flip side, there is political pressure within European countries to adopt a more American labor model. If Europeans did in fact give up their shorter workweeks and longer vacations, they would consume some additional 25 percent more energy. Translated into carbon emissions, this would have enormous consequences….

Shorter hours and fewer emmissions sounds like a good deal to me. No one is suggesting that shorter work hours are a stand-alone solution to the need to reduce negative impacts on the environment, but it could be part of a larger package of approaches.

Curtsy to MaxSpeak.

(This is a guest post, written by a med school student, who prefers to remain anonymous. –Amp)

At least at my school, I have often felt that fat-hating is explicitly built into the pre-clinical medical curriculum. I have, thus far, only taken pre-clinical classes, so I have no idea whether the attitudes taught in 1st- and 2nd-year persist beyond this point (or even if anything taught in the first two years matters at all!)

Nevertheless, I was rather infuriated about the way fat was approached in our curriculum. At the time, I had not yet heard of fat acceptance or HAES¹, and was still firmly in a dieting mindset. Still, I found the difference between how fat was treated compared to how just about anything else was treated quite remarkable. For every other potentially loaded topic, from smoking to mental illness, there was a concerted and explicit emphasis on (1) following an evidence-based approach, and (2) to treating individuals with kindness and empathy. When it comes to teaching about fat, suddenly all that is thrown out the window.

Some representative examples would be cases where a fat man is described, for comic effect, as having difficulty fitting into a waiting room chair. Or where a woman with a BMI of 23 is described as appearing overweight. Or clinical tutors who repeatedly tell us that “calories in = calories out”, and that fat people simply lack willpower. Or lecturers who tell us that 1200 kCal per day is a reasonable weight-loss diet to recommend to patients. Or descriptions of how weight-loss dieting is the most appropriate response to bullying of fat kids. Or students who make comments in class such as “fat people don’t lose weight because they are stupid”. Or numerous alarmist lectures about the “obesity epidemic”. Etc, etc, etc.

My personal favorite, though, had to be the diabetes lecture where we were given a graph showing rates of obesity and rates of type II diabetes in various countries. The rates did not match up; some countries were identified as having soaring obesity and relatively stable diabetes rates, while others had soaring diabetes and relatively stable obesity rates. The conclusion drawn in the lecture was that the data must be wrong, because, after all, we all know that obesity causes diabetes! If it wasn’t so disturbing it would be quite funny - after all, I’m pretty sure I was taught at some point that the scientific method and evidence-based medicine are not _supposed_ to be about discarding data that do not match your pet hypothesis… ;-)

Those are just my personal impressions, and I don’t know how medical students’ attitudes objectively compare to the general population. I would guess that the teaching doesn’t so much make attitudes worse but rather reinforces the anti-fat attitudes that you’d typically find in a group of affluent young people. Of course, that’s not good enough! They should be actively teaching us to treat fat people well as much as they actively teach us to treat members of any other marginalized group well.

1. HAES = “Health At Every Size.” (back)

Whenever a case like the one at Duke comes up, too many people will say that if the case falls apart this alleged victim has harmed future — real — rape victims.

That’s a false charge.

The false-accusation theorists are the ones who harm present and future real rape victims. They never wait for pesky evidence that proves their theory before launching personal attacks against alleged victims. They sit like vultures waiting for the next case where they can get their claws into an alleged victim.

They also shift personal responsibility from themselves to the alleged victims they attack for the fallout of their attacks on all rape victims. If their attacks are proven to be against real rape victims they play the innocent victim and at best offer a putrid, oops. More often they fly silently away until their next target comes into sight.

Women they can label as sluts are a favorite target of these vultures. Often it seems like it only takes being an alleged rape victim for some vultures to label an alleged victim a slut when the alleged rapist isn’t someone totally repulsive.

If any charges are dropped they swoop in triumphant while making enough of a ruckus to attract other vultures. The kill is all that matters since they don’t need legal proof that the alleged victim is a liar who committed a crime by reporting rape.

The interesting contradiction about these vultures is that many of them will also feast on select alleged rapists. Any disreputable alleged rapist with male alleged victims is a prime target. That target becomes tastier if he is a minority and any of his victims are not.

Alleged rapists who are classified as illegal aliens are also favorite prey of these vultures.

Vultures accuse those who assume all alleged victims to be credible — until proven not credible — of being vultures out to destroy innocent men. That is a false accusation and a projection of their own habits onto those who oppose them.

That vultures say they oppose false or unfounded accusations at the same time they make them is the ultimate vulture irony.

Legal proof is only needed when the accusation is against someone they identify with. Which raises the question of why so many vultures identify with alleged rapists.

If you don’t want to prevent rape victims from getting justice, don’t be a vulture.

(Crossposted at my blog, Abyss2hope)

This post is a feminist, pro-feminist and feminist-friendly only thread.

If you aren’t sure what that means, please read this before commenting.

Bean and I went to see “The Pursuit of Happyness,” a new movie starring Will Smith as real-life stock broker Chris Gardner. Set in the 80s, the movie tells the story of how Gardner — black, poor, a single father with only a high-school education — became a stock broker using only intelligence, hard work, and a seemingly inexhaustible will to succeed.

The movie was entertaining but not fantastic. What struck me most about it is how differently liberals and conservatives will interpret the movie’s message. To conservatives, like Michael at InternetMonk, the message is that hard work wins the day:

Will Smith’s “The Pursuit of Happyness” [is] a stunningly positive, pro-individual, pro-America film that may go to the top of every economic conservative’s “must see” list. “Pursuit” is a stereotype breaker in every scene, and it’s not an accident. This is a film with the unashamed message that America is a place where individuals aren’t rewarded via pity, but through initiative, sacrifice and hard work. Chris Gardner’s success came by taking the gifts God gave him, motivating himself with love for his son, and persevering in a superhuman effort to outdo people with racial, social and educational advantage. [...]

And when he achieves his goal- a genuinely emotional breakthrough that will be hard for any man who loves his family to resist- it is not because of affirmative action, but because Chris Gardner was the best man for the job. You can look in the eyes of all those corporate types and know that they have only been dimly aware that this is a man who has been sleeping in restrooms and at homeless shelters, but they are treating him completely in line with the content of his character and not in pity. At a moment when he is nearly starving, his boss- a millionaire many times over- asks him for five dollars for cab fare. Gardner gives it to him because that is who he is and will always be.¹

I saw the same movie, but I got a different message. Because the effort Gardner puts forth in the movie really does seem (as Michael says) superhuman. In the movie², Gardner had no real friends, no support network, no savings, no home, and a child to take care of. He was pretty much in the situation Hilzoy discusses here — no margin for error, no margin for bad luck.

There are thousands of Americans in that situation. What makes Gardner’s story so unusual — and a good subject for a major Hollywood movie — is that Gardner ended up a millionairre. The far more common story of people who don’t make it, isn’t the story of which major movies are made. Artist and blogger Marc Vallen (who created a 1980s protest poster used as set dressing in the movie) writes:

The Pursuit of Happyness has as its actual star the mythic American dream story, where anyone can become financially successful through dedication and hard work. While it’s said “everyone loves a winner” and “a happy ending”, I’d still like to see Hollywood tackle the stories of those real-life people who’ve struggled and worked hard all of their lives but never even came close to achieving their dreams. Odds are that describes a huge number of people, and as yet, their stories haven’t appeared on the silver screen. I also find it ironic that a poster once considered controversial, and used by activists who were willing to be beaten, arrested, and jailed for a cause - has became set dressing for a popular “feel good” movie.

For me, the lesson to take away from “The Pursuit of Happyness” isn’t that anyone can make it in America. Gardner wasn’t “anyone.” He was broke, but he had a natural endowment of intelligence, charm and drive that made him one in ten thousand, or maybe one in a million.
I’s ludicrous to think that “Pursuit of Happyness” shows that anyone can make it; on the contrary, “Pursuit of Happyness” shows that for someone starting with nothing in America, it take a ludicrous amount of talent and drive to pull oneself up.

I think it’s possible to become a better society — one in which no one is every that utterly lacking help and resources, and in which it doesn’t require Chris-Gardner levels of talent and drive for someone on the bottom to make the system work.

The San Francisco Gate has a story with more information about The Real-Life Chris Gardner; there are interesting contrasts between his life and the movie version. (For example, in the movie he was homeless while doing an unpaid apprenticeship; in real life I doubt he was homeless while he was an apprentence, since the apprenticeship program paid $1000 a month.) And CNN has an article about Gardner’s current activities – he’s hoping to become the next Oprah.

Also, Czerna has a related post.

1. Contrary to Michael’s interpretation, I think it was clear that Gardner gave him the five bucks because he was an intern who had no choice but to suck up to his bosses, and who couldn’t let them know how close to the edge he was living. (back)
2. and in real life, for all I know (back)

Hey, it’s the 24th. Merry Christmas, for those of you who do that sort of thing. (Me, I have my own way of celebrating Xmas - I call it “time and a half day”).

(I’m going to be traveling more or less nonstop for the next five or six days, by the way, so I’m not sure if I’ll be able to check in on “Alas” in that time.)

Please feel free to use this thread to discuss anything, including posting links to anything you think is cool (including your own stuff - in fact, posting links to your own stuff is encouraged!).

People In Our Blogging Community Need Help
If you have even five bucks you can spare, now’s the time to hit the donation buttons on the sidebars at:

Black Amazon’s place. BA is broke because she got ticketed in an empty subway car by the NYC Transit Cops (for those of us without perfect vision, you have to kneel on the seat to be able to read the tiny print on the maps!) Note: You’ll have to go to BFP’s front page to find the donate button!

Wampum, which does a huge service to the entire lefty blogosphere by running the annual Koufax Awards, but needs a new hard drive on their server to make it happen.

Shakespeare’s Sister, where a combination of a car accident and long-term unemployment is turning SS’s wallet into an echo chamber.

Brownfemipower is looking for help attending a variety of academic conferences which will be otherwise be Brownfemipower-less, which would be a loss for all parties.

And Bitch|Lab is fundraising for mysterious purposes a new host after her old hosting was attacked by hackers (see her comment in the comments). You can click through on her ads to help her out, or donate on the right sidebar, or get her a lead on some work in Web design, Web development, editing, proofing, graphic design, book design, or database development.

Please, if you can drop just a few bucks into a few of these fine blogs, do so. I’ll do the same.

* * *

Sandy D’s presents: The 29th Carnival Of The Feminists!

Shaenon: Why Everyone Should Hate Anthony
This post, a feminist-informed critique of the character “Anthony” in the comic strip For Better Or For Worse, is the best post I’ve read all week. And, sadly, it convinced me that it’s not just me getting tired of the strip; For Better Or For Worse really has lost a lot of its spark.

Latina Lista: Privatized American Internment Camps Lock Up Whole Families Indefinitely, Without Trial

Obsidian Wings: Carrying Water Has A Huge Impact On Third World Women’s Lives

Think about spending 660 hours a year just collecting water — and often pretty vile water at that. An hour and 48 minutes a day. Think about 40 billion wasted hours, hours that might have been spent working, caring for children, or doing any number of productive or interesting things.

Washington Post: My Life As an Open-Identity Sperm Donor

Youtube: Mary Poppins, The Horror Movie Remix
Brilliant! The best I’ve seen since the remix of The Shining. Curtsy: Boing Boing, The Disney Blog.

YouTube: Dude, I’m Deaf
Far better to be hearing-less than clueless. Curtsy: a fabulous post at Making Light about how some Deaf people are using YouTube as a public forum for Sign speakers.

The Debate Link: Young Black Men, The Cops, And “Existing While Black”

The Gimp Parade: The Best Gimp Parade Posts of 2006!
One of my favorite bloggers (and an occasional “Alas” contributor). The best of Blue is guaranteed good reading - check it out.

The Gimp Parade: Finding The Langauge, Making The Connections
Blue bounces off of Richard’s recent post about male survivors of sexual abuse and adds thoughts of her own.

Feministing: Interview About Immigration and Lesbian And Gay Issues

Box Turtle Bulletin: Another Scientist Objects To Focus On The Family’s Anti-Gay Distortion Of Their Research
Follow the links at the bottom of the post for more info.

Making Light: The News Media Have Sided With The Privileged Elite

Big Queer Blog: Why Gender-Neutral Pronouns Don’t Work For Me

The Debate Link: Why A “Top 10%” Alternative To Affirmative Action Does Far More Harm Than AA

Blackfeminism.org: Why Aren’t More Black Women Married?
Clue: It’s not because of the bias of bridal magazines.

The Infamous Brad: Is “It’s Cold Outside” The Date-Rape Christmas Carol?
Brad says “yes”; I think “it can be, but it depends on how the female singer interprets her role” is a more accurate take on it. But I’m just being pedantic. (Thanks, AJ!)

Latina Lista: Why Are Latino Candidates For Office So Often Dismissed As “Unqualified”?

Planet of the Blind: Thoughts Regarding A Guy Wearing A Gorilla Mask At A Bus Stop
And check out Connie’s followup , as well.

Geogreeting: Your name or message spelled out in sattilite photos of buildings. Neat!

Blackprof: China, the Adoption Market, and the Demand For Healthy Non-Black Babies

Thinking Girl: Reflections On Barbie

The National Student Genderblind Campaign
These folks advocate for gender-neutral policies in college housing for bathrooms and dorm rooms. Curtsy: Hugo.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Many Muslims Have Simply Never Heard Of The Holocaust

The Guardian: Interesting Article About “Orthodoxia”

Taken from the Greek “ortho” (meaning “correct” or “true”), this term was first coined by a Californian doctor, Steven Bratman, in 1997, to describe a “fixation on righteous eating”. It refers to people who, while generally not as extreme in their limitations as Hackney, are obsessed with healthy eating, concerned with quality rather than quantity, refining and restricting their diets according to their own personal understanding of which foods are truly pure.

Rabble News: Excellent Article About Working For Iraqi Women’s Rights In Iraq

CM Lee: Latin@ American Citizens Sue INS For Illegal Raids And Harrassment

The agent twisted Perez’s arm behind his back and held him that way for 10 minutes while other agents searched his home and property. The agent then suggested Perez and his family should leave the area for two weeks to avoid any more such incidents.

YouTube: This kitten falling asleep is so cute it’s almost painful.

On The Whole: Incredibly offensive, anti-fat program airs on public radio.

Screw Bronze!: On Being Female And Over Six Feet Tall

Because height is a key part of how our society determines masculinity, tall women are societally often viewed as unfeminine….

Racialicious: Odd Trend Of “Ask A Racial Minority” Columns Being Used To Endorse Misogyny

Feministing: Working Mothers Leave Jobs Because Jobs Aren’t Structured To Combine Parenthood And Work

Cerebus Fans Take Note: New Comic Strips by Dave Sim
These three odd strips, about a Canadian actress I’ve never heard of, are lighter than lightweight, but diehard Sim fanatics will want to take a look. The first two strips are drawn in Sim’s Al-Williamson-esque style; the third is done in Sim’s more lively and slightly cartoony style, which for my taste is far more interesting to look at.

The Silence Of Our Friends: Free Anti-Virus Software
Donna has the current scoop on which free anti-virus software is good. I’m linking it here because I need to get around to installing some of that stuff on my own computer, and putting it on the blog makes it unlikely I’ll lose the link. But hey, maybe it’ll be useful to some “Alas” readers as well. :-)

There were too many good posts from Junkfood Science for me to pick just one to link to… so here’s a bunch!

Junkfood Science: The Holiday Weight Gain Is Mostly a Myth

Junkfood Science: Some Health Benefits Of Being Fat

Junkfood Science: Being Fat Does Not Increase The Odds Of A Miscarriage

Junkfood Science: On Mass Hysteria

Junkfoodscience: Increasing numbers of the obese in hospitals, or just a change in how frequently data is being recorded?

Nutrition Today: It’s Not Healthy To Cut Fat Out Of Kid’s Diets

One of the principal worldwide goals of public health practice is to provide adequate nutrition for children. In the Third World, this goal is not attained because of the lack of food. In the Western World, this goal is in jeopardy because of unwise recommendations from expert committees that fat in the diets of children be restricted in the vain hope that this measure will prevent coronary artery disease many decades later. (Found via an excellent Junkfood Science post on the subject).

[Crossposted at Creative Destruction, where we think every day is Christmas Eve, because we're just that clueless. If your comments aren’t being approved here, try there.]

From the LA Times:

Hours after the outgoing attorney general of Kansas charged one of the nation’s few late-term abortion providers with illegally aborting viable fetuses, a judge dismissed the charges, ruling Friday that the attorney general had overstepped his authority. [....] Kline’s last-minute push to charge Tiller before he leaves office was dismissed on the grounds it violated a 19th century statute outlining the attorney general’s duties.

Kline, who is Operation Rescue’s “Man Of The Year” for 2006, was rejected by the voters at least in part because of his fanatical anti-abortion views. He’s not through making trouble; the article reports that he’s already planning to use his next gig, as a county-level district attorney, to harass a Planned Parenthood office.

Here’s the part of the article I found most interesting:

Last year, Dr. George Tiller reported aborting 240 viable fetuses at his Wichita clinic because the pregnant woman was at risk of irreversible harm.

Anti-abortion activists have long contended that Tiller’s diagnoses are flimsy. Seeking to verify those suspicions, the attorney general pressed a two-year legal battle to get access to Tiller’s medical records. Charts for about 60 patients were turned over to him in late October.

The 30 charges Kline filed against Tiller — all misdemeanors — center on 15 of those patients. According to court records, all were approved for abortions because they suffered anxiety or had experienced an episode of “major depressive disorder.” Among them were several young teens and one 10-year-old, all of them in their late second or early third trimesters.

Kline maintains that depression is not a valid reason for a late-term abortion under Kansas law because the woman’s major bodily functions are not irreversibly threatened. Allies in the anti-abortion community agree: “This is a loophole that Tiller’s trying to exploit,” said Troy Newman, director of Operation Rescue.

But the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that any restrictions on abortion must include an exception for the pregnant woman’s health, including her mental well-being. The Kansas Supreme Court reminded Kline of that precedent last year.

“I believe I have complied with the spirit of the law and with the letter of the law,” Tiller said in an interview in June 2005, one of very few he has given in recent years.

On Friday, Tiller’s lawyers said he is “wholly innocent” and “has operated his practice under a microscope of scrutiny from the public and regulatory authorities.”

Tiller’s clinic — one of just three in the nation that perform late-term abortions — draws patients from as far as California, Vermont, Florida and Puerto Rico. Many have discovered late in their pregnancies that they’re carrying fetuses with genetic abnormalities or fatal deformities. Some are suicidal. A few, Tiller said, fear their relatives will disown, beat or even kill them for conceiving out of wedlock.

“They are absolutely desperate, for whatever reason, to terminate the pregnancy,” Tiller said in the 2005 interview. “I will never know in my heart and soul what that [feels like]. But I think it must mean as much to a woman to be told she can’t have an abortion as it does for a patient with cancer to be told that nothing can be done for him.”

The pro-life movement has committed itself to opposing health exceptions to abortion bans. But Dr. Tiller’s statements reflect a reality that pro-life fanatics ignore: There are real reasons that late-term abortions are needed; the suffering that some individual women will deal with, if pro-life fanatics get their way, will be horrible. Proposing to do away with health exceptions, including mental health exceptions, is proposing that the well-being of women (and girls) is not a relevant concern under the law. A more misogynistic view is hard to imagine.

(Also, that Operation Rescue’s “man of the year” opposes a mental health exception for a pregnant 10 year old vividly illustrates how little concern or compassion the pro-life movement has for post-birth children, doesn’t it?)

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

I just saw this on Yahoo. The lesser charges remain, but the rape charges are dropped. I’d like to take some time to give a longer response to this whole scenario, and I will do so when I get a little more time. Unfortunately, I cannot leave comments open for discussion because too many white supremacist and misogynist comments are left on this subject, but for now check out the link above.

Kennebec Journal

A children’s T-shirt has aroused the ire of a local shopper. The T-shirt depicts two panels of stick figures, with a male figure pushing a female figure out of a box. Captioned “Problem Solved,” the shirt has appalled people engaged in deterring domestic violence.

“I thought that shirt was very offensive, and I’m sure people who made that shirt thought it was cute,” District Attorney Evert Fowle said Friday. “But when you prosecute 728 domestic violence cases a year, it’s not cute.”

The shirt was removed briefly after a customer protested — but later returned to the shelves of the Augusta Kmart.

To me the term offensive doesn’t accurately describe the message of this T-shirt.

In the first frame the girl stick figure is jumping up in excitement while the boy stick figure appears to be frowning at her with his hands at his waist. Underneath that frame is the word Problem.

In the second frame the boy figure is smirking and has one arm fully extended toward where the girl was, but now there is now only empty space beside him. The far wall of the second frame has been shattered sending bits of the frame wall out. Two lines show the path of the girl’s descent and she is shown falling head first. Underneath the second frame is the word Solved.

Her crash landing is left to the imagination. Which makes sense since what happens to her isn’t relevant to this boy’s problem and his solution.

This attitude T-shirt is unintentionally educational.

In only 2 frames it captures the dynamics of a common and sometimes deadly form of interpersonal violence that happens in the real world. It perfectly illustrates the imbalance between the stimulus and the response. She annoys him and he shoves her through a wall. He’s left with a feeling of satisfied power and that’s all that matters.

Just as with this T-shirt, many people don’t understand why the dynamic captured in this T-shirt is offensive. They think nobody should make a fuss about this because it’s a cartoon. Those who do make a fuss must be missing a funny bone.

This isn’t satire or humor. It is reality in stick-figure form. And it makes some people smile or laugh.

That’s the real problem.

So often when a man murders a woman in his life, people ask where this violence comes from. How could an otherwise nice man do something this horrific? This T-shirt gives the answer.

Murder as simple problem solving. She was annoying and now she’s not.

That leaves the question of how we would illustrate a third box in this same style if the back of the T-shirt continued this story.

If the boy stick figure ended up in the hangman’s noose with the caption Justice (printed hangman style), would those who find the original version funny still be laughing or calling this T-shirt cute?

Would they think the revised T-shirt would be an appropriate Christmas present?

(crossposted at my blog, Abyss2hope)

This post is a feminist, pro-feminist and feminist-friendly only thread.

If you aren’t sure what that means, please read this before commenting.

Go check it out!! This edition is good because Christina has been able to pull in some new folks.

I’m soon finishing up working at the union, which means I’m going to have to deal with WINZ.¹ I’ve decided that the best way to deal with this is to re-tell all contact with WINZ as an epic adventure on my blog.

The first step in this story is the WRK4U seminar. Before you can apply for a benefit (at least in Wellington) in New Zealand you must go on a WRK4U seminar. The main goal of a WRK4U seminar is to kill people with boredom before they get the chance to apply for the dole.

My seminar was very much what you’d expect at a Wellington seminar at this time of year: mostly pakeha², mostly young, mostly men. There were five women, including me, and all the other women were students, as was the only Maori guy there.

The first thing the guy running the seminar asked us was if we had a partner. I was very pleased to see that everyone said no. While I’m not suggesting any specific person was lying (and in case there are any WINZ employees reading this I’m not in a relationship in the nature of marriage) - lying to WINZ about the nature of your relationships is an important rite of passage in this country.³

Relationships in the nature of marriage have a funny history. Women on the DPB⁴ were one of Muldoon’s many targets, and in the late 1970s (the DPB only became a statutory benefit in 1972) there was a real campaign against women on the DPB who knew any men. One cabinet member was explaining what a relationship in the nature of marriage meant, and he said that the woman didn’t necessarily have to be having sex with a man for the man to be financially responsible for her, because he knew lots of married people who never had sex. At the time they tried to get a woman to sign an agreement that specified that she wouldn’t have dinner with the same man more often than three times a week, or have sex with him more than once a fortnight. Whether their ideas of relationships in the nature of marriage are weird or accurate probably depends on whose marriage they were using as a basis.

The rest of the seminar involved a WINZ employee showing us over-head projector slides and explaining them to us and, as time went by, people arguing with him. The guy asked us who the major employers were in Wellington, of course everyone said the government. He agreed but then said restaurants, and then mentioned McDonalds and KFC by name (which is complete rubbish, I know the person who organises for fast-food outlets in Wellington, and they’re not that big in terms of total hours). Just in case we were thinking we should be looking for actual jobs, with fixed hours.

Then he put up a chart showing how much money we’d get on the benfit compared with how much money we’d get in a full-time job. He explained further that if you got into a job the employer would see how well you were doing, and give you a pay rise (I looked sceptical and giggled a bit at this, since this cheery picture doesn’t match either my personal, or union experience of employers’ attitudes towards pay rises). Then he said that the benefit would stay the same amount forever, and ever and you’d never get any pay increases. When I said “surely the benefit gets inflation adjusted” - he wouldn’t even answer my question and say ‘yes the benefit is inflation adjusted.’

I think the idea of the seminar was supposed to be that you sit there and listen to the WINZ guy talk. It should come as no surprise to readers (and certainly not to anyone who knows me), that I wasn’t very good at that. I can’t remember where I started butting in, but I do know that by the time he got to the working for families package entitlements I was explaining it (after that he said he thought I should get a job working for WINZ, which shut me right up).

The really good thing is that once I started, everyone else started putting their two cents in. One of the guys there didn’t have the two forms of ID they claimed to need, and another woman said ‘it’s just another stupid hurdle to try and persuade us not to apply.’

After this we had to go away again, make another call to the 0800 number and set up another time wasting appointment. Apparently you used to make the second appointment at the end of the first appointment, but they don’t do that anymore. Presumably because if just 1 in 20 people don’t have a phone and find it just too hard to ring the 0800 number, that’s many benefits they don’t have to pay each year.

The whole thing was in essence creating opportunities to shove people down the cracks. What makes me so angry is that it won’t be the people who need the benefit least who don’t get the benefit under this system, it’ll be the people who need it most. I’m fairly certain that I’ll get the benefit, and I’m also fairly certain that the woman sitting next to me, who’d been on the student allowance and was wearing a Gucci bracelet, will too. But the guy who’d been on the independent youth benefit and didn’t have a passport or a birth certificate, he probably won’t.

What bothered me most is how any form of paid work was again and again portrayed as the solution to everyone’s problems. There were posters on the wall with photos of happy workers and inane quotes such as “I love my job so I always give 100%.”

Even in a half hour seminar (well it was supposed to be half an hour), the guy took the bosses side against the workers on a number of different occasions. He used the example of someone who bought a stereo on installments one week, and the employer put him off the next. This implies that bosses can just get rid of people at will.⁵

I’m not saying that having a job can’t be good for someone’s life, of course it can. But they’re not necessarily; employers have a very real power over workers, and particularly in an unorganised workplace, where employees have absolutely no power, that power can make someone’s life much worse.

Just this month I’ve talked to workers who were trying to fight back against really awful sexual and racial harassment, another worker who was made to work so many hours that she fell ill, and someone else who was driven out of her job. A few weeks ago I walked past an accident on the street - someone had been crushed to death at work.

There is more to this life than having our labour exploited.

1. Normal people would call it the social welfare department, but not in New Zealand (back)
2. New Zealand European (back)
3. If you’re in a relationship in the nature of marriage - usually sleeping with someone more than three times a week - then they’re financially responsible for you and their income is tested before you get any help from WINZ (back)
4. solo parent benefit (back)
5. which they can’t in New Zealand (back)

The top spot on Time Magazine’s “books of the year” list:

ALISON BECHDEL, FUN HOME
The unlikeliest literary success of 2006 is a stunning memoir about a girl growing up in a small town with her cryptic, perfectionist dad and slowly realizing that a) she is gay and b) he is too. Oh, and it’s a comic book: Bechdel’s breathtakingly smart commentary duets with eloquent line drawings. Forget genre and sexual orientation: this is a masterpiece about two people who live in the same house but different worlds, and their mysterious debts to each other.

I’m thrilled that Fun Home has been a huge success; not only is it a great book, but Alison Bechdel has been an obscure great cartoonist for too many years. I highly, highly recommend buying this book.

Above: a couple of panels from Fun Home. Picking out a sample of art from Fun Home isn’t easy, because Bechdel isn’t a show-offy cartoonist; she’s all about communicating the story and the moment, and usually she does it in the least obtrusive way possible. I love the two-panel sequence above for how well it communicates the emotional undercurrents; the body language and expressions of two people trying not to have any reaction to what they’re saying are perfect.

In 1999, when The Comics Journal put out a list of the “Top 100 English-Language Comics of the 20th Century,” based on voting by a group of critics, I argued on their message boards that two cartoonists whose works belonged on the list were missing. One was Dave Sim, whose omission was objected to by many, and who was left off the list because voters were split among several different works.

The other was Alison Bechdel, and as far as I know I was the only person to object to her omission. With Fun House, it has hopefully become more obvious to people that Bechdel is a major comics creator.

One reason Bechdel wasn’t on the top 100 list, in my opinion, is sexism. Not sexism as in “the Comics Journal critics hate women.” Rather, I think the critical culture in comics tends to dismiss female-dominated genres as fluff, while male-dominated genres — even extremely fluffy ones, like adventure comic strip and superhero comics — are taken more seriously (and were well-represented on the top 100 list). Before Fun Home, Bechdel’s major work was a soap opera comic strip; the fact that it was soap opera meant that few critics read it seriously (or at all).¹

I’ve spent today rereading the short stories that Bechdel publishes at the end of each “Dykes To Watch Out For” collection. Pre-Fun Home, these short stories were where Bechdel experimented with long-form comics, and she did a lot of great work with characterization, pacing, and tying together multiple narratives. I hope Bechdel is considering publishing a collection of her “Dykes” short stories; they stand on their own quite well, and publishing them as a group could help make more visible some of Bechdel’s best and least-read works.

Curtsy: Quirkybird.

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

1. There are a few comic strips with soap elements on the top 100 list - Little Orphan Annie, Thimble Theatre (aka Popeye) and Lil’ Abner. All three are certified classics with male creators and a lot of “adventure” elements. (back)

I’ve been extremely lax about enforcing the “feminist, pro-feminist and feminist-friendly” threads lately. I’m making a somewhat early new year’s resolution to stop being lax.

Here’s the relevant bit of blog policy:

Please note that some posts are marked as “feminist, pro-feminist and feminist-friendly only.” [If you're not in those categories,] Please do not post comments on those posts. The purpose of this policy is to allow some intra-feminist conversations to take place on “Alas,” while still leaving other conversations open to non-feminist participation. Please respect the spirit of this policy, and not just the letter. Attempts to play “rules lawyer” will not be well taken by the moderator.

I’m particularly disappointed at non-feminists who have been regular comment-writers here long enough to know the policy, but who still ignore it. You should know better. If you have a response to a “feminist only” thread you want to post on “Alas,” you may do so in an open thread. Or you can take it to your own blog.

I’ve hesitated to enforce “feminist only” threads — or to moderate in any way at all — in discussions following posts written by folks other than me. That’s been the policy, and I think there were good reasons for it. But I think it’s time to experiment with a change.

So from now on, I’ll feel free to moderate when it seems like an easy call to me (such as telling obviously non-feminists to get out of a feminist-only thread), even if it’s not my thread. When moderation questions are more ambiguous, I’ll leave it to the blogger who started the thread to make the call, but in some cases I’ll put questionable comments into the “needs to be approved” area until the thread-starter has a chance to take a look at it.

At the same time, I have a life outside of this blog. Sometimes I don’t read “Alas” for ten or twenty hours at a time, or more if I’m doing something like plane travel. And sometimes I’m just plain absent-minded. So there are going to be comments that slip through unmoderated. So I’ll ask “Alas” readers to help me out by sending me email if you think there’s a comment I should be concerned with. It’s extra-helpful if you can include some specifics to help me find the comment you mean — for example, by quoting a paragraph of it.

Via Ezra, an interesting interview with Bruce Western, author of Punishment And Inequality In America. Here’s a couple of sample quotes:

What were some of the striking elements of your research?

There were two things that I found particularly striking. The first was the very high rates of incarceration among young black men, in particular if they haven’t been to college. When we actually calculated the estimates, we were finding that one in three black men now in their mid-30s had prison records, and that one in three black men who hadn’t been to college now had prison records; and if they had dropped out of high school the number was two in three. These were astonishingly high numbers and initially we thought we’d made mistakes in our calculations. We only have to go back 20 years to find a time when the penal system was not a pervasive presence in the lives of young black men.

The other surprising element involved reexamining labor market trends, particularly during the 1990s. The story about the 1990s was that economic growth and the labor market were so strong, particularly at the end of the 1990s, that the market was finally providing benefits to very marginal workers — young men with less than a college education — and their employment rates and wages were apparently increasing. All of these statistics, of course, don’t take into account the fact that a growing share of that population is increasingly in prison and doesn’t show up in any economic statistics. Once you take account of the growing numbers of poor young men in prison, you can see that black men obtained no real economic benefit at all from the economic expansion of the 1990s. This was a pretty surprising finding because there was a consensus that very strong economic growth could provide benefits to the furthest margins of the labor market.

What policy recommendations do you have for breaking the cycle of mass imprisonment?

We need to do at least two things. We need to re-examine our current approach to drug control policy. At the moment, incarceration is the presumptive sentence for drug offenders. I think we need to look at that and ask: Is this really the best way to spend our criminal justice dollars? Particularly in light of evidence that shows that many drug offenders really pose little risk of violent crime to the community. But changes in sentencing policy are not going to be enough. The fundamental problem is there is still no real functioning economy in poor urban neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage. And as long as a shortage of jobs remains, as long as we have these very high rates of unemployment among young unskilled men, we’re still going to get very high rates of involvement of these young men in the criminal justice system. So I think ultimately we can’t avoid trying to solve the social problems that we’ve so far only tried to solve through criminal justice policy with social policy.