With all the discussion of false rape convictions on this blog lately, I thought it could be worth pointing out that one form of false rape conviction doesn’t involve false accusations at all. Many false rape convictions now being discovered due to DNA analysis involve genuine rape victims who make good-faith, but mistaken, IDs.

One disturbing thing is the apparent connection between false IDs and race:

One thing that may reduce false IDs is changing police proceedures for IDs by victims; the methods used by police too often send unspoken messages to the victim that “this guy here! He’s the one!” The Innocence Blog has an interesting post about methods of making the ID less subject to police bias.

300 High School Seniors Refuse to Join IDF

Have you heard about the Shministim? In Israel, typical teenagers serve a while in the Israeli Defense Force after high school (there are some exemptions available). But recently some teens are refusing to serve, because they beleive that serving in the IDF supports an immoral occupation.

Seeking to make an example, the IDF is court-martialing six of the high-school conscientious objectors (five who are refusing to serve because they object to the occupation, and one who is refusing to serve because he’s a pacifist). As always, Aron’s Israel Peace Blog has the info: a summary article, “The Saga of the Court Martials“; an interview with Haggai Matar, a co-founder of Shministim and one of the six boys on trial; and an interview with Haggai’s mother Anat Matar, a philosophy lecturer at Tel Aviv University. I liked this quote from Ms. Matar:

Conscientious objectors have always been my heroes; even as a kid, I read The Hobbit and thought that Bilbo’s refusal to fight at the end was the coolest thing I’d ever read. I hope the Israeli COs win their case.

If you’re interested in more information about the Shministim or about Israeli refuseniks in general, check out the Refuser Solidarity Network’s website.

One IDF Policy for Girls, Another for Boys

One fascinating point the “Saga of the court martials” brings up: a genuine case of anti-male sexism. The Israeli Defense Force has an official policy of not granting conscientious objector status to folks who oppose the occupation: this is the “pacifists yes, political refusers no” doctrine.

(In fact, whatever the official policy, the IDF in practice doesn’t grant CO status. “The army’s Conscience Committee, in theory charged with exempting CO’s, was in practice a dead-end, turning down virtually everybody who applied.”)

But, as the defense pointed out in court, the IDF does grant CO status for “political refusers” - if the political refuser happens to be female. In effect, male applicants for CO status are being discriminated against. The court has not yet ruled on this question.

Likud leader accuses IDF of violating human rights

Interesting article in the Guardian: a Likud leader has accused the IDF leadership of looking the other way while the IDF abuses the human rights of Palestinians. The accusations are nothing new, but the source is interesting.

Hopefully Mr. Eitan’s charges won’t be so easily dismissed.

Finding Love in the International Solidarity Movement

This cute story (again from the Guardian) describes how Adam Shapiro (nicknamed “the Jewish Taliban” by some disgusting people) and Huwaida Arraf (founder of the International Solidarity Movement) met, fell in love and married. Both of them were born in the US, and both of them have spent their lives fighting the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

As well as telling the story of their romance and marriage (which is pretty amusing - Arraf almost missed her own wedding because she was performing a hunger strike in an Israeli jail), the article gives an interesting picture of the life of a couple of very dedicated Americans opposed to the occupation.

An interesting cultural point from the article: Arraf’s father (a devout Catholic who at first didn’t approve of the marraige) apparently had difficulty understanding that Shapiro was Jewish but not Israeli. This is something I’ve read about elsewhere - many Palestinians learn to use the word “Jew” and “Israeli” interchangeably, referring not to religion but to Israeli citizenship.

J. at Silver Rights (aka Mac Diva - how does she manage to write so much?) has a must-read post about race, sex, and Pfc. Jessica Lynch. (If the permalink is bloggered, look for the entry on April 3 2003 entitled “Good for Pfc. Lynch, but…”).

I can’t find a quote that works well out-of-context, and I don’t really have anything to add to what J. says, so just go and read the post, kay?

Somewhat related to J.’s point is this New York Times article - which is very typical in how it approaches coverage of female deaths. Here’s the first two sentences of the article:

What’s wrong with this picture?

A Melissa Morrison article in the current issue of Bitch Magazine, “Women and Children First!,” by Melissa Morrison, puts it very well:

“Women and children” is a phrase that we’ve seen too much of. Women are not children, and should not be grouped with children; men are not natural casualties, and men’s deaths shouldn’t be reported as if less notable.

Okay, for this post to make sense, you might want to first read this post by me (rebutting something said on Donahue by men’s rights activist Marc Angelucci), and then Marc’s reply to me, which I posted yesterday. This post, alas, is therefore a rebuttal to a rebuttal to a rebuttal.

First point: funding. Marc correctly points out that I didn’t discuss past funding; to tell you the truth, it didn’t occur to me to fact-check something someone said two months ago by looking up what the stats were in 1997. But I think that looking at the funding over time actually supports my point. Let’s look at some data, shall we? This table shows National Cancer Institute (NCI) funding for research on breast and prostate cancer. (NCI funding isn’t 100% of all federal spending on cancer research, but it’s the largest chunk of it, and as far as I can tell is fairly representative of the whole).

So what’s been happening? Breast cancer research gets funded much more than prostate cancer research does, just as Marc says. But the level of funding for prostate cancer has been going up a lot faster. Why the difference? My guess is that the higher level of funding for breast cancer is due to decades of work and activism by women’s groups. But in the past few years, men’s rights groups such as Mr. Angelucci’s have been getting active as well, resulting in a huge increase for prostate cancer funding.

If I understand him, Marc thinks any disparity in funding is unjust and sexist; the lack of even funding is, in Marc’s view, an example of discrimination against men. He feels the diseases are equally deadly (or perhaps prostate cancer is worse), and thus should get equal funding:

The figures I’m looking at published in Men’s Health from the American Cancer society show that in 1996, 317,000 men were diagnosed with prostate cancer and 184,000 women were diagnosed with breast cancer. But in any case, they both kill about the same number every year.

But in a world without sex discrimination, would breast and prostate cancer research really be evenly funded? I doubt it. Marc’s data is just plain wrong. Here are some correct figures (all of this data comes from the NCI Factbook 2002 (pdf)):

• According to the American Cancer Society, there are about the same number of new cases of breast and prostate cancer a year (193,700 vs 198,100 in 2001).
• In 2001, 40,600 people died of breast cancer, and 31,500 of prostate cancer.
• Five years after diagnosis, 97% of white prostate cancer patients will be alive, compared to 87% of white breast cancer patients. (For black patients, the survival numbers are worse: 92% and 72%).
• The average years of life lost to breast cancer is 19; for prostate cancer, 9.
• Breast cancer is the number one cancer killer of women age 15-54; prostate cancer is not the number one cancer killer of men at any age.

I think prostate cancer research was until recently underfunded, and perhaps still is; and I certainly don’t resent men’s rights groups lobbying for more research dollars. But given the many ways breast cancer is deadlier than prostate cancer, it’s just strange to call the funding disparity an example of discrimination against men. Breast cancer is deadlier and strikes younger; there probably should be a funding disparity.

And I think that Marc’s refusal to acknowledge the elephant in the living room - breast cancer is deadlier - is a classic example of what’s wrong in so much “men’s rights” thinking - the belief that everything is always worse for men. Marc’s ideology means that he has to always see men as “the worse victim” - and if that means bending statistics backwards until he can convince himself that prostate cancer is worse than breast cancer, then that’s what he’ll do.

There are some other minor points I disagree with, but I have limited time and energy. Let me thus skip over the many, many examples Marc comes up with (labor laws of the 1930s?) to concentrate on just one: disparities in prison sentencing.

Marc links to this article - also written by Marc - to make the point that female criminals tend to have an easier time than male criminals in our court system - the women tend to get sentenced less often and for fewer years, even for the same crime.

Now, I certainly could pick at Marc’s data; he admitted to me in email that the data on drunk driving came from The Washington Times, which is not exactly a reputable source of data. [Update:Marc made a mistake; he's now clarified that the info came from the Post, not the Times. -&] And although Marc wrote the article in 2002, 3 of the 4 legitimate studies he cites are from the 1980s. Why? Because those studies are using sentencing data from the 1970s, when sentencing disparities peaked. Quoting from an article in The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology: (1994, vol 85 (1)):

…the “women and crime” literature… may describe sentencing patterns that no longer exist. Much of the research contained in these works is based on data collected in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1980s, however, significant efforts were made to reform sentencing systems at both the state and federal levels. These reforms were designed to substantially reduce judicial sentencing discretion, to reduce unwarranted sentencing disparities, and to reduce race, gender, and class discrimination.

Even if we stick to Marc’s preferred decade, the evidence isn’t nearly as clear-cut as Marc implies: some studies found no sentencing disparity at all (for example, see American Soc. Review vol 49 p541; Justice Quarterly v3 p516; Law and Society Review v8 p375). Nonetheless, although he exaggerates the scope of the problem, on the whole I think Marc is right - being a male criminal probably does tend to mean getting a longer prison sentence, all else held equal. What’s going on here?

Well, what’s going on is sexism screwing men over. As I’ve blogged before, it doesn’t only hurt women. Although in most ways our society reserves the material and political power for men, there are ways that men get screwed over: for example, by the draft, by on-the-job injuries, by lack of contact with their families, and - as Marc points out - by prison sentencing disparities.

The difference, I think, is that most men’s rightists think everything in society is like that. In fact, almost no men will ever be called upon to chivalrously give up a lifeboat seat and drown; most men go through life without being sentenced to felonies; and it’s been decades since there was a military draft. There’s another half of this picture: a half in which rape and spouse-battering happen mostly to women, in which 87% of Congress and 100% of U.S. Presidents are men, in which wage gaps and childcare gaps act against women’s interests, and in which the primary problem of reproductive rights isn’t that men have to pay child support against their will. And that’s a half of the picture that too many “men’s rights” activists seem unable to see.

As I’ve said before (quite recently), “I think feminism needs to be a movement fighting for the social, political, and material equality of the sexes - both sexes. Although sexism affects (and hurts) both women and men, in the end it’s almost always women who end up with the short end of the stick, politically, socially and materially (compared to men of the same race, class, etc.). So most of the time, when we fight for equality and justice, that means improving the status of women. But not always.” Sometimes it’s men who are getting hurt more - as in the case of sentencing disparities - and in those cases, the right feminist action is to oppose the sexist harms to men.

As far as Marc’s lawsuit against the state of California goes - asking for a department of men’s health to be a counterpart for the already-existing department of women’s health - I don’t know anything about the issue. But just at a glance, I think Marc’s right, and I hope his lawsuit is successful.

For years, I hung out on this online feminist discussion board, although lately I don’t hang out there much. On those boards, someone made up an expression: PHMT. It stands for “Patriarchy Hurts Men Too,” and it’s a way of quickly summing up - and dismissing - a common anti-feminist argument. Here’s a typical example:

Feminist: Rape is a horrible problem.
Anti-Feminist: It’s not just women suffering, you know. Look at how many men are killed while working dangerous jobs.
Feminist: Yeah, yeah, PHMT. Returning to what I was saying….

“PHMT” has become kinda a cliche on this particular feminist discussion board (and is spreading to other boards; I wonder if it will be a widespread term ten years from now). I think using PHMT as a dismissal is often justified - based on the correct perception that some anti-feminists bring up male problems not because they’re willing to change society to fix those problems, but because they’re trying to divert the conversation from discussing women’s problems.

But PHMT also points to a very real split in feminism: are men’s problems feminist problems? Should feminists care about the ways PHMT? Some feminists - in particular, some (not all) radical feminists - understandably argue that feminism is about women and women’s issues. In this view, including “men’s issues” - or agreeing that men can be feminists - will weaken feminism.

But I’m not convinced that a bright line between “women’s issues” and “men’s issues” exists, and pretending it does will prevent us from understanding how sexism in our culture works.

For instance, all feminists agree that violence against women is a feminist issue, but some say violence against men is not. But violence against men - both the threat of it and the reality of it - is how sexist cultural standards of “masculinity” are created and enforced (as any ten-year-old boy beaten up by his peers for being too girly could tell you). And those sexist ideas of “masculinity” are one essential element motivating a lot of violence against women, such as rape. Anyone who’s serious about fighting “the rape culture” must want to change (or eliminate) the sexist conception of “masculinity,” because it’s just two different words for the same damn thing.

This is the case with virtually all feminist issues (the only exception that occurs to me offhand is abortion). Sexist male norms and sexist female norms aren’t separate things in our culture, which can be fought separately and one-at-a-time; they are one and the same thing, codependent norms from hell, flip sides of the same poisonous coin.

Take the woman’s-place-is-in-the-home myth. It’s the flip side of the men-can’t-raise-children myth; you can’t have homemakers without breadwinners, and vice versa. To speak about eliminating one as if it’s a separate issue is not only mistaken, it’s counterproductive. It so totally fails to grasp the realities of sexism it’s guaranteed to fail. What we’ll end up with if we try to change only half a culture - what we have, in fact, ended up with - is a situation where women are now expected to be both breadwinners and homemakers, but men’s role hasn’t changed at all, so women are working twice as much overall and still not getting equal pay. Did that solve the problem? Is there any potential that looking only at women’s role in this codependent mess will solve the problem in the future?

(And note that any real solution to this problem would also solve the problem my made-up antifeminist brought up - the very real fact that men are a thousand times more likely to be killed on the job as women.)

Some feminists I know (not the majority) deride all this as “PHMT” - as an attempt to deflect attention from women’s very real problems and issues. Making feminism about men only would, I agree, totally warp feminism and limit its effectiveness. But as long as it’s true that sexist expectations and norms hurt men as well as women, making feminism about women only does the same thing.

You can’t unwarp only one side of a dented coin. Feminism can’t solve patriarchy by refusing to look at huge portions of the problem.

So am I saying feminism needs to be focused on men’s problems? No, of course not. I think feminism needs to be a movement fighting for the social, political, and material equality of the sexes - both sexes.

Although sexism affects (and hurts) both women and men, in the end it’s almost always women who end up with the short end of the stick, politically, socially and materially (compared to men of the same race, class, etc.). So most of the time, when we fight for equality and justice, that means improving the status of women.

But not always. When NOW argued, in a brief to the Supreme Court, that a male-only military draft discriminates against men and violates men’s equal protection rights, that was a feminist action too.

Most of feminism’s fights are, and should be, about women - about improving women’s status, about helping women get by in patriarchy. But that doesn’t make what NOW did unfeminist; and it doesn’t make being concerned about the ways men are hurt by sexism unfeminist.

Update:Jeanne recommends that, having read this post, you go on to read this one at The Watch I second the suggestion.

Update 2: Tish at Fatshadow has posted some thoughts on the same topic, which are well worth reading. (I’m having trouble figuring out the permalinks, so you may have to scroll down a little.)