Pics of Iraqi elections

Despite my trepidation, it looks from here like the Iraqi elections went pretty well. These pics (NYT: not sure how long the link will last) are really touching.

I, for one, will be reading Juan Cole a lot more closely in the next few weeks and months, trying to suss out what to make of all this.

On the other hand, this is clearly not okay

Given last week's discussion, I feel obligated to post this: 'If you don't take a job as a prostitute, we can stop your benefits'. "Under Germany's welfare reforms, any woman under 55 who has been out of work for more than a year can be forced to take an available job – including in the sex industry – or lose her unemployment benefit."

What I don't get is this: "The government had considered making brothels an exception on moral grounds, but decided that it would be too difficult to distinguish them from bars."

How would it be difficult to make that distinction? Also, why must it be a moral exception? Why not make it an exception on the grounds of risks to mental or physical health, or the risk of rape?

Of course, the larger issue of forcing people to take any available job is one that I also object to. People shouldn't have to take swing shift jobs if they have kids, or jobs that require a commute if they don't own cars, or jobs that require them to stand if they have circulation problems. And no, they shouldn't have to take jobs that require them to fuck.

Link via Umbrae Canarum, who got it through Drudge (which I won't bother linking to, shudder).

Update: see this post for a retraction--the story isn't true.

Election weekend in Iraq

1. Houzan Mahmoud: Why I am not taking part in these phoney elections

. . . these elections are, for Iraq's women, little more than a cruel joke. Amid the suicide attacks, kidnappings and US-led military assaults of the 20-odd months since Saddam's fall, the little-reported phenomenon is the sharp increase in the persecution of Iraqi women. . . .

If Iraqi women take part in Sunday's poll, who are they to vote for? Women's rights are ignored by most of the groupings on offer. The US government appears happy to have Iraq governed by reactionary religious and ethnocentric élites.

2. Rocket hits U.S. Embassy.

3. Transcript of Hersh's remarks at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, NYC. Hersh is the cassandra of our times, it feels.

. . . as virtuous as I feel, you know, at The New Yorker, writing an alternative history more or less of what's been going on in the last three years, George Bush feels just as virtuous in what he is doing. He is absolutely committed . . . George Bush thinks this is the right thing.

He is going to continue doing what he has been doing in Iraq. He's going to expand it, I think, if he can. I think that the number of body bags that come back will make no difference to him. The body bags are rolling in. It makes no difference to him, because he will see it as a price he has to pay to put America where he thinks it should be. . . .

It's hard to predict the future. And it's sort of silly to, but the question is: How do you go to him? How do you get at him? What can you do to maybe move him off the course that he sees as virtuous and he sees as absolutely appropriate? All of us -- you have to -- I can't begin to exaggerate how frightening the position is -- we're in right now, because most of you don't understand, because the press has not done a very good job. . . .

Let's all forget this word "insurgency". It's one of the most misleading words of all. Insurgency assumes that we had gone to Iraq and won the war and a group of disgruntled people began to operate against us and we then had to do counter-action against them. That would be an insurgency. We are fighting the people we started the war against. . . . they only choose to fight in different time spans than we want them to, in different places. We took Baghdad easily. It wasn't because be won. We took Baghdad because they pulled back and let us take it and decided to fight a war that had been pre-planned that they're very actively fighting. . . .

There's a lot of anxiety inside the -- you know, our professional military and our intelligence people. Many of them respect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as much as anybody here, and individual freedom. So, they do -- there's a tremendous sense of fear. . . .

Words mean nothing -- nothing to George Bush. They are just utterances. They have no meaning. Bush can say again and again, "well, we don't do torture." We know what happened. We know about Abu Ghraib. . . . The spectacle of these people doing those antics night after night, for three and a half months only stopped when one of their own soldiers turned them in tells you all you need to know, how many officers knew. I can just give you a timeline that will tell you all you need to know. Abu Ghraib was reported in January of 2004 this year. In May, I and CBS earlier also wrote an awful lot about what was going on there. At that point, between January and May, our government did nothing. Although Rumsfeld later acknowledged that he was briefed by the middle of January on it and told the President. . . . They've gotten away with it. . . .

Every four-star General I know is saying, "Who is going to tell them we have no clothes?" Nobody is going to do it. Everybody is afraid to tell Rumsfeld anything. That's just the way it is. It's a system built on fear. . . .

. . . the economy. It's going to go very bad, folks. You know, if you have not sold your stocks and bought property in Italy, you better do it quick. . . . Europe is not going to tolerate us much longer. The rage there is enormous. I'm talking about our old-fashioned allies. . . . it's going to be an awful lot of dancing on our graves as the dollar goes bad and everybody stops buying our bonds, our credit -- our -- we're spending $2 billion a day to float the debt, and one of these days, the Japanese and the Russians, everybody is going to start buying oil in Euros instead of dollars. We're going to see enormous panic here. . . . the damage he's going to do between then and now is enormous. We're going to have some very bad months ahead.

Hersh's remarks via Majikthise.

Made me laugh 'til I wept

Disturbing Auctions. Via scribblingwoman.

My favs:

1. Eat Mr. Peanut's brains!

2. Obscene (in so many ways) salt shaker.

3. WTF is going on here?!?

4. Seriously disturbing sculpture of a woman, from what initially appeared to be merely a shitty craft book.

The Children of Iraq

The Children of Iraq. Via HungryBlues.

As I scrolled through these, I kept looking at the parents. One thing that's universal is the way parents hold kids. The woman in the chador, hefting her son in the blue shirt, probably 3, with her left arm, right hand cradling his head in an attempt to hide his face in her shoulder, in front of the tanks? That could be me. I know what it feels like to hold a kid that age and weight, exactly that way. You do it when the kid is upset, and you have to carry him, and you're trying to comfort him and protect him as you walk. The older woman, in pink, with her hands to her mouth, standing behind the boy, maybe 5 or 6, who is being frisked by a soldier who, trying to make this as easy as possible, is looking the kid in the eye and talking to him? She's horrified that her son is going through this, that there's nothing she can do to stop it. Ashamed that she has to let this happen. The woman sitting next to the bed of the child, completely covered in burn ointment, with his arms outspread so as to minimize contact between his skin and anything else, who is gently touching the kid's head with two fingers? That's all she can do. She can't touch the kid for comfort, because touching him/her would tear the skin off. Is the kid a plump, spoiled, beloved child? Boy or girl? Does she/he merely look plump because of swelling? Who knows? Who can tell any more? This child is going to die. The woman sitting there has to know that. And she can't even hold her son or daughter, grandson or granddaughter. All she can do is sit there and keep watch, and stroke her child's temple with two fingers.

There's no way to rationalize, or excuse, or explain this away. "Saddam was worse" isn't okay. "War is hell" isn't okay. None of what's happening in these pictures is okay.

Why do parents blog?

Is it because they're neurotic, selfish people who care too much about themselves and not enough about their kids? Or maybe it's because they're neurotic, selfish people who "are focused on taking their children's emotional, social and academic temperature every four or five seconds"? Possibly both, according to the NYT. Maybe, the article concedes at the end, "all the online venting and hand-wringing is actually helping the bloggers become better parents and better human beings."

Or maybe, you know, people write about their kids because it's part of life. A really big part. Maybe kids are just people, which sort of makes the question, "why write about parenting?" akin to asking "why write about relationships with other people?"

But hey, what do I know. I'm a neurotic, selfish parent with a blog.

Be sure and check out Clancy's post on this article--she was interviewed for it. Follow the trackback.

More shoe porn

God, if only I could go on a shopping spree here....

Ooh! Look at this one! Even if New Kid thinks it's one of the ugliest things she's ever seen ;)

Time for a new template?

I'm starting to feel a little crowded here, now that I've found this exciting new "feminist of the day" button thing. But I'm no web designer, and I'm not about to pay someone else to design a page for me. Sigh.

It's not a huge priority, but it's gonna bug me until I get around to doing something about it.

Time to call/email/write about another stupid law criminalizing women

Over at The Well-Timed Period. If you're not reading ema's blog by now, you really really should be.

She also points to a new proposed law, this time in Kansas, that seems to be intended to make home births illegal, though as she reads the bill, it unintentionally points only to hospital births, though it does criminalize people who know about a home birth and don't report it to the authorities.

So, time to get those calls, letters, and emails going again. Ema's got the relevant contact information in her post. Obviously, we all know that swearing (no matter how well-deserved) is a less effective rhetorical strategy than firmly-stated opposition.

I hate to say this

because I never mind dissing Dick Cheney, but the Washington Post is wrong about this. Cheney isn't wearing a ski parka, embroidered like a kid's coat at camp. He's wearing a USAF parka with a USAF patch on it. Arguably, there is nothing at all wrong with wearing a US military parka to an event commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz.

Now, what the deal is with the boots and pants, I can't say. It looks to me like someone on his staff forgot to bring the right suitcase. But the parka itself isn't objectionable (except possibly on the grounds that Cheney hasn't done military service).

Anyway, it's petty, but I figured I'd blog it b/c I've seen it already picked up here and here, and it occured to me that the usual lefty circuit of which most of my readers are part, might not know what a military parka looks like.

Why the Washington Post doesn't know, I have no idea.

Poem, for when you are blue

A few years ago, when pseudonymous kid was maybe two, I had to go on a trip for work. His papa took him to the art museum while I was gone, and it started to rain as they were walking home. Pseudonymous kid came up with this extemporaneous poem, which Mr. B. memorized for me, and which I too have never forgotten.

Mama is gone.
I miss Mama.
I love Mama.
The rain comes on my hat.
The rain comes on my hat.

This is getting ridiculous

Third columnist caught with hand in the Bush till (Salon).

He lied about why we were going to war (or, if you want to be charitable, his adminstration was grossly incompetent in assessing the information they had); he's broken the law by bribing columnists; he and Cheney clearly lied during the election campaign about what they'd said and done. They lied about torture, for christ's sake.

Remind me again why lying about a blowjob is an impeachable offense?

I know, I know. This is probably the least original post ever. But I'm just feeling gobsmacked by this for some reason.

Edited to add this link, by the folks at Salon, who have more time and money to put into researching the nitty-gritty of the various illegalities than I do.

Between-class blogging

On the other hand, it's a good thing I don't currently have expensive shoes, because it's gray and sorta drizzly out and slogging through slush between classes pretty much requires functional, boring black waterproof boots.

On the up side, I got my offprints in the mail today! Yay me!

Ok, now must do something teaching-related.

Omg, I want these shoes

The low heels? Or the high?

I'm not going to buy them. Although I've apparently given the impression that I own Manolo Blahniks, in fact, I do not. I do love shoes, and I once owned a $300 pair of opera shoes, but they weren't brand name and after pseudonymous kid was born my feet no longer fit in them. Anyway, I usually don't spend more than $100 or so for shoes, and less in the last couple of years.

Plus, I found out today that our car needs $500 worth of work, and because my university is dragging its heels on reimbursing me for my recent laptop expenditure (okayed ahead of time, even), we got a call yesterday from the credit card we put it on dunning us for not having paid the bill yet.

Aargh.

A li'l levity

Via a new blog, discovered through my site stats: Applecidercheesefudge.

1. Reality shows for academics.

2. Is your computer screen dirty? Click here. (TSFW = "totally safe for work").

What I ate today

1. A small yogurt.

2. A ham sandwich, purchased at a snack bar (mmm, yum).

3. A few potato chips.

Hypatia is right: professors tend not to eat. Between running from class to class, obsessively checking the flamewars on my blog, and getting collared by colleagues in the hall, who has time to eat?

More jokes about whoring

Since driving up traffic is gonna be good for my new money-making scheme, the whole tone of this blog is going to change to offending as many people as possible.

Kidding. I have, however, decided to blogwhore by signing up for the Amazon Associates' program (yes, I know re. liberal politics; as I've said before, consumer politics aren't my bag), and also with Blogads. Sadly, the Amazon button appears not to work: all I get in Safari or Firefox is a little "there should be a picture here but isn't" graphic. Anyone have any tech advice?

In the meantime, if you click on the non-existent button above my blogroll, you can buy books, hooker boots, or Wacoal bras and I'll get a cut. The Blogads will have to wait until they process me through.

update: Fixed! Thanks to JM over at No Fancy Name for the advice and bandwidth!

Ye olde hatebag

Title borrowed from Uffish, who gets much better hatemail than I do. But, against advice of counsel, I cannot resist sharing this one.

(If m'friend here decides to come on over and start trolling the comments, I'm asking my readers to ignore him.)

"Hi Bitch, Phd:

"With the idea of straightening out your thinking on the male gender I found I couldn't post a comment to you. Your blog is broken.

"So I'll just comnment that you have not had any anthropology, maybe not even biology, in your education! Formally neither have I by the "bye and bye" I'll add but quite a lot informally! I do know that my cat "Lil Guy" is an Animalia Chordata Mammalia Carnivora Felidae Felinae Felis Silvestrus Catus Domesticus! That is Kingdom Phylum Class Order Family SubFamily Genus SubGenus Species Subspecies. Expose yourself to it so as to learn about the genders in particular and homonids in general, or the vice versa of the two. I have less knowledge about you and I than the felines anthropologically speaking but, as I suggested in the first paragraph, more than do you know about me and I'll wager as much about you, too!

"My irritation is I greatly dislike to see gross ignorance being expressed by purported academics! That's especially if they are a rank above me, the "Adjunct Professor" class in academic criteria! I think "time in grade" in living gives me some PhD level knowlege, maybe far more than yours, about people! Admittedly I'll never contrast myself nor compete with the caliber of Stephen Hawkings nor the late Richard Feynman or that caliber in anything!

"So there, but this is fun. I struggled to get my brand new 19" flat screen running nicely in all modes aboard Linux,especially text input/output, and just can't get away from using it! This "Lunix Mono Font 11" is georgeous here. I don't know about how it squirts out at your end.

"Best wishes on your Professoring of whatever but I hope not about men vs women! In the last few days of the NY Times there have been several related articles, probably motivated by the Harvard President's comments, on the matter. One actually strongly implies a sound genetic predisposition toward differences. Note the word "differences" lacked any descriptive adjective from me!

"Intrepid"

"Were I to choose another pseudonym I'd like "spunky rascal", the first desciptor provided by a girlfriend and the second from a very old male friend. Bracketing "Intrepid" with those would be perfect! It makes the mnemonic "SIR"!

"P.S. I must add: you don't know many men very well! Hint in the mode of Plato regarding your beliefs: how did men and women, as comparatively feeble as they were, evolve to us over the last million years or even the dozens of millions from Homo Habilis et al while there were existant predators a thousand times heavier! And some of the Carnivores then could outrun our human ancestors at five times their speed and fly ten times as fast! Not solo, I'll assure you of that!

"P.P.S. And I can't resist: you certainly have little background in classical literature! I know: men predominate because of the bias against women! Go ahead, match Elizabeth Barrett against Robert Browning! Try to tell me she'd have "made it" without him! That wouldn't match the history I've read."

Winter fun!

Ugh, so this crappy storm made our power go out last night! Apparently the whole neighborhood. When we woke up it was COOOOLD. Luckily Mr. B. is very brave, so while pseudonymous kid and I huddled, whining, under the covers, he got up, grabbed some clothes, and stuffed them in bed with us where, once they'd warmed up, we all got dressed under the covers. Then he went downstairs and lit the gas stove with a match (yay gas stove!) and made some hot coffee and oatmeal to get us going. Fed, dressed, and freezing fucking cold, we dragged our butts out of bed and went into town, where we spent the morning thawing out in a coffeeshop. We also found out that it was indeed just our neighborhood and not the whole town that had lost power, so after a few hours we took a chance and went home and found that gracias a dios, the power was back on.

Of course, it kind of blew my plan to grade this morning, since I'm having my students submit most of their work via WebCT this semester. But no big deal. I have this afternoon, and I don't teach tomorrow, so I should be able to get caught up.

The fresh snow does indeed look pretty. Through the window.

Obscene

Everyone has seen the picture of the little girl screaming and crying after her parents were shot in front of her. It's a horrifying image. Of course, lots of kids in Iraq have seen their parents killed, as have kids in every war. It's just that there happened to be a photographer there for this one, and it's an extremely good photo, aesthetically: the darkness, the color, the framing. Gross to aestheticize it, but that's part of the power of the image.

Anyway, one is upset by the rubbernecking, which is why I didn't blog it. On the other hand, I also think that rubbernecking is a human impulse and kind of an expression of solidarity. Even if one feels/is helpless to actually act, we're social animals and we want, somehow, to witness, support, help.

Which is maybe why what I find really obscene is picture #10 in this photo sequence (picked up from Travis). We're warned that "this gallery contains graphic images." Then we get to see all these pictures of the poor goddamned children, covered in blood, sobbing in horror.

But the one picture where we have an opportunity to see what these children saw--keeping in mind that it was their parents--is pixelated. Because apparently our delicate sensibilities shouldn't have to see the collapsed face of a stranger, just the expressions of the stranger's kids after they saw it.

Abortion links

Today, of course, is the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. I'm not a big birthday person myself, so I don't have any exciting new content on the subject, but as a kind of placemarker here are a few good links:

1. The Well-Timed Period: A History Lesson

2. Bitch. Ph.D.: Abortion.

3. Feministing: Happy Birthday to Roe.

Whore

So the comments to my last post on this subject turned to the subject of, does prostitution inherently harm women and, by extension, is it possible to be a feminist without being absolutely against prostitution?

I think there are a number of issues here. Let me start by stating the obvious. I am a feminist, yes. I am also femme, which means that in many ways I am buying into a broader patriarchal system. I spend money and time on my appearance. I shave my legs (in the summer). I buy semi-costly moisturizers and cleaning stuff for my face. I like shoes and clothes. I pay some attention to fashion. Though I am no Uma Thurman (que lastima!), I am not unaware that by conventional standards I am considered fairly attractive, and I am also aware that this plays to my advantage in a number of situations, including being in the classroom. I also have a Ph.D. and I teach at a research university: those facts, too, indicate that I have bought into a broader system that depends on and perpetuates a lot of things that I find objectionable.

Now, by doing all this shit, I recognize that I am being shaped by (and myself contributing to) a system that judges women by how they look, that burdens us temporally and economically with adhereing to a fairly narrow standard. I have also, by virtue of the Ph.D., participated in a system that pretends to be a meritocracy even though I know it is not, and by teaching graduate students I am continuing to perpetuate that myth.

At the same time, I do speak out about the falsehoods inherent in these systems. Should I walk the walk as well as talk the talk and refuse to play the game at all? Should I refuse to wear stylish clothing, refuse to spend $50 on a haircut, refuse to consider my appearance, eschew vanity? Doing so would, on one level, be consistent with my beliefs. But not entirely, because frankly, I enjoy this shit. I enjoy it when my colleagues whisper, "fantastic purse!" or "we were talking earlier about how great your shoes are!" after a meeting. I take pleasure in compliments, and I like it when people find me attractive. I'm not interested in a revolution where I can't dance, and I think there is not a goddamn thing wrong with enjoying pleasure and flirting. I also, of course, reserve the right to schlep around and look like crap on a given day, and I'm not going to play the game of running other women down, and frankly I go through periods where I am more or less femmey (right now I'm in a femmey phase), and I'm cool with that too.

Because frankly, even while I can criticize the system, even while I can bitch about the beauty standard and point out the constructedness of gender and all of that, I am also well aware that I do live in that system. We all care about what we look like, even if the look we choose to project is "I don't care about what I look like" or "fuck your fascist beauty standards" or "combat boots kick ass." I can pull those looks off, too, and sometimes I do. But it is a fact that, if I stand up and identify myself as a feminist, the fact that I am femmey, the fact that I am married and have a kid, the fact that I have a Ph.D., gives my words a certain kind of weight. My words are not more important than the words of a woman who is butch, or single, or never wants kids, or uneducated, of course, and I'll be the first to say that (or the last, after the butch, single, childfree dropouts have had their say).

Take this blog as an example. I'm not stupid. I know perfectly well that one reason I get the traffic I get is because I talk about sex occasionally, because I have semi-titillating content on here. I'm not immune to the simple desire to please an audience or to enjoy attention. On the other hand, I have made a conscious decision not to get into detail about my sex life, not to talk about sex all that much. Partly this is because, frankly, despite everything, I am pretty middle class: I would be embarrassed to go into detail about fucking. But the more high-minded reason is that my purpose is not just to titillate and get hits and comments. Ages ago, one commenter said something to the effect of, "wow, I see what you are doing here: you're using sex to bring people in and get them to hear what you say about feminism." To some extent, that is true.

Now, on the question of prostitution specifically. I am not going along with the comments and/or emails I got saying, "well, yes, you might take money for sex but you wouldn't really be a prostitute if you did so, because you're educated, you're making a choice, you're exercising a lot of control over the transaction." First, I think it is shitty to play the "exception" card, and second, I believe in calling a spade a spade. If I take money for sex, that makes me a prostitute. So what? There's a huge social stigma associated with that, of course, and I think that stigma is bullshit, and I'm not gonna let the stigma make me euphemize what I'm doing.

On the other hand, I am well aware that the conditions under which I am considering prostituting myself are not the typical conditions under which women do so. I'm not without other means of support. Polymnia made a very good point: it is important to recognize how broad a term prostitution is, and the differences it encompasses. I am not considering standing on a street corner or working in a brothel or even becoming a full- or part-time call girl. I think the points that funnie and Paige are making towards the end of the previous comment thread (start here) come, in part, from defining prostitution narrowly--back to the "what you're doing isn't really prostitution" argument.

Yes, as funnie puts it, "prostitution hurts and kills prostitutes and reinforces the power of men." Not always, perhaps, but often enough. But here, the analogy (and it is no more than an analogy) of being femme comes to mind: to some extent, shaving my legs also reinforces the patriarchy. I'm not trying to minimize prostitution by comparing it to leg-shaving, which would be stupid. But what I'm saying is, even if you believe that prostitution is only possible in an unequal, patriarchal society, the fact is, well, we live in that society. I'm not gonna get down on women who decide to play the game for their own advancement. More goddamn power to the Jenna Jamesons, the Anna Nicole Smiths, the Madonnas of the world. And I'm gonna say I admire the hell out of women who make conscious decisions to do sex work because they believe that it is feminist work, that doing it and writing about it is empowering, demystifies sex, educates, or is just plain fun and/or profitable. I'm going along with Vanessa on this one: it is not true that all women doing sex work lack agency.*

And agency is what it's about, really. The problems of prostitution, arguably, are problems of a lack of agency--whether those problems stem from its being illegal, stigmatized, or patriarchal. It isn't true that the chances of my doing this on my own terms are pretty slim, and to doubt that I know what I'm doing is to deny, or at least question, my agency. Does the ability of someone like me to prostitute myself on my own terms make prostitution, generally, okay? No, not as it's usually practiced. Does the fact that prostitution is usually practiced in a way that's very damaging to women (or, at least, takes advantage of women who are damaged in other ways) mean that it is not possible to prostitute oneself without damage? No.

One last thing. I object firmly to arguments that deny actual reality and context in order to abstract some theoretical equality, and I don't think that is what I am doing here. I am not saying, "well, prostitution is always shitty, yes, but in theory it could be okay, therefore it is okay." That would be stupid. I am saying that while prostitution is, to the best of my knowledge, usually fairly shitty, I have also read enough by actual sex workers to know that it is not always about victimization, that it can be experienced as empowering.** I am not making a claim that for me this is some majorly empowering situation: it isn't, really. It's flattering as hell that someone is actually interested enough in sleeping with me to cough up a chunk of change, and as I said before, I won't deny that it's fun to think about and will, I suspect, be fun to do, if I do it. But fundamentally it's a way of having a little adventure and making (as someone said) some free money, and I don't, in the end, see anything wrong with that.


* Nor is it true that all sex workers are women, of course. Funnie asked me in the earlier thread why I wasn't paying the guy, and I think her implication was that I'm not because the patriarchy gives men more power and agency and money than it does women. In general, this is of course true: but that's not why. I'm not paying him because, to be blunt, he wants to fuck me more than I want to fuck him. As I said, I like him, I might fuck him anyway if I didn't have a husband and a boyfriend and live a long way away from him, but as it is I'm pretty well set and so, no. He wants to turn that no to a yes, and he's willing to pay for it. I could use the money, and I'm not opposed to fucking him, and I trust him, and so, well, hey. (I'm aware, of course, that there's also the issue of the scarcity model of sex going on here: "women can always get it, men can't, so they'll pay for it instead"--but again, this guy's thing isn't that he's not getting laid. It's that he specifically wants to lay me.)

** I read a while back an article about child prostitution in Afghanistan. It was really upsetting, and all the young women interviewed for the article arrived at prostitution after incredible abuse at the hands of their families. One story in particular really struck me, though: a young woman whose parents set her on fire, who was hired by the madam of a brothel as a maid. This woman was absolutely useless as a prostitute, because she had been burned so badly: but the woman who hired her obviously, on some level, saw her job as a refuge of last resort for desperate women. Is that feminist? I would say that, in a sad but undeniable way, it is.

More on Summers

The comment thread in my previous post has taken a more thoughtful turn (not that there's anything wrong with knee-jerk bitching about stupid shit, imho), and I was thinking about posting on the question of whether it's reasonable to imply that a hypothetical innate difference in the average abstract reasoning skills of men and women would be large enough to account for the lack of tenured women in the hard sciences, but thankfully Preposterous Universe--a physicist! and a boy!--has done it for me. (Edited to add a link to Matt Yglesias's post, which I hadn't read before I wrote this.)

So I can turn to the other thing I wanted to say instead. My understanding is that Summers trotted out three possible explanations: past and present discrimination, innate difference, and the "choice" hypothesis, that is, that women don't do hard jobs because those jobs are just too demanding and women have families and children to consider.

Now, the specific figure Summers apparently mentioned is 80 hours/week. I'm gonna go on record here and say that yes, in most cases, women with young children are not gonna want to work 80 hours/week. Then again, I assume that men with young children also do not want to work 80 hours/week. In fact, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say no one wants to work 80 hours/week. I would even argue that working 80 hours/week, week in and week out, is unhealthy and impossible.

There are 168 hours in a week. Let us say you work 80 of them. That leaves you with 88 hours of non-work time. If you sleep 8 hours/night, as you should--especially if you are doing 80 hours of productive thinking every week, which really would require you to get your rest--that is 56 hours/week of sleep, leaving you with 32 hours. Let's subtract 2 hours/day for meal preparation and eating, and an additional 2 hours for grocery shopping and putting groceries away. Now you have 16 hours. Per week. That is 2.29 hours/day to do everything other than work, eat, and sleep: talk on the phone, clean your house, shower, brush your teeth, relax, date, pay bills, do laundry, take a shit. If you go to a movie, that's it for the day: you have no time left to go to the bathroom or shower that day.

Now, maybe if you are a single person and you are paid a lot of money, you can hire someone to clean your house and do your laundry, and you can cut back on your eating time by microwaving frozen dinners every night and eating while you relax in front of the tv. That might leave you enough time to shower every day and occasionally go out to buy new clothes. But to presume that this is a reasonable life to ask people to lead is completely insane.

Oh, there may be periods of extreme productivity or inspiration when people can work like that. But regular work on that scale? No. And let's be honest: because it is, in fact, physically impossible to work like that, people don't. I was talking to Mr. B. about this the other day, and he pointed out that the main difference between men and women-with-kids* is that what women-with-kids do when they aren't working is, more work. If I'm not being lazy, I pretty much walk through the door and start interacting with pseudonymous kid, maybe I start dinner, maybe I set the table or tidy up a bit. Sometimes it's hard just to find time to change out of my work clothes, b/c pk is all over me. As Mr. B. put it, "what women do when they're not working is important, so people talk about it. What men do isn't important, so no one mentions it. 'Oh hey, I'm leaving work early so I can go home and masturbate. I'm going to go play golf. I'm going to go to Best Buy and look at plasma tvs. I'm going to make some little doohickey out of paperclips for the next half hour and then maybe wander off and get a candy bar.'" In other words, the difference isn't kids: it's leisure time. And that, yes, people who do intellectual work need. Maybe with with young children have less, and maybe that is a disadvantage for us. But then, everyone needs leisure time.

We women-with-kids, we who are so busy "choosing" not to live this way, we are the goddamn canaries in the fucking coal mine, people. Women make up more than half the population. Most women do, sooner or later, have children. And so do most men. Any system that is set up so that more than half the population is presumptively disqualified from being part of it is not a reasonable system.

*When I say "men" or "women-with-kids" I am talking about stereotypes and cultural expectations. In my own family, of course, Mr. B. is the "woman-with-kid" who has "chosen" to stay home, and I am the "man" who works and gets a fair amount of leisure time. Not as much leisure as "men" are supposed to have, because pseudonymous kid is under the impression that I am his mama, and also because despite my bitchiness, I have internalized a lot of expectations about shit--witness my calling myself "lazy" if I do not do something productive as soon as I get home, but instead sit on my butt and read the paper or something.

Political masturbation

Mr. B, listening to the inaguaration: "Honoring our soldiers at the inaguaration is kind of like political masturbation, isn't it? Everyone stops and claps." (Makes jerking-off motion.) "Our soldiers are dying in Iraq." (Makes jerking off motion.)

Posts I want to make: follow-up on Larry Summers; the family and women in academia thing and why I am quitting; maybe some babbling about feeling better in my job now that I have taken a lot of the pressure off myself; this whole question of how one "knows" that one's unfaithful (or cuckolded) partner isn't on the way out the door; what kind of job I want next (with a request for people to advise/network me if they can); the theory and theoretical practice of whoring.

Today, however, I am ignoring the news and focusing on creating my own reality. That's how it's done now, right? In my reality, Barbara Boxer is president, or at least gearing up for a successful campaign in 2008.

Edited to take down personal info that's just a little too revealing to leave up more than a day.

There are worse things

than being a whore. You could, for example, have this job.

Creating lovely dessert items like "Ho Ho Surprise" or "Ding Dong Mousse," "Twinkie Tacos" or "Layered Twinkie Delight."

Or, if you're kinky, the "Caramel Snail on a Log."

Sluttier than you imagine

Yesterday someone offered to pay me money to sleep with him. I'm seriously considering it. I could use the money and I like the guy.

1. One of my first thoughts was, "they won't let me give blood any more."

2. I wasn't at all worried about what Mr. B. would say or think about this; having already agreed that he doesn't really care who I fuck, the money is irrelevant. I do have to think, though, about the nature of my relationship with my boyfriend. In my head, weird though this may seem, I don't want to cheat on the boyfriend. With Mr. B., I know what our relationship is. I know it's committed. Before we got married, one of the things we talked about was, under what circumstances would we divorce? And we both agreed that infidelity is a stupid thing to divorce over. In our minds, it doesn't inherently affect our relationship--and if it does, we love each other enough to talk it through and figure it out. But with the boyfriend, I'm not yet sure what the parameters are, and as a result I'm still a little insecure. Also, I decided I have to talk to him and find out what he'd think about it, which is good, as finding out also involves finding out some of the more important issue, which is the rules of our relationship.

3. Not sure if this is an indictment of academic salaries or not, but it is kind of amusing to think about being a professor and occasional part-time (or hell, maybe just one-off) prostitute.

Strangely, the process of thinking about this feels very similar to the process of thinking about quitting my job: it's merely a question of identifying the variables, deciding what the most important issue is, and then figuring out whether the variables can or cannot fit into the equation. With the job, I finally decided the most important issue is feeling like I have autonomy over my life: given the vagaries of the academic job market, I don't feel that way, so I am going to do what I would do in any situation, which is look for another job. If one of the consequences of my doing that is that I won't be able to land another job like this one in the future, that's an unfortunate side effect, but it isn't my fault and I'm not going to worry about it (since it's something I can't control). With the sex/relationship issue, the most important thing is whether or not the people in the relationship feel certain of one another: if they do, then the question of what one does outside of the relationship becomes a separate issue, negotiable on a case-by-case basis based primarily around the issue of whether activity X will affect the feelings of the people in the relationship, and how, and how much.

The other thing I've been sort of thinking about lately, w/r/t job stuff, is that really, I am most interested in questions of how people relate to, communicate with, and understand each other. My academic work is more or less about that question, and the reason I enjoy teaching and teach well is because I'm interested in that, and that is a transferable interest and skill, in or out of the academy. It sort of helps to have figured that out. I've said before that I'm very good at handling my personal life, and very certain of my skills there; less so on the job, but boiling down the job "problem" to realize what (one of) the central issues there is, really does help clarify things.

Newsflash: Lawrence Summers is a dick

This is the kind of moment when I'm so pleased that I'm an anonymous academic blogger: Summers' remarks on women draw fire.

Others have pointed out (as does the article linked) the remarkable coincidence between Summers' apparent views of women's capacity (notwithstanding his attempts to backpedal) and the remarkable fact that tenured job offers to women at Harvard have dropped significantly. The article's full of hilarious little snarks like "Summers has called last year's results, when only four of 32 tenured job offers went to women, unacceptable and promised to work on the problem. However, some Harvard professors have questioned his commitment to the issue." Ya think?

This, however, is my favorite. Having said that his hypothesis is "based on . . . scholarly work," Summers goes on to offer this incredibly scholarly piece of evidence:

"In his talk, according to several participants, Summers also used as an example one of his daughters, who as a child was given two trucks in an effort at gender-neutral parenting. Yet she treated them almost like dolls, naming one of them ''daddy truck,' and one ''baby truck.'"

Well, I've got news for you, Larry. My son, whose father took him to see the first X-Prize launch, calls SpaceShipOne the "Mama Plane" and the "Baby Plane." Click on the link, you'll see why. So I think maybe a little more research needs to be done on this topic before your darling daughter--who I'm sure was raised in a completely non-sexist environment (not)--can really serve as definitive proof that girls can't do math and science.

Dumbass.

(Edited to add that PZ Myers, as usual, manages to be vitriolic *and* better spoken than I am, darn him.)

War in Iran next, apparently

Seymour Hersh's latest, posted today:

The New Yorker: Fact

"“This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. . . . Next, we’re going to have the Iranian campaign.'

"The President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia.

"The President’s decision enables Rumsfeld to run the operations off the books—free from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A. . . . “The Pentagon doesn’t feel obligated to report any of this to Congress,” the former high-level intelligence official said.

"In my interviews, I was repeatedly told that the next strategic target was Iran. "Everyone is saying, ‘You can’t be serious about targeting Iran. Look at Iraq,’” the former intelligence official told me. “But they say, ‘We’ve got some lessons learned—not militarily, but how we did it politically.'"

"What do I want for Christmas? I want to be wrong. I want to be totally wrong about everything. And I mean embarrassingly wrong. I want Iraq to be a flourishing, humane, free-market democracy this time next year, and to actually turn to me and say, "In your face, cynical New York man! Your visionary president sowed the seeds of democracy in me while you stood around and belly-ached!" And then I'll be like, "Damn, I guess I never really did have any idea what the fuck I was moaning about, huh? My bad, Mr. President."

I guess there is no Santa Claus after all, Virginia. Happy fuckin' new year.

(Edited to point out that Echidne has some commentary too, including a link to an interview Hersh did for CNN)

Poop

Excerpt from what was, in fact, a very long convo on the subject earlier today:

PK, sighing: "I hate pooping."
me: "why?"
PK: "It smells bad, and it's icky. And poop is not a toy. It's just poop."

I refrained from telling him about this (courtesy of the scatalogical frat house over at unfogged).

Real life

I'll be posting pics soon--on NARAL's Pro-Choice America site, anyway.

Kind of a cool idea. No clue what actual political impact it might have, but it's a cool idea, so what the hell.

Speaking of one's reproductive capacities (there's a smooth transition for ya), I left my keys in the car today when Mr. B. and pseudonymous kid dropped me off at work on their way to the grocery store. They came back to deliver them (which is nice, as trotting up and down the hall for the master key sucks, and leaving my office door unlocked freaks me out) just as I was on my way to go teach. Pseudonymous kid, of course, decided that he wanted to tag along to see where I work. So here I am, in the first week of class, dragging my husband and my kid to class. Li'l embarrassing. Luckily, Mr. B. stayed in the hall while pseudonymous kid marched into the room ahead of me to sudden silence broken by a few "awwww!"s from the girls. I introduced the suddenly shy pk, told him to say hello (whisper: "hello") and then squatted down and said to him, "ok, now you have seen where mama teaches. Now go to the store with papa, and he will buy you a snack, ok?" and he left.

For some reason this kind of thing just mortifies me. I'm happy to bring him to faculty events and such, but having my students see me as a doting mama really fucks with my sense of my professional image.

Feel free to analyze and discuss what this means.

Free e-books

From University of California Press.

Via Amardeep Singh.

One of the books in there was central to my diss, but I'm not gonna say which one.... Lots of neat stuff that I've bookmarked, though, for future reading.

This is the neatest app

If you're a Mac user: Quicksilver

Basically, it seems to be a much better version of the finder. It runs in the background and you set a keyboard command to pop it up. Then, once you bring it to the front, you start typing in the name of a file (syllabus) or an application or someone in your address book, and it pops up a menu for you. It works kinda like autofill, so by the time you get to "syl" it pops up a menu with all the files that have "syl" in the, and it seems to learn which things you use most recently/often, so your current syllabi are right on top. Then you use the arrow keys to pick one, or else you tab and then there's a command menu. You can scroll the menu or start typing a command--"open"--and then hit return, and voila.

It'll also bring up your hard drive if you just type "/", and there's a module you can use to look words up, so you type "." and it brings up a text window, you type the word, tab, start typing "define" and hit return, and there's the definition, sitting there. For contacts, it brings up im name, address, phone #, whatever.

There's a clipboard thing that supposedly stores whatever you copy to the clipboard, but it doesn't seem to work right (the thing is in beta). There's also a thing called the "shelf," that you can use to store & launch frequently used things, but I don't really see the point b/c you can type them in so easily.

And, it's free.

Works for me

Because actually having opinions is more politically viable, methinks, than pandering. Dean to Seek Democratic Chairmanship. Via No Fancy Name.

Score one for the shrill bitchy women

Del. Cosgrove pulls bill after Internet fuels fiery protest (HamptonRoads.com/Pilot Online).

Of course, our "tone" was "disgusting."

But sometimes being a bitchy winner is better than being a nice loser.

All other procrastinators bow before me

It is almost 9 am, my classes start in a few hours, and my syllabi are not done. Well, they are, really, but I want to change one little thing on one of them and there was something I wanted to change on one of the others but I forget what it was. Oh well. Then I have to print them out at home (because I cannot, for the life of me, remember how to set up the office printer on my new machine--I'll figure it out, again, at some point) and go in and xerox the bastards. I don't really have intro lectures planned, either, although I can probably wing it for the two classes I've taught versions of before.

In the meantime, I am going to finish my cheddar cheesecake (an ill-conceived project for a mouse birthday party). My boyfriend the chef told me how to do it, though he advised against the cheddar, but pseudonymous kid insisted that mice like cheddar. I have to say, the boyfriend was right, but pseudonymous kid, at least, was pleased with how it turned out. I am wondering if it might not be possible to do it again with, perhaps, apples on top or something. Anyway, yeah, I'm gonna finish this oddly flavored cheesecake while I correct that last little thing on syllabus #3 and then have Mr. B. print the syllabi out while I hit the shower...

Yes! The new semester begins!

Is god a big geek?

If the universe was created by an intelligent being (that's a joke: I don't want PZ Myers to hate me), then obviously God is really just an enormously huge sci-fi nerd with an incredibly low budget. Check out the picture of this weird Saturn moon, Iapetus.

Very Ed Wood, no?

Will someone make me a blog button?

Pretty please? I won an award.

Unwanted children and the law

In this post, I asked if anyone knew much about the history of safe haven/infanticide laws, and in addition to the discussion in the comments, there's some really interesting history on this subject over at Early Modern Notes. Sharon also talks a little about the history of safe haven laws in this context, but see also iBeth's comments on the latter, over at her place.

PIckup lines: worst and best

So the frat house over at Unfogged is talkin' pickup lines, and since I like giving those guys shit, and in honor of the new semester and Dr. Crazy's preferred method of dealing with new semester stress (of which I wholly approve), and just for the hell of it, I am asking:

Worst pickup line you've ever heard/imagined/used?

Best pickup line you've ever heard/imagined/used?

My nominees are:

Worst: "You really should fuck me, I bet you'd come really easily." (Yes. Someone actually tried this on me. I shit you not.)

Best: I've always liked, "Baby, let's play house. You can be the screen door, and I'll slam you all day long." No one's ever tried it on me, and I'm sure it wouldn't actually work, but somehow I find it charming.

Your turn.

Amused

Apparently I'm the #1 Yahoo search result for boys I'd fuck.

Hint: if you're looking for boys to fuck on the internet, my blog isn't the place to start.

Or, well, maybe it is, come to think of it. Try the archives.

Where the boys are

I'm not the only one who's noticed that men don't blog enough: Flea's using some affirmative action to promote the boys, too.

In other news, I notice via Unfogged that one of the big boys has noticed me (and profgrrrrl). I also notice that for getting mentioned in the same breath as me and profgrrrrl, the boys at Unfogged are "the man," which I think is pretty damn weak (but then I would). It must be because they don't do girly shit like spend money on haircuts.

I'm just going to beat this joke into the ground. Because that's the butch thing to do.

Here's a thought

My boyfriend tells me Cosgrove ran unopposed. So, if you live in Virginia, one way to fight the power would be to run in the next election, or make sure someone else does.

Another heroine gone

I think Shirley Chisholm was the first politician whose name I recognized as a child. She was a hero of my parents. The stuff she worked on--education, worker's rights, opportunities for the poor--is the stuff government should work on, damnit: taking care of things that are collective interests, but that the system as a whole can't adequately provide, or compensating for the weaknesses of the larger system. And she had integrity. And she spoke her mind. And she stood up for good in the world.

She had an honorable life.

Rock on, my sisters

Like Kameron at Brutal Women, I hope some day to be arrested for something like this.

I really like (not) this statement: "Wendy Wright, policy director for the group, said she hopes that "the FDA won't base its decision on stunts like this." She said allowing nonprescription sales "would be simply disastrous." "You could have a 40-year-old man who is committing statutory rape on a 14-year-old simply going in and picking up Plan B himself. An age limit won't stop anyone.""

Yeah, let's make birth control illegal, so that men can rape women but not force them not to get pregnant. Priorities, people.

Eeney-meeney-miney-mo

So I'm really excited about deciding where to live next. (I'll also blog in the next few days about the whole women/moms in academia thing, and my decision process to leave, and feeling a little sad about it, but for now I'm focusing on the up side.) In order of my preference, my choices are:

1. The city where I got my Ph.D. We have lots of contacts there, it's beautiful and v. kid-friendly, the weather's pretty good, and the public school system (based on the students I used to teach and some research I did after pseudonymous kid was born) is really good. Some of my grad school friends, obviously, have moved away, and there's a little worry about whether I'm being overly nostalgic about it, but it would be a very easy move to make.

2. A close seccond: the city where my sister lives. My mom's there, too, as are pseudonymous kid's cousins (on my side), the weather is fan-fucking-tastic, it's incredibly diverse and vibrant. Housing is more expensive, and the schools are uneven, which would introduce issues of living in less-diverse areas with better schools, or more diverse areas with potentially worse ones, but the cousins and the weather are a strong draw. I have a few contacts there, too, and there are a ton of colleges and institutions where I could certainly find work, including the place where my brother-in-law works. It's also closer to my grandmother in a nursing home and my dearly beloved aunt with a terminal illness, and I would like to see them a lot more often than I've been able to in the last few years.

Tied for third place are:

3. A smaller, affordable city where, again, I have a few contacts. I don't know this place as well, but it's close to Ph.D. city (so we'd see our friends there fairly often, probably), and my impressions are pretty favorable. Job opportunities are probably more limited and it's not as diverse, but it certainly seems like a nice place to live and being able to buy a house would be an up side. I don't know about the schools, but I suspect they're ok.

4. A big, incredibly pricey city with great natural beauty. We have contacts there, too, including some dear old friends of mine, and Mr. B. could certainly find a good job. I'm a little concerned about the hours we might end up working to afford living there. It's close to family, but not too close, and it's Mr. B.'s first choice. I always wanted to live there growing up, but we'd almost certainly end up in a suburb (which isn't so bad, as the suburbs are cities in themselves) because of the money issue. Dunno about the schools, but we could easily find out. The weather's sketchier, but I can easily imagine being happy there.

Feel free to weigh in.

No, we are not satisfied

Wolf Angel points out that Delegate Women-Can't-Be-Trusted Cosgrove's response to letters (damn, that internet activism seems to work sometimes, dunnit?) has been posted over at Democracy for Virginia. The initial responses over there seem to be, "oh, okay," but as Ema at the Well-Timed Period points out, though the "oh we didn't mean to criminalize miscarrige" thing obviously responds to the most easily criticized aspect of this poorly thought out bill, it doesn't quite deal with all the problems inherent in it (Ema also commented over at DforV).

Plus, isn't murdering a newborn already a crime in Virginia? This bill, in my not-at-all-humble opinion, is clearly an attempt to control pregnancy and birth, and it clearly comes from the same philosophical/political soil as the anti-abortion movement. The stupidity of the bill's language merely demonstrates that trying to second-guess and legislate the complexities of pregnancy and birth pretty much inevitably ends up compromising women's rights and fucking us over, because the very impulse to legislate this shit comes from a basic distrust of women as moral and political agents.

A lot of states already have infant "save haven" laws that let a woman drop off a newborn at a hospital, no questions asked. Historically, I believe this kind of thing is a pretty good way to combat infanticide, by providing an option for desperate women to safely abandon an unwanted baby. (Anyone who knows more about this, either in the U.S. or in more distant history, feel free to weigh in.)* It certainly seems to me that if your real focus is on helping children, doing so in a way that doesn't automatically provide an incentive for women to lie in order to protect themselves makes a lot more sense.

But then again, we've been pointing out the difference between protecting babies and punishing women for quite some time now, haven't we? And it still seems that people can't distinguish between the two. Or maybe they're more interested in the latter.

*(See follow-up post here.)

Miscarry? That's a crime.

You know, when I first read The Handmaid's Tale, a long time ago, I didn't like it, largely because I thought it was terribly overwrought and unsubtle. But more and more I think I should give Margaret Atwood credit for being a goddamn prophet.

1. Pharyngula: Virginia is for hateful loons

2. Apostropher: All Your Baby are Belong to Us

3. Democracy for Virgina: Have Miscarriage, Go to Jail?

I think I'm gonna quit

I've sort of realized that it doesn't, in the end, matter "why" I need to leave--whether it's the job, the profession, the place, whatever. The fact is, I need to leave. The trying for a different t-t position doesn't seem to have worked out, and for better or for worse I don't think I have the energy or will to hang out and try again next year. I said to the boyfriend last week, "welcome to the world where the rest of us live," and I just realized that one could say the same to me.

I think the real thing is the unremitting pressure to be constantly, constantly pushing forward. Whether this pressure is job-imposed or self-imposed again doesn't matter: I can't wait 'til I'm perfect before I feel able to do this job, b/c I'll never be perfect, so I need something that will let me feel that being imperfect is okay. Teaching used to do that. A lot of writing actually does that, too. Hopefully I'll end up someplace where I can still do both.

It's a pity, and I feel sure that I'll mourn over it for a while, but it feels like the right decision.

In the meantime, I have to start thinking about the roundtables I'm doing for a conference this spring. I don't know if I can or should or will talk to either my chair or my mentor about this: I suppose if it comes up I will, but I don't think I'm gonna go out of my way to have a big confession. There's a lot of other decisions I guess I need to make--hiring a research assistant this semester to use up my research funding, going on a research trip early this summer for the same reason, what kinds of jobs I'll apply for this spring and summer, how to move, blah blah blah, whether or not (taking money into account) we'll decide to stay another year and I'll just hang out and phone it in a couple more semesters. Whether or not to change the name of the blog :P (On which note, one reason I haven't been and may not blog so regularly is that I'm dealing with this stuff in my brain. Oh, and the stuff in my life. You know, that.)

But all that stuff is merely detail. Those things will work out, or not, and I don't think I'll care much either way. In the end, it boils down to: I need to leave.

I'm turning thoughts over in my head on this whole "moms in academe" thing and the ways that intersects with my life (and the ways it doesn't). Maybe I'll talk about that at some point, if anyone's interested. I do think that my decision doesn't have anything to do with my abilities: clearly I'm able to do this job, clearly I could do it very well, my department will be very sorry to see me go. It does have to do with the structure of the profession, which I just do not think I can hack. Like I said: a pity, but in the end, the perfect is the enemy of the goddamnwell good enough, and I think this decision is going to be goddamnwell good enough for me.

Hope springs eternal

Gonzales Disavows Torture as Confirmation Hearings Begin: "'I hope that things will be different if you are confirmed,' Mr. Leahy said"

And I hope that someone will call me tomorrow and offer to move me to a place I like and pay me $60,000/year for blogging.

But it seems somewhat unlikely.

In other news, Andrea Yates' conviction was overturned on the grounds that evidence that suggested she pre-planned drowning her kids and then copping an insanity plea was false. The evidence, I mean. In other words, gosh, maybe she really was completely fucking insane.

Here, I can only wonder, who leaves a woman who has tried suicide more than once and has been insitutionalized more than once and is clearly still not well, alone with five children all day every day? Hell, I fantasize sometimes about throttling my one kid, and I'm not batshit crazy (no, really, I'm not). In charity to her husband, he appears to have bought into the idea that God would provide and that even crazy mommies are, in the end, the best caretakers for children by virtue of their Godly momminess, so presumably he too is a little nuts. And then there's the other issue, of course, which is that even if your wife is completely insane, you still gotta put bread on the table b/c God ain't delivering your groceries.

Anyway, the morals to be drawn from the Yates story are (1) even married, Christian mothers do need a lot of social support to raise children well, b/c bad things (like craziness) do happen to good people; (2) the myth of perfect motherhood probably does more harm than good; (3) in the end, there is probably no real moral to be drawn from human tragedy.

How to treat depression (was: Emotional rollercoaster)

1. How to make me cry in the morning: Nina Simone covering "Here Comes the Sun".

2. How to make me act the fool: take me to a party where there's a six year old boy who needs some wrasslin'.

3. How to make me feel really good: take me to a family gathering on new years' day and let your sister introduce me to everyone as your girlfriend.

4. How to make me feel luxuriously pleased with myself: become obsessed with BtVS and watch it with me non-stop for several days.

5. How to make me purr with pleasure: (that information remains on a need-to-know basis).

6. How to make me feel guilty and tender: call me at 2 am so that I can video chat with pseudonymous kid, who is begging me to come home because he's really, really sick.

7. How to make me feel confirmed in my life choices: text me after I've sung pseudonymous kid to sleep from 700 miles away to tell me that I look great, you hope I'm having lots of great sex, and you hope I'm happy, and that pseudonymous kid will feel better tomorrow and I shouldn't worry about him.

8. How to spoil me rotten: let me sleep 'til noon, then make me coffee, eggs, and pepper bacon for breakfast.

9. How to get me to form a wicked plot: leave Sunday open with a corset, stockings, and super fantastic shoes squirreled away in my luggage.

10. How to silently say you love me: take luxurious, tender care of me and lift my spirits even though you're feeling pretty down yourself.