Seriously, what is wrong with this guy, Part 2

I was at the Jiffy Lube this morning, getting an oil change. W's press conference this morning was on TV. Six people were in the waiting room, and I swear no one looked up at the TV once, they were all so engrosed in their People magazines. But my ears perked up when I heard this question:

Mr. President, recently Amnesty International said you have established, quote, a new gulag of prisons around the world beyond the reach of the law and decency.

I'd like your reaction to that, and also your assessment of how it came to this -- that that is a view not just held by extremists and anti-Americans, but by groups that have allied themselves with the United States government in the past, and what the strategic impact is that in many places in the world the United States these days under your leadership is no longer seen as the good guy.

Oh, this oughta be good.

Mr. Bush (smirking): I'm aware of the Amnesty International report, and it's absurd. It's an absurd allegation.

The United States is a country that promotes freedom around the world. When there's accusations made about certain actions by our people, they're fully investigated in a transparent way.

It's just an absurd allegation.

In terms of, you know, the detainees, we've had thousands of people detained. We've investigated every single complaint against the detainees.

It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of and the allegations by people that were held in detention, people who hate America, people that have been trained in some instances to disassemble [sic], that means not tell the truth.

And so it was an absurd report. It just is.

No, Mr. President. What is absurd is that we have a president who is disassembling American credibility. Who is disassembling the rule of law in America. Who is disassembling America's complience with the UN Convention on Torture. Who is disassembling accountability in the government and the military. Who is disassembling any shred of respect America had in the world as a beacon of freedom. Who has been dissembling all along about our reasons for going to war. Who has been dissembling about what has been going on in Guantanamo Bay and in prisons in Iraq and Afganistan. Who has, in fact, disassembled the transparency of which he speaks and engendered a whole culture of dissembling under his civilian and military chains of command.

Or, as Amnesty's Executive director William Schulz said:

What is 'absurd' is President Bush's attempt to deny the deliberate policies of his administration.

What is 'absurd' and indeed outrageous is the Bush administration's failure to undertake a full independent investigation.

If you haven't heard anything about Amnesty's report, it makes for some sobering reading. Here it is: href="http://web.amnesty.org/report2005/usa-summary-eng">Amnesty International's Report on Human Rights in the USA, 2004

There was no follow-up question, by the way.

NeuroScience Sells Out?

Deep Throat outed himself, proving that Nixon's downfall had the additional element of an unofficial FBI coup (as Nixon himself suspected. But he suspected everyone. Perhaps this goes in the "even paranoids have enemies" file?). Lots of other news today, too.

But I'm going to blog on a topic I find more fascinating - and appropriate for this particular weblog. The NYTimes reports that, "romantic love is a biological urge distinct from sexual arousal."

It is closer in its neural profile to drives like hunger, thirst or drug craving, the researchers assert, than to emotional states like excitement or affection. As a relationship deepens, the brain scans suggest, the neural activity associated with romantic love alters slightly, and in some cases primes areas deep in the primitive brain that are involved in long-term attachment.

The report concerns a forthcoming report in the The Journal of Neurophysiology. But the kicker here is important: "Brain imaging technology cannot read people's minds, experts caution, and a phenomenon as many sided and socially influenced as love transcends simple computer graphics, like those produced by the technique used in the study, called functional M.R.I. "

Anyway, reading this made me think of Dr. B, her boyfriend, and Mr. B. Perhaps some of the confusion/frustration of this earlier post is due more to her neural circuitry than anything else.

Now, for academic purposes, I've been looking into the application of brain imaging technology in advertising (known as "Neuromarketing"). This is extremely controversial - and flying under everyone's radar right now. Based in Atlanta, a new organization called BrightHouse is pioneering the application of fMRI for consumer research. Here is how they sell Neuromarketing:

Neurostrategies - Dr. Justine Meaux and her team have been at the intersection of neuroscience and business since the idea for the world's first neeroscience practice was birthed at BrightHouse. Today, this cutting edge group is carving out a whole new place in research. Tasked with a better understanding of how human beings think and buy, Dr.Meaux is discovering unprecedented insights into the emotional connections to brands and the businesses that spawn them. The group has conducted studies for Fortune 500 companies resulting in ground shifting insights. Presently, Dr. Meaux and her colleagues are lecturing around the globe. A worldwide conference is being schedules at BrightHouse for March 2006.

BrightHouse is the brainchild of one of Atlanta's top advertisers and Emory University. Now, I'm no conspiracy theorist, but all this mucking around in our brains cannot be very good for Joe and Jane Doe. As a society, we cannot find a cure for cancer, but we can discover that Pepsi and Coke stimulate different parts of the brain?

Now I know what to call him!

From November, 2004Speaking of Weird Names:

Pseudonymous kid, who is incredibly cranky with this sick thing (but not puking any more, thankfully), says:

"You are a stupid! Idiot! Potato chip!"

Which would be a great blog name, if I didn't already have one.

There is a stupid. Idiot. Potato Chip in my life. I will call him that. Thank you, PK.

The white (wo)man's burden

I wanted to link to the comments about school systems and white flight in PoJ's recent post up to the main page, because it's a great topic, because the discussion is really good, and in order to provide a fresh new thread for it to continue. (There are a couple of comments before the one I linked to, but it was here that the discussion really got going.)

And then, when John Emerson sent me an email noting that my embarrassing gaffe of confusing Dominica with the Dominican Republic had been reproduced by "Clifford Fucking Geertz" in the NYRB, I couldn't help laughing. I mean, of all people.

So, thanks to Dr. Geertz for providing a nice introduction to a discussion of institutionalized racism, ignorance, and education. The fact of the matter is, as Peggy McIntosh's well-known article White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack points out, in this country, at this time, it's really impossible not to operate within a racist nexus, and therefore to perpetuate racism. And, imho as a white liberal (more or less), one of my pet peeves is that pesky problem of white liberal guilt. The problem with feeling guilty is that one wants, naturally, reassurance (guilt is so terribly uncomfortable), which can end up taking different forms: defensiveness and denial mostly. "My decision to do X has nothing to do with racism, because I'm not racist" or "people are way too sensitive about racial slurs, c'mon, get over it already" or "well, most of the people I know aren't racist (in the actively, consciously bigoted sense), so the problems you're pointing to probably have nothing to do with racism." And so on.

Now, I truly think that one of the best ways to get past that paralyzing and annoying and counter-productive guilt bullshit is just to learn to recognize onself as part of a larger whole; and, in my own education, learning to think past guilt (not, of course, always successfully) was probably one of the best things I ever learned how to do.

A vivid memory. When I was in fourth or fifth grade, I was in a bilingual program, Spanish/English. This was in lieu of putting me in honors, which my parents saw as a covert way of perpetuating segregation in a "desegregated" school--they also refused to let me advance a grade, so I was often fairly bored in school, and they compromised by putting me in the bilingual program, figuring that even if the math I learned wasn't new to me, the language would be. As the only native English speaker in my classes, then, I was often tapped to help tutor (the teachers had a pretty progressive pedagogy, where students would work together and help teach each other things--it wasn't all top-down education). One day, I was set up with a boy, whose name I don't remember, who was new to the classroom and who had very little English. And we were told to talk for the next ten minutes about anything we liked, but to do so only in English, so that he could practice. So, we talked a bit, and then I ran into something that he didn't understand, and I tried saying it in different words, but he still wasn't getting it--there was some key word, I don't remember what, that was a stumper. So I switched over and gave the Spanish translation of the key word, and continued, in Spanish, by asking if that was enough and he understood what I had been saying now? And he, relieved, replied in Spanish, yeah, that helps, thanks. Anyone who's ever had to learn a second language knows how much work it is to talk in a language you don't know well even for just ten minutes, and what an enormous relief it is to be able to switch back into a language where you can actually express yourself.

And the teacher heard us, and came over, and said, "hey, I asked you two not to speak Spanish!" And my conversation partner said, "well, she did it first!" And I, being about nine years old, got scared and said, "no I didn't!"

And the teacher, who was himself Latino, said to my partner without any further enquiry, "don't lie." I can still remember the look of anger and betrayal that kid gave me. And I realized, suddenly, that the teacher had believed me, and not this other kid, because I was a "good student"--and that a lot of my "good student" status in this class had to do with the fact that I was the brainiac white kid, who'd been deliberately put in this classroom, and that the teachers thought my presence there was terribly progressive (while the other kids were there because they "had" to be), and, well, all those things made me something of the teacher's pet. And that this wasn't my fault, and that the teacher--who was a really good teacher, actually, very fair-minded--wasn't being unfair on purpose; it was just the way things are. And that my conversation partner knew that too, and was really pissed off at me because I could get away with speaking Spanish and he couldn't, precisely because it wasn't my first language.

This is one of my most vivid memories from elementary school. There are others, very similar--the fact that I won class president in the sixth grade because I delivered my speech and put up posters in both English and Spanish--all the candidates were white, though the school was pretty mixed, and I was the only person who campaigned to the brown kids as well as the white ones. Or the time my best girlfriend and I were walking down the hall, and she suddenly veered away as a boy, walking the other direction, reached out and grabbed my crotch--and afterwards, pissed off, I said to her, "how did you know he was going to do that?" and she said, "oh, him? Everybody in the neighborhood knows he's like that" and I realized that I wasn't in that particular neighborhood, and so I didn't know. Or the time, the same year, that the seventh-grade pot dealer, teasing me, told me that he'd give me whatever I wanted "on the house," because unlike the other white kids I was "cool." And when I said hell no, I don't smoke pot, he laughed and said, of course you don't, because you're a schoolgirl, and I realized that I had this weird kind of insider status on both sides of the fence.

And I wouldn't have learned those things if I'd been in honors math class instead of the bilingual classes, or if I'd been in the "safe" schools on the other side of town. In high school, my parents broke down a bit and sent me to the Catholic school a few blocks from my house, which was much whiter--and most of my friends were the few students of color, and most of the guys I dated lived on the "bad" side of town, and the white kids were always amazed that I felt comfortable driving over there to see my boyfriends. My best friend, who is currently teaching at one of the best liberal arts colleges in the country, went to a "better" college than I did, and we both waited tables over the summers, and when customers would chit-chat with us and I said I was in college, they believed me, but they said to her, "oh come on, you *wish* you went to Big Ivy." A lot of that shit is invisible to most middle-class white kids--through no fault of their own--and when I used to tell those stories in some of the classes I taught, the white kids would start out saying, "oh, I'm sure that the teacher wasn't being racist, he just didn't hear you speaking Spanish but he heard the other kid"--until I said, "and what about this story? And this one? And this one?" And the students of color would say, "I was that brown kid, and the teachers *never* believed me," and then the white kids would say, "really? wow," and get kind of quiet and say, well, maybe yeah, after all. And then sometimes they'd start to see that there were things they just *did not know* that the brown kids did, and that not knowing was not their fault, but that nonetheless, it was a kind of ignorance, a kind of racism.

So I'm really glad, actually, that my parents had the guts not to protect me from the "bad" kids, or the drug dealers, or the boys who would grab my crotch in the halls (and yes, white students also deal drugs--the coke dealer in my high school was a white boy--and they also sexually harass girls, but it would have been very easy for my parents to hear those stories when I was in middle school and react by wanting me to be in a "safer" school). Because, really, when I was academically bored, I would just pull out a book and read after I'd finished the class work, and with two parents who were teachers, we did a lot of stuff at home that made up for the academic failings of my schools, but I would not have learned some of the things I learned at a "better" school. I wouldn't have seen my parents working with black and Latino parents to improve the schools I was in, and I wouldn't have seen how much easier it was for my parents to get teachers and principals to make exceptions for me (like putting me in the bilingual program, or letting me read my own books during class) when similar exceptions weren't made for other kids.

And those things were a pretty damn important part of my education.

Update: a couple of links.

1. Landismom's story of her decisions about where to put her kid in daycare--noting that nowadays, it is often the suburbs that are more integrated than the cities, what with the cost of housing.

2. An article from last May, that still stays with me, about one woman's experience integrating white schools after Brown v. Board:

Josephine's relatives worried for her safety. "She is going to get killed, that was my first thought," said Spencer Dungee, a cousin. He organized carloads of friends to patrol the school the first few mornings, just in case.

But Josephine and her parents apparently did not fully appreciate the danger.

"I thought the school would be able to take care of one child," Boyd said. "But we found out differently, in a hurry."

Any outburst, even tears, her parents had told her, would hand her tormentors a psychological advantage. Only once did she allow herself to be provoked. On that day, a white boy pushed her into a locker and passed along a crude message from his father, saying he had had sex with her mother the previous night. Josephine pushed back; a teacher broke up the scuffle.

The teacher did not want to hear about who had started it, Bradley said. "If you pass another lick," she warned Josephine, "you will be sent home."

"Why wouldn't he be sent home? " Josephine asked.

"Because you're the perpetrator," the teacher answered.

There were times she wanted to quit, like the days she had to go home to change her food-splattered clothes. Down the road in Charlotte, Dorothy Counts, the first black student at Harding High, had been pulled out by her parents the first week, after white students pelted her with rocks and shattered the rear window of the family car.

But Josephine persisted, feeling the weight of obligation. She learned that Greensboro High, with its expansive campus and big gymnasium, was nothing like Dudley. The books she received were new, while the worn texts at Dudley typically bore six or seven signatures. The science lab, she noticed, was fully equipped with microscopes. Dudley's had three.

Josephine was an outcast in two worlds. She began the year eating lunch alone in the library, and put aside any interest in school clubs and activities. Meanwhile, many of her black friends kept their distance. The boys she had dated her junior year no longer seemed interested. Her cousin, Spencer, escorted her to the Dudley prom.

"It was hard to understand then," Bradley said. "But I understand now that jobs of parents could have been in jeopardy had their children been noted to be friends of mine."

Bradley doesn't remember a thing about June 4, 1958, the day she became the first black student to graduate from a previously all-white public school in North Carolina. A telephone caller had warned there would be a coffin waiting for her at Brown's Funeral Home if she attended the ceremony. She went anyway.

No kid should have to go through that--and the woman profiled chose not to send her daughter to a school where she would be the only black child, not wanting her to have to repreat her mother's experience. But it's worth keeping this sort of thing in mind when we talk about not wanting to put our kids in any but the best, safest schools--the cost that black parents and their children were willing to pay to try to change things.

Memorial Day Thoughts

While you feast upon the charred, rendered flesh of one of God's beloved creatures, take a moment to remember.....

... All those who died to keep China British.

In all seriousness, I noticed a commentator on an earlier thread signed off "libertarian soldier." I suspect this blog, with its huge readership, has both active-duty personnel and the spouses/relatives of active duty or reserve personnel among its readership. And that got me thinking...

It seems that to many of us the last acceptable stereotype is that of the American soldier/sailor/marine as a deeply conservative, misguided, ignorant, impoverished redneck. Some might pity the person that is this caricature - and others might despise them. But we should remember that right now there are plenty of enlightened people in the military who are liberal, conscientious, and intelligent. Some are gay. I'd be willing to bet that there are plenty of soldiers who understand why the policies of the current administration are misguided and troubling. I know veterans (no active duty personnel, to be honest) who have told me that I'd be surprised at just how reflective the military is of the society. Both Democrats and Republicans serve. There are probably some libertarians, and even Greens, too.

These are the soldiers I'll be thinking about and honoring this weekend.

One superstar not leaving the "leaky pipeline"

News from a good friend or mine, who I've known since college -- more specifically, since her first day of college (my sophomore year), when she was just a babe of 17, full of brillance and potential but also just a bundle of insecurity (or, more likely, just a normal amount of insecurity for a 17- year old girl who already knows some group theory, which is a lot). Anyways, I just talked to her last night, and she's just accepted a faculty job in an engineering department at a great university (which happens to be in my hometown). She's in a field that hires people just out of, or a year or two out of, grad school, as opposed to mine, where we languish in postdoctitude forever, which is how she caught up to me (well, of course that and the fact that she's a superstar).

She holds a special place in my heart, because in a way she was the first person younger than me (just one year but these things matter when you're 17) that I feel that I mentored in some way. Though, all along I have to say that I always felt I would make it though sheer willpower, where it was clear to me that her brilliance was going to get her through. And, although I know a lot of very educated people, I just realized that she's actually my only good friend that I knew before graduate school that went on to get a PhD. She's also just about the only friend I can think of (excluding people in my field, which is full of people who think they are smarter than everyone else), that when I first met her it was just crystal clear to me that she was much, much, smarter than me -- but in college (which was full of mostly male smart geeky people) she certainly didn't believe this or believe in herself as much as it was clear to me that she should. And I feel like I played at least some tiny part in upping that confidence at a critical juncture when we were both a lot younger.

She had every reason to leave academia: she's in a field where there are plenty of other options, and more money to be made, outside of it; she is married to a great, accomplished, slightly older man who is more well established in his career and is not very movable (PhD but not in academics), they love where they live now, and they want to have kids very soon. She applied to faculty jobs this year fully expecting that she might not take one even if it was offered. When we last talked a couple of months ago, she had several offers in hand but it seemed that she was leaning towards staying where she is and taking a job in industry. Which might have been just great for her, but from my clearly myopic position in the academy it sure as hell seemed like it would have been a loss for her field and for all of her future students, and for all the rest of us women trying to make it in science and engineering departments in major universities. Me, I love my science, but my stubbornness (which is just as essential as any talent or love of my field I might have) comes in large part because I feel like it's important that *I* be doing what I'm doing, as opposed to just another guy who looks like your average 5th grader's drawing
of a scientist. I never got the sense that she felt that way about herself, which is completely respectable, but does make it easier to make different choices.

But gosh darn it if this university didn't just do everything right in recruiting her! First of all, they have clearly been doing something right already, since they already have 20% women faculty in this depatment (where I'm sure the national average is less than 10%) -- but they also made her a fantastic offer, including doing specific things that seem likely to help her suceed and a great start-up package and regular flights for the husband for a while so that he has time to figure out a more permanent solution. Kudos to him, by the way, for encouraging her to do this, when there were clearly easier options for the two of them that put her career at just a bit of a lesser priority than his. Anyways, congrats to her, on the job, and for everything she has accomplished since the day we met almost half our lives ago. I couldn't be prouder, and I couldn't be more delighted that she has decided to take a job in academia at a place that seems as likely as any to truly help her succeed. And congrats to the department and the institution for doing all these things right -- they are going to be very lucky to have her. If they continue to do things right she might even find that this choice makes her both happy *and* successful. Here's hoping.

It's been a while

since I bitched about my health care, so obviously I was overdue for some frustrating news.

I had an abnormal pap about two months ago. The doc called with the results and suggested we follow up with another in six months (rather than the standard year). I said, uhm, no, given my sex life and the fact that I don't feel comfortable wandering around for six months knowing that something is "abnormal" about my cervix, I'd like to do a follow-up pap now, if that's quite all right with you. So I had the second pap in April. The doc promised to call with the results, good or bad, but then they didn't call and I got busy with work and assumed that meant it was normal but I was going to call at some point, and then I went on vacation and had forgotten about it.

Of course, this means that I got a call today saying they want to give me a referral because the second test also had abnormal results. Also of course, the person calling was the receptionist, calling to schedule the referral, and she couldn't tell me anything about the results or what we're going to do next. So I said, well, look, I'm out of town and we can't schedule anything until I get back, but let's do that and will you please have the nurse call me and explain the results and what happens next? Grr.

Luckily, since I am at the boyfriend's, I have a huge box of books thanks to y'all, including the new edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves to refer to and get some information, since my doc apparently doesn't feel it's his job to give me any. Yesterday I finished reading The Story of Jane, which is fantastic and eye-opening and empowering and makes a very strong case that not just abortion, but all women's health care (and men's, for that matter) should be collaborative, informed, and respectful, so I'm feeling pretty pro-active on the health front right now. And, of course, it is probably nothing, these two abnormal paps. But even so.

A few years ago, before Pseudonymous Kid, I had a cyst in my left breast. Mr. B. was the one who discovered it, one morning, when he woke up and said, "what is that blood coming from your nipple?" Freaky. I had to have a mammogram (my first, and for the record, not bad at all) and some weird procedure where they snaked a wire into my nipple to draw out some tissue or discharge or something and find out what was going on, and I fainted (also for the first and only time in my life) because, damn, a wire in your nipple? Yikes. But in the end it was fine, just a little cyst, and it went away on its own. It wasn't until I got the results, though, that I realized how worried I'd been. I knew, of course, that at my age and with my health history the probability that it was the big C was extremely low, and so I had thought I wasn't terribly worried about it, just a little annoyed by the inconvenience and uncertainty. But when I got the "everything's okay" call, I felt this enormous wave of relief wash over me and realized I'd been carrying around a little unconscious worry for about a month while we went through all the testing.

So now I guess I can admit that I'm worried about this stupid pap thing. There'd better not be anything wrong with my cervix--I like it, and I have plans for it. But I have to sit around now wondering if everything's okay inside the famous Bitch reproductive tract until July, and I'm willing to bet the doc's office won't call back today and I'll end up calling them and having to hassle them into telling me what little they know.

Frustrating shit. Thank god I insisted on doing the follow-up pap right away. Feel free to offer reassurance, empathy, acknowledgment of the irony that I got this call while I'm visiting C., or actual information about abnormal paps, please.

Also, should I start using the stupid condoms again just in case?

"Affordable Family Formation" in the USA

Via Kausfiles this morning: an interesting theory. Conservative Steve Sailer makes a very persuasive case that "affordable family formation" has been the key to Republican success. And it will continue to be.

I cannot claim to have any kind of expertise to assess the support for his argument. But anecdotally ("what's the plural of anecdote? Data!") it seems to make sense. Take Dr. B as an instructive example. She and Mr. B. took a job in nowheresville - Red State central - in order to further her career, purchase a home that Mr. B. could work on, and live somewhere where one salary would make this life possible. She seems to be rueing that choice, but we'll see how that turns out.

I know plenty of academics who are having trouble cutting it in San Francisco, Boston, and DC on $40 or even $50 grand a year. Decent homes within a 30-minute commute are moving north of $400K in these citites. Add in a second child, and look out! The second full-time salary becomes a necessity. And what makes it even more annoying - as one grad school friend of mine told me - she looks over at the Chair of her Department and sees somebody who owns a house worth over $1 million, with three children put through college tuition-free, who stopped serious scholarship about fifteen years ago. In the meantime, her school no longer provides a substantial tuition discount (unless her son goes to the huge state university that employs her) and no professor is going to land a mortgage to live in the Chair's neighborhood without substantial family subsidy ("Mommy? Daddy? We need to talk...."). And the Chair - who she is friendly with - pulled her aside last year and asked why she applied for other jobs! (she's t-t and doing quite well).

Frankly, I think many of our senior colleagues have no idea of what is going on. But at least one does. When my wife and I had dinner with her, she estimated that in the 25 years since she arrived at the University salaries have gone from about 20K to about 50k (this is a major urban area we are talking about). But in the same time the cost of a house has risen more than 20 times (the same $100K house in 1977 is a $2 million house today).

O.K., I'll stop bitching. That's Dr. B's perogative. But I'll also note that the people really being screwed in this system - essentially for the rest of their lives - are the childless by choice types and those not permitted to marry and raise kids by the state. Not only do they pay more in taxes and housing, but their political representation gets diluted because they are concentrated in fewer geographic areas.

Propaganda & Our President

Via Fark, the President of the USA:

If you've retired, you don't have anything to worry about -- third time I've said that. (Laughter.) I'll probably say it three more times. See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda. (Applause.)

Here is the White House's transcript of the speech.

Seriously, what is wrong with this guy?

From NPR this morning, quotes from a stop on the President's bamboozlepalooza social security tour, talking with the regular folks:

GWB: "I like explaining the situation"....

GWB: "You are Audrey Ciblensky."

AC: "That's right. I'm a 70 year old widow."

GWB: "Don't ever say your age."

AC: "Oh, I have no problem. Don't ask me my weight."

GWB: "he he"

GWB: "You look great. You look like 100 to me."

GWB: "That's where you are going to be. 30 more years."

Oh boy.

a proper hello

pseudonymous guest blogger #3 here. been a bit slow to take up the blogging duties the past few days, super busy at work catching up from travel and then actually took the weekend off since my boyfriend who lives across the country was in town and i won't see him again for more than a month. (ah, the joys of academic coupledom, which i see many of you readers are all too familiar with). and yesterday and today the insightful musings of bitch herself and the bitch of christmas past have been a tough act to follow! (plus, excuses excuses, i installed tiger
on my G5 on monday, and of course got distracted by getting everything up and running. more on that later). but i figured i should say a proper hello anyways.

first, i wanted to let you all know that i was supremely flattered to be asked to guest blog in this space for a few weeks, cause it has recently become just about my favorite blog to read, full super smart comment (from both host and commenters!) on lots of great wide-ranging topics that i find pretty relevant. although i have only been an infrequent commenter here (life's been a bit busy lately...), i admitted to bphd a short while ago that the urge to blog has been hitting me strongly lately. i've been putting it off, since i'm trying to get a tenure-track job in the next year and stuff, and i should probably be writing papers instead of blog posts. but bphd is just so sweet that she's given me (and PorJ and pseudonymous colleage, of
course) a ready-made audience, which is hard to refuse.

anyways, i'll never live up to bitchphd's wit, nor to her prolificness, but i'm already having fun, since you are all just a
great and lively and intelligent crowd. (i think i'm even tough enough to deal with people calling my first post "more than a little stupid" -- i'm a women in an extremely male-dominated subfield of science, so i've learned not to faze too easily ;)

given my short warning for the gig, i still haven't come up with a super snappy name to go by (which will at present not be my own, since i'm not sure what i will decide to write about and i'd like to see how that goes before self-censoring). i thought very briefly about going as dr. science, just to help dispell the still very prevalant myth that all scientists look like this guy -- occasionally, some of them even wear red high heels! -- but really, that one's taken. so for now, i think i'll just sign off as

-- pseudonymous rocket scientist

and say thanks for reading whatever nonsense i end up putting forth.

Feminism, (open) marriage, and fucking around: some preliminary thoughts

This is one of the the first-ever Bitch, PhD posts I read. Although I didn't know it at the time, it prepared me for things I would not have imagined and what looks to be a very happy stage in my life. So for curiousgirl and as a thank-you, I re-give you this post from August 2004.

Stimulated by the most recent issue of Scholar & Feminist Online - Young Feminists Take on the Family, which includes an (iffy) article about adultery: while I agree with the essay's main point, that adultery can be seen as a form of resistance against marriage, I think Kipnis (cited in the article, and also, before, by me on this blog) said it much better. Largely because Johnson, in this article, seems to be arguing against marriage but for monogamy (of a sort): her betrayal comes when her married lover promises not to sleep with his wife any more and then, of course, does. Also there's a weird bit in there about wearing his wedding ring, which she speculates makes her somehow queerly married to his wife: this is actually an interesting idea, that I'll try to address either here or at a later point, but she doesn't explore it and just kind of leaves it sitting there, seeming a kind of outrageous wishful thinking.

Anyway, other than that article, I have just started glancing through the essays on the site, but the subjects of them alone--the myth of "Doing It All," "The Myth of Balance," the "Privilege and Emotional Energy" of motherhood--are tapping into stuff that has been going on for me the last couple of days, so I will use them as a jumping off point. This may be a rather kaleidoscopic entry; I hope to return to some of the issues I'll probably just gloss here, maybe develop them at another point. (Would that this were the material of my primary research field; alas, it is not.)

The pieces:

1. Fighting with Mr. B. the last couple of days about how he runs (or, as I am arguing, fails to run) the house. Blog not called "bitch" for nothing: I can be demanding and unforgiving. In my defense, however, Mr. B. was adamant that being the primary house person was what he really wanted to do, even though I initiated several conversations before our move about whether or not he really meant it, how much work it was, how it seemed to me that his free time was not spent futzing with the house but instead doing other hobbies, etc. So part of my current anger is the intellectual dishonesty and lack of self-awareness thing.

2. Fucking around: though I fear my "queen of het open marriage" crown may slip a bit on admitting this, in fact our open relationship has been largely theoretical since we tied the knot lo these many years ago. While we were dating and living together, I did indeed fuck other people. Once we got married, I didn't; the openness up to this point has consisted of Mr. B. fooling around on a few occasions with two different women, and me getting highschool hot n' heavy with a guy at my 10-year hs reunion (no penetration, b/c no condoms), trying to seduce someone (unsuccessfully) last year, and a very drunken attempt on both our parts to initate a 4some with some friends of ours that resulted in me making out with my girlfriend, showing off for her sexy boyfriend, and that was about it.

3. Affairs: married men looking to cheat. Man, these guys are easy to meet, especially online where my profile says up front that I, too, am married and want "discretion" (not b/c of Mr. B., though, but b/c of my job, which is always misunderstood initially). What fascinates me about all these married guys is that they love their wives. Now, mine isn't a scientific sample because if a man starts to run his wife down to me, I wind up the conversation (polite to the end) and then block his ass; but I would say that the ratio of loving (cheating) husbands to men who think that the way to court another woman is to tell her all the bad things about your wife is, ime, about 4:1.

4. Talking to Mr. B. about all this. This might sound strange, but it makes perfect sense: ever since we have known one another, Mr. B. and I have agreed that the biggest problem with monogamy is that it preemptively cuts off one possible avenue of growth. You are not allowed to explore this set of feelings, this person, what you can learn here, because it is "wrong." To me, that seems deeply fucked up and inimical to love. I love Mr. B. (even though he is pissing me off this weekend), and he loves me, and therefore why in the earth would we want to put limits on each other? Fooling around, getting crushes on others, or (as I'm doing now) really pursuing relationships and/or fucking other people is a pretty profound learning experience.

I would say this is so even if you don't think much about what you're doing: one of my closest friends has twice had affairs. The first time was as she was getting ready to leave her husband, and she married the guy she was fooling around with; the second time was a year after the second marriage. It was, of course, very risky--but I think it taught both her and her husband a lot about themselves individually and as a couple. I offer her as an example because she is very instinctive and impulsive: when these things happened, I tried to ask her what she thought they "meant," and her response was, basically, "huh?" And yet, from the outside, and watching her work through these things with the men involved, it is clear to me that they were a (dangerous, risky) learning experience, a way of testing the relationships. Though she and I are very different, we share this important quality: we need to know that when push comes to shove, our friends and partners will stick it out, argue it through, rather than impose arbitrary boundaries and limits. (This is a theme; see (1) above, and I shall return to it at the end, I think.)

Back to (4): one thing my recent adventures have really taught me is that there are different aspects to this open marriage thing. One is that the extracurricular activities really have nothing to do with the main event: other than a little "hehe, good for you!" kind of thing, most of our fucking around up to this point has been pretty meaningless. I know that people don't always get this "how are you not jealous?" thing, but it just has always felt like how you are about your friends' sexual adventures: giddy, maybe titillating, amusing, entertaining, and largely having little or nothing to do with the friendship itself.

But there's apparently this other side, too, where it does have to do with the marriage. More backstory (I analyze anecdotally and digressively; this explains both why I chose my job, and why I worry that I'm not as good a critic as I think I "should" be, but that is a topic for another day). A year or two ago (big scary revelation here! blogfodder for many years to come! another reason for anonymity!) I made a pass at--gasp--a student. Well, I waited 'til he was not my student any more, because I am neither stupid nor mean, but once that grade was in, I propositioned him. I feel the need to explain that I was very principled about it: I was on my way to another job, so I knew I would never have him in a class again; during class, despite his obvious flirting with me, I stayed friendly but professional; I never ever touched him, though we met a couple of times (I have touched him since those initial moments, after we became friends); and, in the end, he couldn't get his head 'round my marriage, so I settled into being the friendly older woman mentor figure I am, for him, to this day. Anyway. An old friend, who I talked to about this, asked: "what is it you are getting out of this boy that you are not getting from Mr. B.?" At the time I thought that was the wrong question to ask. But it stuck with me, and I am starting to realize what it means.

The truth, I think, is that it is impossible for one person to be "everything" to someone else. Impossible and, I think, cruel: setting the other person (and, incidentally, yourself) up to fail. In part, this is the answer to the "why open marriage?" question in a nutshell: because I think it is loving to deal with your fear in order not to limit the other person's growth. Yes, my standards are high (which is why you do not want to be keeping my house), but at least I try to avoid a double standard. Now, surely there are people who have such issues with jealousy and fears of betrayal that it is best for them and their partners to agree that there are limits: here, monogamy has its uses. But I think that for most people, garden-variety jealousy and fear is, or can be, or should be, a way to learn: what is it you are afraid of? What is it that you are not getting (or giving)? What does your crush on this other person, or your partner's crush, say about who they are that they didn't know before? In other words, as my friend asked: "what do you get out of 'cheating' that you don't get at home?"

Now, a lot of these married men, it seems to me, get something very simple, something that I get too, and empathize with. This is partly my response to the Johnson article I linked at the top, my sense that my feminism means that learning what "cheating" means to me means beginning to recognize, and empathize with, what it means to married men. Fucking someone you love is terrifying, requiring enormous vulnerability; to try to manage the fear, probably a lot of people have pretty bad sex, b/c while you need to get off, you are not going to take the risks involved in opening up and really communicating much, sexually. A lot of these married guys seem caught in this trap: their wives put them off, they don't know how to get around it, they are horny, they look around a bit, but they end up just feeilng guilty and sad because what they really want, hand to god, is to fuck--to communicate with--their wives.

I said to someone recently that I want to give all these men feminist cards to sign, because if they only realized it, the feminist project is their best friend: get women to feel entitled (to sex, to autonomy, to money) and they will find it less threatening to admit what they want, and they will be able to have better sex, more often, if their husbands love them and are also willing to take those risks; or, to decide that this is not the marriage for them, if not. (This is part of the way that I think the "married to his wife" thing in the Johnson article might make sense, and part of why I won't listen to men complain about their wives: it is obvious to me that if your sex life is unsatisfying, it ain't entirely her fault, and so I tell the unhappy, sweet, thinking-of-cheating men that they need to tell their wives what they are telling me.) Yes, it's a risk. But the alternative, it seems to me, is to live in a tiny box for the rest of your life.

So, better sex and better relationships through entitlement: this, at least, is true for me, and it is what I'm exploring right now with by fucking around. With someone who I am not married to, who I do not have to deal with next week, next month, next year, I can feel free to try something embarrassing; I can feel free to be, frankly, as whorish as I like; I can feel free to be entitled, goddamnit. This includes entitled to say no: no, I won't do that, no, I won't pretend to believe that your wife is just frigid. With my partner, I am afraid--not to say no, I am halfway to feminist perfection--but to say yes. What if I do something that he thinks is freaky, or that he finds so very titillating and erotic that I have to do it from here on out, forever? So, sticking strictly to sex, what one gets out of it is a chance to explore things in a less-fraught environment; ideally, one then processes that shit and brings it home and expands one's sex life with one's partner.

But obviously there is more to it than just sex. There is the little domestic, date-like stuff: enjoying knowing that someone has made an effort to impress you, enjoying making an effort to impress someone else, being kind, being considerate, being on your best behavior. You know you should do that--all the preachy marriage manuals tell you to--but there is a huge difference between knowing it intellectually and knowing it by feeling it. Date-boy cleaned the hell out of his apartment just in case I showed up; I groomed the hell out of my body and took him to a very nice restaurant for dinner, one I could barely afford. And I found myself thinking, over dinner: "wow. I really should take Mr. B. out to a nice dinner like this some time, leave pseudonymous kid at home with a sitter, we should have an evening like this, we always say we can't afford it but fuck that shit, when you're dating spending money on your partner is a priority." And Mr. B. told me later that he was thinking, while I was gone, "gee, I really should probably make more of an effort not to always look so frumpy, I should shave more, I should take my bitchy wife less for granted." And, since I started this whole sex-chat leading to dating thing, we have been much more courtly of one another, and it's been great, I'm telling you, though it's embarrassing for both of us, and hard, because my god! who is going to notice these changes more than the person who lives with you? And then they'll know that this isn't, actually, the way you "really" live, and the illusion will be blown, and oh no, they'll know that you are actually trying and ahhhh! what if they reject me?

But you know, if you love someone or you want to have decent sex, you need to stick your neck out. I've talked to Mr. B. about what I'm enjoying about these sex chats, aspects of my (sexual) personality that I haven't found a way to talk about before, and that, too, is cool. So yes, there is actually a little bit of jealousy, a little bit of a threat there, in the sense of a challenge to integrate this new stuff into the old relationship. But isn't that the challenge of marriage? Isn't marriage, by definition, threatening in that way? Here we have two people who have promised to spend the rest of their lives together, or to try. Shit. Presumably you want growth, you want to grow as a person over your life. That means change. How is that going to fit into the promise? How are you going to handle it when your partner makes you a promise ("I want to keep house") or takes a new job, and you have your doubts, but you go along with it, and then it doesn't work out? How are you going to handle that learning in a way that holds them to a standard without tearing into them for failing?

Somehow, compared to housekeeping, sex seems like a very safe place for finding out some of that stuff.

What we talk about when we talk about love

Notes towards something. There are things trying to be said here that are buried or obscured, sleights of hand that intentionally divert attention from what I'm really thinking, ideas that I feel are only half-true (or less), clumsiness and incoherence. None of this matters so much; take what has meaning for you, and I'll do the same.

Seeing the boyfriend always makes me very happy, but it also makes me a little sad, too. I can't spend as much time with him as I'd like, and lately he seems unhappy, which I think is about work/money shit. But he doesn't really share those worries with me, so sometimes I feel a little distanced by that, and I react to that by trying, in probably really clumsy and stupid ways, to reassure him or to reassure myself, and yet all that seems to do is make me feel stupidly insecure, and make him (probably) feel like a fuckup because I'm feeling insecure and that's the last thing he wants me to feel, and so it ends up being a goddamn vicious cycle.

And Mr. B., same thing. I haven't blogged about this much, on privacy grounds, but fuck it, I'm thinking out loud here. He left a career about seven or more years ago, a career he really loved and excelled at. And then he worked for a few years at jobs that ranged from "eh, okay" to "I hate this job," primarily to keep me in grad school. And now he's stayed home for a few years, which is what we both wanted years ago, but it's not working out like we thought--I haven't settled into the professorial role in a satisfied way, and I think he needs something more challenging, more about making things work, than housekeeping--he's a great dad, but he likes projects and a lot of kid-work isn't "project" oriented. So he, too, is sort of in a transitional phase career-wise, and I think it makes him feel kind of insecure and unsure about stuff.

And I'm in the same boat, trying to figure out career issues, and I've been getting a lot of help and advice. And interestingly, a lot of it is from my men friends--my women friends are supportive and empathetic, but less apt to do the concrete stuff like say, "let me see your resume" or "let me arrange for you to meet so-and-so." Or maybe I'm less likely to ask them to do that, which could be me, or it could just be something about the relationships between women and other women vs. women and other men. Who knows. Anyway, that's not the focus of analysis here.

So I have these two men in my life, both of whom I love dearly (and a lot of great men friends--women too, but this is about men). And they're both kind of feeling crappy for different ways--ways I empathize with for reasons of my own right now. But while Mr. B. wants reassurance and help figuring his stuff out, the Connoisseur (boyfriend) doesn't. And I'm not sure what all the factors there are--partly just personality, I'm sure; partly probably the fact that the relationships are qualitatively (and quantiatively, which pains me but it's unavoidable) different. The Connoisseur's work problems have a lot to do with a fairly catastrophic business failure (fire, not fuckup) that means he's fallen pretty far and is coasting, for now, on a lot of accumulated cultural capital (connections and so forth). But he's lost a lot of the actual real money capital that used to sort of underlie that standing, which is probably a really insecure place to be. I empathize with this, b/c I'm sort of in the same boat income-wise--but I kind of have a sense of what to do next and I don't think he does yet, plus business ownership is necessarily (I think) way more unstable, income-wise, than employeeship. And I'm a woman, so despite the fact that I'm a woman whose sense of identity is extremely bound up with my job and who really likes being able to afford things, my feelings of job-related personal inadequacy might be less overwhelming than his are. Or maybe just different. I think this is true for Mr. B. as well, though interestingly in a different way; he tends not to wrap his identity as much up in his job title, but he does need a sense that he's doing something that's goal-related. And finally, I think I tend to look for structural reasons why individuals "fail," including my own failures, rather than placing them all on my (or other people's) shoulders--whereas both the Connoissuer and Mr. B. (and probably this is broadly more true of men than women) tends to view failure and success as primarily within their own control.

Which is a great advantage--it means men can be really helpful career counsellors and mentors, because they basically assume that it's mostly a question of knowing what to do and doing it, and that tendency to just kick butt and say "well, ask so-and-so for what you want" often serves as a needed kick in the pants--and the fact is, when you ask, people are often really happy to help. It also means that men are not afraid to take credit for their successes (which is personally advantageous, a good model to follow, and sometimes can also be a real pain in the ass, politically speaking--the "I pulled myself up by my boot straps, so can you" thing when we all know that Mr. Horatio Alger had connections and help every step of the way). But the downside is that when men feel like they've failed, or like they don't have much to offer, or like they can't help, they take it very personally. Which is horrible for them individually and for us politically as well (resentful men make shitty political decisions).

What this is really about, though, isn't work, but the impact of work on relationships. Specifically, men's desire to nurture. Most of the men I know seem to feel happiest when they are helping others--and many, if not most of the good ones, perhaps feel happiest of all when they're helping women. They can accept help, too, but it's easiest for them when they feel like they're not completely down and out. So Mr. B., I think, is worried about what he brings to the relationship now. He's worried--a feeling he knows is not based in reality, but a real feeling nonetheless--that I might leave, or that I could leave, because I don't "need" him any more. (And no, the boyfriend has nothing to do with that, so fuck the fuck off with that line of thinking; do me a favor and take my word for it that I know my husband better than you do.) It's hard when you feel like that about a relationship, and all the reassurance in the world won't make it go away; he has to figure out who he is, apart from Mr. B./PK's dad, before he'll feel better about that, I think.

The boyfriend relationship is scarier, for me, because as I've said before, there is nothing outside of our will and desire that keeps us together. And we don't see each other very often, so my visits always feel, to me, like relationship concentrate--the elation and desire and happiness are really pronounced, but the worries and anxieties also come to the fore, and I find myself really struggling not to constantly want to "talk" about those things. What I really want is to relax and enjoy being together, but I'm bedevilled by this perverse desire to make our meetings like some kind of fucked-up relationship therapy where we need to talk and have breakthroughs and understanding, all so exhausting. And, ironically, inimical to the Connoissseur's very nature, which is to be quiet and experiential--one of the qualities I most love about him. Even more ironic is the fact that my whirring brain, constantly forming theories and explanations, is one of the things he loves most about me.

So yesterday I was theorizing that for the Connoisseur, one of the challenges of our relationship right this minute is that the usual ways he has helped women and friends in the past aren't available to him with me. My work is really different than his, so the ways he can be a resource to me there aren't obvious; he's as broke as I am; he lives in a different area than I am planning to move to, so his connections can't really help me much, nor help hold us together--though I think we both really prize my meetings with his friends and family, and my having converted him to the Cult of Buffy, because those things are little ways we're building common experiences. We don't live together, so he doesn't get a lot of chance to help me with day-to-day things, so those day-to-day things we do share matter so much.

And I think it makes him feel bad, maybe, and I know it makes me feel bad, this complicated desire to make things special but also to enjoy normalcy, these longings to give to one another, to take things for granted and to savor every moment. And I suddenly realized yesterday morning, as I was fretting in the shower over my own worries about whether this bad feeling is about *me* or something else entirely, that in a strange, subtle, unexpected way, probably the best evidence right now that he absolutely fucking adores me is that he sits there with that feeling of not being able to do a goddamn thing for me, or with his worries or anxieties about this relationship, and keeps his mouth shut about it. He doesn't do that guy thing of getting pissy, or whiny, or wanting me to make myself less than I am in order to make him feel bigger. It's like the biggest gift he's giving me right now is, paradoxically, the gift of not being able to give me much or promise me anything--but loving me anyway.

We all think we want someone who will love us no matter what--but the fact is, we also really want to be able to give to those we love. And I think maybe this is truer of men than it is of women, for lots of fairly complicated socio-cultural reasons which most people reading this already know about. And that makes it hard, damn hard, for men at this moment in time, to love successful ambitious women--because what can you give the woman who has everything, and who is determined to get whatever she wants on her own terms, with her own money, in her own good time? Nothing other than loving them, and a good fuck once in a while? But no one wants to just be a sex object (ha ha, smartass, no you don't, really). How are we all going to figure this crap out, to distinguish between loving people and knowing they love us, and thinking of relationships as a kind of currency? "I can't give you anything but love" is a lovely sentiment in songs; but in real life, it feels like a really weak position to be in. We don't want to be loved for what we give; but we want to be able to give to those we love. Mostly, I think, we want to give ourselves. The trick is figuring out what that means.

The Murder of Shaima Rezayee

Shaima Rezayee will, I assume, never be nominated for Feminist of the Day. Yet she deserves that accolade - and much more. Her murder and its subtext speak so clearly to the world we live in - where human rights, patriarchy, cultural preservation, globalization, and religious extremism violently collide on a daily basis - that I'd like to introduce her to you (via The Times of London):

SHAIMA REZAYEE was the face of a new generation of young Afghan women: she discarded her shalwar kameez and burkha for Western clothes and a glamorous job as a television presenter on Kabul’s answer to MTV.
But two months ago her bosses were forced to dismiss Ms Rezayee, 24, under pressure from conservative mullahs who were disgusted by the “unIslamic values” of her music show.
This week she paid for her unconventional choices with her life: she was shot dead in her home by an unknown assailant.
Police said that they believed the killing was linked to her former job as a “veejay” — video journalist — on Hop, which was broadcast by Tolo TV, one of a number of private stations set up since the fall of the Taleban.
Ms Rezayee was the only female presenter on the show.

In February, Rezayee told Reuters, ""Whenever I go out, some people say some [bad] things... But there are more who praise me. Especially my family -- and a lot of young people in this country encourage me." Shaima Rezayee is the 27th journalist murdered so far this year for doing her job.

From AAUW

It's a bit late, but I found this in my e-mail (click on the e-card), and thought it worth sharing, in honor of Prof. B. Apropos of my last post, it is important to call these people on their bullshit. Basically, AAUW reminds us that:

Girls can do the math when it comes to judicial nominations. Can the Senate?

218 - The number of judicial nominations made by President George W. Bush

208 -The number of Bush nominees that have been confirmed.

95% - The percentage Bush’s judicial nominees have been confirmed.

24% - The percentage of the federal judiciary appointed by President George W. Bush (208 of 862 judges).

There are also some nice links to the nominees who have been the focus of controversy.

Just last night, I was reminded...

of just how bad,
it had gotten-
And just how sick,
I had become....

The night before she left us alone, Dr. B posted at 2:30am. I remember reading somewhere in the archives about some crazy psycho-drama Dr. B's Mother put her through the night before her qualifying exams. And it got me thinking.

When the fetching Ms. PorJ and I are scheduled to go somewhere - anywhere - we always remind ourselves that we need to get to bed early the night before. We tell ourselves that we'll have everything packed, and ready to go, and double-checked, before we tuck ourselves in for a good eight hours. We've tried this for, I dunno, about a decade. Long before little Sprout came on the scene.

And yet, it never fails: we find ourselves awake, doing nothing of importance, late the night before. I don't get it. I wonder if its some subconscious anxiety that we refuse to address (what if tomorrow's plane doesn't make it?) . We both really, really want that sleep. But there we are - both surprised and disappointed that we remain awake.

So what's the deal with anxiety and the night before travel, or an exam, or something big? What's the solution? (Remember the "no sex before a fight" canard for boxers?) Any ideas? (we'll pass on pharmaceutical solutions, thank you very much).

The next time we're scheduled to go somewhere, as soon as Sprout is asleep, I am going to ask the comely Ms. PorJ if I may give her a jolly rogering (or several) until we are passed out, collapsed on the bed, with none of our suitcases packed and the TV still on. Then, the next morning, we'll re-commence and miss the airplane entirely. Problem solved!

If you've got a good, juicy, "night before" story, share it. I think we could put together a good book proposal here, or at least some interesting reading. Perhaps a new literary trope.

Dr. B's attic...

Since Dr. B. left her keys to the Castle with me, I'd like to make sure you all rummage through her attic and dirty laundry. You can find it over there - yeah, to the right, down below the vast blogroll - watch your step. Lots of great stuff.

I'm a little worried. As you can tell, her replacements so far have yet to capture that blogging essence- the combination of political thought, personal revelation, and sexy goodness - that Dr. B has mastered so well. And there's the kid, too. I don't want her numbers to go down, but I know reading about the vigorous sexual gymnastics enjoyed by my lovely wife and I wont garner the same kind of enthusiasm. Plus, I'm a guy, so you will assume its all fiction anyway. And it probably would be.

So, I walked over there, and I found a good one. This post contains Bras, Boobs, Boyfriend, Mr. B, a corset, and consumer desire. Not the sexiest one around, but I didn't have much time. (I decided on this one because I noticed Dr. B. didn't include any saucy stuff in her "best of Bitch" over there above the blogroll).

Thoughts for the Day

First, a sad one: Kylie has breast cancer. Why is this sad? Other than the fact that I have a soft spot for Kylie and that she has breast cancer? Other than the fact that she's young and this very fact makes the spectre of breast cancer loom larger for women like me? All those things are true, but here's something else. Kylie is white and well-off. If she were black and lived in the US and had breast cancer, she would be 1.3 times more likely to die, according to
American Cancer Society statistics. I am not confusing causality and correlation, by the way. We have to figure in the fact that black women tend to receive less in the way of medical treatment than do their white contemporaries. But then that's another can of worms.

Second, about those judicial nominees: OK. I was going to ask why it is that we are playing into the Republican agenda by allowing them to put up the two problematic female candidates (out of 8 who have been found wanting) as poster children against the filibuster. I ask because I think there are a lot of valid issues we don't address. For example, they are women, and they seem pretty intelligent, if morally and ethically opposed to most of the things Prof. B's readers hold dear. And yet, even those of us admittedly on the left seem to want to deny them any kind of personal responsibility or agency when we look at their politics. Why is it that it is so difficult to accept the idea of conservative women living what are essentially feminist lives? I have a hard tiome reconciling the two, myself, but I'm just sayin' ... And sure enough, much of the brouhaha over these announcements has been built up as the Left hating their (the judges') Freedom. I was going to ask if any of us had done any serious digging on these women ... but then I saw this: "Rove Guided Career of Judicial Nominee in Filibuster Fight."

Justice Owen was, by all accounts, a respected but little-known lawyer in Houston in 1994 when she was first elected to the State Supreme Court with Mr. Rove's support and tutelage. Her experience up to then largely involved obscure legal cases involving pipelines and federal energy regulations.

At the time, Mr. Rove was helping to make over the Texas Supreme Court from a bench populated by Democrats widely viewed as favorable to the plaintiffs' bar - the lawyers who sue companies - to the business-friendly Republican stronghold it is today.

Ms. Owen would probably never have had a chance to run for the Supreme Court, because everyone considered it a hopeless task to oppose the enormously popular incumbent, Justice Lloyd Doggett. But when a Congressional seat opened up suddenly, Justice Doggett, a Democrat, decided to leave the court and run for the House. Ms. Owen found herself the Republican nominee in a state turning increasingly Republican.

Mr. Rove, who had helped select her as the Republican candidate, helped raise more than $926,000 for her campaign, almost half from lawyers and others who had business before the court, according to Texans for Public Justice, a liberal group in Austin that tracks Texas campaign donations. Mr. Rove's firm was paid some $247,000 in fees.

Takes the wind out of my sails a bit, that does.

Futures Past (Quick Quiz)

O.K., no cheating. Extra credit for anyone who can name (without looking at the link) the speaker of the following passage, and the year in which the speech was made:

When the germ theory finally came in and people learned how to arrange it so that women could have babies in reasonable safety, the world discovered to their surprise that women had a longer life expectancy than men. This had never been understood before, because throughout history women had, on the average, lived years and years less than men had. With all the dangers men faced, the hard work in the fields, the hunting accidents, the killings in war, everything else, women died faster for one reason and one reason only: childbirth. Every woman had one baby after another until one of them killed her. Usually, it didn't take long.
Well then, why do women do this? Because they are carefully told that being a wife and mother is the most glorious thing in the world, the one thing they're fit for, the most noble activity they can possibly have, and...and this is told to them until they believe it. And if they don't believe it, there's a lot of trouble made for them.
Well, I won't go into the whole thing. I suspect that you women know all about this already, and you men would rather not listen.
[group laughs mildly]
But notice the difference: once you want women not to have children, you're going to have to give them something else to do! It is absolutely impossible to tell a woman that she can't have children, and at the same time that she can't do anything else either except maybe wash an occasional dish.
[mild laugh from a few of the women in the group]
Because if you tell a woman that, she'll figure out some way to have a baby.
[swelling mild laughter from group]
I think I know the way, too!
[mild laughter from the group]
Well then, in the world of the 21st century in order to keep the birth rate down, we're going to have to give women interesting things to do that'll make them glad to stay out of the nursery. And the interesting things that I can think of that we give women to do are essentially the same as the interesting things that we give men to do. I mean we're going to have women help in running the government, and science, and industry...whatever there is to run in the 21st century. And what it amounts to is we're going to have to pretend...when I say "we", I mean men...we're going to have to pretend that women are people.
[group laughs]
And you know, pretending is a good thing because if you pretend long enough, you'll forget you're pretending and you'll begin to believe it.
[mild laugh from group]
In short, the 21st century, if we survive, will be a kind of women's lib world. And as a matter of fact, it will be a kind of people's lib world because, you know, sexism works bad both ways. If the women have some role which they must constantly fulfill whether they like it or not, men have some role which they would have to constantly fulfill whether they like it or not. And if you fix it so that women can do what suits them best, you can fix it so that men can do what suits them best too. And we'll have a world of people. And only incidentally will they be of opposite sexes instead of in every aspect of their life.

This should take the techno-geek readership all of twenty seconds.

I Slept With Washingtonienne. Wah!

Dr. B recently posted about the anonymous blogger who got busted by her University (S.M.U.) for her blog postings (see Inside Higher Ed article here) . In the comments section a lively debate ensued concerning freedom of speech for adjunct teachers, the role of the University in employing (and protecting) its adjunct-scholars-teachers, and other issues. Including the legal liability of the University and defamation. Which is a tricky thing.

Now comes one Roger Steinbuch. Who is this jolly Roger? He is a lawyer on Capital Hill who is suing the blogger known as Washingtonienne for a "gross invasion of his privacy." Seems Roger is a bit anxious that his proclivity for spanking was made public last year. But if you read the lawsuit, I think Roger's really angry that he was unaware that Washingtonienne was sleeping with another man, "let alone five other men, let alone that she was prostituting herself to some of them," &tc. (see count 11).

All this is to say: the blogger never named him in the blog, but his identity was easily deducible. Personally, I think the suit is beyond ridiculous. But I'll defer on its merits to lawyers, as well as whether a "gross invasion of privacy" via a blog is actionable. If it is, then my original thought that SMU was acting prudently is confirmed.

Speaking of Red and Blue

Ever since the red-blue meme took hold across the land, I've been sad that Republicans appropriated the good color. I mean, you have to admit that red is hotter than blue. No one ever talks about blue fuck-me pumps. But now this!

"Across a range of sports, we find that wearing red is consistently associated with a higher probability of winning," Dr. Russell Hill and Dr. Robert Barton, researchers in evolutionary anthropology at the University of Durham, wrote in a paper that appears today in the journal Nature.

The research began a year ago with a hunch based on observations in the animal kingdom, where red coloration is often associated with male dominance, Dr. Barton said in an interview. Zebra finches fitted with red leg bands tend to become dominant, while those given blue bands are more submissive.

(Emphasis mine). So, apparently it's not just that the more aggressive players choose red instead of blue, but that when these colors are externally applied, it changes behavior! Could it be that they not only got the cooler color, but also that their color is helping them win elections? Or helping to provide them with the balls to make up intelligence to justify a war, nominate Bolton to the UN, renominate 7 previously rejected judges, and change the rules of the Senate on a whim? Could it be that the fact that Dems got stuck with blue is partially responsible for what shrinking violets they have been for the past 5 years?

-- Psuedonymous Guest Blogger #3, who will properly introduce herself later

Hello, Everybody!

Hello, Everybody: it's Dr. Nick! Actually, I'm the guest blogger to-be-named later. I frequent the comment boards here - you know me as PorJ - and I was chosen primarily because I do not have my own blog (poor Dr. B had to go to the D-list to ask me). In terms of an introduction, all you really need to know is that Dr. B has called me a "cynical bastard," John Emerson thinks most of my comments are "inane," and I nearly started a U.S.-Canada border war over definitions of a "free press." In short: I love this place!

Seriously: this is one of the great blogs, and its not just because of Dr. B. In fact, I often run straight to the comment boards because I dig what the Misanthrope, Trish Wilson, Orange, or Sergei or Ash have to say (I'm leaving out tons of others, but you get the drift). I'm particular fond of Erudite Redneck and Amy because they (like me) stick around to argue the finer points with Dr. B. Its a real salon (dare I say: Public Sphere ?) around here.

My first post concerns an old chestnut, but I don't think I've seen it addressed. Down the street from where I live there is a Curves. You've seen them. They're the gyms marketed to women. The slogan is: Only one place can give you the strength of over 4 million women. They've just opened a new one on the way to my work. That's two within 3.5 miles of each other. This wouldn't be so surprising - afterall, Curves is one of America's top franchise businesses right now - except that I live in a "blue state." The absolute bluest of states possible. And Curves gives 10% of its profits to such pro-life groups as Operation Save America (more radical than even Randall Terry's Operation Rescue). Turns out Gary Heavin, the founder of the chain, is a "committed Pro-Life Christian." But you wont read this in his biography at the Curves site, nor in any of their promotional materials.

I was stunned to find this out last year. Its probably well-known amongst the feminists who read this blog. But as long as I've got Dr. B's microphone, I'd like to remind everyone. And I'm sure - if they are doing so well here in blue America - that several (most?) of their patrons are unaware of the causes they are (in)directly supporting.

Favorite bitching?

Jo(e) asked for some archive hits in my absence, and how can I turn my readers down? Especially when it's 2:30 am and I'm still up? So I finally started doing a little "greatest hits" linkage over there on the sidebar, below the social conscience linkage and above the shameless begging. For now, it's some of the better abortion and motherhood essays; there have been previous requests for Pseudonymous Kid's best