The naked truth

I have always been impressed with people who seem free and liberated enough that they color their hair in purple and blue and whatever else; or wear outrageously colorful clothing; or couldn't care about how they look when they are clothed or not.  Nudity in the public terrifies me, and I bet am not alone.

I am, therefore, all the more impressed that an academic at Cambridge, with graduate degrees from Oxford, sometimes presents self in the nude in order to convey the point.  In the nude in the public.  Or, in the nude in videos that the entire world can watch whenever.  And, oh, this a female academic.

I won't embed any unclothed image of Victoria Bateman's in this blog, even though it is not at all difficult to track them down.  Bateman herself provides plenty even at her Twitter stream.

Why the public nudity sometimes?  For one, she is pissed off that women are "invisible" to economists and economic historians.  And, she is one hell of a strong feminist.

I think “my body, my choice” should be at the heart of feminism. It shouldn’t just apply to birth-control rights.

Bateman's forceful and well thought out arguments remind me of Camille Paglia.  But, I don't want to digress.

Bateman has come out with her latest book, which is about how women made the West rich.

The Industrial Revolution was a new technological wave. Women were crucial for sowing the seeds of that wave. They created the incentives for technological change, the savings, the skills base, and the entrepreneurship. But when that feeds through to the economy, women don’t get paid back in return.
And so we see quite a sizable decline in women’s participation in the labor force throughout the Industrial Revolution. By the late 19th century, we have the roots of the idea of the male breadwinner model. That then becomes the middle-class ideal, and we then get the cult of domesticity.

Which leads us situations like this today:

There was an International Labour Organization (ILO) report out last year that showed that globally 75% of unpaid care is provided by women. They estimated it’s the equivalent of 2 billion women working full time, for nothing. The ILO says the way in which unpaid care is seen as women’s responsibility is one of the big impediments to women entering the workplace and being able to achieve equality within the workplace.

Now, don't for a second be tempted into thinking that Bateman comes from a privileged background and, hence, the OxBridge and feminism and nudity and all that.  Nope.  Bateman's parents didn't complete high school.

[Her dad,] inspired by Thatcherite entrepreneurialism, went into business for himself, again in ductwork, and her mom helped out with the administrative side while working other odd jobs and raising Bateman and her two younger sisters. Customers often couldn’t pay Bateman’s father, and the business soon went under. When Bateman was 11 and home sick, she’d go with her mom to clients’ homes begging for them to pay what they owed, sometimes blocking their driveways to help persuade them. At home, however, the family was on the flip side of that ugly equation, several men armed with bats demanding that her parents pay what they owed.
When Bateman was 14, her parents split, and her mom raised the girls as a single mother.

A tough life.  A blue-collar background just like Paglia's.

A woman who has accomplished a lot. "Bateman is embraced and appreciated by colleagues and students alike for her approachability, her down-to-earth sensibility, and her sense of humor."

Her dad, now in his 70s, still works in duct fitting, traveling about in his van. Her mom was in a bad car accident 10 years ago and is on disability. One of her sisters went to night school and has pulled together a career for herself, but the other still struggles mightily.

But, even this uber-confident feminist academic sometimes feels the bad moments ... what does she do? "I play the Ella Fitzgerald song “They all laughed.”

Whether we are clothed or in the nude, men or women, academics or duct workers, we all find comfort in Ella Fitzgerald ... and Louis Armstrong.  

No more taxes. Period!

The older I get, I find that the rules for being and doing good seem to be getting simpler by the day.  The problem of persuading others, however, has gotten to be increasingly difficult.  As Aziz Ansari says, “Everyone weighs in on everything. They don’t know anything. People don’t wanna just say, ‘I don’t know.’”  And the loud voices of idiots drown out the truth!

Today's exhibit: Tampons.

Yes, tampons. And sanitary pads. And, yes, real men talk about this too!

Almost three years ago, I blogged about the idiocy of taxing feminine hygiene products.  I wrote there:

To me, well, there is no argument here: the sales of tampons and sanitary napkins should not be taxed.  But then who listens to me anyway!

The rule is so simple, but persuading others is damn difficult.  Especially to us Rodney Dangerfields who thought our mothers had the best approach to life!

In responding to comments--yes, in those pre-trump years, there were commenters--I became blunter than I was in the blog-post:

Feminine sanitary products are necessities. I would argue that even birth control pills are necessities for that same reason--it is not like women *choose* to have periods and, therefore, it is a luxury. Unlike with shitting, which all of us do, it is a segment of the population that has to deal with menstruation. Which is why tampon tax is a remarkably stupid idea. I am surprised that it has continued this long--I am sure it is because politics is dominated by men, in the discussions and in the decision-making bodies.

This NY Times piece reports on the development in Australia, where from January 1st, tampons won't be taxed.  The report adds:

The fight over a tampon tax goes beyond Australia’s shores. In the United States, there is no tax in nine states for products like menstrual cups, pads and tampons. Five other states have no sales tax at all. Washington’s mayor signed an exemption into law last year. But 36 American states still tax sanitary products, according to the group Period Equity.

It is just bizarre that 36 states here continue to tax them.  (BTW, menstrual cups? What the hell is that?)

There are countries around the world that are a lot wiser compared to the US. Even the less "developed" countries:

Kenya was among the first countries to eliminate the tax on tampons and pads in 2004. India ended its 12 percent tax on sanitary products in July last year, and Canada abolished its goods and services tax completely in 2015.

It was a 12 percent tax in India?  Twelve percent?

Here in the US, politics is dominated by men, in the discussions and in the decision-making bodies, even more now compared to January 2016 when I blogged about tampon tax.  The outright misogyny surprises and shocks me.  As if to put the icing on the cake, the chairman of the all-male Republican membership of the Senate Judiciary Committee has this to say about why their group is all-male:

Even "intelligent" Republican women vote for such assholes!  I tell ya, persuading people about the truth is way more difficult than it should ever be.

What does it mean to be a male?

I had drafted a blog-post. And then I read the news.

Now, I want to think more about "save the males."  That other post will appear later.

In this #MeToo context, "save the males" might sound strange.  But, it is not. Not to me.  I have been saying this, and blogging about it, for a mighty long time.

I am not referring to the rapists and the gropers and the assholes.  Nope. Not at all.  I have no sympathy for those males, and I continue to be shocked and angry that 63 million voters elected one such scumbag to the Oval Office.

The "save the males" that I have been writing about has many aspects. For one, boys are getting lost all the way from middle school on.  They are falling behind.  We have not been able to articulate for them what it means to be a man in a changed and changing world.

Right from the mid-1990s, I was talking with people and cautiously writing in op-eds that we were not paying attention to the developing trends of boys being neglected.  I deleted all the blog posts from 2001 to 2007 because looking back I felt they were rather sophomoric. I wish I had not.  Thus, the earliest I can cite as evidence from this blog is this one from November 2008.

I don't mean neglected as in abused, but neglected as in we were systematically redefining what it meant to be a girl in the changing world, but were not doing the same with boys.  And boys were falling behind in schools.  Men were falling behind in colleges. Masculinity was being re-made and men were not readying themselves.

Thus, when I read this NY Times piece, I was not surprised one bit.

For parents, raising a girl can seem as if it’s about showing them all the things they can do, while raising a boy is telling them what not to do, researchers say.
“There’s been a much more complete gender revolution for women than for men,” said Dan Clawson, a sociology professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “If I’m raising a daughter, I’m raising someone who can challenge conventions, and that’s an attraction. On the other hand, if I’m raising a boy, am I raising someone who’s going to get in trouble, who won’t do well in school and so on?”
The fading bias against girls should cheer all who desire a more egalitarian society. But there are risks to society if what replaces it is a bias against boys.

I don't understand what it will take for American society to start talking about this.  But then we are the same people who don't talk about guns, about racism, about ...

One of the earliest scholars whose works I found to be extremely valuable in this is Christina Sommers.  Which is the reason I spent a good chunk of a Sunday, four years ago, watching her on C-Span.

Even early on, Sommers was sharply attacked by her critics. Now, those attacks have become even more vicious because she is a feminist from the right side of the political spectrum.  So much so that her scheduled talk in Oregon--in Portland--was interrupted and had to be wrapped up early because of protesters.

Sommers was labeled a "fascist" and protesters wanted her talk to be canceled!

I don't always agree with Sommers. But, to call her a fascist? To not let her speak on a college campus?  It is one thing to protest against a Richard Spencer or a Stephen Bannon. They are thugs. Fascists. Neo-Nazis. But why shut down Sommers?

Lost in all this brouhaha: The much needed discussion on what it means to be a male, and what we ought to be teaching young boys about masculinity!

No Belles, Hombres, and Equalism

David J. Thouless
F. Duncan M. Haldane
J. Michael Kosterlitz
Jean-Pierre Sauvage
Sir J. Fraser Stoddart
Bernard L. Feringa
Yoshinori Ohsumi
Juan Manuel Santos
Bob Dylan
Oliver Hart
Bengt Holmström

If you are like me, then reading "Bob Dylan" in that list of names is the clue that explains that they are the people tapped with the Nobel honors this year.  Well, except the last two on the list--theirs is a fake Nobel!

The listing of names reveals something, right?  No females honored with that stratospheric honor.  In fact, "it’s been 53 years since a woman won the Nobel Prize in physics."  Most of that is political--a process that keeps deserving women away.  My favorite in this context is Rosalind Franklin.  While controversy abounds, from what I can understand, I am convinced that sexist politics kept her out of the picture.

But, here's what we also find--males tend to be found in high percentages at the high achieving end, and they also seem to be overwhelmingly the gender in everything from mass shootings to drug-dealing to the population in prisons.  Of course, for even thinking about this, Larry Summers was kicked out of his job at Harvard; recall that brouhaha?

Most of us in our regular lives do not ever cross paths with the high achieving end nor the other extreme.  And, what I find in that vastness of regular life is this, and about which I have been thinking and blogging for the longest time: Men are in trouble.

Consider some startling statistics.
More than a fifth of American men — about 20 million people — between 20 and 65 had no paid work last year.
Seven million men between 25 and 55 are no longer even looking for work, twice as many black men as white.
There are 20 million men with felony records who are not in jail, with dim prospects of employment, and more of these are black men.
Half the men not in the labor force report they are in bad physical or mental health.
Men account for only 42 percent of college graduates, handicapping them in a job market that rewards higher levels of education.
Lawrence H. Summers, the former Treasury secretary and now a professor of economics at Harvard, estimates that a third of men between 25 and 54 without college educations could be out of work by midcentury.
Well-paying jobs that don’t demand a college degree have been shrinking for generations — and technology is accelerating that trend.

That report from the NY Times is filled with rich evidence, which is why:

Alan B. Krueger, a professor of economics at Princeton, recently conducted a study of working-age men. “I came away thinking our biggest social problem is men,” he said. 

Take your time to read through and digest all that.  A point there reinforces something that I have been talking about for a while--we need to seriously reconsider what it means to be a man in these rapidly changing times.

Succeeding in the new economy and culture may well require rethinking conventional ideas about masculinity.

I cannot understand how and why we as a society are not engaging in such important conversations and are, instead, wasting away our time and money on frivolity.

Feminism in these modern times

Sex in advertisements.

Which is why there was that woman on the sidewalk by a major thoroughfare, holding a sign for fundraising via car-wash.

No, just because it is a woman holding a sign I would not conclude that "sex sells."  But I would because of the clothing that she had on her.  Shorty-shorts that made sure that her legs were all exposed.  And then the skimpy bikini-bra-top that barely contained her big breasts.

We were stopped at the traffic light and she walked like a sex kitten waving the sign.

"Why don't you put a shirt on?" a voice rang out from the waiting vehicles.  The voice sounded friendly, as in a constructive and engaging tone.  Perhaps a middle-aged woman's voice.

I turned to the left, which is where the voice came from.  It was a pick-up truck that had a female driver and an older female passenger.  The passenger was beginning to roll up the window.  I suppose after voicing their thoughts, they were done.

"Am good" the sign-carrying woman replied, with a smile and with a thumbs-up from her free hand.

"A shirt might help" the voice rang out again from the truck.  The woman on the street smiled again.

The light turned green.

The two cars ahead of me kept going straight.  I read the sign that she was holding as I passed her.  I was curious what the fundraising was for.  For ladies football!

As I passed her, I kept watching the traffic in the rear to see if any car turned towards the car-wash.  None.  I was happy that sex does not sell.  At least, not all the time.

We live in strange times.  On the one hand, we have made enormous progress and have largely moved away from acting on our primal, animal instincts.  We don't beat the crap out of somebody when we disagree, and we don't sexually assault another.  Well, mostly.  This kind of a healthy progress has created the space for people to be what they want to be and say what they want to say.  Mostly.  But, this freedom, the progress, now means that a woman can be practically semi-nude on a city sidewalk in the middle of the day.  Is such an element of sexuality a good thing or a bad thing?

That's practically the question that The Economist also addresses in reviewing two books, which are about the troubling aspects of young girls, their sexuality, and modern technology:

That young women often aspire to be titillating should not be surprising given that the most successful female celebrities often present themselves as eye-candy for the male gaze. “Everybody wants to take a selfie as good as the Kardashians’,” says Maggie, a 13-year-old. 

"If you've got it, flaunt it!" has become "normal" behavior.

 [Unlike] past feminists, who often protested against their sexual objectification, many of today’s young women claim to find it empowering. “There are few times that I feel more confident about my body than when I wear a crop top and my boobs are showing and my legs are showing,” says Holly, a college student. “I never feel more liberated.”
This hardly seems like progress, particularly when only certain bodies, those that are sexy to men, are allowed to be a source of pride.

As the review notes, "For anyone raising a daughter, these books do not make for easy reading."  Not easy materials even for us worrywarts who are all done with raising a daughter.

Modern medieval maidens

Even through the few years of my existence, I have been witness to a phenomenal change--for the better--in the treatment of women.  From a grandmother, who was condemned to live a life of widowhood from the age of eighteen to her death at 67; to a mother and aunts who graduated high school and went to live in cities far away from the old village; to a sister and cousin sisters and schoolmates who went to college not only for an undergrad but also for graduate and professional degrees; to a daughter and niece and other young women whose professional accomplishments are so stratospheric that even most men cannot dream of ...

Yet another reason why I cannot ever agree with people who talk about the good old days, when the old days were good only to the fewest of few males somewhere.

Against such a background, I have been increasingly troubled by the recent uptick in American colleges and universities to "protect" young women.  Of course, we need all the education about good practices like treating genders equally and not harassing women, for instance.  But, we seem to be going way overboard to such an extent that the system seems to want treat young women as helpless maidens in some medieval literature.  The more I listen to the chatter, the more I am amazed at the prevailing sentiment to equate women with damsels in distress..

It is a shame that young women seem to be characterized that way.  Even the female students in my classes are such a contrast to all that.  Most women in my classes seem a lot more together, confident, and purposeful, compared to the typical male student who comes across as an overgrown adolescent.

Of course, I am not the only one who is upset these days about how the system is caricaturing young women as ones who need all the parental guidance.  My favorite feminist, Camille Paglia, says that and more with her usual blunt talk.

I am continually shocked and dismayed by the nearly Victorian notions promulgated by today’s feminists about the fragility of women and their naïve helplessness in asserting control over their own dating lives. Female undergraduates incapable of negotiating the oafish pleasures and perils of campus fraternity parties are hardly prepared to win leadership positions in business or government in the future.

Now, that is some criticism, eh!

Paglia takes it up another notch:

If today’s young women want to be passive wards of the state, then that is their self-stultifying choice.

Ouch!

I have complained enough (like here) that young women and men seem to want a lot more rules and not fewer rules.  And even more bizarre that they seem to be all too eager to obey those rules.  Paglia's phrase of "passive wards of the state" can equally apply to young men too.  But, our interest in this post is about feminism and young women.  So, what would Paglia like to see happen?

Too many people, both men and women, have foolishly conflated their personal identities with their jobs. It’s a bourgeois trap and a distortion of the ultimate meaning of life.
The childless Gloria Steinem, who was unmarried until she was 66, has never been sympathetic to the problems faced by women who want both children and a job. Stay-at-home moms have been arrogantly disdained by orthodox feminism. This is a primary reason for the lack of respect that a majority of mainstream citizens has for feminism, which is addicted to juvenile male-bashing and has elevated abortion to sacramental status. While I firmly support unrestricted reproductive rights (on the grounds that nature gives every individual total control over his or her body), I think that the near-hysterical obsession with abortion has damaged feminism by making it seem morally obtuse.
I want universities to create more flexible, extended-study options for young women who choose to have earlier (and thus safer) pregnancies, and I want more public and private resources devoted to childcare facilities for working parents of every social class.

I have no disagreement there.  Well, I don't have the cojones to disagree with Camille Paglia ;)

Source

Sex and the single guy. Well, married guy too.

Back in the early years of graduate school, when I was beginning to understand the libertarian political economy, an opportunity came up in class discussions for me to see how far that can be stretched.  I suggested to the class--this was before the days of NAFTA, the Berlin Wall was still there, and China was just about waking up--that in the global division of labor, perhaps we can also think of the spatial distribution of sex work.  And that as much as the US specialized in the silicon industry, well, Thailand specialized in the sex industry.

Of course, discussions at the graduate level are often to test the limits of a theoretical interpretation, but in this one maybe I went too far. Or, for all I know, thanks to my accent, nobody understood a word of what I had to say.  There were no discussions, and we moved on.

The sex industry has morphed in so many different ways now.  Like I mentioned in this post two years ago, I was thrown for quite a loop reading about the vibrator in the New Yorker and in the Atlantic.  If these two magazines that I have subscribed to for years could mainstream sex and the vibrator, then there must be a great deal happening and, as always, I am the last one to know!

Last night, I was flicking through the options on the telly--back home I get only the basic channels and the 49 channels here was mindblowing. One of those was HBO.  The channel surfing me was shocked when I reached HBO.  A completely nude woman was demonstrating various types of vibrators and other sex gadgets.  On regular HBO. Not even some special HBO.  And definitely not some adult pay channel.  When did the puritanical America become so open about sex and vibrators and sex toys?  Did I miss a memo update?

And then today, I scanned at one of my favorite websites ever--the nerd that I am, I have to check in there even when on the road--and there was a link to an article with this teaser:

Prostitution used to be a bad thing – degrading, retrograde and to be opposed. Now sex work is just another service job, like being a waitress...

What was even more interesting was that the link was not to a libertarian publication but to The Nation. So, of course, I had to read it.

On the left, prostitution used to be seen as a bad thing: part of the general degradation of the working class, and the subjugation of women, under capitalism. Women who sold sex were victims, forced by circumstances into a painful and humiliating way of life, and socialism would liberate them. Now, selling sex is sex work—just another service job, with good points and bad—and if you suggest that the women who perform it are anything less than free agents, perhaps even “empowered” if they make enough money, you’re just a prude. Today’s villain is not the pimp or the john—it’s second-wave feminists, with their primitive men-are-the-enemy worldview, and “rescuers” like Nicholas Kristof, who presume to know what’s best for women.

What the what?  There is a group on the left that argues that sex work is just work?  Really?  From the left?  When did I miss this memo?

The author, the ever fiery feminist Katha Pollitt goes for it:

It’s one thing to say sex workers shouldn’t be stigmatized, let alone put in jail. But when feminists argue that sex work should be normalized, they accept male privilege they would attack in any other area. They accept that sex is something women have and men get (do I hear “rape culture,” anyone?), that men are entitled to sex without attracting a partner, even to the limited extent of a pickup in a bar, much less pleasing or satisfying her.

I think I should get back to my ashram soon and stay away from these updates.  Nah, that won't happen--I will continue to investigate this strange world from the protective ashram that my home is.  Stupid is as stupid does, whether on the road or at home!

Girls. Bond Girls, that is. Part II

A follow-up to this post; I have always wondered how the Bond Girls came across to impressionable young girls.  All I felt was that it would have been different.  Different from from the experiences of impressionable young boys like me.

As a graduate student, and as a lifelong student that I am as a faculty, I have become all too familiar with the feminist critiques of the representation of Bond Girls.  The blatant sexism, and the patronizing attitudes, and, of course, sensationalizing the female sexuality.   Which are not far off the mark, of course.

The recent Bond movies, however, have radically changed Bond and the women in the movies.  Bond shows emotions, and has a confident vulnerability.  Women?  A women "M" is a big change all by itself.  And the Bond Girls can do some serious ass kicking.

But, how did those original Bond Girls come across to the preteen and teenage girls in the audience?

Here is one engaging perspective (ht):

Quote of the day (Ashley Judd fights back)

Patriarchy is not men. Patriarchy is a system in which both women and men participate. It privileges, inter alia, the interests of boys and men over the bodily integrity, autonomy, and dignity of girls and women. It is subtle, insidious, and never more dangerous than when women passionately deny that they themselves are engaging in it. This abnormal obsession with women’s faces and bodies has become so normal that we (I include myself at times—I absolutely fall for it still) have internalized patriarchy almost seamlessly. We are unable at times to identify ourselves as our own denigrating abusers, or as abusing other girls and women. ...

The insanity has to stop, because as focused on me as it appears to have been, it is about all girls and women. In fact, it’s about boys and men, too, who are equally objectified and ridiculed, according to heteronormative definitions of masculinity that deny the full and dynamic range of their personhood. It affects each and every one of us, in multiple and nefarious ways: our self-image, how we show up in our relationships and at work, our sense of our worth, value, and potential as human beings. Join in—and help change—the Conversation.

 All because Judd did not look her usual stunning best.  Her puffed up face, Judd writes, was from being "sick for more than a month and on medication (multiple rounds of steroids),"

You go, girl!

What? Protests in Ukraine too?

Ahem, different from the protests in Egypt and Tunisia.

Quote of the day: on men, masculinity, and feminism

Men are caught between an old-fashioned breadwinner ideal and an economic era that no longer delivers the family wage, and are left facing two choices: They can feel terrible about themselves, or they can help to change an outdated ideal. Feminists need to engage men on this issue.

 From this essay (ht) which itself is from Reshaping the work-family debate, by Joan C. Williams.

Women in the Kennedy clan

This one was too good that I decided to copy and paste the entire piece:

One thing we have lost with the passing of Edward Kennedy is a certain generational model of the proper role for the family women in public life—the mother, wife, mistress, and daughter. It’s not a model I will miss.

It starts, of course, with Rose Kennedy, described thus in a review of a book about the Kennedy women:

Rose changed from an ambitious, lively, curious girl to a wife and mother whose emotions were rigidly controlled and whose mechanisms of denial so highly refined that she could accept her husband's lovers—notably Gloria Swanson—into her home. She passed much of that legacy on to her daughters Kathleen, Eunice, Patricia, Jean.

In the Kennedy family, the women preened and posed, suffered mistresses, got divorced. That iconic video of Jackie Kennedy giving a tour of the White House, recently replayed on Mad Men, is disturbing to watch today. She honestly seems as if she’s being directed by a remote control.

If they were lucky, like Eunice Kennedy Shriver, they managed to install themselves at the head of virtuous nonprofits—“charities,” we used to call them. When it came to the family’s sense of its own mission, the women were not in the picture. Here is Joe Kennedy’s line of succession, which seems medieval today:

It was understood among the children that Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., the oldest boy, would someday run for Congress and, his father hoped, the White House. When Joseph Jr. was killed in World War II, it fell to the next oldest son, John, to run. As John said at one point in 1959 while serving in the Senate: “Just as I went into politics because Joe died, if anything happened to me tomorrow, Bobby would run for my seat in the Senate. And if Bobby died, our young brother, Ted, would take over for him.”

Now, thank god (and feminism) we have Maria Shriver and Caroline Kennedy, who are contained by their husbands and children, but still exist as independent women in some recognizable form.

Do professors think and say foolish things?

YES, they do. A lot more than we let the public know. Unfortunately.

Christina Hoff Sommers has a wonderful essay, again. When she writes about the lack of professional and academic integrity, I cannot think of any flaw in her argument. Her comments below, in the context of feminism, are applicable to any field:

Why should it matter if a large number of professors think and say a lot of foolish and intemperate things? Here are three reasons to be concerned:

1) False assertions, hyperbole, and crying wolf undermine the credibility and effectiveness of feminism. The United States, and the world, would greatly benefit from an intellectually responsible, reality-based women's movement.

2) Over the years, the feminist fictions have made their way into public policy. They travel from the women's-studies textbooks to women's advocacy groups and then into news stories. Soon after, they are cited by concerned political leaders. President Obama recently issued an executive order establishing a White House Council on Women and Girls. As he explained, "The purpose of this council is to ensure that American women and girls are treated fairly in all matters of public policy." He and Congress are also poised to use the celebrated Title IX gender-equity law to counter discrimination not only in college athletics but also in college math and science programs, where, it is alleged, women face a "chilly climate." The president and members of Congress can cite decades of women's-studies scholarship that presents women as the have-nots of our society. Never mind that this is largely no longer true. Nearly every fact that could be marshaled to justify the formation of the White House Council on Women and Girls or the new focus of Title IX application was shaped by scholarly merchants of hype like Professors Lemon and Seager.

3) Finally, as a philosophy professor of almost 20 years, and as someone who respects rationality, objective scholarship, and intellectual integrity, I find it altogether unacceptable for distinguished university professors and prestigious publishers to disseminate falsehoods. It is offensive in itself, even without considering the harmful consequences. Obduracy in the face of reasonable criticism may be inevitable in some realms, such as partisan politics, but in academe it is an abuse of the privileges of professorship.

"Thug," "parasite," "dangerous," a "female impersonator" — those are some of the labels applied to me when I exposed specious feminist statistics in my 1994 book Who Stole Feminism? (Come to think of it, none of my critics contacted me directly with their concerns before launching their public attacks.) According to Susan Friedman, of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, "Sommers' diachronic discourse is easily unveiled as synchronic discourse in drag. ... She practices ... metonymic historiography." That one hurt! But my views, as well as my metonymic historiography, are always open to correction. So I'll continue to follow the work of the academic feminists — to criticize it when it is wrong, and to learn from it when it is right.

Oh, yes, save the whales, er, males :-)

Sommers mentions Sarah Blaffer Hrdy as one of the models for scholarship. Interestingly enough, it was yesterday that I was reading a review of a book by Hrdy--the book is an anthropological exploration into why humans might be interested in raising children who are not their own.

Save the males, part two :-)

In August of last year, I blogged that we needed to worry about the males.
Now, two significant developments--one from economics and the other from science. (No, economics is NOT a science!)

In the world of economics, in this Great Recession, it turns out that males have been losing jobs, and finding it difficult to get employed again, than what has been the female experience thus far. So much so that apparently one economist has termed this the "mancession"--"a recession that hurts men much more than women, and we are allegedly in the worst mancession in recent history"

The huge loss in manufacturing has a significant gender implication. On the other hand, services like teaching holding steady to a large extent has kinds of gender implication.

Amidst this kind of an update from economists, comes a completely surprising, though not that unexpected, news from the world of medicine--reports, which are yet to be confirmed through independent studies, that scientists have been able to create human sperm without any help from a male! To which the BBC has assembled a bunch of funny and serious responses; here is my favorite:

The Daily Telegraph's Rowan Pelling says men are redundant but worth keeping for menial tasks.

"Yet I feel compelled - and not just as the mother of two small boys - to make a spirited defence of the weaker sex. Where would I be without my husband to read 80 pages of a car manual, in French, to find out how the back windscreen-wiper works? Who would tug the dried lumps of excrement from our cat's backside? Who would explain the rules of cricket to an American? Who would clear a blocked drain of unspeakable clotted matter? Who would take hours to demonstrate the dreadnought manoeuvres at the Battle of Jutland, armed only with salt cellars and jam jars? Without men, there would be no one to read Joseph Conrad or Norman Mailer, to remove spiders from the bath, or (important one, this) to tell women they're pretty."

So, if unemployed men had so far been lining up to donate at sperm banks, the prospects are getting dimmer, eh!

Feminism: needed, passe, or dead?

So, I finished reading Camille Paglia's essay (actually a keynote address at Harvard) where she ends with this forceful message:
we must stop seeing everything in life through the narrow lens of gender. If women expect equal treatment in society, they must stop asking for infantilizing special protections. With freedom comes personal responsibility.

And then, I thought I would read the Guardian, which I have not done for a while. There too was a lengthy piece on feminism, but from a completely different perspective.
The sex industry is booming, the rape conviction rate is plummeting, women's bodies are picked over in the media, abortion rights are under serious threat and top business leaders say they don't want to employ women. It all adds up to one thing ... an all-out assault on feminism.

I liked this paragraph there:
the obsession [with pregnant celebrities] is such that one magazine editor has said that "it's at the point now where some stars might decide to have more kids just to collect the money from their photos". We've seen Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, former child star Melissa Joan Hart and Myleene Klass all pose naked and pregnant in the past few years - as Keri Russell, an actor who has played a pregnant woman in two films in the past year has said, there is "this weird, crazy pop-culture infatuation with all these actresses being pregnant. Have you ever seen so many pictures of [pregnant] actresses?"
Indeed not. The message that these images strike home is that women's worth is directly tied to childbearing,