feminist blogs

This is where I fail miserably as a political blogger. I can't get excited about 2008 yet, just can't. Do we really have to talk about the candidates for the next two years while ignoring everything else that happens in the political arena? Can't someone make a law that the campaign period can't run for more than a few months?

Are you sick of these? A couple of commenters in the earlier posts wanted to know why I'd go on the MRA sites and suspected that I just want to bathe in misogyny. Now, misogyny is of course one of my very favorite things in this world, but that is not the reason why I went there. This time I ended there quite accidentally, but then I remembered an earlier commenter accusing me of not looking at what the opposition is saying, and this seemed a good opportunity to do so. Also, if I go there you, my sweet readers, don't have to. Unless you want to check on my impressions.

My two earlier posts on this topic have discussed emotions and misconceptions, respectively. This one addresses the topics which I found contained at least a gist of truth in them, in the sense that what is being described can cause anger, pain and frustration in some men, and their roots are in the arrangements of patriarchy. But in some cases it is the intermediate stage in which we live, neither patriarchy nor something egalitarian, that causes the grief. Before I discuss the topics I picked for closer analysis, I want to dispense with one more topic which is very common in the MRA sites and which doesn't have anything to do with gender roles as such.

This is that individual people can be really horrible and that it is quite possible that a particular man's ex-wife or current wife or colleague is a pretty vile person. That this is true, of both women and men, does not tell us anything at all about women or men in general or about feminism. In a similar manner, the court system can fail and produce results which are unfair towards one of the people involved in it. This could happen in the most heavenly of societies, as long as information is partial and humans prone to error. In short, anecdotal evidence is anecdotal.

Now let's attack the meat of the story.

The first concern of some relevance on MRA sites has to do with male military conscription. In most countries where conscription is used it is only men who have to physically go to war and to risk death as a consequence. I think this is a legal unfairness to men.

But note that it is not feminists who had anything to do with this arrangement; it is pure patriarchy (in the sense of the old men in power sending the young men off to fight), and based on the past where most able-bodied women where too often pregnant or breast-feeding to be of much use on long war-campaigns and where fighting was based on physical body power much more than it is today. Also, the maternal mortality rates were very high in those days (and still are in Afghanistan, say), so that women usually died at earlier ages than men, even with all the warmaking.

The feminist writings on this topic I am familiar with apply to the United States. They tend to take one of two possible stances: either women and men should be treated the same and conscripted at the same terms or neither women nor men should be forced to wage wars at all. I don't know of any feminist writings that argue that men should be conscripted and women not, though such writings may well exist. But the usual argument is for equal treatment, though some feminists point out that war is a particularly male business and that perhaps women shouldn't be forced to fight in wars unless they have more of a say on when to start a war in the first place.

The military conscription argument is currently not terribly valid in the U.S., given the professional military forces and no draft, but the argument has validity in general, I think. What should be remembered here, too, is that it is the anti-feminists who fight against women in direct combat roles, not feminists.

I don't think I got the whole flavor of the MRA arguments about war here, because many on those sites also believe that women can't do war and so don't really want equality in this sphere but special rights to counteract the need for men to die in wars. An excuse for patriarchy, perhaps.

The second general MRA argument that has some validity has to do with men's reproductive rights. As I have mentioned in an earlier post, I'm not sure if anyone has the right to become a parent as such, but we usually argue that people should have the right not to become parents if they so wish. For both men and women contraception is what one uses in that case (or should use), but what happens if contraception fails?

It is then quite possible for a man to be in a situation where he can no longer refuse parenthood even though the woman still can, through abortion. If she decides not to abort the pregnancy, he is going to be a dad whether he wants it or not. And this means child maintenance payments for two decades, even if he decides not to have anything else to do with the child.

I think this is an unfairness, of a sort. Of a sort, because it is caused by avoiding an even greater unfairness: having someone outside the woman's body dictate its uses. The unfairness is created by the fact that pregnancy takes place inside a woman's body. If we had uterine replicators I could easily see the rules being different. But we don't have uterine replicators, and I can't see another solution to this unfairness that wouldn't bring in something even more horrible.

Many MRA sites argue that a man in this situation shouldn't have to pay child maintenance. He didn't want to be a parent in the first place. I actually have sympathy with this view. Where things get complicated is when the baby is born, because from that point onwards we have three people to consider in the equation, and the child maintenance is not because of some victory points for the woman but because the child needs food, clothing and so on. It is a mess, though.

The obvious lesson from all this to learn is that nobody should trust another person to take care of the contraception, and that it might be a good idea not to go to bed with people whose motivations you don't know. But I can see the MRA point in this case.

The third general complaint on the MRA sites has to do with divorce, the awarding of custody and the treatment of fathers in divorce courts. This is linked to the previous topic in that many of the comments argue that once a man is divorced he should no longer have to pay anything towards his children. This viewpoint is present as often as the viewpoint that men should have custody more often than they do. Other versions of the anger divorced fathers feel have to do with ex-wives stopping them from seeing their children often enough and with the question of how the child maintenance payments are used.

It's useful here to take a step back from these arguments and to look at what is going on in these cases from a more neutral seat. Note, first, that these cases are not just about a man and a woman getting divorced. There are children involved, too, and the courts usually consider the children first in deciding on custody and child maintenance. If one parent gets custody, that parent then becomes the custodial parent and has different rights and responsibilities than the non-custodial parent.

And this is the crux of the complaints which are all from non-custodial parents. It is not that these people are fathers that matters here: it is that they are non-custodial parents. A mother without custody rights to her children is in the very same position.

So what makes this a Men's Right topic? The fact that custody is usually awarded to the mother. In most cases this is done without any challenge from the father, but in the cases where the father challenges the mother for custody his odds of winning it are quite good. Still, most non-custodial parents are fathers, and what they are angry and hurt by are the opportunities that this system offers for exploiting the non-custodial parent. As I mentioned earlier, it is the custodial parent who decides how the child maintenance money is used. Assume a nasty divorce and a lot of grudges on both sides, and you can see how this can be an unpleasant situation for the non-custodial parent. Games could be played to turn the children against you and your hard-earned money might go towards buying fancy clothes for your ex. Or your ex might make it hard for you to see the children. And so on.

Of course very similar stories can be told by the custodial parent: child maintenance not being paid for years, the non-custodial parent badmouthing you when he or she meets the children, the children not being picked up when agreed, and even worse stuff, stuff about abuse and the custodial parent's inability to stop visitation rights by an abusive non-custodial parent. And so on.

How does this all relate to feminism? The usual argument is that feminism made divorce easier and that feminism gave women more rights in the case of a divorce. But note that the problems these men discuss are not related to their sex directly but to the patriarchy-based tradition that it is the women who have more to do with children and the court rule that custody is usually awarded to the parent who did more hands-on care of the children, to keep the children's lives as constant as possible. A stay-at-home father would get custody under these rules, and feminists have certainly advocated for a greater role for fathers in the day-to-day care of their children.

It is painful, divorce and losing daily contact with your children, or divorce and ending up a single parent. Painful and horribly hard in many cases. But the causes and remedies are not in some return to patriarchy where children are automatically the father's property. Imagine a very bad marriage that you can't escape at all and then imagine what that does to the children and to the fighting parents.

The final point on which I found the MRA arguments to have some merit has to do with the possibility that a man might meet a woman who is not a feminist or a woman who is a feminist, and that these two might have quite different ideas of the man's proper gender roles. How should he behave then? What if he thinks he married a feminist and ends up with a wife who expects him to work two jobs so that she can stay at home with the children? Or what if it is the reverse? Confusing. Of course, the very same confusion faces women meeting men who run the gamut of Rush Limbaugh types to radical feminists.

The point I'm making is that when societal norms are changing it can be hard to know what is expected of you, and I sympathize with the frustrations. Communication might help to make things clearer, too.

A related and perhaps more important point was made by one commenter who stated that the public sector is increasingly open for women but that the private sphere of the family and the children may not be equally open for men. Not only are traditional norms still pretty much focused on men as breadwinners but there are women who don't want to share direct parenting with their partners. And there are, I might point out, many men who want nothing to do with childcare or household chores.

This commenter has a point, I think. The feminist wave of the 1960s and 1970s addressed mostly the problem of how to let women access to the labor markets and societal decision-making positions in general. Many of the feminists also wanted to tackle the reverse problem of how to get men access to wider household roles in general, but the revolution slowed down before much progress there took place. This is the job for the next wave, a wave which must consist of both men and women.

Those of you who read my earlier post about Mired in MRA Land are probably eagerly awaiting the post in which I talk more about the substance of the anti-feminist complaints, expecting me to shed tears and to repent and to find a common ground to build a better society with those friendly folk. And you will not be disappointed! Just kidding... But you will get not just one post but two! This is the first one of the two.

What I want to do in this post is to look at some of the most common talking points on the MRA sites, points, which are presented as evidence that either patriarchy hurts men more than it hurts women (and that this makes patriarchy just fine) or that feminism hurts men so much that we must return to patriarchy or that being a man is a crappy thing to be and so women shouldn't aspire to have the same rights or that what women mistakenly see as extra rights for men are indeed just extra burdens or responsibilities. Often all these arguments are mixed together in one paragraph, and often essentialist arguments about women's inferiority dance polka with the argument that men are inherently more fragile.

It is a tangled weave I try to unravel here, so tangled that I found myself going around in circles, chasing my logic which ended up all dizzy and wanted to have a nap. But here are some of my semi-logical observations:

Some of the most common talking points on MRA sites are illogical or based on some odd view of how the world works. For example, it is very common on these sites to argue that feminism gave women choices, that women can choose to work or choose to stay at home, choose to divorce, choose to act like feminist women or choose to act like traditional (i.e. nonfeminist) women, whereas men have no choices at all.

Now why would this be the case? It doesn't make sense at all. I saw several people arguing that men have no choice but to work dangerous jobs (and possibly get killed young) because they have to support a woman who has chosen to stay at home. Yet if we use this "choice" framework, the decision to accept a dangerous job is every bit as much a choice as the decision to stay at home with children, say. Both have some negative and some positive consequences and neither is necessarily a "free" choice but constrained by money, other resources such as education, and the society's norms and expectations. And there are no laws which ban men from staying at home with their children, no laws which say that men can't initiate divorce or refuse to work dangerous jobs. What is it that looks to these men as lack of choice in their own lives? All I can think of is that perhaps the norms of patriarchy no longer work that well and that an unthinking acceptance of those norms might feel like not having any choice.

Another common fallacy on these sites is the argument that any attention or remedies intended to help women are by their very existence evidence of a bias against men. Thus, university Women's Studies Programs discriminate against men because there are no Men's Studies Programs and the Violence Against Women Act (WAVA) discriminates against men because it is about women. What is this based on?

I can think of two explanations. One is that these men really believe that there was no inequality between the sexes to begin with, no need to address any unfairness towards women, and that therefore all these extra programs are like giving more ice-cream to your siblings than to you. The other one is a zero-sum game view of life: If women get something it must be off the men's plates. Either way, some of these arguments look to me like someone demanding that healthy people should have the same hospital facilities as sick people do. Consider the case of the Women's Studies Programs. The traditional feminist answer to the question why there are no Men's Studies Programs at universities is that all the rest of the curriculum is one large Men's Study Program.

A third common mistake on the MRA agenda is to assume that various types of problems men might have are caused by feminism even when the evidence contradicts this or when there is no evidence on it at all. Examples are the problems boys have at school and the high U.S. divorce rate. Both of these are frequently attributed to feminism. This ignores a whole lot of evidence from countries which have hardly any feminism at all and still suffer from the very same problems. It is highly unlikely that all these other countries would just happen to have the same social trends but for totally different reasons. It is much more likely that the reasons are the same in all these countries, and if that is the case feminism can't play a large causative role.

Do you think that God is interested in who wins the Super Bowl?* Do you think that God roots for one side and gives extra help for the players on that side? Do you think that God does the same for people who win other sports events?

Some athletes seem to think that God takes sides like this, given the myriad times I've heard them thank their coaches and their teams and then God for some victory. Logically this implies that the losers of the same match should shake their fists at God. It's an odd and interesting God these people believe in. A details guy who can be made to work for some people and against others, perhaps by suitable rituals and prayers. Like a personal coach in the clouds.
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*I didn't watch the Super Bowl and have no idea if anyone thanked God this year. But it happens a lot.

Mothers: Have you ever thought about what might happen to your children while you are asleep during the night? Or when you are in the bathroom (unless you bring the kids in with you, every time)? Perhaps you should not sleep. One of your children might have a heart attack or develop a sudden fever and succumb to it before you wake up.

Do you have a car? A driver's license? A home resuscitation team handy? If you don't, you are a very bad mother. What will happen if your child suddenly gets sick? What are you gonna do? Get a cab? Bad mother!

You may be thinking that I've gone crazy, but I'm just reporting on the momtini wars: the Today Show (in late January) which decided to do a story about stay-at-home mothers drinking during playdates. "Decided to do a story" is exactly how they went about it, and it was specifically "mothers" who were to be evaluated as to how good caretakers of their children they might be after a glass of wine:

Well, the Today Show wasn't kidding around when they put together this "trend" piece more or less alleging that mothers who have a glass of wine while their kids are playing nearby are bad caretakers. The story implies they don't just drink, they get drunk: "There are safety issues to consider. Who would drive to the hospital if a child were hurt?"

That there was a subtext to the program is supported by this statement from one of the mothers who were contacted by its producer:

In the beginning they wanted to come and film my playgroup for the piece. Since our kids are now all in school full time, we don't have a weekly playgroup anymore so this was problematic. I suggested a more 'happy hour' gathering where we'd meet after school and our husband's would swing by after work for our usual family pizza night. Alicia [the NBC producer] said the mixing of dads would 'taint' the story (Read: "Make the subject more palatable because men keep their women in line and they have an auxiliary liver in their penises.") So I told Alicia it just wasn't going to work out.

Sheesh. Another one of those fake trends. Fathers would "taint" the story, because either fathers are allowed to drink or fathers are assumed to keep the mothers' drinking under control or, most likely, fathers are not seen as responsible for the children 24/7 so it doesn't matter what they do.

But mothers are on duty 24/7, and everybody can have an opinion on how they should act. This opinion is almost always that mothers should be perfect. Nothing less falls short and can be criticized. A good mother should lie in bed at night worrying about the possibility that an airplane might crash on the nursery. A good mother should imagine every possible if ever-so-unlikely risk her children might have, and a good mother should sacrifice everything, including all personal life, to prevent such risks.

I find it ironic in a very unpleasant way that now it is the stay-at-home mothers who are being criticized by the mother-the-madonna-or-the-whore school. We already know that this school finds all employed mothers to be heartless egomaniacs who have abandoned their children somewhere along the road to careers and to a paycheck, but it used to work as a defensive shield to stay at home. This is no longer true. Now the binoculars of the critics are aimed straight into the living-rooms and bedrooms and nurseries of all mothers.

I will now take a deep breath and say all the expected and moderate things I'm expected to say. Of course getting drunk while taking care of children is bad. Of course alcoholism is a terrible thing and having alcoholic parents is not good for the children at all. And of course it is a good thing to talk about how drinking and driving or being in charge of small children doesn't mix. But to then imply that there is no safe limit to the number of drinks a woman at a playdate can have? And to say nothing about the drinking that both parents might do after the father gets back from work (who's going to drive to the hospital?)? Or the father's drinking when he is in charge of the children? Or those similar risks caused by sleeping I mentioned at the beginning of this post?

No, the story is not about alcoholism per se. It is about women without a male supervisor possibly drinking and having fun while the Puritan ethic says that they should be suffering or at least feeling like they are performing some boring duties. The story is about the Mommy Wars, and the only new twist it has added to these wars is that now there are hardly any good mothers left at all and that everybody and their uncle Bob can criticize mothers while doing none of the duties themselves.

I wanted to post a picture of the mousetrap someone in my family made in the 18th century but I can't find it now, and I haven't completed my self-imposed quota for today's blog posts. All this means that you are given even more nasty news:

Russia has flown a team of chemical experts to a Siberian region to find out why smelly, coloured snow has been falling over several towns.

Oily yellow and orange snowflakes fell over an area of more than 1,500sq km (570sq miles) in the Omsk region on Wednesday, Russian officials said.

Chemical tests were under way to determine the cause, they said.

Residents have been advised not to use the snow for household tasks or let animals graze on it.

One day we will have songs about the orange snowmen...

The mousetrap, by the way, is wonderful. It consists of a large wooden weight hanging precariously balanced over the area where the mouse will be served a dainty piece of cheese. When the mouse enters, BANG!

I couldn't sleep last night, so I surfed the net and ended up reading all sorts of posts which led me to the Men's Rights Activist sites. This is never a good idea for a feminist but especially not in the middle of the night. Lots of anger and hatred blaring into my house from the screen, and the night-time brain is eerily open to begin with. So as a form of self-defense I decided to start trying to find what it is exactly that these activists are saying. What it is that feminists have destroyed so badly in this country, and what it is that makes men the truly oppressed gender.

But to do that I had to try to clean out the other stuff, the stuff that whirls around in the very air of those places,the stuff which is dangerous to inhale because it makes you stupid and slow. This post is an attempt to report on that cleaning process. I will write about the more substantive stuff on Monday.

This is the first of the odd wriggling creatures I caught by the neck:

According to many if not most MRA-guys, the whole world is ruled by a small cabal of radical feminists. George Bush doesn't run this country; the ghosts of radical feminists do, and what these ghosts want is not equality but female supremacy. They are driven by their deep hatred of men and every feminist proposal ever made has been intended to destroy men. Even more surprisingly, proposals and laws which feminists opposed and have fought are still attributed to them. As an example, I read that it is the feminists who don't want women in the military to be in combat roles and that it is the feminists who keep women out of firefighting so that they don't get killed as often as men do.

Now this is clearly delusional thinking. A cabal of radical feminists with such powers these men believe they have would surely have gotten rid of men altogether by now. Instead of that, we don't even have paid maternity leave in this country. So why is it that so many men seem to firmly believe in this fantastic scenario?

Perhaps for similar reasons as the ones that make people believe in black helicopters hovering over the United Nations building. But there is an additional reason, and that became evident when I managed to isolate and cage the next weird creature messing my brain up: The hermetically sealed and distorted set of "evidence" used in the MRA circles.

The same incidents crop up again and again, quoted as final proof of the perfidy of feminists. A famous rape accusation that may turn out not to be rape at all: Proof that almost all rape accusations are false. The case where terrible state laws put a young teenager to prison for ten years just because he received a blowjob from a minor: Proof positive that all sentences for sexual crimes are wrong and somehow proof positive also that feminists were behind this particular (and very old) law. Only certain cases are quoted and no attempt is being made to look at the actual numbers of different types of examples.

The more statistical evidence cited in these circles is also fascinating: The same few studies are mentioned over and over again, usually in a context where it is clear the person mentioning them didn't understand the study. And what studies these are! They come from the famous conservative gals of the Independent Women's Forum! Did you know that there is no gender gap in wages at all and that schools are run by feminists to destroy boys? They come from the guy who wrote the book Why Men Rule! Did you know that men earn more than women because they do all the dangerous work in this world? These are mostly really poorly made studies or perhaps not studies at all, in some cases, but they have been turned into the eternal truth in the MRA circles.

I'm not sure how one could calmly debate anything with these guys. Their whole world view is set.

I finally caught the most slippery of the nasty creatures, and despite the many colors and forms it took, I think it's called just plain old-fashioned misogyny. It is intertwined with everything that is said on those sites. Everything.

Misogyny makes it very hard to know what some of those men are saying. For one thing, the word "feminist" is often used as an euphemism for "woman that I can hate openly" and so what is being said about feminists really applies to women. Most men I read seem to think that equality of the sexes means going back to male supremacy and that this is necessary because feminism is destroying families and men and because women are quite stupid and weak and can't be garbage collectors and don't even want to be garbage collectors even though they try to usurp men's roles in life!

But many men also complain about what one might not call feminism-created women: Women who stay at home and who don't earn enough money to support themselves and the children that the man didn't want in the first place but was forced to bear. Indeed, both uppity women and downity (?) women are bad women.

It also occurred to me that some of these sites are guilty of blaming others for what is in fact in themselves. Thus, the idea of feminists as all man-haters sounds hollow when it comes from the head of a misogynist, and someone calling women illogical in a sentence that contains five major logical errors is disconcerting, to say the least.

More about this topic on Monday.

A new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has just been obtained by the press:

The world's leading climate scientists said global warming has begun, is "very likely" caused by man, and will be unstoppable for centuries, according to a report obtained Friday by The Associated Press.

The scientists - using their strongest language yet on the issue - said now that world has begun to warm, hotter temperatures and rises in sea level "would continue for centuries" no matter how much humans control their pollution. The report also linked the warming to the recent increase in stronger hurricanes.

"The observed widespread warming of the atmosphere and ocean, together with ice-mass loss, support the conclusion that it is extremely unlikely that global climate change of the past 50 years can be explained without external forcing, and very likely that is not due to known natural causes alone," said the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - a group of hundreds of scientists and representatives of 113 governments.

The phrase "very likely" translates to a more than 90 percent certainty that global warming is caused by man's burning of fossil fuels. That was the strongest conclusion to date, making it nearly impossible to say natural forces are to blame.

What that means in simple language is "we have this nailed," said top U.S. climate scientist Jerry Mahlman, who originated the percentage system.

Nice that we are mostly all agreed on that caused by humans bit. Too bad it looks like too late to do anything much about it. I hope I'm wrong in understanding the conclusions of the report that pessimistically.

The politics of all this is quite interesting:

The senior authors of the report, from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.N. body convened every five years or so, have been inundated with e-mail messages and calls from some of the 650 other authors and outside experts eager to see findings tweaked in one direction or another.

With the clock ticking down and translators juggling six official languages, and government representatives trying to ensure that findings do not clash with national interests, tussles have intensified between climate experts and political appointees from participating governments.

Scientists involved in the discussions said today that the U.S. delegation, led by political appointees, was pressing to play down language pointing to a link between intensification of hurricanes and warming caused by human activity.

I don't know what to say about that all.

The Grey Lady does not like women very much, if the kinds of columnists she regularly hires is any indication. Though getting rid of John Tierney's sermons about us ladies and our insignificance was a blessing, the truth is that the New York Times does not have very many female columnists at all. Maureen Dowd and Lisa Belkin come to mind. Now Lisa Belkin's column on balancing work and family

First Amanda and now Shakespeare's Sister. She, too, has joined the Edwards blog. This is wonderful news for women bloggers and suggests that our voices are beginning to be heard! Now I will just sit back and wait for Sam Brownback to hire me for his net campaign...