feminist blogs

This kind of out-of-control globalization, wherein wealthier women are able to rent the wombs of poorer ones, makes me extremely uncomfortable.

I’m certainly sympathetic to the plight of couples who can’t conceive for whatever reason. And it certainly makes sense for women to voluntarily carry someone else’s pregnancy if it means making a lot of money. But I think it’s possible to be skeptical of this situation without passing judgment on the people involved in it, most of whom are doing the best that they can in tough circumstances.

An article published in The Times of India in February questioned how such a law would be enforced: “In a country crippled by abject poverty,” it asked, “how will the government body guarantee that women will not agree to surrogacy just to be able to eat two square meals a day?”

One could argue that surrogates are simply providing a service like any other. But I’m not sure that we want to turn reproduction into a service industry. The inequalities here are so stark — and the carrot of thousands of dollars so tempting for women in a country with astounding poverty rates — that writing if off as purely business is inadequate.

“Surrogates do it to give their children a better education, to buy a home, to start up a small business, a shop,” Dr. Kadam said. “This is as much money as they could earn in maybe three years. I really don’t think that this is exploiting the women. I feel it is two people who are helping out each other.”

Mr. Gher agreed. “You cannot ignore the discrepancies between Indian poverty and Western wealth,” he said. “We try our best not to abuse this power. Part of our choice to come here was the idea that there was an opportunity to help someone in India.”

In the Mumbai clinic, it is clear that an exchange between rich and poor is under way. On some contracts, the thumbprint of an illiterate surrogate stands out against the clients’ signatures.

Thoughts?

Three minutes?!

The US study is the first to review what experts believe is the ideal length of time to have penetrative sex, with the random sample of Americans and Canadians labelling seven to 13 minutes most “desirable”.

Intercourse lasting between three and seven minutes was deemed “adequate”, but anything less was considered “too short” and beyond 13 minutes was “too long”.

Cara aptly points out that the study has a pretty narrow definition of “sex,” and perhaps that accounts for some of the study’s… oddities. But even if sex only refers to PIV penetration… three minutes?

Back to Cara:

The problem here is — as is generally the case — the media coverage. You’d think that in 2008, we’d have a more encompassing view of sex than “man inserts penis into vagina, thrusts for X minutes, ejaculates, rolls over and sleeps.” You’d think that we’d understand that acts like oral, anal and manual sex count as sex, as do mutual masturbation, play with sex toys, etc. You’d think we’d realize through this understanding that wow!, men can have sex with each other and so can women! Maybe it’d even occur to people that straight couples engage in these acts, too — and that while many women love PIV penetration, a majority of the female population requires at least one other tactic to actually have an orgasm. In 2008, shouldn’t we be at a point where we realize that the ultimate goal of sex is not a male orgasm, and that a male orgasm should not be seen as the definitive end to anything that we could potentially refer to as “sex?”

Seriously. Although I guess if I were partnered with someone who saw sex that way, I’d probably want to get it over with in three minutes, too.

If you’ve kept track of the scant number of posts I’ve contributed to Feministe over the past half-year, you may have realized that I get very irritated when I come across blatantly misleading “science” reporting. (I guess it must come from being raised by scientists, then working in the media.) So my eyeballs bulged and turned a hilarious shade of pink when I came across this lead for a “Health” story on the BBC News site courtesty of Feministing:

Humour ‘comes from testosterone’
Men are naturally more comedic than women because of the male hormone testosterone, an expert claims.

Men make more gags than women and their jokes tend to be more aggressive, Professor Sam Shuster, of Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, says.

The unicycling doctor observed how the genders reacted to his “amusing” hobby.

Women tended to make encouraging, praising comments, while men jeered. The most aggressive were young men, he told the British Medical Journal.

Previous findings have suggested women and men differ in how they use and appreciate humour.

Women tend to tell fewer jokes than men and male comedians outnumber female ones.

What we really need to do is find out the gender of whoever research and wrote this story for the BBC, because few things are funnier than someone who’s supposed to be a journalist, working for the largest broadcasting company in the world, making a complete ass out of themselves. Not to mention spreading the story to all sorts of other news services that seem to be taking the story seriously.

So, the first thing I always do with these science stories is find the original study: Sex, aggression, and humour: responses to unicycling. It turns out that Sam Shuster is a retired professor of dermatology. (Note to BBC researchers: this means he studied skin, not hormones or psychology.) Shuster wrote about reactions to his unicycle for the traditional end-of-year issue of the British Medical Journal. This season, the BMJ also features densely written scientific papers on which brand chocolate bar doctors ought to use to demonstrate bone fractures and whether magical powers are heritable, based on an analysis of Harry Potter novels. In short, it’s clearly a joke. I would blame the notoriously dry wits of the British for the confusion, but it seems all too likely that the BBC reporter is… also British, albeit maybe not a doctor with enough time on hand to write witty, self-referential papers about the statistical mistreatment of orthopedic surgeons in medical journals.
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Ah, 1992. I remember the year fondly… Dr. Dre came out with his first solo album, Kurt and Courtney got married, and movie reviewers struggled with how to describe The Crying Game without giving away that oh-so-titillating secret. (I was more interested in seeing Jeunet & Caro’s Delicatessen, personally.)

That year, my best friend Michele started a letter-writing chapter of Amnesty International at our high school, as well as another student organization dedicated to sex education. We volunteered to help teach sex education in middle schools, and I learned an awful lot of facts very well, especially about HIV–which had definitely become the Huge Scary Thing that was driving a lot of parents & teachers to want more and better sex education. It might seem a little odd that teenagers were teaching pre-teens about sex, but we took it very seriously. I had relatives and family friends who were HIV+ (and still alive, at that point) and a few years before, some of them had been involved in tests of a new drug called AZT, and methods to keep the virus from infecting newborn babies of seropositive mothers.

One thing we were careful to stress to the middle school kids was that they didn’t need to be scared of people with HIV. They couldn’t catch the virus from toilet seats, contrary to urban legend, or from kissing someone with HIV. We even had a big bucket full of water that we would haul out to show how much saliva you’d theoretically have to drink in order to stand a chance of transmitting the virus; it was a big bucket and never failed to get a chorus of “ewwww, gross!” at the thought of that much spit. Sex ed information has changed and updated since then, and we didn’t have as much precise information as we do now. But it was pretty clear to us, from our own education as well as the little sessions we were teaching, that you could not “catch AIDS” just from being in the same room with people who were positive, and that it was far from just being a “gay disease.” This stuff had been known for years and years.

Well apparently down-home traditional-values Mike Huckabee, who applied to run for the U.S. Senate in 1992, was far more confused about HIV transmission than a bunch of high school kids like us. He answered a questionnaire sent to him by the Associated Press and more or less advocated quarantining people with HIV, comparing the epidemic to tuberculosis. Which, by the way, is transmitted via airborne droplets that can infect anyone who breathes them in regularly, especially children and people in poor health for other reasons. Huckabee also said “I feel homosexuality is an aberrant, unnatural, and sinful lifestyle, and we now know it can pose a dangerous public health risk,” and it’s all too obvious what he was talking about. A “gay disease.”

Since then, Huckabee has made all sorts of excuses about why his comments were appropriate at the time. He claims that transmission wasn’t well understood back then… somehow to the extent that it was all right for a man running for office to spread myths that I was trying to counter at the time, that only schoolchildren and apparently evangelical politicos believed? He even invoked the “but I had a friend who died of AIDS” card, twice: once for hemophiliacs and once for honest-to-gosh gay people. I wonder how he treated that unnatural, abberant, sinful friend of his, dying of AIDS in the late 80s or early 90s? (Actually, I wonder if that friend existed at all, or is just a rhetorical device.)

I don’t really have much more to add that Pam didn’t already say in her first post on the subject or her more recent one. It’s just a shame that in this day and age — whether it’s 15 years ago or today — someone running for public office can get away with spewing this kind of ignorant, fear-mongering bullshit. Not only get away with it, but be rewarded for it.

(Footnote: I just remembered that early in 1992 was also when I discovered a very strange computer network. I managed to get access to some University of Washington servers and then discovered that I could talk to people in Sweden. Mind-boggling. “All the college kids are using it and calling it… the internet! It’s way better than AOL and it’s free!” I exclaimed to my friends. Then I ran off to try and develop my first online game, which was based on a very nerdy roleplaying game about vampires, and got about 30% finished despite me enlisting a boy who could actually program.)

Masturbation is Murder, originally uploaded by JillNic83.

Amanda wrote a satirical piece for RH Reality Check about how the next anti-choice step should be to outlaw menstruation. Well, it looks like anti-choicers have caught up with her — they’re trying to pass legislation in Colorado that would give fertilized eggs full Constitutional personhood rights. Unfortunately, the majority of fertilized eggs (somewhere around 70 percent) naturally don’t implant in the uterus and are flushed out onto tampons, pads and panties everywhere. Meaning that, well, Menstruation is Murder.

But my question is, what about the little sperms? They’re fucking adorable (way cuter than eggs), clearly alive (until they are cruelly wanked into oblivion), and completely innocent in their host’s perverted, self-indulgent proclivities. Do they not deserve life? Should they not be spared? Must they be slaughtered for your own selfish pleasures?

What about them?

Calling all small-waisted wide-hipped big-booty chicks: Ya’ll are smarter than the skinny bitches (and childbirth will definitely be less painful. Double score!):

Researchers studied 16,000 women and girls and found the more voluptuous performed better on cognitive tests - as did their children.

The bigger the difference between a woman’s waist and hips the better.

Other experts are skeptical because, well, it’s quite possibly a bullshit study:

“On the fatty deposits being related to intelligence front, it’s very hard to detangle that from other factors, such as social class, for instance, or diet,” said Martin Tovee of Newcastle University.

“And much as we logically like the idea that men are interested in the waist to hip ratio, it actually features relatively low down the list of feature males look for in a potential partner.”

And the “evidence” provided by the BBC reporter?

The findings appear to be borne out in the educational attainments of at least one of the UK’s most famous curvaceous women, Nigella Lawson, who graduated from Oxford.

Clearly, Natalie Portman cheated her way into Harvard.

Don’t you just love studies that pit women against each other in our eternal search for mates? Nothing warms my little feminist heart like an article that says something vaguely good about “curvy” women, but feels the need to bash thin women in the process.

Thanks to Fauzia for the link.

If only we could do it again.

Yeah, I know, you’re sick of hearing about Matt Yglesias. But I want to address something that kept coming up in his posts and the comments thereto, as well as Ross Douthat’s defense of abortion criminalization. Namely, the idea that the Guttmacher study is flawed and those who say that criminalization does not affect abortion rates are wrong because “everyone knows” abortions in the US skyrocketed after Roe.

What Matt said:

In the United States, when abortion was legalized in the 1970s, the number of abortions went up.

What Ross Douthat said:

Whereas we know that when abortion was legalized in America in the early 1970s, the abortion rate went up dramatically;

Actually, we know no such thing. According to the Guttmacher Institute, the number of LEGAL abortions rose dramatically after abortion was legalized; there’s no data on the absolute number of abortions performed pre-Roe. From the note on page 4 of the report:

Prior to the nationwide legalization of abortion, information on the number and rate of abortions was not gathered, and estimates of illegal and self-induced abortions varied widely. In the years immediately following the Roe v. Wade decision, the number of LEGAL abortions grew rapidly for several reasons. The number of physicians trained and experienced in the procedure increased, and a nationwide network of outpatient abortion clinics developed that enabled women who would previously have had an illegal abortion, or would not have been able to obtain one at all, to do so legally in a medical facility.

Now, there was data on legal abortions prior to Roe because 15 states had legalized abortion or reformed their abortion laws by then. Naturally, when you go from abortion being legal in 15 states to abortion being legal in all 50, you’re going to see a dramatic rise in the number of legal abortions. But the data doesn’t support the conclusion that Matt and Ross have both drawn from it — that criminalizing abortion in the US would necessarily result in a dramatic drop in the absolute rate of abortion, rather than just a drop in the rate of legal or safe abortion.

So, what we have here is a case of a statistic that “everybody knows” is true being used to support a conclusion that really, when you go to the source of that statistic instead of relying on what you “know,” isn’t supported by that statistic at all.

Help! The radical feminists are coming!

Watching the responses to Zuzu’s post and other feminist responses to Matt’s piece has been… enlightening. It’s a classic example of how concepts like rationality and logic become gendered, with men automatically assumed to be exercising them when they’re challenging women, and women automatically assumed to be bypassing them when we challenge men or widely-held assumptions.
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That’s just one of several responses to the New York Times article about how women are less happy than men. As it turns out, though, the happiness gap is total bunk. Whoops.

Thanks to Raquel for the link.