A Bit More Detail

This post at Crasstalk makes the provocative argument that the continuing gap in pay between men and women in the United States (and almost developed countries, I’m willing to bet) doesn’t necessarily speak solely, or primarily, about the continuing issues of women in moving towards full equality. Things may be very bad for the majority of men, too.

Hanna Rosin’s controversial article for The Atlantic, “The End of Men,” struck a nerve in 2010. After all, if men are losing out to women, why are our corporate boardrooms and government institutions still dominated by men? Rosin’s answer is that the period of male dominance in management and leadership may be coming to an end. We’re on the cusp of changes that will topple the old Man Men paradigm.

Rosin’s argument centered around the fact that male-centric jobs (manufacturing, construction) are seriously threatening the role men have long held in the home and in communities, but she also combines an analysis of our economic recession with a sort of evolutionary argument about how males evolution hasn’t kept up with society at large.

Dr. Roy Baumeister, a psychology professor from Florida State University and author of “Is There Anything Good About Men?” has explored how male behaviors affect socities. In a speech to the American Psychological Assocation in 2007 he argued that the dominance of a few powerful men at the top of the food chain says nothing about the overall socio-economic wellness of men in our culture.

Thoughts?

• Andrew Barton at Acts of Minor Treason despairs on the occasion of Earth Hour. Broader recognition of the critical problems facing the environment of Earth is so badly needed.
• Bruce Sterling quotes at length from Michel de Montaigne, pioneering essayist and critical futurist.
• At Crasstalk, LaZiguezon describes, in pictures and words, five haunting abandoned places: a mine in California’s Death Valley, Cyprus’ abandoned international airport, and more.
• The Everyday Sociology Blog’s Janis Prince Inniss comments on the way that the Trayvon Martin shooting case in Florida is polarizing people into two audiences, once seeing his shooter as an inveterate racist and the other blaming the victim. Intermediate situations are possible: class might be more of a factor than race, for instance.
• Eastern approaches notes that after having been stripped of his doctorate for plagiarism, Hungarian president Pál Schmitt has resigned.
• Geocurrents notes South Korea’s significant presence in post-Communist Central Asia.
• The Language Log’s Victor Mair calls for the use of more pinyin in Chinese classes to help boost education.
• At the Naked Anthropology, Laura Agustín comments on the recent ruling on prostitution in Ontario, noting that the ban on public solicitation hits relatively disadvantaged prostitutes worse than their more advantaged peers who can better take advantage of the new liberalization.
• Registan is unimpressed by Mitt Romney’s identification of Russia as the United States’ main enemy.
• Yorkshire ranter Alex Harrowell notes that great efforts are being made to keep new Chinese soldiers depoliticized.

NewAppsBlog’s John Protevi linked to a very worthwhile post by JoAnn Wypijewski at The Nation, “Reproductive Rights and the Long Hand of Slave Breeding”. This post establishes, in the United States at least, a connection between reproductive freedoms and civil rights, by establishing the intimate links between coerced reproduction and the denial of reproductive rights and the particular nature of American slavery.

Slave populations in the United States, most unlike slave populations elsewhere in the world, maintained themselves, in fact grew through natural increase. Why? Wypijewski points to the research of American legal scholar Pamela Bridgewater, who points out that only the sustained domination of the sexual and reproductive lives of African slaves by their white owners let this occur. This domination needs to be remembered.

Pamela Bridgewater’s argument, expressed over the past several years in articles and forums, and at the heart of a book in final revision called Breeding a Nation: Reproductive Slavery and the Pursuit of Freedom, presents the most compelling conceptual and constitutional frame I know for considering women’s bodily integrity and defending it from the right.

In brief, her argument rolls out like this. The broad culture tells a standard story of the struggle for reproductive rights, beginning with the flapper, climaxing with the pill, Griswold v. Connecticut and an assumption of privacy rights under the Fourteenth Amendment and concluding with Roe v. Wade. The same culture tells a traditional story of black emancipation, beginning with the Middle Passage, climaxing with Dred Scott, Harpers Ferry and Civil War and concluding with the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Both stories have a postscript—a battle royal between liberation and reaction—but, as Bridgewater asserts, “Taken together, these stories have no comprehensive meaning. They tell no collective tale. They create no expectation of sexual freedom and no protection against, or remedy for, reproductive slavery. They exist in separate spheres; that is a mistake.” What unites them but what both leave out, except incidentally, is the experience of black women. Most significantly, they leave out “the lost chapter of slave breeding.”

I need to hit the pause button on the argument for a moment, because the considerable scholarship that revisionist historians have done for the past few decades has not filtered into mass consciousness. The mass-culture story of slavery is usually told in terms of economics, labor, color, men. Women outnumbered men in the enslaved population two to one by slavery’s end, but they enter the conventional story mainly under the rubric “family,” or in the cartoon triptych Mammy-Jezebel-Sapphire, or in the figure of Sally Hemmings. Yes, we have come to acknowledge, women were sexually exploited. Yes, many of the founders of this great nation prowled the slave quarters and fathered a nation in the literal as well as figurative sense. Yes, maybe rape was even rampant. That the slave system in the US depended on human beings not just as labor but as reproducible raw material is not part of the story America typically tells itself. That women had a particular currency in this system, prized for their sex or their wombs and often both, and that this uniquely female experience of slavery resonates through history to the present is not generally acknowledged. Even the left, in uncritically reiterating Malcolm X’s distinction between “the house Negro” and “the field Negro,” erases the female experience, the harrowing reality of the “favorite” that Harriet Jacobs describes in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

We don’t commonly recognize that American slaveholders supported closing the trans-Atlantic slave trade; that they did so to protect the domestic market, boosting their own nascent breeding operation. Women were the primary focus: their bodies, their “stock,” their reproductive capacity, their issue. Planters advertised for them in the same way as they did for breeding cows or mares, in farm magazines and catalogs. They shared tips with one another on how to get maximum value out of their breeders. They sold or lent enslaved men as studs and were known to lock teenage boys and girls together to mate in a kind of bullpen.They propagated new slaves themselves, and allowed their sons to, and had their physicians exploit female anatomy while working to suppress African midwives’ practice in areas of fertility, contraception and abortion.Reproduction and its control became the planters’ prerogative and profit source. Women could try to escape, ingest toxins or jump out a window—abortion by suicide, except it was hardly a sure thing.

This business was not hidden at the time, as Pamela details expansively. And, indeed, there it was, this open secret, embedded in a line from Uncle Tom’s Cabin that my eyes fell upon while we were preparing to arrange books on her new shelves: “’If we could get a breed of gals that didn’t care, now, for their young uns…would be ’bout the greatest mod’rn improvement I knows on,” says one slave hunter to another after Eliza makes her dramatic escape, carrying her child over the ice flows.

The foregoing is the merest scaffolding of one of the building blocks of Bridgewater’s argument, which continues thus. “If we integrate the lost chapter of slave breeding into those two traditional but separate stories, if we reconcile female slave resistance to coerced breeding as, in part, a struggle for emancipation and, in part, a struggle for reproductive freedom, the two tales become one: a comprehensive narrative that fuses the pursuit of reproductive freedom into the pursuit of civil freedom.”

[. . .]

Bridgewater argues that because slavery depended on the slaveholder’s right to control the bodies and reproductive capacities of enslaved women, coerced reproduction was as basic to the institution as forced labor. At the very least it qualifies among those badges and incidents, certainly as much as the inability to make contracts. Therefore, sexual and reproductive freedom is not simply a matter of privacy; it is fundamental to our and the law’s understanding of human autonomy and liberty. And so constraints on that freedom are not simply unconstitutional; they effectively reinstitute slavery.

The courts and Congress of the nineteenth century understood contracts, and even a little bit about labor. Women they understood wholly by their sex and wombs, and those they regarded as the property of husbands once owners exited the stage. It is not our fate to live with their failings. It is not our fate to live with the failure of later courts to apply the Thirteenth Amendment to claims for sexual and reproductive freedom or even to consider the historical context out of which the Fourteenth Amendment also emerged. It is not our fate, in other words, to confine ourselves to the pinched language of choice or even of privacy—or to the partial, white-centric history of women’s struggle for reproductive rights.

This is good news. The paradoxes of a legal code which which allowed prostitution but significantly increased the risk to prostitutes by making fixed, defensible institutions impossible had to be collapsed somehow.

The continuing ban on communications for purposes of prostitution is something I have concerns over, inasamuch as this affects the most vulnerable classes of prostitutes, those who work on the streets in public and so are directly exposed to police harassment and violence generally. Still, it’s a start.

Ontario’s Court of Appeal has ruled that sex workers should be able to legally take their trade indoors and pay staff to support them, steps that many in the industry have already taken to make their work safer.

The court released a decision Monday on an appeal of Superior Court Judge Susan G. Himel’s high-profile ruling that three provisions of the Criminal Code pertaining to prostitution should be struck down on the grounds that they are unconstitutional.

The Ontario appeal court agreed with two-thirds of Himel’s ruling, namely that the provisions prohibiting common bawdy-houses and living off the avails of prostitution, are both unconstitutional in their current form.

But the court disagreed that the communicating provision must be struck down, meaning that it “remains in full force.”

The court said it will strike the word “prostitution” from the definition of “common bawdy-house,” as it applies to Section 210 of the Criminal Code, which otherwise prevents prostitutes from offering services out of fixed indoor locations such as brothels or their homes.

However, the court said the bawdy-house provisions would not be declared invalid for 12 months, so that Parliament can have a chance to draft Charter-compliant provisions to replace them, if it chooses to do so.

[. . .]

The court will also clarify that the prohibition of living off the avails of prostitution – as spelled out in Section 212(1)(j) of the Criminal Code – should pertain only to those who do so “in circumstances of exploitation.”

The changes to the “living-off-the-avails” provision will not come into effect for 30 days.

In the preamble to its judgment, the court said prostitution is legal in Canada, with “no law that prohibits a person from selling sex, and no law that prohibits another from buying it.”

While the court acknowledged that “prostitution is a controversial topic, one that provokes heated and heartfelt debate about morality, equality, personal autonomy and public safety,” it said the questions before it were about whether the laws being challenged were unconstitutional or not.

• Daniel Drezner highlights a problem with collaboration between authoritarian state capitalist economies: there’s no recourse when corruption comes. See China in Venezuela.
• Geocurrents discusses the ongoing flight of Hindus from Pakistan.
• Language Log reflects 1, 2) on Rick Santorum’s statement that Puerto Rican statehood would require the adoption of English as an official language. Briefly, English is already an official language, and language requirements have never been involved in statehood anyway.
• Laura Agustín at The Naked Anthropologist describes the pressures which encourage Chinese prostitutes to move to Malaysia.
• Palun at Itching for Eestima notes the phenomenon of Estonian migration–often permanent–to Finland. Despite post-Soviet progress there are still severe gaps.
• Otto Pohl notes interesting similarities between Soviet and South African nationality policies.
• Registan considers the import of a Taliban killing of a Chinese student in Pakistan. Will this bring China into the border region?
• Torontoist’s Hamutal Dotan takes issue with the inclination of even pro-light rail folks in Toronto for subways, pointing out that light rail is better-suited to the financial requirements and transport needs of subways. True, but subways are cool.

Gerry Canavan linked to the Scientific American blog The Primate Diaries, where Eric Michael Johnson described the sorts of legal mechanics necessary to grant smart animals basic rights. Dolphins and whales were the subject of a recent declaration by scientists, Johnson notes.

Such a declaration is a minefield ripe for misunderstanding, as the BBC quickly demonstrated with their headline, “Dolphins deserve same rights as humans, say scientists.” However, according to Thomas I. White, Conrad N. Hilton Chair of Business Ethics at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, the idea of granting personhood rights to nonhumans would not make them equal to humans under law. They would not vote, sit on a jury, or attend public school. However, by legally making whales and dolphins “nonhuman persons,” with individual rights under law, it would obligate governments to protect cetaceans from slaughter or abuse.

“The evidence for cognitive and affective sophistication—currently most strongly documented in dolphins—supports the claim that these cetaceans are ‘non-human persons,’” said White. As a result, cetaceans should be seen as “beyond use” by humans and have “moral standing” as individuals. “It is, therefore, ethically indefensible to kill, injure or keep these beings captive for human purposes,” he said.

This is not as radical an idea as it may sound. The law is fully capable of making and unmaking “persons” in the strictly legal sense. For example, one Supreme Court case in 1894 (Lockwood, Ex Parte 154 U.S. 116) decided that it was up to the states “to determine whether the word ‘person’ as therein used [in the statute] is confined to males, and whether women are admitted to practice law in that commonwealth.” As atrocious as this ruling sounds, such a precedent continued well into the twentieth century and, in 1931, a Massachusetts judge ruled that women could be denied eligibility to jury status because the word “person” was a term that could be interpreted by the court.

[. . . P]rior to 1886, dating back to the 1600s, corporations were viewed as “artificial persons,” a legal turn of phrase that offered certain rights to the companies but without the full rights of citizens. By using the wording of the 14th Amendment (intended to protect former slaves from a state government seeking to “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”) it was ruled that corporations should enjoy the same status. As a result, between 1890 and 1920, out of all the 14th Amendment cases that came before the Supreme Court, 19 dealt with African-Americans while 288 dealt with corporations. With the legal stroke of a pen, artificial persons were granted all the protections of citizens.

But that would be unlikely to happen with whales, dolphins, or even great apes. A “nonhuman person” would have a definition similar to this earlier tradition of “artificial person,” one that grants limited rights that a government is obligated to protect. Furthermore, according to White, the term would only apply under specific cases for nonhumans that had self-awareness, complex social as well as emotional lives, and met certain criteria under the definition of consciousness (so, for example, ants would never be considered persons under law). According to White, these criteria have been met in the case of dolphins and whales and our legal institutions should incorporate this evidence into American jurisprudence.

Similar legal precedents regarding the concept of personhood exist elsewhere, for instance in Canada in the famous Persons Case put before the Supreme Court. In the Canadian case, the Persons Case established Canadian constitutional law as a corpus in constant evolution in keeping with changing times.

Thoughts, legal-type people?

French-language sociology blog Une heure de peine’s Denis Colombi has posted–originally in French but also available in English via Google Translate–an interesting essay examining the poor representation of women (realistic women, any women even) in comics. Why is this the case when there would be a market for comics featuring believable women? Colombi’s answer? The market is policed by fans with a vested interest in the established order. My slight editing on Google’s translation of a key passage is below.

Fans are organized and have been for a long time: “fandom” did not wait for Internet development. In a sense, and if you go back to science fiction, home of what was to become the geek culture, Hugo Gernsback was the first craftsman. Following this came conventionsand, obviously, the fans were among the first on the Internet. exercise real power over publishers: reactions to the announcement of prequels to the majestic Watchmen by Moore and Gibbons were noisier than in many other social worlds.

Some of the reactions to requests for greater consideration of the female audience are some unambiguously hostile. DC Women Kicking Ass example relates some, left as comments on the site or sent via Twitter:

Have you considered starting your own independent comics publisher? Have you regarded starting your own independent comic book publisher? Then you can make comics the way YOU think they should be made…rather than trying to get a billion dollar corporation like WBE to create something for a tiny niche minority base that ultimately will not be sustainable or profitable Then You Can make comics the way THEY think YOU Should Be Made … Rather Than Trying to get a one billion dollar corporation to create something like WBE for a tiny niche based Minority Will not Be That ultimately sustainable or profitable
Just a thought. Just a thought.

In short, the moral entrepreneurs are numerous and they defend the borders of the market. Modern guardians of the temple, they are ready to rein in those who come to challenge their conception of comics.

But why are they listening? There are a number of reasons. First, they are the first demographic that canb e picked up by a publisher: it is they who are most visible, either in conventions or on the Internet, they are the ones who speak the most, including sometimes very directly with producers. Therefore, it can be difficult to see that there is another potential market elsewhere. A product is never simply the product of a producer who would propose a demand that would accept or reject. Any production stems from the cooperation of a group of actors who influence the form and content: what Becker calls an “art world”, noting that, for example to produce an opera, it is necessary that there is an audience willing to listen and equipped to understand. If your opera lasts 12 hours, it is unlikely to be performed because we will not find the public to attend. Same thing for the comics: the fans involved in the definition and design of what they are. And this is done through these moral entrepreneurs struggling not with them but the producer: comics traditionally have male supporters, not promoters of “kicking ass is gender neutral.” And because they are unequally endowed in terms of resources, not everyone can be heard. A market like comics is an issue of struggle and confrontation. It is built in and the conflict between groups, and not just because some Schumpeterian entrepreneur had the brilliant idea of ​​a particular innovation.

Second, for a publisher, to disappoint fans is extremely risky: alienating them is to see dry up a key source of income. L’une des caractéristiques centrales du fan/geek, c’est qu’il achète tout : comics, produits dérivés, places de cinéma, etc. One of the central features of the fan / geek is that he buys everything: comics, merchandising, cinema tickets, etc. He might be disappointed by this or that product but he’ll buy it anyway. This attitude is largely based on the distinctive aspect of these practices: we are very proud to be a true fan, to be the one who really knows best (and indeed it confronts happy to know which is the fan, the wisest, the most knowledgeable, etc.), to appreciate what others can only grasp. Again, this is an attitude very similar to that of dance musicians described by Becker: for them, jazz was only defined by the fact that almost it could not please the squares. Therefore expanding production to a wider audience, especially if it carries the stigma associated with women (with the continual devaluation of feminine practices labeled as feminine [. . .]), will lead to a loss of value in their products, their value distinction. Again, this gives a very different market than is generally promoted: the producers do not clash so that they can sell goods or services to be around them a small group of fans could follow them though do. Far from being brought to innovate, rather the publishers are encouraged to comply with standards and rules they can not be the only ones to handle and control.

Go, read.

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• At A Fistful of Euros, Edward Hugh is resigned to ongoing instability in the Eurozone’s economy this year.
• The immigration of Afrikaner farmers to Georgia, according to Eastern approaches, is actually occurring.
• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Robert Farley is scathing towards an ill-judged editorial at The New Republic calling for an untenable very partial military intervention in Syria.
• Marginal Revolution wonders why more Americans aren’t moving to booming western Canada.
• At The Naked Anthropologist, Laura Agustín reproduces a 2003 article arguing that rhwtoric on migration that assumes migrants’ weakness is flawed.
• The Population Reference Bureau’s blog notes that improvements in sex ratios at birth in Indian states have stagnated for the time being.
• Anatoly Karlin’s post at Sublime Oblivion is extended examination (translated from another’s post in Russian) describing how rising fertility, falling mortality, and net migration has helped Russian population growth return to positive territory.
• At Torontoist, Patrick Metzger points out that Ontario’s upcoming budget isn’t going to be politically fun for everyone. Either McGuinty angers the electorate with an austerity budget or he lets things slide and our economy collapses. (Or both?)

In the most recent of a series of gust posts at Charlie Stross’ blog, Cat Valente argues–inspired by her experience living in a Japan that combined highly-advanced technology in the public sphere with little and expensive technology in the private sphere of the home–that there’s a bias developing or even closely identifying with the future technologies associated with the private, female sphere.

[I]t began to occur to me that the tech I was using was incredibly gendered. In the “male” sphere, of professional operations, offices, corporations, pop culture, businesses, the available technology was extremely high-level, better than anywhere I’d yet lived. In the “female” sphere, the home, domestic duties, daily chores, cleaning, heating, anything inside the walls of a house, it was on a level my grandmother would find familiar.

Given that during the time I was there the Japanese parliament was suggesting removing the social safety net (social security benefits, in American parlance) for women who chose not to have children, and the issue of young men who expected a stay at home wife and young women who wanted to have careers was quite a hot one, I could not then and still do not believe that divide was an accident. The simple fact is that domestic chores take a huge amount of time and energy, and if a woman is occupied doing them, and especially doing them without the machines that speed up the process considerably, means that she rarely has the time to pursue interests and a career. Though for cultural and financial reasons, Japanese houses often house more than one generation, the lack of technology creates so much unnecessary work that most of my neighborhood required both the young mother and grandmother in a household to devote their days to it.

I don’t think there’s some dastardly man in a high office making Mr. Burns fingers and saying: EXCELLENT. I have oppressed women for another day! Let us celebrate! (Except the PMs who wanted to take away benefits for childless women–but not childless men.) This kind of thing is always more subtle than that. People who have imbibed from their culture that men and business are important and women and the home are slightly distasteful and irrelevant spending their time on inventions applicable to one and not the other. Corporate managers approving projects along the same lines. Everyone performs their upbringing in their work in one way or another. Obviously, I don’t consider business a male bailiwick and the home the kingdom of woman, but a whole lot of people do, and a goodly number of them have a massive influence on the allocation of R & D funds and the political narrative than I do. Right this very second, here in the US, we are having an actual, serious, if incredibly stupid, conversation about whether or not women should have easy access to birth control. We are having this conversation because significant humans in our government believe women should not have access to it at all. I’m super excited about that, because it means it’s 1965 and we’re gonna go to the moon soon.

And Japan is HARDLY alone. C.f. that entire viciously moronic conversation about the care and feeding of my uterus. I merely noticed it for the first time over there. The article I linked to is fascinating because it is a very high tech response to a domestic issue, which is something I don’t come across very often. Most of us are cooking in kitchens quite recognizable from 40 years ago. The Roomba in the corner of my living room is about the only chore-class object in my house that that same grandmother would not have used in cleaning up after my parents.

One of the things that has frustrated me about science fiction is that technology pertaining to the smaller aspects of our lives is often neglected in favor of big giant rockets and exotic weaponry. Birth control seems non-existent and childbirth is still rocking the stirrups. And the home is at best not mentioned much. One of the things that “the future,” when we use that word as a metonymy for an idealized world in which machines solve all our problems, is supposed to do for us is give us time. Relieve us from work that is repetitive or unpleasant and allow us the sheer, simple hours in the day to do more. And yet, by far the biggest time sink going is the need to clean our habitats, prepare food and clothing, and maintain our environments. For those who have always had the, dare I say, privilege of ignoring that work, you simply cannot imagine how much time it takes to do all that and then turn around and do it again, often multiple times a day if there are offspring at play. Despite the fact that we here in the first world are supposed to have leveled up our gender equality stat, women still perform the majority of this labor, often in addition to a full shift outside the home. Fully automating this activity would free humanity on a scale that even the most awesome BFG can’t even begin to contemplate.

I like her conclusion.

The future is not evenly distributed. Not along cultural lines, along language lines, along political, economic, class, or generational lines. And most certainly not along gender lines. A significant portion of the digital world proceeds on the quiet, probably subconscious meme that the future belongs to men and women are just along for the ride. Oh, sure, some women can play with the big boys. If they act right. But not the girly ones. They’re feminine, therefore: weak and frivolous and shallow and shrill.

They can do the laundry.

• Crooked Timber hosts a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novel about the Greek economic crisis. What will you, aided by your assistant, do to solve the crisis? In the comments and elsewhere, readers report opting for Argentine-style bankruptcy as the least bad option.
• Daniel Drezner is worried about Iran, suspecting that the ambiguity of the American government as to the ultimate goal of sanctions on Iran (limiting nuclear proliferation or regime change) may back the United States into a corner where regime change is the only option.
• The Global Sociology Blog notes that the culture warriors’ opposition to liberalized divorce laws and growing singledom may be ill-founded, inasmuch as the traditional family may no longer be a useful unit and it’s–at the very least–open to question whether or not singles are more isolated than people in couples.
• The Global Sociology Blog also looks at the tradition and mechanics of patriarchy in Afghanistan and Kashmir.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money considers the question of what web documents get tweeted on Twitter as opposed to liked on Facebook. The consensus seems to be that Twitter, as the more professional medium, carries links to more professional documents than a more informal Facebook.
• Another post at Lawyers, Guns and Money links to the Crooked Timber CYOA novella I mentioned above but also to a statement by the Greek foreign minister warning that the country’s military can still respond to threats from Turkey.
• Spacing Toronto’s Luca de Franco interviews Sharon Switzer, the woman who curates art displays on video monitors in the subway.
• Strange Maps explores through maps the idea of a Scandinavian Scotland.