He’s speaking directly about leadership in China, but Matthew Yglesias hits the ball out of the park with this general observation about the roles of women in politics.

Politics is a lot like, say, higher education or advertising insofar as there’s a big difference between the people in “management” roles and the people who are respected as leaders in the field. Few students who want to go into academia say “Yeah, maybe I’ll be a famous historian, but I really want to be a college dean!”; by the same token, most kids with political aspirations want to be like Barack Obama or Sarah Palin, not Tim Kaine or — heaven forbid — Michael Steele. The fact that women are getting sorted into administration instead of leadership indicates that the dynamics that keep women underrepresented in elected office and high-profile professorships are probably more complicated and harder to fix than they seem.

He said it here.

It’s something to keep an eye on. It’s also something to keep reminding those who care about erasing relative opportunity, recognition, and power gaps between the (various) sexes. It’s great that Nancy Pelosi (the House of Representatives), Hillary Clinton (Secretary of State), Elana Kagan (Harvard, possibly the Supreme Court) are filling roles of real, visible leadership in politics. But it’s important to remember that, say, Margaret Thatcher also had an incredible leadership role in England without… really doing much to develop a deep bench of promising women with potential to rise not just into administration but leadership roles in the future.

Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon has another one of those silly moments where she forgets that anti-feminists know so much more about feminism and what it really means.

[Kathryn Jean Lopez of National Review Online] is the first to line up to explain to all the stupid feminists why we’re so stupid thinking we actually enjoy contraception, sex, and having choices. 

In an otherwise largely celebratory forum on the pill at CNN’s website, Republican strategist and book publisher Mary Matalin cleverly and jarringly wrote: “Packages of portable liberation ushered in a generation of women determined to break free from their inferior patriarchal oppressors. And how did they manifest their superiority? Their freedom? Thanks to The Pill, by casual, drive-by sex. Whoa. That really showed those stupid boys.”

They can keep telling us that feminism is about hating men, and therefore we’re breaking our own rules by having good relationships with them and (if we’re straight) enjoying sex with them, but it’s not sticking.  Perhaps they’re wrong about what feminism is?  I don’t know; I’m just an actual feminist.  So when I say that feminism is about women’s equality and creating a non-patriarchal world where men and women are freed get along as equals, I don’t know what I’m talking about.  The only people who get to define feminism are people who oppose it.

She said it here.

Say what you like about Sigmund Freud but I think the world is a better place for his articulation of projection — the tendency to see in others the evils one perpetrates, or at best most wishes to perpetuate, oneself.

I mention this because for all that anti-feminists claim they’re standing up for the definition of men as… well… by-definition superior to women, they’ve got some seriously, seriously man-hating tendencies.

I mean yeah, Lopez is dumping on women for having Teh Sex with men but… but… some times you just gotta ask yourself why she’d think that would be a problem. And the answer, I’m pretty sure, boils down to one of three possibilities:

1) she thinks men are disgusting creatures who’s penises by their very existence sully women. Or

2) she thinks men are lazy animals who can’t be persuaded to do anything at all, let alone anything productive, couth, or genteel, unless they’re positively starved for sex. Which starvation will never take place if women succumb to their own “animal” instincts and “give it up” for free. Or

3) both #1 and #2.

Lopez, who hates men, projects this hatred onto feminism. Which she also hates. Furthermore, she then hates feminism worse for “contradictions” she perceives between how feminists behave and how she thinks feminists ought to behave.

The problem being that Lopez confuses “patriarchy,” which feminists rightly oppose, with “men,” who feminists can get a little impatient with but with only the occasional exception feminists don’t hate at all.

Clue time? Patriarchy is not limited to men. Patriarchy is a coed enterprise. Lopez isn’t a dupe or a thrall of patriarchy, nor a collaborator with it, nor is she a “useful idiot” of patriarchy (though, sorry, she is an idiot!) Instead she’s a fully-invested, active agent of it, a would-be architect of it. And as part of the patriarchy she hates men even worse than she hates women who have sex with them.

Now as to the substance of Lopez’s claim I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that if you go on the pill just so you can let men have “casual” sex with you then… then I think it’s a good idea to maybe rethink both your relationship to men and your relationship to sex and who your sexuality it’s really for. And about. But I don’t think it’s a good idea to rethink your relationship to the pill, as Lopez would have you do. The main thing the pill does, or any other contraception does, is help couples, of whatever duration, avoid pregnancy. Who one has relationships with, and why, is an issue contraception really isn’t going to help, except possibly to the extent it helps avoid obstacles that make exiting an unfortunate relationship very much more difficult.

Oh and can I just add one more thing about Lopez and the pill in particular but contraception in general? Who does she thinks uses contraception here? It’s at least as common among married and/or partnered women as it is among “casual” sex-having single women. And if you take into account the married women who are currently actively seeking planned, wanted pregnancies I’m… pretty sure married women who aren’t trying to get pregnant are even more likely to use contraception. So WTF with her implication that the pill primarily enables casual sex? As opposed to sex inside established and even long-term committed relationships.

When you see patriarchal framing you probably want to call it. Lopez is a patriarch. Framing contraception in terms of “casual” sex and “letting” boys have sex with you? That’s patriarchal framing.

Anna N of Jezebel, in a post on the general state of “men’s reproductive rights” activism, raises a persistent point that… I wonder… well, let’s go with the quote first

But sometimes it’s men who shut women out. In her thorough article for The Nation on reproductive coercion (which we’ve also discussed), Lynn Harris writes of “the striking frequency with which it is in fact young men who try to force their partners to get pregnant. Their goal: not to settle down as family men but rather to exert what is perhaps the most intimate, and lasting, form of control.” She cites one study finding that 15% of sexually active young women who visited reproductive health clinics had suffered birth control sabotage by a partner, and another in which 26% of a sample of teens in abusive, sexually active relationships said their partners were “actively trying to get them pregnant.”

She said it here.

So…

I’m wondering…

Y’know how all those “pro-life” types will do just about anything to stop women from getting an abortion… or even avoiding pregnancy in the first place… except, y’know, make it actually safe, easy, inexpensive, and socially acceptable for women to, y’know, actually stay preganant, have, and raise their unplanned, unwanted pregnancies?

And how instead they try and make it, and keep it, as close to social, economic, moral, even corporal punishment as possible? How they present it as the ultimate in dependency? In sacrifice? In pain, and exhaustion, and tedium, and frustration, and helplessnes? In stigma? In shame?

So…

I’m wondering…

How much do you think all that plays into this notion of coerced pregnancy as intimate control (a.k.a. as a form of partner abuse?)

I mean…

Not to put too fine a point on it but it’s well within society’s capacity to make unplanned, unwanted children (if not pregnancy itself) not just not just not punishment, and not just easy, but downright enjoyable. In the grand scheme of things it involves beginning social investment in children’s lives just a few years earlier than we do now — call it 3-6 months before birth instead of 3-4 years after.

And it’s not like the returns on that social investment wouldn’t be appropriate — I mean, even after 18 years of exacting all those “wages of sin” from the mother on behalf of traditionalist/conservatives, those same children will spend somewhere between four and seven decades as real adults — equal with all other adults for responsibility for the world. To invest in children as future fellow citizens instead of present punishments for parents would be to reap fantastic benefits in the future.

And…

Finally…

Not to put too fine a point on it but just how enthused might callow youths be to sabotage their partners pills or to pinhole their condoms if the outcome was not lasting “who’ll love you now, bebbeh?” control but a little more respectability, more rather than less independence, and a whole lot more support?

I’m not saying let’s all go out and encourage teen pregnancy. I am, however, saying that to the extent society would like to avoid teen pregnancy and, especially to also avoid pregnancy terminations, the incentives are currently… perverse.

In a news roundup Katy of Jezebel passes along news about contraception in the U.S.

Out of married U.S. women, only 16% are currently on the pill, compared to 29% in the UK and more than 40% in the Netherlands and France. Surprisingly, sterilization is a much more popular option in America.

1 in 4 married ladies here have had their tubes tied, while most other countries that reported figures have sterilization rates below 10%. These patterns also appear to apply to all women – not just the ones who have tied the knot.

She said it here.

Statistics for contraceptive use by men is surprisingly sketchy — since virtually all the focus around contraception and pregnancy is on women, including focus on statistics-gathering, virtually all information about men and contraception has to be extrapolated from assumptions that women who use contraceptives tend to have male partners. Oh, and I say “surprisingly” because men still have direct access over three kinds of contraception: condoms, withdrawal, and vasectomies, with the most recently invented (vasectomies) still being nearly 200 years old! So how long would that questionnaire be anyway? But I digress…

The best… or at least most frequently-cited estimate for male sterilization in the U.S. is one in six men over age 35 or, I think, a little more than 15%.

Lindsay Beyerstein of Big Think offers the briefest complete response possible to some patriarchal asshat’s attempt to return to pre-20th-Century gender roles.

Reflecting on a BBC report

“The chief rabbi of a West Bank settlement has prohibited women from standing in a local community election.

Rabbi Elyakim Levanon of the Elon Moreh settlement, near Nablus, said women lacked the authority to stand for the post of local secretary.

He wrote in a community newspaper that women must only be heard through their husbands.

BBC article here.

Beyerstein asks, simply

WWGMD? Or, what would Golda Meir do?

The aspirations of patriarchy remain alive and well.

Levi Pulkkinen of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s Seattle 911 Police Blog brings home to points that are really, really critical in debates about human trafficking, as opposed to “sex-trafficking.”

The first point is that non-sex-trafficking human trafficking is perfectly real.

The second, even more important point, is that while not all human trafficking is “sex trafficking,” i.e. not all trafficked people are trafficked into conscripted sex work, all trafficked people face the prospect of coerced sex. Some face the reality of it.

For instance…

A Pacific couple previously convicted on human smuggling charges was sentenced Tuesday to federal prison.

Maria Bartola Santos-Gonzalez, 63, was sentenced to three years in prison Tuesday, while her husband, Juan Gonzalez Guerra, 55, was sentenced to one year and a day, according to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement statement. Both pleaded guilty to in January.

Investigators with the Pacific Police Department and ICE launched the investigation in May 2009 after a 7-year-old girl told her school counselor that an older man had been molesting her, according to the ICE statement. The Pacific Police Department followed up on the claim and it led them to Gonzalez Guerra.

Read the quote in context here.

So. As often happens in these kinds of situations, the Gonzalez couple hired runners in Mexico to locate people who wanted to be smuggled into the U.S. so they could find work. So the people willingly entered into agreements to be brought here.

So. Their intention was to be in migration. Their agreement was to be smuggled in exchange for a fee to be paid after they arrived. Their reality was that when they arrived they were blackmailed, defrauded, threatened with violence, and were victims of violence at the hands of people they’d believed to be smugglers but who instead had instead trafficked them into forced, largely uncompensated labor.

And while they at it their children were tied up, beaten, sexually assaulted, and, it sounds like, raped by their traffickers.

But I guess since they were only being sexually assaulted and raped by their captors instead of “prostituted” it’s not really very important. Because to their mind only sex-trafficking matters. (In fact some of them, mostly, no surprise neoconservatives and/or their very-conservative feminist allies, claim that concern about “human trafficking” is a deliberate dodge invented by the sex industry to distract resources away from them.)

Point being this case illustrates that yeah, really, there really, really is human trafficking, often of would-be ordinary migrants, and that people who say otherwise are liars. And yeah, some of the people trafficked into the U.S. — a little less than half according to credible, non-partisan estimates — are trafficked into sex work but the rest aren’t, and people who say otherwise are liars about that too. But finally, yeah, this case illustrates that the assholes who claim that only the sex-trafficking matters because ZOMG!!!TEH!!!WHITE!!!SLAVERY!!! are assholes who don’t get that regardless of age, gender, orientation, or forced profession once you’re coerced you don’t really have a lot of recourse if your trafficker wants to use your body as well as your paycheck.

Pulkinnen’s article adds

At the hearing, U.S. District Court Judge Marsha Pechman said, “[Ms. Santos-Gonzalez] took their money, put them in circumstances that were dire … children went to bed hungry … [she] took advantage of these people … in many ways it was a form of modern-day slavery… it is at the fundamental core that you cannot take people and grind people down… this is not the way to treat other people… you need to treat them with respect, you need to treat them with dignity.”

Just a little reminder that accusations of “accommodation” can go both ways. To obsess about the sex part of trafficking, instead of the trafficking part of trafficking, is to enable not only slavery, debt peonage, coercion and labor conscription but also sexual assault and rape.

For why this issue is so nettlesome to me see, also, for instance

• The Sex-Trafficking (Neo)Con
• Wiberforce Reauthorization Finally Passes

• Cool! Someone With a Clue Who Cares About U.S. Trafficking Policy

I’ll just say that the women (and it’s almost exclusively women) who are making the arguments in the main post and in comments at Generation Cedar in favor of the proposition are not being illogical, irrational, or stupid for saying that a (not the only but a) reason women should try and stay pregnant is (I’m not making this up) to show the community that they and their partners have an active, non-dysfunctional sex life.

I happen to think the premises upon which they base their lines of reasoning are batshit insane with the result that their conclusions bring more harm than necessary on themselves and others. So I’m not saying I agree with them. Nor am I even saying “well, takes all kind to make the world” either. And in fact to the extent they argue or agitate that their choices should be imposed on all women (and by extension imposed on their partners and anyone else needed to take up the slack they drop by being perpetually pregnant) I’d oppose them… vigorously.

But there’s a tendency (around the world) to think people who do something you really, deeply, and based on evidence, believe is a mistake are deluded, enthralled, diminished, or coerced otherwise safe to dismiss as second-class or second-rate human beings. It’s pretty clear these are first-class and first-rate human beings who either have, or would have done well in college, grad school, or business.

They’re not stupid, or ignorant, they’re just really, really wrong.

They’re not even wrong about everything! They’re being a little (ok, a lot) dogmatic about the whole women should be fruitful and multiply thing, but no more dogmatic than other people can get about the overarching importance of women of not having any children at all.

And they’re certainly not wrong about the whole lower-case “it takes a village” importance of recognizing that community implies mutual responsibility and obligation as well as mutual support.

On the other hand I sure don’t see how even if they accept Paul’s (local, tactical) admonitions in his letters that wives should be to their husbands as their husbands are to God as some kind of claim that it’s a sin for women, or men, to decline sex when they don’t feel like it… or simply because their partner demands it.

And, whoo boy, I seriously don’t see where they get the idea that frequent and visible pregnancy, or not, is a more discreet way to signal ongoing sexual compatibility… or at least activity… to one’s community than, say, verbally checking in with friends, family, and confidants from time to time.

I mean, sure, if you add those last two bits as axioms for your value system then a lot of their conclusions start to follow a little more logically. Though since, despite a very conservative and Biblically-minded childhood, I don’t see the basis for those axioms in faith I’d strongly, strongly advise adherents to discard them.

And I suppose if you add a further axiom that for those so inclined, physically gifted, who can find the financial backing, competitive childbearing wreaks no more (but no less) havoc on one’s body or lifestyle than many other physically intense athletic disciplines such as career-professional ballet, track, power lifting or bodybuilding, etc. We just don’t see, say, Billy Jean King, Michael Jordan, Pikaboo Street, or Brett Favre recommending that all children be not only encouraged but required to dedicate their lives to athletics. Nor do they regard any other pursuit as sinful. Nor do they claim that everyone is physically capable of doing so. Nor do they claim that everyone should be pressured to succeed or die trying. Nor do they insist, at all, at all, that people should be forbidden a choice to participate. The women in the post aren’t willing to make those accommodations to themselves or to others.

But even that doesn’t make them stupid. It just makes them intense, uncompromising, driven, passionate, committed, fierce, gonzo, brave, adventurous, dedicated, persevering, rational in the application of their first principles, and a whole bunch of other words and phrases that have been historically used admiringly about men… if not so much, or so admiringly, about women.

Finally, all the above is not a random exercise in “gee, everything is just empowerment isn’t it?” I’m not saying it to somehow celebrate or admire what women can accomplish even when I disagree with them. Nor, as I mentioned earlier, is it a bunch of “takes all kinds to make the world” cultural relativism. Instead it’s to point out that because the proponents are intelligent and motivated rather than intimidated or enthralled to their husbands or ministers the task of persuading them to back off advocating their model as an obligation to be jammed down all out throats is more daunting than we tend to wish… or wish to imagine.

Columnist E.J. Dion of The Washington Post on now-disgraced, and now ex-congressman, Mark Souder who resigned last week when news broke that he’d had an affair with a member of his staff.

I always thought he was the real deal, both serious and thoughtful in his approach to religious and political questions. I disagreed with him on many things but not on everything.

So I do hope that Souder finds a way to work out his redemption. But it is precisely because this story hits me personally that I want to shout as forcefully as I can to my conservative Christian friends: Enough!

Enough with dividing the world between moral, family-loving Christians and supposedly permissive, corrupt, family-destroying secularists.

Read the quote in context here.

Yup. I think “enough” is a pretty good choice not just in social or human terms but in terms of political strategy.

To the extent one could ever argue that progressives have really been permissive, corrupt, or family-destroying (or, for that matter, irreligious) it’s certainly not the case that they’re the exclusive source of such permissiveness, corruption, or family destruction. And meanwhile, to the extent one could ever argue that Souder’s conservative-style Christianity has ever been moral or family-loving (or, considering how much of Jesus’s teaching stands in opposition to their political objectives, recognizably Christian!) it’s certainly not the case that they’re the exclusive source of such morality or love of family or even sincere religious faith.

I mean, sure, it’s worth considering that the Pharisees were the dominant political force in 1st Century Jerusalem. And they were so “observant” of Biblical laws they literally squeezed their wine through mesh to filter out tiny but non-kosher insects (i.e. “straining at gnats.) But as Jesus himself pointed out (Matthew 23:24) for all of Mr. Souder’s and his sex partner’s pious recordings of abstinence-only videos, and for all his recent protestations that their couplings only proved his videos were necessary and correct, the bottom line is that Souder and, I’m afraid, far too many of his fellow would-be-dominant political force have been blindly swallowing (equally non-kosher) camels since roughly the 1980 election.

The solution, my dears, and the key to salvation if one is as Christian as Mr. Souder (or Ms. Palin, or Mr. Sanford, or Mr. Gingrich, or Ms. Haley) claim to be and claim to wish others would become, is not to crusade against those who don’t strain enough gnats but to emulate those who swallow fewer camels.

Enough!

The first session block on Sunday morning at this weekend’s Sex 2.0 Conference was The Whore Madonna Complex in Contemporary Society, presented by sex-worker activist Veronica Monet.

Since the subject was about the madonna/whore dichotomy the subject matter was mainly about women in heterosexual contexts. One issue that’s sort of inextricably linked to comprehensiveness of the dichotomy is just how little room there is in contemporary society for male sex workers.

For instance, Monet pointed out, in San Francisco back in the days before the internet female escorts who placed ads in the backs of the local alt-weekly newspapers had to be freakishly circumspect. For instance they had to avoid too much physical description. Nor could they mention what a customer might expect. You even had to say “no sex” in your ads. If I recall correctly from discussion back in the day it wasn’t just that the papers wouldn’t print your ad if you were anything but circumspect, it’s that the police would answer them! That would have been just for women escorts, mind you. She said at the same time gay male escorts, on the other hand, could get away with saying how long their cocks were, or, say, what they charged for blowjobs without worrying much about either censorship or law-enforcement scrutiny. In other words as far as local law enforcement was concerned male sex workers were invisible.

There were upsides and downsides to that, by the way. On the one hand (this is my recollection, not Monet’s) women prostitutes had higher visibility to law enforcement than men… but on the other hand when male sex workers were robbed, beaten, or murdered it was generally chalked up as “gay bashing” rather than sex-worker abuse.

So that’s one thing that came up about the invisibility of men in sex work.

Another point came up when Graydancer mentioned trying to convince a journalist that being hired to have heterosexual sex with other sex workers for johns made him a sex worker. The journalist remained unpersuaded. Even though I’m… pretty sure he’d have agreed that another woman being hired to perform sex while a customer watched would make her a sex worker. (Surprise! Guess what customers sometimes hire sex workers to do!?!?!)

Aaand finally, thinking about the discussion reminded me how really invisible men are in conversations about sex work and human trafficking on the one hand, and (see the San Francisco ads mentioned above) in conversations about how prostitution is by definition trafficking because no one ever “prostitutes” themselves willingly.

Think this peculiar blind spot for men who have sex for money has anything to do with a dominant paradigm that both believes and demands that women be reluctant to have sex and that men be unable to resist it, or that women must be interested in sex only for the things it can be exchanged for… and that men must be interested in things only for the sex they can be exchanged for? Why yes, I believe it does!

Aside: I’ll need to do at least one entire post to her observations and answers about not just men’s, not just “square” or “straight” people, but everybody’s participation and/or complicity in the madonna/whore complex. I hate to tease the subject like that but it’s probably not surprising what sort of insights someone who was an active feminist before she because a sex worker or sex-worker activist can bring to or bring out in a discussion like that. I’ll just say I’m extraordinarily glad I made it.

* Good to remember, as Veronica pointed out, not all women who have heterosexual sex are necessarily heterosexual themselves. Nor does the reminder apply only to women doing sex work.

A. Serwer of TAPPED, who writes both frequently and well about issues of the policies, principles, laws, and politics of human rights and criminal, answers a persistent false equivalence raised by conservative defenders of racism-enabling policy advocates like Barry Goldwater or Rand Paul by noting the prior racism of advocates like Democratic Presidents FDR, LBJ, and JFK whose best-known policies substantially thwarted racism.

I care about as much as Kennedy and Johnson being personally racist as much as I care about Goldwater not being racist—which is to say that I don’t—at least, not very much. I care what they did. It seems really weird to give Goldwater all this credit for not being personally racist while championing a cause supported by racists, and say this is the same thing as Kennedy and Johnson being racist but supporting legislation that advanced the cause of black rights. This is part and parcel of thinking of racism in quasi-religious terms, a stain on the soul rather than a matter of actual behavior, and it’s part of why the American conversation on race remains so counter-productive.

Certainly the legacy of the Democratic Party on race is distinct from the liberal one, as much as the Republican legacy is distinct from that of conservatism. When my grandparents left segregated Tampa in the 1950s, they were Republicans. Were I alive at the time, I probably would have been one too. But by the time Johnson was running, they were Democrats. There’s a reason for that. 

Read the quote in context here.

(I’d just add that for obvious reasons no conservative apologist since, I think, an overzealous and ill-fated Ronald Reagan campaign staffer, has tried to brag that Martin Luther King, Jr.‘s father was a lifelong Republican. Because, hello? Abraham Lincoln? Once upon a time, not even that long ago,“Republican liberal” was not an inconceivable oxymoron. But I digress…)

I bring this up in part because the “moral stain on the soul” line of reasoning percolates through and through political and social activism on left and right.

For instance

• Liberals who passionately argued in the 1980s and 1990s that the uncontested evils of Ronald Reagan’s or George W. Bush’s thuggish administrations were preferable to the merely insufficiently pure Jimmy Carter or Al Gore
• Libertarians who’d passionately prefer to see thirty-three million African Americans denied service than see one fucking asshole be told he doesn’t have the freedom to turn them away
• certain women’s rights activists who’d rather see millions of sex workers perish of preventable illness than “accommodate trafficking” by distributing a single condom
• hard-line “pro-life” activists who oppose contraception not on principle but reductions in the need for abortion has been shown to reduce support for eliminating abortion
• certain completely-out-of-touch alt-sex publishers who passionately argue that it’s more noble for 10,000 sex workers be stalked, prosecuted, or worse than to criticize revenge-seekers who solicit, pay for, and publish sex-worker’s personal information

• activists who not only (sensibly) avoid a conference where a (sex-worker!) writer from aforementioned alt-sex publisher was present but also closed the iron door on any further participation with any future mixed-purpose conferences.

I mean, you can be that way, and I understand that a lot of people feel they have to be that way. And yeah, for the faithful, coalition building with prospects of greater understanding and eventual success vs. lonely personal eternal salvation against a sea of the insufficiently pure is always going to be a no brainer.

Or if you’re purity-agnostic like Serwer you can measure success by outcomes. I dunno.

Maybe I’m just sensitive (really sensitive!!!) after coming back from a funeral a week or so ago with folks so religiously conservative they seriously agonize about whether a friend or loved one was really going to heaven before risking attending the funeral. But results sort of matter too.