Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

In comments on an early post, It’s About Putting Shoes On Both Feet, Not On the Other Foot: Courtney Martin on the Myth of the Fairer Sex, Zilla proposed a great mathematical model for why it makes sense to make preferential microloans to women (and by extension to, well, extend differential preference to underserved demographics of any sort) despite there being no essential difference between sexes.

Leaving out the gender essentialism arguments (either side) and the culture arguments, I’d say that when you target the microloans to women, you get more bang for the buck, because there are more good investments as-yet unfunded, on the women’s side of the divide.

The men have historically had more access to those resources, so far more of their good investments have already been found and funded. The odds of getting good return by investing in a woman, are higher because the women have been historically under-invested.

Suppose you have 10 men and 10 women. 8 out of 10 men will do good things with investment money, and 2 will waste it. And say that women are exactly the same: 8 good, 2 bad. Randomly select 5 men to invest in, and ignore the women. Of the men invested in, 4 succeed with their investment, and remove themselves from the pool. The 1 who wasted the money still has his hands out in round two. So now the people seeking investments are:

Men: 4 good, 2 bad
Women: 8 good, 2 bad

If you again invest in five randomly chosen men, your returns are statistically unlikely to be as good, as they would be if you invested in five randomly chosen women.

The more rounds of investment are targeted to men alone, the more extreme the disparity becomes, and the better a bet on women looks. With successive rounds targeted to women, the effect will fade, but I think there’s a long way to go before that happens.

Zilla said it here.

It’s a nice, closely-reasoned explanation for what I was only able to say intuitively. It’s also generalizable to almost any situation where prejudice artificially distorts economic, social, or political access. It’s not that women are inherently better investments, it’s that thanks to discrimination the men who are better investments will tend to have already been invested in whereas the pool of women who would be good investments has not had access.

It also helps highlights why any argument that we’d be better off just putting women in charge instead of men… or keeping the status quo instead… will fail: to do so would only switch the pools of the under- vs. over-covered; it wouldn’t increase overall coverage. And finally, it demonstrates rather nicely why, in the long run as power equalizes, arguments of gender essentialism or exceptionalism would tend to evaporate. As would incentives for “preferential” treatment.

Further down in comments Zilla adds

Even if you believe men are inherently superior, this works as a mathematical argument that women are the better investment bet in any culture that has historically favored men.

That too! It works even if you think men have situational superiority due to, say, greater experience or the benefit of traditional narratives for dealing economically, or socially, or politically, or whatever. (For instance microloans for women tend to be a lot more boot-strappy — more conditions, more use of network effects for enforcement, more initial attached education and supervision, etc.)

I happen to think economists have a bit too much veto power when it comes to assessing social interactions. But they do. So it’s nice to see an economic/mathematics rather than political or moral argument for doing the right thing anyway.

Update: The case is obviously, obviously not just about microloans. See also Stubbornella’s post, Women in Technology, plus comments there on the topic of Google’s decision to sponsor female students to attend JSConf. (Via Geekfeminism.)

Scott Lemieux of TAPPED is logically correct but, I think, tactically mistaken for dismissing pro-choice efforts to look for “common ground” with anti-abortion conservatives.

To follow up on Monica’s post about Dana Goldstein’s terrific article about the coming battle over contraception, it’s also important to emphasize what Republican opposition to contraception reveals about cultural conservatism.

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The problem with this line of reasoning is that it ignores the broader set of assumptions about women and sexuality on which actual opposition to abortion is based. Consider anti-choice Republicans, who consistently opposed expanding contraceptive use: Given the choice between reducing abortion rates and controlling female sexuality, they will always choose the latter. Thus the idea that contraception can be a means of achieving a ceasefire in the culture wars has always been a fantasy. Liberals and conservatives aren’t just divided by abortion but by broader questions of female equality and sexual freedom.

He said it here.

I agree strongly that there’s a hard core of social conservatives who just flat-out hate the idea of women having sex (or possibly instead hate the idea of men having sex with women) and “getting away with it.”

And for those people abortion is virtually a red herring, relevant only to the extent that abortion, like contraception, amounts to a get out of jail card on the “wages of sin.”

Fine. You’ll never reach compromise with those people.

The trick, though, is that the hard core hides behind a heck of a lot of people who are squishy on abortion, sometimes really squishy, but 100% fine with contraception.

Those people you can find common ground with. And for logical and tactical reasons it’s extremely important to do so.

The point of engaging in “common ground” rhetoric isn’t about getting to compromise with the acid right. It’s to flush them out, to drive a wedge, to starkly separate them from their nominal allies in the squishy middle.

Maybe 20 years ago someone from Operation Rescue very bluntly said it was their policy to oppose initiatives that only reduced abortions because, in his opinion, unless abortions continued in big, big numbers the majority of opponents would lose interest in the issue.

“Common ground” solutions like contraception availability amounts to calling their bluff.

Would it be great if the majority of people were willing to back abortion rights 100%? Oh yeah, definitely. But the bad guys wish the majority were as enthusiastic about letting women die of preventable pregnancy-related complications. Since neither side seems likely to get such support, it becomes a question of who can provide intermediate solutions that are most appealing to the majority in the middle.

I happen to think the most appealing intermediate, a.k.a. “middle ground” solution is pressing hard on contraception. First of all because all but the fanatics are comfortable with it, and second because while nearly all the squishy middle are squishy about the boogeyman of “abortion on demand” they’re actually extraordinarily tolerant of abortion as a backup when contraception fails. That’s exactly Terry Randall and the American Bishop’s worst nightmare and… I just can’t see any reason why we shouldn’t give it to them.

So. Bottom line: you can’t compromise with fanatics, but by appearing reasonable (heck, by being reasonable!) you can peel off millions and millions of their nominal supporters.

I say go for it.

Via all sorts of sources on the left, right-wing propagandist Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post correctly (correctly for a propagandist anyway) disregards reality and history in her possibly-successful attempt to frame President Obama as “feminine.”

Obama: Our first female president

If Bill Clinton was our first black president, as Toni Morrison once proclaimed, then Barack Obama may be our first woman president.

She said it here.

Parker’s pretty good at wielding feminist and gender-study language and theory

We’ve come a long way gender-wise. Not so long ago, women would be censured for speaking or writing in public. But cultural expectations are stickier and sludgier than oil. Our enlightened human selves may want to eliminate gender norms, but our lizard brains have a different agenda.

Women, inarguably, still are punished for failing to adhere to gender norms by acting “too masculine” or “not feminine enough.” In her fascinating study about “Hating Hillary,” Karlyn Kohrs Campbell details the ways our former first lady was chastised for the sin of talking like a lawyer and, by extension, “like a man.”

M’kay, nothing you wouldn’t hear in a 1st-year gender-studies paper, and also perfectly true. Not too surprising either since Karlyn Kors Campbell was a pioneering women’s-studies professor who focused on the rhetoric and reception of women speakers in American political history. She’s also the part-namesake of an academic prize in Rhetorical Criticism. So good call on Parker’s part!

Of course as with all good propaganda she uses two paragraphs to cite credible people and accurate statements in order to make you less-critically receptive to the first sentence in the sentence that follows. Which would be

Could it be that Obama is suffering from the inverse?

Well, nice try but no, Obama is almost archetypically male of a type well-understood, admired, and often feared by socially or hierarchically subordinate men. See “father, remote.” See also the myriad leaders among aviation engineers, software developers, biotech researchers, research university employees, merchant transoceanic shippers, bureaucrats and technocrats, career-military, and industrial-scale, export-oriented commodity-crop farmers for examples.

The reasonable-sounding way Parker sets up her assertion, though, you could almost agree that his distant-father routine might… somehow… um… be feminine. Incredible reframing if she could pull it off, yes. Maybe she’s bucking for an award in rhetoric herself.

You wanna know how much of a stretch this is, by the way? Karlyn Kors Campbell didn’t just study women’s political speech, she’s also written about male Presidential rhetoric. And possibly since Campbell is still alive, Parker acknowledges a… slight problem with her attempted spin

Campbell’s research, in which she affirms that men can assume feminine communication styles successfully (Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton), suggests holes in my own theory. She insists that men are safe assuming female styles as long as they meet rhetorical norms for effective advocacy — clarity and cogency of argument, appropriate and compelling evidence, and preempting opposing positions.

Ooh, that’s gotta hurt your thesis! Barack Obama’s “feminine” just like… um… Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton? Oh yeah, that’s going to get you an award, but only if you can make that one stick. In the next paragraph Parker wisely relies on the rhetoric of uncertainty to express confidence.

I’m not so sure. The masculine-coded context of the Oval Office poses special challenges, further exacerbated by a crisis that demands decisive action. It would appear that Obama tests Campbell’s argument that “nothing prevents” men from appropriating women’s style without negative consequences.

Yeah, masculine-coded contexts that evidently weren’t in place in those crisis-free, no-need-for-decisive-action years when Reagan was President (1980-1988) or when Clinton was (1992-2000) but magically are today. Oh, and speaking of crises that demand decisive action, how ‘bout My Pet Goat boy from 2001-2008?

But suddenly Parker’s saying President Obama somehow will finally be the guy who finally gets hit with the consequences? Of being to “womanly” as opposed to, say, too male-professor/remote-father-figure aloof?

Give her credit for trying. And give her credit, as well, for her women’s studies bone fides… which, incidentally, I think really are bone fides!

Parker’s pretty clear throughout her piece that while she’s criticizing Obama for… well… obviously like a lot of her peers she’s just throwing shit on the wall and seeing what sticks… but while she’s critical of Obama’s “femininity” she doesn’t actually see anything wrong at all with “womanly” leadership styles or, indeed, women leaders!

Indeed, negative reaction to Obama’s speech suggests the opposite. Obama may prove to be our first male president who pays a political price for acting too much like a woman.

And, perhaps, next time will be a real woman’s turn.

She’s not talking about Hillary Clinton. But only because Clinton is a Democrat, not because she’s a woman. She’ll support, campaign for, and might would outright prefer, a Sarah Palin to a Mike Huckabee or Mitt Romney for President, and prefer a Nikki Haley to a Haley Barbour for Vice President.

Don’t underestimate the significance of this.

The patriarchy is alive and well, and women like Parker, Palin, Haley, Bachmann, Angle, and others are utterly committed to its maintenance. But this is not your father’s patriarchy!

Update: Oh cool, and professor Mark Lieberman of Language Log has a technical takedown of Parker’s factual assertions about “feminine” vs. “masculine” language usage at Rhetorical testosterone and analytical hallucinations

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.