Please don't pretend to care about school shootings

No one really cares when strangers die, right? Maybe a few super-empaths. But everyone else who pretends to be sad about the most recent school shooting is faking it. Why fake it? Peer pressure, I guess, because public hyper-emotionality is overvalued in our society, and empathy is perceived as a mandatory personality trait. Or am I just being autistic?

North Korean epiphanies

What causes North Koreans to become disillusioned with the regime? Here are five examples of the little epiphanies which caused people to wonder whether after all, life might not be better across the border. They illustrate why strict control over its subjects’ movement and contact with the outside world are important for the regime.

“One North Korean soldier recalled a buddy who had been given an American-made nail clipper and was showing it off to his friends. The soldier clipped a few nails, admired the sharp, clean edges, and marveled at the mechanics of this simple item. Then he realized with a sinking heart: if North Korea couldn’t make such a fine nail clipper, how could it compete with American weapons?”

 For one North Korean student it was a photograph in the official media showing a South Korean on a picket line.

The photograph was meant to illustrate the exploitation of the worker in capitalist society; instead the student noticed that the “oppressed” worker wore a jacket with a zipper and had a ballpoint pen in his pocket, both of which were luxuries at the time.

Why it’s forbidden to listen to South Korean radio:

 A North  Korean maritime official accidentally picked up a South Korean radio broadcast--a situation comedy featuring two young women fighting over a parking space at an apartment complex.

He couldn’t grasp the concept of a place with so many cars that there was no room to park them. He had never known anyone, certainly not young women, who owned a private car.

 During the famine, a young North Korean man found himself near enough to the border to see the Chinese countryside. He noticed that in China, the cornfields weren’t guarded by armed men, and the trees still had bark.

A North Korean pediatrician, still loyal to the regime but desperate for food, swam across the river to China. She went up to the first farmhouse she saw to ask for help finding a job. As she peeked through the gate, she saw a heaping bowl of rice on the floor of the courtyard. Back home, rice had long been unavailable at any price, and people were eating flour made from ground bark and corn stalks. Why would so much precious food be left out in the courtyard? Then she heard the barking. Dogs in China ate better than doctors in North Korea.
   
Examples are taken from Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea.

Against masculinity

The list of things women are not allowed to do has gotten much shorter over the years. Although lots of good things are still coded masculine, if a woman engages in a masculine-coded activity, she is likely to be praised for it. I have often been praised for drinking whiskey, something which is neither difficult nor particularly praiseworthy. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I was criticized for acting like a stereotypical man, except for the occasional creep telling me to smile.

Partly, of course, this is because I am a bachelorette and childless. As soon as a woman starts trying to get pregnant, there are hordes of people eager to tell her what to do. Mothers (or even potential mothers) can’t drink, smoke, eat what they like, exercise, use public transportation, have careers, use formula, use childcare, or pursue their own goals in any way. And there’s no getting out of it: women who allow their children’s fathers to take custody are told they are abandoning them, and if you have a miscarriage or a child dies accidentally, you may be imprisoned. That is terrible and unjust--but I suspect that, comparing childless adult women to childless adult men, the women actually have more freedom from gender roles.

From various sources, we hear that men cannot: eat brunch, talk about feelings or relationships, drink non-whisky-based cocktails, clean up after themselves, go to plays, use certain toiletries, watch TV shows or movies with female characters, be in a committed relationship, wear colors other than black, brown, white, gray or blue, appreciate fiction or poetry, do yoga, care for children, do laundry, be interested in fashion, exercise self-control, do well in school, read between the lines of what people say, or be vegetarian. It sometimes seems like Esquire magazine is solely concerned with telling men what is and is not sufficiently masculine.

Now, different groups have different motivations for furthering this “men can’t” trope. Sellers of consumer goods have an incentive to convince us that men and women can’t possibly use the same products. Gendering clothes, shoes, bags, foods, drinks, cell phone cases, bandaids, shampoos, pens and whatever else you can think of ensures that men and women will buy different ones. Just think about how similar men’s and women’s bodies really are--and how different their clothes are. Or consider the human foot. On average, women have smaller and less hairy feet. Other than that, there is no difference. All feet work the same way. Yet how dramatically different our shoes are! Even those women who have the willpower to avoid wearing heels wear women’s flats. Either the world is sexist, or every Western man other than the ones I have dated is a foot fetishist.)

I often  hear complaints about the unflattering portrayal of men in sitcoms and other comedy. (Solution: don’t watch sitcoms. They are all bad.) But seriously, this happens for a fairly innocuous reason. You have to make fun of someone, and since we are in a weird world which is both sexist and post-feminist, few writers know how to make fun of women without being sexist. That leaves the man, ideally the straight white man, as your figure of fun.

Ordinary men themselves do a lot of the grunt work of spreading the belief that men are incapable. It’s a useful excuse for men who are behaving badly and want to continue doing so without consequences. Their strategy is to try to convince us that asking an individual man to change his behavior amounts to attacking masculinity itself. Is my wife asking me to do the dishes, talk about our relationship, or refrain from cheating on her? Probably because she hates men.

Similarly, the man who thinks men can’t control their sexual impulses is probably a harasser or rapist. The man who thinks that men can never be as good at parenting as women “naturally” are didn’t want to get up for that midnight feeding anyway. Meeting women and asking them out can be stressful, but it gets a lot easier if you can convince them that men can’t be expected to understand the body language, tones of voice, facial expressions and the other types of implicit communication which human beings are constantly engaged in. That way, whenever hard communication is necessary, it’s the woman’s job; and if she has taken too seriously the social belief that women should be passive, quiet and unselfish, she may never successfully get her message across.

These excuses are more palatable since they often come packaged in flattering-sounding essentializing descriptions of women. A woman who knows she hated breastfeeding and had to be taught how to hold a baby still enjoys being told her “maternal instinct” “naturally” makes her a better parent than her husband could ever be. And it would be tactless to question your boyfriend’s belief that women are “naturally” monogamous.

Stephanie Coontz, a scholar of marriage, agrees with me:

One thing standing in the way of further progress for many men is the same obstacle that held women back for so long: overinvestment in their gender identity instead of their individual personhood. Men are now experiencing a set of limits — externally enforced as well as self-imposed — strikingly similar to the ones Betty Friedan set out to combat in 1963, when she identified a “feminine mystique” that constrained women’s self-image and options. Although men don’t face the same discriminatory laws as women did 50 years ago, they do face an equally restrictive gender mystique...Now men need to liberate themselves from the pressure to prove their masculinity.

Maybe we should stop asking “is he gay?” every time a man bends the rules of masculinity.

Crazy Doctor Sangrado

One of the amusing episodes in Gil Blas concerns a charlatan doctor named Sangrado. When he sees a patient with gout and learns that the patient regularly eats large meals consisting mostly of meat and drinks large quantities of wine, he suggests that the patient’s diet may be aggravating his gout. He advises him to eat moderate meals consisting mostly of vegetables, legumes and baked apples, and says he should drink water instead of wine. In fact, the physician believes that everyone should follow this diet.  He doesn’t agree with the prevalent belief that wine is necessary to prevent indigestion, and he thinks people should stop eating before they are stuffed, even if they can afford to eat more.

This doctor is portrayed as a fool who kills his patients and makes Gil Blas sick through denying him wine. Isn’t it funny how medical advice which now is now so mainstream that it seems obvious was in the past seen as self-evident lunacy?

 Of course, Sangrado also says that no one really needs blood to live, and advises the patient to have himself bled as often as possible.

Graphic labels on cigarettes packages

Forcing cigarette companies to put graphic warning labels, including health warnings, pictures of diseased organs, and the 1-800-QUIT-NOW number, on cigarette packages, is a violation of the First Amendment, according to a recent and totally correct ruling by the DC Circuit (pdf).

You might wonder why this is so, since cigarette companies are already required to put warning labels on packs, while alcohol manufacturers have other warning labels, and all makers of packaged food are required to list ingredients, calories and so forth. The legal reasoning behind this regulation is that the government had a legitimate interest in making sure that consumers are accurately informed about the contents and risks of the food, beverages and cigarettes they consume.

Now, there is nothing in the Constitution restricting the ability of government agencies to campaign against smoking, taking the public stand that the risks of smoking outweigh its benefits. The libertarians among us might think that this is not a proper use of the power and money of the state, but the libertarians among us are often disappointed. However, the state still does not have the right to force any individual or company to express a certain opinion. The federal district court and DC Circuit agree that graphic labels and the QUIT NOW message go beyond informing consumers about health risks and amount to discouraging smoking. (In fact, the FDA made no secret of the fact that it hoped the labels would nudge people to quit.) This "ideological" message is one the government cannot force a company to send.

The Companies contend that, to the extent the graphic warnings go beyond the textual warnings to shame and repulse smokers and denigrate smoking as an antisocial act, the message is ideological and not informational. “[B]y effectively shouting well-understood information to consumers,” they explain, “FDA is communicating an ideological message, a point of view on how people should live their lives: that the risks from smoking outweigh the pleasure that smokers derive from it, and that smokers make bad personal decisions, and should stop smoking.”

No one doubts the government can promote smoking cessation programs; can use shock, shame, and moral opprobrium to discourage people from becoming smokers; and can use its taxing and regulatory authority to make smoking economically prohibitive and socially onerous. And the government can certainly require that consumers be fully informed about the dangers of hazardous products. But this case raises novel questions about the scope of the government’s authority to force the manufacturer of a product to go beyond making purely factual and accurate commercial disclosures and undermine its own economic interest—in this case, by making “every single pack of cigarettes in the country [a] mini billboard” for the government’s anti-smoking message.

The so-called "warning labels" are not really warning at all, the Court held, but propaganda. Some convey no relevant facts, and others might be deceptive: an image of someone smoking through a tracheotomy hole might give the inaccurate impression that a tracheotomy is a common result of smoking.

Many of the images do not convey any warning information at all, much less make an “accurate statement” about cigarettes. For example, the images of a woman crying, a small child, and the man wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “I QUIT” do not offer any information about the health effects of smoking. And the “1-800-QUIT-NOW” number, when presented without any explanation about the services provided on the hotline, hardly sounds like an unbiased source of information. These inflammatory images and the provocatively-named hotline cannot rationally be viewed as pure attempts to convey information to consumers. They are unabashed attempts to evoke emotion (and perhaps embarrassment) and browbeat consumers into quitting.

I find myself saying, as often before, thank God for the First Amendment. Cigarette companies in other countries are already forced to use graphic "warning" labels. Now, if only we still had the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments...

Non-conformity is suspicious and dangerous

This seems like a point Phoebe would make/has made: encouraging people to be suspicious of strange behavior stigmatizes strange people, who are generally not terrorists. This has the effect of making social life harder for the very people for whom it is already hard! Just as so-called "behavioral analysis" at airports has the effect of making security screening harder and more traumatizing for people who are already uncomfortable and anxious about it.

The video tells viewers not to ignore their “instincts.” But do we have an instinct for detecting “sketchy” people or behavior? Given what we know about stereotyping and selective perception, the reality is that people will view behavior through their pre-existing beliefs. Their interpretations of behavior as unusual or inappropriate will be influenced by how comfortable they otherwise are with the person engaging in it, which is impacted by race/ethnicity, class, and many other social categories. A guy leaving a backpack unattended is scary if that guy has a mohawk or, you know, looks scary and stuff, but when I do it, no one bats an eye. This video basically legitimizes turning anyone who makes you at all uncomfortable in public in to the police, on the argument that you are simply following your “instinct.” When you ask every citizen to become an intelligence agent, reporting every incident they perceive as odd, the result is the increasing stigmatization and semi-criminalization of those who can’t or won’t conform to pretty narrow standards of physical appearance, dress, and behavior.

No judge and jury this time

Nothing doing. No judge and jury this time. Sometimes those trials drag on three weeks. Sometimes they even let the guy go because he’s innocent. But that isn’t going to happen this time. I’m going to get the killer, innocent or guilty, and when I do, I’m going to saw off his head, crack his ribs, jump on his neck, smash his Adam’s apple, beat in his nose, tear off his ears, pull out his hair, bend back his fingers, twist off his toenails, and shatter his kneecap. But before I do this I’m going to work him over with a rusty knife. I’m like that, Matt. I want a clean and decent America, a place where our kids can grow and sniff the good fresh air.

--Ira Wallach

Fat and class

The fact that the people at the gym are thin and the people at Walmart are fat does not show that going to the gym makes people thin or that Walmart makes people fat.

Poor people in America are fat and rich people are thin. The disgust the thin upper classes feel for the fat lower classes has nothing to do with mortality statistics, and everything to do with feelings of moral superiority engendered in thin people by the sight of fat people. Precisely because Americans are so repressed about class issues, the disgust the (relatively) poor engender in the (relatively) rich must be projected onto some other distinguishing characteristic. In 1853, an upper-class Englishman could be quite unself-conscious about the fact that the mere sight of the urban proletariat disgusted him. In 2003, any upper-class white American liberal would be horrified to imagine that the sight of, say, a lower-class Mexican-American woman going into a Walmart might somehow elicit feelings of disgust in his otherwise property sensitized soul. But the sight of a fat woman—make that an “obese” woman, better yet a “morbidly obese” woman going into Walmart, ah, that is something else again…the fact that this woman happens to be poor and non-white can be dismissed by those observers as an irrelevant coincidence.

--Paul Campos

Cornelius Gilliam

Just feeling like random quotes today.

Cornelius Gilliam, sheriff of Clay County, who had campaigned for sheriff with the slogan that he had shot more wolves than any other man in Missouri...ran the Mormons out of town.

The mother's fault

When a child dies, for whatever reason, people want to punish the mother.

In 1996, Kristin Bunch was 21, pregnant and living in a mobile home with her three year old. A sudden fire engulfed the trailer, killing her three year old. The police said it was arson and claimed she went into her son's bedroom, doused it with a liquid accelerant like kerosene or diesel fuel and set it on fire. She was charged and convicted of felony murder and arson and sentenced to 60 years in prison. Arson investigators testified at her trial that burn patterns indicated the fire was arson...There was no direct evidence at Bunch’s trial that she set multiple fires in the mobile home through use of an accelerant. No one saw her set the fire or heard her refer to setting the fire, there was no evidence she had purchased a liquid accelerant, and there was no motive offered for her to intentionally set a fire.

A similar example is the case of Hannah Overton. Her four-year-old foster son, who had physical and emotional problems and suffered from pica (according to the defense) died of salt poisoning after having consumed large amounts of salty seasoning from the pantry. But the prosecution decided that his foster mother had fed him the seasoning in order to punish him, despite the fact that there was no evidence that she had ever used such a bizarre punishment with her many other children, and that she had no record of child abuse or indeed any other criminal conduct. In this case, the prosecution practically admitted they were prosecuting her because of public feeling that when a child dies, someone has to be punished.

And this is only one of dozens of cases I've read about where mothers have been sent to prison for accidental fires, accidental poisonings, or medical conditions which caused the death of a child. Even when it is clear that a third party harmed a child, the mother is blamed. And yes, always the mother.

For instance, the disappearance of Madeline McCann, a small girl, from her English parents' room in Portugal. Still unsolved, but never any plausible theory that it was anything other than a stranger abduction. But the mother, Kate McCann, was vilified in the tabloids for having left her daughter alone in the room for a few minutes. The father did so too, but no one mentioned him. After the disappearance, the mother was stalked by paparazzi and stories were run criticizing her for such crimes as wearing earrings, brushing her hair or smiling. The fact that the mother had a prestigious job was used against her.

Or the Cleveland, Texas rape case, in which dozens of men raped an 11-year-old girl, and some of her neighbors suggested it was the mother's fault for letting her daughter out of the house.

But I think my point is clear. If your child dies, get a lawyer.

Buying healthcare is hard

I've been calling doctor's offices trying to find out the price for some relatively simple and common procedures. It's ridiculously difficult. For every three receptionists I talk to, one will act as if she has no idea what a price estimate even is. She'll offer me medical codes, but dollar amounts? You must be crazy.

Another will assume I must be uninsured, because why else would I care about the price? She'll tell me that actually they charge more for cash patients. Yes, thank you, for making it clear that you practice price discrimination which hurts the most disadvantaged patients.

Probably two will require me to laboriously explain that yes, I know the price I pay may not be the same as what they charge the insurance company.

Oh, and those price comparisons?

Procedure 1:
One office told me it would be $ 20-500 --and they refused to narrow it down any more than that.
Procedure 2:
At one office it was $70, at another $470.
Procedure 3:
I called three offices: one said $800, one $1200, and one $300. The one my primary care physician recommended was the most expensive.

I think this tells us something about why our healthcare system doesn't work.

Transsexuals

Fact is, most transsexuals agree there’s something wrong with them. The difference is they think it’s with their bodies, while unsympathetic outsiders say it’s with their heads.

Are transsexuals mentally ill? Pretty meaningless question, since there is no objective definition of mental illness. In a remarkably calm and even-handed column on a contentious topic, the author of the Straight Dope suggests that a condition which causes unhappiness in itself, rather than unhappiness as a result of social disapproval, should be considered a mental illness:

DSM-III dropped the old classification of homosexuality as a disorder because of the dawning realization that whatever gays and lesbians might be unhappy about, it wasn’t about being gay or lesbian as such — the main issue was social disapproval. In contrast, even with all the social acceptance in the world, transsexuals are still going to think they’re the wrong sex.

What ought to be measured, but has not yet been with sufficient validity, is whether sex reassignment surgery makes transsexuals happier (ideally I would think the surgery group should be compared, not only to a control group, but to a group of transsexuals getting cognitive-behavioral therapy intended to help them learn to get away from the obsessive thought of being in the wrong body.)

I know there's a certain amount of controversy over terminology here, but I don't care enough to figure out whether "transsexual" is considered the correct term. 

 

 
I highly doubt whether many people would even notice a transsexual in the locker room. But it would provide a great opportunity for unscrupulous men, wouldn't it?

I have not yet seen an explanation for why there seem to be so many more male-to-female transsexuals than the other way around. Is it because it's easier for women to wear male clothing without automatically being read as transsexual, so that they can indulge their genderbending urges without having to go all the way? Or is it that women are lower-status in our culture, so that pretending to be a male when you're not doesn't have the same transgressive edge as pretending to be female?

If you buy into the PC theories about transsexuality, you'd have to say that actually there are just as many female-to-male as the other kind, but for some reason they are not as willing to be open about it.

Questioning the conservative explanation for poverty

Bryan Caplan, the iconoclastic George Mason economist and author of Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, is planning a book on poverty. Working title: Poverty: Who to Blame. I’m excited, but judging from his blog, he has some big blind spots when talking about poverty.

The basic truth conservatives start with, when talking about poverty, is that people who finish high school, do not commit crimes, do not have children before marriage, and find and hold a full-time minimum-wage job are very unlikely to be poor. This is true. Charles Karelis makes this point in his book, The Persistence of Poverty:

One 2003 simulation estimates that if all nonelderly and nondisabled heads of families with children worked full-time at their present wages, or at the wages they could earn based on their education and other factors, the fraction of the US population living below the poverty line would fall from 13 percent to 7.5 percent.

 

Caplan’s advice for poor women in particular is to refrain from childbearing until they find an eligible (stably employed, marriage-minded, nonabusive) man to marry. It sounds very simple. So what's the problem?

Here are some complicating questions I would expect the book to address:

1) Is it true that having children out of marriage hurts women’s economic prospects? Evidence from Kathryn Edin for one suggests that women who start out in the same economic place end up in the same place whether they become single teenage mothers or not.

2) Is it true, as he asserts, that poor people drink more and use more drugs? Actually, no. The consensus seems to be that alcohol use and income are positively correlated; richer people are more likely to drink and to drink more. Use of illegal drugs is correlated with poverty, but if Caplan thinks that substance use is one of the causes of poverty, he needs to explain why drugs and alcohol are so different here. They both cost money, carry health risks, and increase the risk of getting in trouble with the law. If the poor have lower impulse control, why are they better at controlling the impulse to drink?

3) What if there aren’t enough eligible men?

For women like me, it’s a no-brainer to wait a decade or more after puberty before having children. We know that there will be eligible men out there for us. If anything, the supply of men increases and improves over time: a 25-year-old college graduate has access to a greater variety and higher quality of men than a 15-year-old high school student.

Is this true for poor women living in poor neighborhoods? Isn’t it possible that the opposite is true for them: that the number of 18-year-old men who are marriage-minded, childless, without a criminal record and out of jail  is actually greater than the number of 25- to 30-year-olds who meet those requirements?

This is something of a speculative tangent, though. But it is true that there is a very high ratio of marriage-age women to marriage-age men in poor neighborhoods. Factor in the very high unemployment rates for young black men with no college degree, and the number of eligible men goes down further. 

Caplan rightly thinks preaching abstinence is unrealistic for most, and suggests contraception instead. But suggesting that women delay childbearing until they find an eligible man, even when this might take decades and might mean giving up the possibility of motherhood altogether, is almost as unrealistic.

4) What about the dangers of marriage? Caplan says that marriage is a good economic decision: two people living together spend less than two living apart. But it's not just about the money: what about the risk that the seemingly eligible man might lose his job, become abusive, or steal the woman’s money? Not to speak of the loss of independence.

5) What if finding full-time employment is impossible? Many minimum-wage employers deliberately avoid hiring full-time staff, because after that 40-hour-a-week threshold, they will be forced to provide more benefits. Anyone can get a job at McDonald’s, but getting 40 hours a week is a lot harder.

The largest liberal objection, of course, is that it shouldn’t matter who we blame for poverty. No one denies that the poor exist and are generally worse off than the rich. That, to me, means that they are entitled to a few of my superfluous dollars (which I probably would have spent on liquor anyway.)

Why object to the execution of the stupid?

The latest liberal outrage is the execution of a murderer, Marvin Wilson, who, according to his lawyers and one IQ test but not others, has an IQ of 61, below the threshold of 70 which Texas law takes as the minimum IQ needed to take responsibility for one’s actions.

For a while I was baffled, since many people seemed outraged by this without
 really saying why.  After some thought, I’ve decided this is not really about the death penalty.

Rather, it seems to me like a difference of opinion between those who believe judicial punishments exist to punish “guilt” (whatever that means) and those who believe the purpose of the judicial system is to protect law-abiding citizens.

If you fall into the former camp, then, if the criminal is too stupid to know what he was doing, if he is young, if he is uneducated, if he is poor, and so forth, his guilt is less. He should be punished either not at all or else the bare minimum amount. We should favor more humane prisons to promote rehabilitation. The death penalty should either not be used at all, since it precludes rehabilitation, or it should only be used for older, richer, more educated, and higher-IQ criminals (of which there are very few).

If you fall into the second camp, you will be inclined to say a murderer is a murderer is a danger to society. This danger should be eliminated regardless of hard-to-ascertain metaphysical “guilt”. The seriousness of the crime matters, but not the personal characteristics of the victim. If you favor more humane prisons, you will do so to decrease recidivism. You might favor the death penalty on grounds of efficiency, or you might oppose it because you think it does not deter.

Note, of course, that these two broad schools of thought are not correlated with opposing or supporting the death penalty. That’s a whole ‘nother issue involved in the Wilson case. I suspect that most people who think a low-IQ man should not be executed also think that no one should be executed–they focus on Wilson because he’s the easy propaganda case. (Just as most medical marijuana advocates favor legalizing all marijuana, but they focus on medical uses for the easy propaganda.)       

NB: Difference between rehabilitation and preventing recidivism. Preventing recidivism means ensuring that criminals do not reoffend–this might mean changing hearts and minds, or scaring criminals with the threat of more or worse punishment, or preventing their contact with other or worse criminals in prison, or keeping drugs off the streets, or improving economic opportunities for low-income men, and so forth. Rehabilitation focuses on changing the criminal’s personality, so that he will understand that crime is bad.

Talking about single women

Most societies fear, hate and suspect young women. Therefore, talking about young, unmarried women is linguistically problematic. This is true in several languages.

• It's especially clear  in French: garce, originally the feminine of garcon, came to mean 'slut', while garcon continued to mean simply 'boy'. After garce became contaminated, fille, the feminine of fils, came to be used. But soon fille fell victim to the same contamination. Finally jeune fille was expanded from its original meaning of 'young girl' and came to be applied to young woman, similar to the English 'girl'. Jeune personne (young person) is another euphemism used in the past to avoid facing the uncomfortable fact of a young woman.
• In English, the word 'woman' came to be used only to refer to lower-class women; the words 'lady', 'young lady' and 'girl' replaced it,and in the early 20th century English even borrowed the French 'young person' to mean an unmarried woman.
• In modern English,'lady' or 'young lady' is less often used, but the discomfort with the word 'woman' persists. A new development is the use of the word 'female', which is military and bureaucratic jargon as well as giving a helpful air of pseudo-scientificity to one's speech. When you are making unsupported allegations about the difference between men and women, it's a lot easier to call them 'males' and 'females'. It makes you sounds objective, like a farmer talking about his livestock. On the other hand, using the term 'woman/women' is so unusual it actually tends to make you sound like a feminist.
• In a Language Log post which is more comprehensive than I will do justice to, the same phenomenon is shown to appear in Chinese.
  

  
  When I started to learn Mandarin nearly half a century ago, it used to be that xiǎojiě 小姐 ("miss") was a polite way to refer to or address a young, unmarried woman. You could also extend xiǎojiě 小姐 ("miss", lit., "little elder sister") to convey other, related meanings, such as lǎo xiǎojiě 老小姐 ("old maid / miss"), xiǎojiě píqì 小姐脾气 ("petulant; flirtatious; coquettish"), and so forth. Gradually, however, xiǎojiě 小姐 ("miss") evolved to the point that it often came to be used in a jocular or facetious manner.  Furthermore, when used by itself, xiǎojiě 小姐 may be applied to prostitutes, so one must be careful when referring to someone with this word.  It seems that there is no longer a broadly accepted, relatively respectful term of address for a young, single woman.

New DSM addiction disorder criteria

Among the millions of people who will be diagnosed with an addictive disorder in the new DSM are many whose lives will be derailed by their substance use, leading to car accidents, suicide, brain damage, sexual trauma...The new criteria will allow clinicians to intervene at an earlier stage in the addiction cycle, when relatively brief and inexpensive treatments can prevent more serious problems from escalating. Psycho-education, psychotherapy and group support should be available for people who seek treatment early on. Who would argue that it’s better to wait until the substance use escalates before treatment can be initiated?

Who would argue against early intervention? I would. There are costs to substance abuse treatment: big financial ones, the cost of limiting people's autonomy, and the risks of teaching someone who may never (yet) have experienced addiction that he probably will get addicted and will be powerless to stop it. Not to mention teaching that if a person continues to use drugs or alcohol, he's no longer responsible for his behavior.

I mean, imagine a bunch of typical 20-year-old drinkers sent into AA. They probably fit the diagnostic criteria (since the definitions of "binge drinking" and "heavy drinking" keep being revised downwards!), but does anyone think that such drinkers would benefit from a treatment program? In fact, we know that most young people who use drugs or alcohol heavily will age out of such heavy use naturally. In most cases, no intervention is necessary: and treatment programs have a terrible record of success. To call for early intervention drug and alcohol treatment is like calling for surgery to treat the common cold. We know it doesn't work for most people, it's expensive, and it does serious harm to the people subjected, in many cases involuntarily, to treatment.

Oh, and ignore the first sentence. As my astute readers will have noted, horror stories are totally irrelevant when talking about early intervention. For every person who will have serious problems with a substance, there are hundreds who fit the criteria for early intervention but will never have serious problems.

Abominable women proposing marriage

The offer of herself by a woman to a man is, to us all, a thing so distasteful that we at once declare that the women must be abominable...But the man to whom the offer is made hardly sees the thing in the same light.

 --Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds

Barely 150 years since this sort of attitude was mainstream. And we already hear men complaining that women don't take enough initiative. They can't imagine any reason why a woman would be reluctant to make the first move.

Pseudomutuality in relationships

How will we ever achieve an equal society if we can’t even live in equality with those whom we love?

--Maria Sveland

Heterosexual women and men in our society often describe their relationships as egalitarian and fair while also reporting relationship patterns that are objectively unfair.

For instance, they may report that they both do housework--but measurements of how much time each spouse puts in almost always reveal that the woman does more (on average, 80% of the work). One man said that his wife did all the cooking, but he did the dishes. By “doing the dishes” he meant putting the dishes in the dishwasher, leaving his wife to notice when they were done and put them away.

Or spouses may say that they are both responsible for childcare--but often, the man’s contribution to childcare is playing sports, going on outings, and watching TV with the kids, while the woman remains in charge of cleaning up after the kids, nagging them to take a bath, going to doctor’s appointments, and other boring stuff. Even when spouses sincerely attempt to share the burden, often the woman remains the manager, in charge of the family schedule, remembering what needs to be done, and reminding her husband to do it.

Couples may talk as though they are peers, but behave in ways that unintentionally promote invisible male power. Research in  the ‘90s that examined couples’ shared work and family decisions found that even though both partners reported that their decisions were mutual, outcomes tended to favor the husband’s needs and goals more than the wife’s.

One reason this “pseudomutuality” exists is that, when you ask women whether their relationship is equal, they don’t compare the relationship to an ideal of equality; they compare to an imagined “evil man” scenario. I know my husband is not a wife-beater or crude cartoon misogynist. He helps out more than my friends’ husbands. So I have nothing to worry about, right?

This cultural narrative of evil men trying to control women appears very important to women as something to avoid and to men  as unacceptable behavior. Although this discourse appears useful as a negative model of what to stay away from, it also seems to be applied to individual men in a sort of all-or-nothing way. Some men dominate and control; others don’t. The more subtle ways that male power is embedded within normative gender discourse and social structures did not seem to be part of the story. When men do not fit the dominating male pattern, couples can have a false sense of security about the existence of male power in their relationship and are less likely to look for or recognize the more subtle forms of male power built into the gender-differences discourse.

Within heterosexual relationships, and, the research suggests but does not prove, especially within marriage, even women who believe in equality are often pulled towards traditional gender roles. They may find themselves feeling that the condition of the house reflects on them--a feeling that husbands are unlikely to share. Or, with the modesty our society teaches women to feel or pretend to feel, they may say that their husband’s careers are more important than theirs (this tends to occur even when he makes less money). This leads to lives structured to accommodate the husband’s career.

Francine Deutsch describes two couples she encountered. In one couple, he was a college professor and she was a physician, and in the other couple she was the college professor and he the physician. But in both cases, both the husband and wife claimed the man’s job was less flexible.

There is no happy ending to this post, but I will leave you with a hilarious anecdote from Linda Hirshman . A female professor of her acquaintance decided to drop out of the workforce. When Hirshman asked her why, she said she had no choice: commuting 300 miles every weekday was driving her crazy. Hirshman asked the obvious question: why in the world had she chosen to live 150 miles from her university? The answer, equally obvious, was that she lived right next to her husband’s office.

The serious point here is that one traditional choice tends to lead to another traditional choice. In most marriages, the husband makes more money, so it might seem reasonable to value his career more. But for this woman, that seemingly innocuous choice led to locating near his workplace, spending most of her free time commuting, and, ultimately, housewifery.

I’m not going to bother precisely attributing these quotes, but here is my essential bibliography:

Couples, Gender and Power, Carmen Knudson-Martin

Gender Vertigo, Barbara Risman

Wifework, Susan Maushart

Get to Work, Linda Hirshman

Fiction and memoir:

An Unconventional Family, Sandra Lipsitz Bem

Bitter Bitch, Maria Sveland

We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lionel Shriver

Update: more quotes along the same lines.

Some research suggests that men cope with such uncomfortable inequities by denying that housework matters--or that it even exists! Male respondents to a time use study frequently tried to draw the interviewer into a collusive dismissal of the significance of housework and child care. Male partners were sometimes unaware that cleaners were doing some of the work. All they knew--and all they needed to know--was that it was getting done, and by someone else. One man admitted that he did no cooking, but claimed it was because he wasn’t interested in cooked food. When a wife suggested they might alternate responsibility for bed-making, the husband said he didn’t believe in bed-making. Or male respondents implied that their attitude toward housekeeping was tolerant and their wives’ obsessive. To most men, the suggestion that there might be a right and a wrong way to vacuum or fold a nappy or hang out the laundry inspires eye-rolling, or even disbelief. This is another way in which we betray the very deeply held assumptions that what men accomplish matters, and what women accomplish doesn’t...a women who persists in framing housework as skilled work, and who cares about the results obtained, is routinely stigmatized as too fussy or a control freak.

The persistence of marrying up or hypergamy is one of the most serious obstacles to achieving genuine equality within marriage today.

 

"Glamour" magazine

We all know Glamour as the magazine which led Americans to start misspelling “glamor.” But did you know it also teaches many terrible life lessons?

To the best of my recollection, all of these wonderful quotes were in the same magazine:

“Engagement eyeliner” worked for me!

(“Carrie’s” boyfriend complimented her electric blue eyeliner. Less than 24 hours later, he proposed. Glamour helpfully provides the brand name, but I will not. It sounds dangerous.)

Reading comprehension hint: when you see the word “hardwired”, know that whatever you are reading is probably bullshit.

Like most women, I’m hardwired to try to keep everybody who counts on me at the office and at home happy. There are weeks, not just days, when I feel like I’m cheating on him—with my work.

(Real women never displease others. Also, men need constant supervision. Whatever will he do if you go out and he doesn’t get sex for a whole eight hours? Probably stick forks into the electric outlets and pee on the floor.)

A dumb celebrity hopes her daughter will never develop sexual desire:

Jamie Lynn Spears says: “It’d be dumb to sit here and say that [my daughter] isn’t going to like a boy one day and she isn’t going to have a boyfriend. I’ll just have to handle that the best way that I can. Both her daddy and me will caution her about having sex, and I would hope that she would not want to do that at all, but I have to make sure that I’m realistic too.”

A woman who is boring in bed feels insecure about it:

Maybe everybody is kinkier than you are. So what? Having standard-issue sex in private is my fantasy, and that’s the last I’m going to say about it.

(Kinky sex is something other people do. Not Glamour readers, who are too busy with magic eyeliner and keeping everybody happy.)

Another dumb celebrity (Amanda Seyfried) says she doesn’t want to have sex when she doesn’t want to have sex, and also women never want to have sex:

I’m terrified of being promiscuous. I don’t like the feeling you get when it’s not something that you truly want to do, and I hate the emotional abuse you give yourself afterward.

I will spare you Glamour’s advice on yeast infections, but it is also bad.

Translation and class

“Translators tend to write in a normalized language and are more attentive to what is broadly understood to be the correct or standard form. Translation tends toward the center, to whatever linguistic regularities are conceptualized as belonging to the standard language, irrespective of what native speakers typically say.

No consecutive interpreter would think of adopting lower-class diction to reproduce for the benefit of a visiting foreign dignitary the kind of language spoken to him by a factory hand or collective farm worker. In written prose, too, translators shy away from giving the uncouth truly uncouth forms of language in the target text...Translation always takes the register of naturally written prose up a notch or two.
There is a seemingly inevitable bias against representing forms of language recognized in the source culture as regional, uncouth, ill-educated or taboo by socially matching forms in the target tongue---presumably because doing so risks identifying the translator as a member of just such a marginal or subordinated class. The social dimension of style doesn’t flow easily from tongue to tongue.”

One reason why translations are often less exciting and interesting than original texts. Let's all just learn all the languages instead.

You probably won’t get AIDS

"If you look at the data we have right now, it is very clear what is driving the AIDS epidemic in the United States. It's not sustained heterosexual transmission, it is not IV drug use, it's basically in African American men who have sex with men. HIV in heterosexuals persists only because you have inflow either from other countries, from high prevalence areas for example, or from other risk groups such as intravenous drug users or men who have sex with men."

Trust no one (especially criminals)

Depressing but sounds like good advice from Sam Harris on how to survive an encounter with a criminal.

You should also learn to trust your feelings of apprehension about other people—revising them only slowly and with good reason. This may seem like a very depressing piece of advice. It is. Most of us don’t want to see the world this way, and we take great pains to avoid being rude or appearing racist, suspicious, etc. But violent predators invariably play upon this commitment to civility. The truth is that most of us are very good at detecting ulterior motives and malevolence in others. We must learn to trust these intuitions. To read the reports of rapes, murders, kidnappings and other violent crimes is to continually discover how easily good people can be manipulated by bad ones.

You are under no obligation, for instance, to give a stranger who has rung your doorbell, or decided to stand unusually close to you on the street, the benefit of the doubt. If a man who makes you uncomfortable steps onto an elevator with you, step off. If a man approaches you while you are sitting in your car and something about him doesn’t seem right, you don’t need to roll down your window and have a conversation. Victims of crime often sense that something is wrong in the first moments of encountering their attackers but feel too socially inhibited to create the necessary distance and escape.

However bad your options may appear in the moment, complying with the demands of a person who is seeking to control your movements is a terrible idea. Yes, there are criminals whose only goal is to steal your property. But anyone who attempts to control you—by moving you to another room, putting you in a car, tying you up—probably intends to kill you (or worse). And you must understand in advance that your natural reaction to this situation—to freeze, to comply with instructions—will be the wrong one.

If someone puts a gun to your head and demands your purse or wallet, hand it over immediately and run. Don’t worry about being shot in the back: If your attacker is going to shoot you for running, he was going to shoot you if you stayed in place, and at point-blank range. By running, you make yourself harder to kill. Any attempt to move you, even by a few feet—backing you off a sidewalk and into an alley, forcing you behind a row of bushes—is unacceptable and should mobilize all your physical and emotional resources.

Captain, captive

Captain, captive
Of your fate
Fast asleep
On the bed you made
Dream away
Wake up late

–Samuel Menashe

Scientology

Scientology is not as popular as the celebrity blogs would lead you to believe.

This NYT Motherlode article is all about class (though it doesn't admit it).

Finding good food while traveling

If you travel for business, or if you travel at all, often the first problem confronting you in a new place is that of how to find something decent to eat. We have all spent uncounted hours in our hometowns experimenting with restaurants, reading reviews, chatting about food, comparing grocery stores. All of that experience is torn away from you in a new place. Yet, if done right, the food can be one of the best parts of your trip–even in places which might seem like culinary wastelands (Anchorage). And I will tell you how.

First of all, you will probably want to pick up a map of the area. If you’re serious about food, you can’t afford to stay in the area in immediate sight of your hotel. Yes, you may have to do a bit of walking. Hotel maps can be useful – but ignore the restaurant ads on them. You don’t want to subsidize those places’ advertising budgets.

Instead, you’re going to Yelp. Look for the highest-rated places within a two-mile or so radius. But be careful how you interpret those results.

1) Consider the prevailing cuisine of the region. You want a dinner that will be congruent with the rest of your experience of the location. The best sushi place in Columbus, Ohio, is not likely to give you either the Columbus experience or good sushi.

2) Consider the ancillary cuisines of the region. Is there a concentration of immigrants from a particular area? Does the area have a cultural connection with another?

For instance, when you go to Alaska, you think of fish and reindeer sausage. But consider the fact that many Alaskans vacation in Hawaii. Perhaps there might be good Polynesian food. Or maybe the Russian influence has left behind restaurants as well as Orthodox churches. It’s worth doing a bit of Wikipediaing to find out your prospects.

3) Don’t bother reading bad Yelp reviews. Bad reviews are almost never about food. Bad reviews are written by people with personal grudges – they had to wait too long, pay too much, or the staff didn’t show them sufficient deference. Bad reviews can be hilarious, but they are irrelevant to your quest for good food. Especially when written by people who didn’t get in at all.

If you want deferential service, go to the most expensive place you can afford. If you want food, the service, and hence the negative reviews, are largely beside the point. Also, if a review complains about not being given enough food, remember it was, statistically speaking, most likely written by a fat person.   

4) Do not be too intimidated by reviews claiming it is hard to get into a restaurant or bar. Many places are crowded in the first few weeks after opening, or if you show up, as so many Yelp reviewers seem to do, with five other people and no reservation on a Saturday night. This does not apply to you, the savvy business traveler. You are most likely alone or with only one other person, and you will prefer to dine early on weekday nights.

5) Read the good reviews. The sheer number of good reviews is irrelevant; what you’re really looking for are good reviews written by people who are interested in food. Which are not as common as you might think.

One Yelp review reads in full:
“The salmon soup was good. It was cold and refreshing.”

And this review is averaged in, along with all the others, to give a star rating.

So read the good reviews with discrimination. Does she love the place because it reminds her of the Cheesecake Factory back home? Does he give you details of the food, or details of the decor? Does he even bother to tell you what he ate, or is he focused on how often his water glass was refilled?
   
Once you find several good reviews by people who are like you, who will ideally give specific recommendations about what to eat and what to avoid, you’re set. If you do find a really good place, consider ordering a large dinner and eating the leftovers for lunch the next day. Otherwise, eating well during a business lunch is going to be hard, since you most likely won’t have time to research or range far afield.

If we are lucky, maybe my friend will contribute a post on how to find good food in small towns.


UPDATE:

I forgot to say that, if you are traveling with a group, avoid at all costs the restaurant your meeting planner has picked. Remember that her job is not to find great or even good food, but to find a restaurant which will be acceptable to the least common denominator, preferably within a few blocks from the hotel (because many of us are so used to driving that walking more than six blocks feels like a death march to the gulag.) Plus your meeting planner is probably a middle-aged woman with unadventurous tastes and not familiar with the area. I ignored this advice and had the only bad meal of my time in Honolulu.