Quotulatiousness

November 21, 2013

The cloistered Munk

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:12

Leslie Loftis attended the recent Munk Debate at Roy Thompson Hall and had a few observations:

The organizers had no intention of keeping on the actual topic. The End of Men resolution was just a flashy disguise for a chat about the rise of women. That is probably why no one objected when Rosin changed the premise in the middle of the discussion. It wasn’t really a question of whether men were obsolete — of course they weren’t, Rosin conceded about midway in the discussion. By default, the question became “Are they in decline because the rules favor women?” an obvious and hardly debatable notion. In fact, a post-debate critique I heard both in the lobby and saw on Twitter, the panelists agreed about too much. […]

Prior to the event, I met a lovely older lady in the lobby. A Toronto resident and Munk Debates member, her favorite debate was the one with Kissinger on China. Impressed I’d flown so far (I came in from Texas), she told me these were usually great debates. I told her not to get her hopes up for this one, that Paglia was the only one on stage with any intellectual credibility. This would not be a clash of gifted minds that she had seen in the past. Two hours later, she waited for me as we left the auditorium and asked with wide eyes, “How do they expect me to buy that women are rising when they can’t even stay on topic? What was that?”

She was particularly taken with what Camille Paglia had to say:

Paglia was more diplomatic than I expected. I had thought that the exacting and scathing Paglia of the recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education — Scholars in Bondage — would show up and relentlessly pound Rosin on her lack of knowledge or evidence.

Rosin’s book is full of anecdotal evidence. Like Betty Friedan who wrote The Feminine Mystique based on a questionnaire of a few hundred Smith College graduates, Rosin’s The End of Men is based off interviews and a smattering of uncritically examined data.

Aside, however, from an early statement that “the only men who gain voice in your book are those willing to confess their victim status” (Rosin freely admits she didn’t include the non-victim men because she didn’t think there were enough of them) and a later comment that to believe in the end of men is naive, Paglia didn’t go on the attack. Instead, she was almost pleading with the audience to understand.

She has the advantage of age and the perspective that comes with it. The omens are bad, Paglia observed. No one is listening to men. We are using them, mocking them. And Rosin and others might say that men have no choice to submit to the new women’s order — but they have choices. Whether men retreat into themselves or decide to overthrow the women’s order, it ends badly for women. And the hollowed out shell of modern feminist thought will provide no defense. We change all the rules that we can to favor women, but some rules won’t yield, no matter our wishes.

November 20, 2013

The psychology of female aggression

Filed under: Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:53

Christopher Taylor linked to this New York Times article by John Tierney about a recent issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society which was devoted to the study of female aggression:

The existence of female competition may seem obvious to anyone who has been in a high-school cafeteria or a singles bar, but analyzing it has been difficult because it tends be more subtle and indirect (and a lot less violent) than the male variety. Now that researchers have been looking more closely, they say that this “intrasexual competition” is the most important factor explaining the pressures that young women feel to meet standards of sexual conduct and physical appearance.

[…]

Stigmatizing female promiscuity — a.k.a. slut-shaming — has often been blamed on men, who have a Darwinian incentive to discourage their spouses from straying. But they also have a Darwinian incentive to encourage other women to be promiscuous. Dr. Vaillancourt said the experiment and other research suggest the stigma is enforced mainly by women.

“Sex is coveted by men,” she said. “Accordingly, women limit access as a way of maintaining advantage in the negotiation of this resource. Women who make sex too readily available compromise the power-holding position of the group, which is why many women are particularly intolerant of women who are, or seem to be, promiscuous.”

Indirect aggression can take a psychological toll on women who are ostracized or feel pressured to meet impossible standards, like the vogue of thin bodies in many modern societies. Studies have shown that women’s ideal body shape is to be thinner than average — and thinner than what men consider the ideal shape to be. This pressure is frequently blamed on the ultrathin female role models featured in magazines and on television, but Christopher J. Ferguson and other researchers say that it’s mainly the result of competition with their peers, not media images.

November 15, 2013

Nadine Strossen is against banning “dangerous” ideas

Filed under: Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:25

Brendan O’Neill talks to former ACLU president and ardent feminist Nadine Strossen about censorship and the demand to ban “rape porn”:

New York City doesn’t only have better buildings, bridges and burgers than London — it also has better feminists.

As British feminists agitate tooth-and-nail for the banning, or at least modesty-bagging, of lads’ mags, rape porn, Page 3 and pop vids, the NYC-based feminist and former president of the American Civil Liberties Union, Nadine Strossen, tells me she wouldn’t support the censoring or censure or even stigmatisation of any misogynistic material, including the most warped, woman-objectifying porn.

‘As a feminist, I vehemently disagree with the idea that women are sex objects, that women should be raped, that women should be discriminated against or treated unfavourably in any way’, she tells me in her offices at the New York Law School in downtown Manhattan, where she is professor of law. ‘And yet, to paraphrase Voltaire, I would defend to the death your right to say any of those things, and to say them explicitly, and to say them using sexual language.’

But what about the claim that porn, especially the disturbing rape-fantasy stuff, gives some men a skewed impression of women, implanting in their possibly dim-witted heads the idea that women are objects existing solely to satisfy male lust?

‘Well, if the “harm” [she asks for those quote marks] of a certain form of speech is that the idea it is promoting is one of which society disapproves, then that is the exact antithesis of a justification for censoring it’, she says. So far from dodging the cri de Coeur of our censorious age — which is that speech and film and porn and all the rest of it can affect individuals’ view of the world — Strossen turns it into an argument against censorship. ‘Any expression can potentially affect people’s attitudes. That is why speech is so important to protect — precisely because it can influence ideas’, she says.

November 10, 2013

Alison Bechdel on the revived popularity of the “Bechdel Test”

Filed under: Books, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

You’d think, with all the social advances in equality for women over the last few decades that our media would more directly reflect that equality … but you’d be wrong. Quite some time ago, Alison Bechdel outlined a quick test you could use to determine whether a book or movie treated women as real people or just as foils for males:

The Bechdel test is used to identify gender bias in fiction. A work passes the test if it features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. Commentators have noted that a great proportion of contemporary works fail to pass this threshold of representing women. The test was originally conceived for evaluating films, but has since been applied to other media.

Pretty low hurdle, yet a vast number of books and movies fail to meet even this minimal standard. Recently a Swedish theatre chain decided to use the Bechdel Test to evaluate the movies they were showing (with Bechdel’s blessing), which has revived interest in the test itself. Bechdel talks about this on her blog:

I said sure, that sounds awesome, go for it.

So they did, and the Guardian ran an article about it on Wednesday. Which prompted a flurry of emails from radio programs who wanted to talk to me. I spoke to Marco Werman at PRI’s The World, and got to join in his conversation with Ellen Tejle, the director of the participating cinema in Stockholm. I also did a background interview with the NPR program Here and Now.

Yesterday I got a lot of other requests from other media outlets but I’m ignoring them. I feel bad about this. There seems to be something fundamentally wrong about not seizing every possible chance for publicity — if not for myself, then at least for the brave Swedish cinema consortium, not to mention the cause of women everywhere.

But inevitably in these interviews I say simplistic things, or find myself defending absurd accusations — like that the formal application of the Test by a movie theater is somehow censorious.

I have always felt ambivalent about how the Test got attached to my name and went viral. (This ancient comic strip I did in 1985 received a second life on the internet when film students started talking about it in the 2000′s.) But in recent years I’ve been trying to embrace the phenomenon. After all, the Test is about something I have dedicated my career to: the representation of women who are subjects and not objects. And I’m glad mainstream culture is starting to catch up to where lesbian-feminism was 30 years ago. But I just can’t seem to rise to the occasion of talking about this fundamental principle over and over again, as if it’s somehow new, or open to debate. Fortunately, a younger generation of women is taking up the tiresome chore. Anita Sarkeesian, in her Feminist Frequencies videos, is a most eloquent spokesperson.

October 30, 2013

Fertility and denial – East Asia’s demographic shift

Filed under: Asia, Japan — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:57

In sp!ked, Stuart Derbyshire looks at the unprecedented drop in total fertility rate in most of East Asia:

Fertility rates in East Asia have fallen catastrophically since the early 1970s and are now the lowest in the world. In all parts of Asia, the total fertility rate (TFR) has fallen by half or more in the past 35 years. In Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore, the TFR hovers between 1.0-1.3. For a population to replace itself, the TFR needs to be above 2.1. Thus, if these trends in fertility are not substantially reversed, the population of Asia will rapidly shrink as the continent heads into extinction. How did this happen?

Most commentators are inclined to blame the falling rate of TFR on the influence of modernity on women. Speaking in 1983, for example, Singapore’s then prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, infamously remarked that educating women and bringing them into the workforce had undermined their more traditional role as mothers: ‘It is too late for us to reverse our policies… Our women will not stand for it. And anyway, they have already become too important a factor in the economy.’

[…]

Falling fertility in Asia involves not just the rejection of motherhood but a broader rejection of intimacy and responsibility of many kinds. About two fifths to one third of women in Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan are choosing not to marry. Increasing numbers are not even bothering to date. When I ask my students why this is, they shrug and talk about the hassle and expense, as was highlighted in a recent article. Children are expensive and they are also demanding, intrusive and may not turn out how you desire. Similarly, relationships are messy and difficult, with the ever-present possibility of disappointment. It is easier to live at home, hang out with friends and avoid intimate contact.

The problem in Asia is not modernity but rather the postmodern self-conscious denial of human agency and subjectivity. Young Asian men and women deny that they can be independent and deny that they can forge meaningful intimate personal relationships and so, instead, they accept the relative comforts of living with parents and the relative ease of being single. This denial of independence, intimacy and responsibility is a problem across the world and is bound up in a disregard for human agency typical of mainstream commentary on the environment, terrorism, economics and most other scientific and social issues. The impact in Asia may be more devastating because of the relatively sudden displacement of traditional Asian values without any broader narrative of what modern Asia is. Unlike America and Europe, Asia does not have a clear continental story, no obvious heroic past, unifying welfare state or pan-Asian vision that might blunt a turn towards the denial of the self.

October 26, 2013

Another theory on gender wage gaps

Filed under: Business, Economics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:34

A guest-post at the Freakonomics blog by John List and Uri Gneezy looks at an experiment they conducted to test their theory about the gender wage gap:

Scholars have long theorized about the reasons why women haven’t made faster progress in breaking through the glass ceiling. Personally, we think that much of it boils down to this: men and women have different preferences for competitiveness, and at least part of the wage gaps we see are a result of men and women responding differently to incentives.

Being experimentalists, we understood that without actual evidence, this was just a conjecture. Determined to test our idea in the field we launched a large-scale field experiment on Craigslist where we posted ads for an administrative assistant gig we needed to fill. The experiment was conducted with Jeff Flory and Andreas Leibbrandt as coauthors. We received responses from nearly 7,000 interested job seekers from cities all over the U.S.

After a job seeker touched base with us, we gave them more details on the way they’d be compensated. Then we asked them to provide some basic information if they wanted to be considered for the position. Half the job seekers were told that the job paid a flat $15 per hour. The other half were told they would be paid $12 an hour but they would compete with a co-worker for a $6 per hour bonus (so that both ads would pay workers an average of $15 per hour).

What’d we find? Women were 70% less likely than men to go after the job if it had the competitive pay scale.

The blog post is called “A Unified Theory of Why Women Earn Less”, but I don’t think it actually qualifies — if the experiment was repeated in different markets, it might well explain some of the difference, but I suspect that women’s choices of jobs that provide greater flexibility in hours and the specific fields that draw more female than male workers are probably greater influences on the overall employment and compensation picture.

October 24, 2013

Explaining Japanese culture – “Freud would have a field day”

Filed under: Japan, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:08

It’s commonplace to say “Japan is weird” (I’ve said it myself many times), but even with the constant repetition, I didn’t realize just how weird Japan has become (somewhat NSFW … better not watch this at the office):

Published on 22 Oct 2013

Japan is a country that is dying — literally. Japan has more people over the age of 65 and the smallest number of people under the age of 15 in the world. It has the fastest negative population growth in the world, and that’s because hardly anyone is having babies. In these difficult times, the Japanese are putting marriage and families on the back burner and seeking recreational love and affection as a form of cheap escape with no strings attached. We sent Ryan Duffy to investigate this phenomenon, which led him to Tokyo’s cuddle cafes and Yakuza-sponsored prostitution rings.

October 22, 2013

Dahlia Lithwick on smelling like a teenage boy for a week

Filed under: Humour, Randomness — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:21

It’s not just a scent … it’s a lifestyle:

When I first told my husband that I was planning on wearing only Axe men’s products for an entire week, his answer was a foreshadowing of things to come: “You’re planning on wearing that stuff to bed every night for a week? Man. Axe really does work. It’s only been a few minutes and look, you’re already single again … ”

[…]

Despairing of any kind of social response that wasn’t either threats of a formal legal separation from my husband or subtle nostalgia from mothers of former Axe users, I decided to trot out the stuff at the last night of Slate’s annual retreat in September. Having sprayed it liberally all over my body on the night of the big promlike party, I watched my roommate — Slate’s Dear Prudie — actually flatten herself up against a hotel room wall and slide uneasily down the hallway, in the manner of that poor cat being chased by Pepé Le Pew. Almost immediately upon my arrival at the festivities I was accosted by three female Slate colleagues who spontaneously observed that I smelled completely amazing. I was briefly thrilled at the enthusiastic response, until I realized that I didn’t really want my someday teenaged sons to ever be quite that amazing-smelling to women in their 30s and 40s. One colleague said it brought her right back to whatever it is that happened in the back of a truck when she was herself 14. The silence was slightly less awkward than after the pants-spraying story the week before.

October 1, 2013

QotD: The Sisters of Perpetual Grievance

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

I am convinced that if feminism is to have a positive future, it must reinvent itself as a gender equity movement advocating for both sexes and against all sexism. Focusing solely on female disadvantage was perfectly understandable when, whatever paternalistic benefits women might have enjoyed and whatever burdens men might have suffered, women were the ones lacking the basic rights of adult citizens. But today, there is simply no moral or rational justification for any fair-minded feminist to ignore (for instance) the more lenient treatment of female offenders in the justice system or the anti-father biases in family courts. The concept of feminism as equality of the sexes is increasingly on a collision course with feminism as a movement championing women.

In its present form — as a secular cult that should call itself the Sisters of Perpetual Grievance — feminism is far more a part of the problem than part of the solution. It clings to women’s wrongs and turns women’s rights into narcissistic entitlement. It is far too easily prone to bashing men while painting women as insultingly helpless and downplaying their human capacity for cruelty. (The notion that abuse and dominance would not exist without patriarchy is not only naively utopian but utterly sexist.) It is also deeply irrelevant to most women, only five percent of whom consider themselves “strong feminists” even though 82 percent believe that men and women should be social, political, and economic equals.

Of course the patriarchy — at least here in the West — is dead. Whether feminism deserves to survive it is up to the feminists.

Cathy Young, “Is The Patriarchy Dead?”, Reason, 2013-09-29

September 16, 2013

“This is Britain. And in Britain you can wear what you want.”

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:14

In the Telegraph, Dan Hodges defends the right of women to wear whatever they want:

The debate about “The Veil”, is neither necessary, nor is it complex. In fact, it’s very, very simple. This is Britain. And in Britain you can wear what you want.

Obviously there are practical exceptions. I can’t turn up to my local swimming pool and jump in with my clothes on, for example. When I tweeted about this earlier today a number of people asked: what about people going through airport security? And in that instance obviously veils should be removed. In the same way that when I pass through security, my shoes occasionally have to be removed. But that doesn’t alter the basic fact that if I still want to wander round in my pair of battered Adidas Samba, I’m free to do so. And any women who wishes to wear a veil is free to do that too.

“You can’t wear hoodies in shopping centres, or crash helmets in banks”, some people have pointed out. Fair enough. When the nation is trembling from an onslaught of Burka-clad steaming gangs I may reassess my view. But until then the rule remains; we are a free society, and we are free to wear the clothing of our choice.

I understand those who express concern about the cultural implications of veils. Indeed, I share them. My wife and I regularly drive through Stamford Hill to see relatives. When we do, we invariably reflect on the local Hasidic Jewish community, and how great it is that London is so rich culturally. But it’s noticeable that all the women, (and indeed the men), are essentially dressed in the same way. That’s great to look at from the outside, and reflects a strong sense of heritage and identity. Yet it also reflects conformity. And conformity is a bad thing. It stifles personal identity, and by extension freedom.

But from my point of view, that’s just tough. If I were to advocate passing a law that said Hasidic Jewish women should be banned from going out unless they’re dressed in bright, vibrant colours, I’d rightly be regarded as having lost my mind. And it’s no different to advocating we should start punishing women who decide to go out in a veil.

September 2, 2013

This month in moral panic watch – “rape porn”

Filed under: Britain, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:24

British PM David Cameron has decided that it’s the duty of his government to crack down on internet pornography. In particular, the British government will be attempting to stamp out violent pornography, aka “rape porn”. This may not be his best idea ever:

Lobby organisations like “End Violence Against Women” and sensationalist news rags like the Daily Mail repeatedly claim that watching violent pornography increases sexual abuse and rape by men.

However, the scientific evidence has stubbornly refused to play along with this view:

U.S. Commission on Obscenity and Pornography (1970) found no evidence of a causal link between pornography and rape

“Pornography and rape: theory and practice? Evidence from crime data in four countries where pornography is easily available” (1991) B Kutchinsky

Examined what happened to the rape statistics in four countries (USA, Denmark, West Germany and Sweden) during periods where the availability of violent pornography went from extreme scarcity to relative abundance.

Quoting the report: “The results showed that in none of the countries did rape increase more than nonsexual violent crimes. This finding in itself would seem sufficient to discard the hypothesis that pornography causes rape“

There’s also the problem that pornography is actually quite popular — with both male and female users — over 40% of all internet users view pornography voluntarily. In fact, large numbers of women admit to enjoying rape fantasies:

Whether the puritans or the feminists like it or not, it is a fact that many women enjoy rape fantasies as explained by this female journalist.

Erotic literature such as Fifty Shades of Grey featuring bondage, spanking, hair pulling, fisting and pinwheeling generated sales of over £10M in six months, to a predominantly female audience.

On a more scientific level, a 1988 study by Pelletier and Herold found that over half of their female respondents had fantasies of forced sex.

Nobody (quite rightly) suggests that women who expose themselves to this sort of “violent porn” literature, or who engage in sexual fantasies of rape are more likely to go out and put themselves into situations where they will be raped.

People clearly understand that there is a world of difference between enjoying rape as a sexual fantasy and the violent, painful reality of actual rape.

The same reasoning must logically apply to men who enjoy rape fantasy and rape porn. There is a world of difference between enjoying rape as a sexual fantasy and the violent reality of actual raping another human being.

To assert that women can enjoy rape fantasy, porn and violent BDSM literature without harm because they understand the difference between fantasy and reality, but men do not is nothing more than misandry.

Slate on the gender wage gap

Filed under: Business, Economics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:56

Hanna Rosin debunks the meme that “women only get paid 77 cents for every dollar earned by men doing the same job”:

The official Bureau of Labor Department statistics show that the median earnings of full-time female workers is 77 percent of the median earnings of full-time male workers. But that is very different than “77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men.” The latter gives the impression that a man and a woman standing next to each other doing the same job for the same number of hours get paid different salaries. That’s not at all the case. “Full time” officially means 35 hours, but men work more hours than women. That’s the first problem: We could be comparing men working 40 hours to women working 35.

How to get a more accurate measure? First, instead of comparing annual wages, start by comparing average weekly wages. This is considered a slightly more accurate measure because it eliminates variables like time off during the year or annual bonuses (and yes, men get higher bonuses, but let’s shelve that for a moment in our quest for a pure wage gap number). By this measure, women earn 81 percent of what men earn, although it varies widely by race. African-American women, for example, earn 94 percent of what African-American men earn in a typical week. Then, when you restrict the comparison to men and women working 40 hours a week, the gap narrows to 87 percent.

[…]

Goldin and Lawrence Katz have done about as close to an apples-to-apples comparison of men’s and women’s wages as exists. (They talk about it here in a Freakonomics discussion.) They tracked male and female MBAs graduating from the University of Chicago from 1990 to 2006. First they controlled for previous job experience, GPA, chosen profession, business-school course and job title. Right out of school, they found only a tiny differential in salary between men and women, which might be because of a little bit of lingering discrimination or because women are worse at negotiating starting salaries. But 10 to 15 years later, the gap widens to 40 percent, almost all of which is due to career interruptions and fewer hours. The gap is even wider for women business school graduates who marry very high earners. (Note: Never marry a rich man).

I’ve posted similar articles on this topic before: August, 2012, June 2012, and July 2010.

August 25, 2013

QotD: Persian and Greek views of abduction

Filed under: Books, Greece, History, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Up to this point, there had been abductions only from each other, but after this the Hellenes were largely responsible for offenses. For they began to make war on Asia before their enemies made war on Europe. Now the Persians think that the abduction of women is certainly an act only unjust men would perform, and yet once they have been abducted, it is senseless to make a fuss over seeking vengeance. It is the way of sensible people to have no concern for abducted women; it is quite obvious that the women would not have been abducted if they had not been compliant.

Herodotus, “Book 1”, The Histories, c.450-420 BCE

August 2, 2013

First it was bulemia, then anorexia, now it might be “orthorexia”

Filed under: Food, Health, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:59

It’s nice to know that people in the richest culture in world history can still manage to make themselves utterly miserable by obsessing about things:

Picture this: After spending the summer indulging in ice cream and cocktails, you decide to embrace healthy eating. You cut out refined sugar and packaged food-the kind of nutrient-free junk on any doctor’s warning list. Wheat and dairy are the next to go.

People compliment you on your weight loss; your energy levels rival those of Jillian Michaels. But soon your innocent health kick takes a strange turn. Certain foods – even fruits and veggies – begin to seem dangerous, even unclean.

Within months, you’ve whittled your list of “acceptable” foods down to almost nothing.

This unhealthy fixation with eating healthfully is called “orthorexia nervosa,” a term coined by Dr. Steven Bratman, a Colorado-based physician, in 1997. Since then, orthorexia rates have spiralled in tandem with society’s insistence upon knowing every last detail about its food.

Orthorexia (derived from the Greek “ortho,” which means “correct”) often begins with a noble impulse – to get fit or eat organic – that grows into a self-destructive obsession where fewer and fewer foods meet the orthorexic’s increasingly high standards.

The result is everything from malnutrition to social anxiety as orthorexics avoid restaurants and their friends’ kitchens. At its most extreme, orthorexia can even act as a gateway to anorexia, says Merryl Bear, director of Toronto’s National Eating Disorder Information Centre.

“The gateway possibility is very real because the principles are so similar,” she explains. “Like anorexics, orthorexics prize being pure and in control above all else.” (Orthorexia is currently classified as a form of disordered eating, not a clinical eating disorder, in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association.)

Since orthorexics value purity, not weight loss, eating becomes a moral act. “A day filled with wheat grass juice, tofu and quinoa biscuits may come to feel as holy as one spent serving the destitute and homeless,” writes Bratman in his book Health Food Junkies: Overcoming the Obsession With Healthful Eating (2004).

H/T to Nicholas Packwood for the link.

Update: Colby Cosh was quick to send me a link to a piece he did on this topic more than a decade ago:

Since becoming a physician, Dr. Bratman has seen many people like his own young self — and some who are worse off — flirting with disaster by depriving their body of vital nutrients. The fads of his youth, far from disappearing, have survived and grown in number: there are even “Breatharians” who believe food to be wholly unnecessary. A few years ago Dr. Bratman coined the phrase “orthorexia” — merging Greek ortho-, meaning righteous, with the stem familiar from “anorexia” — to describe a pathological attachment to dietary theories.

“I never intended the term to be a serious diagnostic entity; you wouldn’t go to a hospital with ‘orthorexia,'” he says. “It’s informal, like ‘workaholic.'” The idea has nonetheless stirred controversy: a Yale University physician sniffed in one critique that “We’ve never had anybody come to our clinic with orthorexia.” Yet fanatical attachment to dietary theories can indeed be hazardous. Macrobiotic diets caused a string of deaths in the 1960s and had to be modified; “metabolic” treatments for cancer, usually involving fasting, occasionally turn disastrous; and vegetarians and vegans must monitor themselves for certain vitamin and mineral deficiencies. In September, an Armenian couple in Surrey, England, were convicted of starving their nine-month-old daughter to death on a “Fruitarian” fruit-only diet.

“People become orthorexic by falling in love with a dietary theory,” says Dr. Bratman. “They run across an idea like macrobiotics or raw-foodism, and embrace it like a religion. We’re not talking about common-sense rules of healthy eating, but theories which reject whole classes of foods and make spontaneous eating [impossible]…There’s a personality type, an obsessive type of person who is prone to embrace them in a quasi-religious way.” This can result in an enticing sense of moral superiority, sometimes coupled with the euphoria associated with partial starvation. But orthorexia also brings crippling feelings of unworthiness after the inevitable slip-ups, when the true believer succumbs to a cookie or a pizza. “There are similarities with anorexia,” he says. “An important one is that anorexics feel like they’ve done something evil when they gain weight, something morally wrong rather than merely unhealthy.” Similarly, the sure sign of an orthorexic is that he associates unhealthy eating with a sense of sin.

July 3, 2013

US public opinion on abortion has been stable for decades

Filed under: Health, Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:31

Nick Gillespie says the stability of beliefs on the topic of abortion is one of the most striking things about the whole debate:

So despite decades of polling data showing that large majorities of Americans believe abortion should be legal under some circumstances, you could be excused for thinking there are only two possible positions when it comes to terminating pregnancies: either all abortions should be allowed, or none should be.

Yet the most striking thing about attitudes toward abortion is how stable they’ve been over the 40 years since Roe v. Wade. Gallup has been tracking public sentiment on the matter since 1975, when 22 percent of Americans agreed that abortion should be illegal under any circumstances and 21 percent believed it should be legal under any circumstances. Those numbers are now 18 percent and 28 percent respectively. In 1975 54 percent believed abortion “should be legal only under certain circumstances.” The number is now 52 percent and has never gone above 61 percent or below 48 percent. Over the past 15 years, the number of Americans calling themselves “pro-life” and “pro-choice” has narrowed to a few points, with 48 percent identifying as pro-choice and 44 percent as pro-life (in 2011, those figures were basically flipped).

Official political stances on abortion are absolutely Manichaean, however, with the Republican Party and most of its leading figures stressing that life begins at conception, a belief that would outlaw virtually all abortions except those necessary to protect the health of the mother. The Democratic Party platform — and most of its highest-profile members, including President Barack Obama — “strongly and unequivocally supports” abortion at any time and for any reason during a pregnancy.

Most Americans reject such categorical, extreme views and instead offer conditional support for abortion depending on when it’s performed. Gallup found that while 61 percent of Americans think abortion for should mostly be legal in the first three months of pregnancy and 27 percent felt it should be legal in the second trimester, just 14 percent agreed it should be allowed on demand in the final three months.

Unlike their political representatives, then, Americans hold a far more nuanced view of abortion, and one that comports with the reality of the procedure. Of the roughly 1 million abortions performed a year in America, about 90 percent take place within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy and only 1 percent take place after 20 weeks (in fact, over the past decade, there has been a marked trend toward earlier abortions). That helps explain why 62 percent of Texans supported S.B. 5, the bill that Wendy Davis filibustered.

Update: You went full Satanist. Never go full Satanist:

Not that invoking Satan isn’t serious, but the response on Twitter included some great humor. A few of my favorites:


The Blaze noted:

Obviously, it is much more likely that the abortion supporters were chanting “Hail Satan!” to mock pro-lifers rather than actually hailing Lucifer, but anything is possible.

Ed Morrissey responded:

I’m certain that the intent was mockery. The overall effect of chanting “Hail Satan”? That’s another story, but one of those effects is surely clarity.

Right. Having been to Texas, I can assure you that the defense of “We were mocking Christians by invoking Satan,” might actually make things worse.

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