Quotulatiousness

June 30, 2013

Confessions of a reformed Manic Pixie Dream Girl

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:10

In the New Statesman, Laurie Penny talks about the MPDG stereotype and her recovery from it:

Like scabies and syphilis, Manic Pixie Dream Girls were with us long before they were accurately named. It was the critic Nathan Rabin who coined the term in a review of the film Elizabethtown, explaining that the character of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl “exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures”. She pops up everywhere these days, in films and comics and novels and television, fascinating lonely geek dudes with her magical joie-de-vivre and boring the hell out of anybody who likes their women to exist in all four dimensions.

Writing about Doctor Who this week got me thinking about sexism in storytelling, and how we rely on lazy character creation in life just as we do in fiction. The Doctor has become the ultimate soulful brooding hero in need of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl to save him from the vortex of self-pity usually brought on by the death, disappearance or alternate-universe-abandonment of the last girl. We cannot have the Doctor brooding. A planet might explode somewhere, or he might decide to use his powers for evil, or his bow-tie might need adjusting. The companions of the past three years, since the most recent series reboot, have been the ultimate in lazy sexist tropification, any attempt at actually creating interesting female characters replaced by… That Girl.

[. . .]

So here’s what I’ve learned, in 26 years of reading books and kissing boys. Firstly, averagely pretty white women in their late teens and twenties are not the biggest, most profoundly unsolvable mystery in the universe. Trust me. I should know. Those of us with an ounce of lust for life are almost universally less interesting than we will be in our thirties and forties. The one abiding secret about us is that we’re not fantasies, and we weren’t made to save you: we’re real people, with flaws and cracked personalities and big dreams and digestive tracts. It’s no actual mystery, but it remains a fact that the half of the human race with a tendency to daydream about a submissive, exploitable, transcendent ideal of the other seems perversely unwilling to discover.

Secondly, you can spend your whole life being a story that happens to somebody else. You can twist and cram and shave down every aspect of your personality that doesn’t quite fit into the story boys have grown up expecting, but eventually, one day, you’ll wake up and want something else, and you’ll have to choose.

Because the other thing about stories is that they end. The book closes, and you’re left with yourself, a grown fucking woman with no more pieces of cultural detritus from which to construct a personality. I tried and failed to be a character in a story somebody else had written for me. What concerns me now is the creation of new narratives, the opening of space in the collective imagination for women who have not been permitted such space before, for women who don’t exist to please, to delight, to attract men, for women who have more on our minds. Writing is a different kind of magic, and everyone knows what happens to women who do their own magic — but it’s a risk you have to take.

June 20, 2013

The world map of modern slavery

Filed under: China, Law, Liberty, Russia — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 14:05

In The Atlantic, Olga Khazan talks about the countries that appear on this US State Department map of human trafficking:

World Map of Slavery, 2013

China, Russia, and Uzbekistan have been named among the worst offenders when it comes to human trafficking, according to a State Department report released Wednesday, joining Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Sudan, and Zimbabwe on the bottom “tier” of the U.S. human trafficking rank.

Their lower designation means the U.S. may sanction those countries with measures like cancelling non-humanitarian and military assistance, ending exchange visits for government officials, and voting against any IMF or World Bank loans.

China, Russia, and Uzbekistan had previously been on the “Tier 2 Watch List,” a middling designation for countries that show little progress in making strides in preventing forced labor. Because they had been on the “Watch List” for four years, the State Department was obligated to either promote or downgrade them.

In China, the one-child policy and a cultural preference for male children perpetuates the trafficking of brides and prostitutes.

“During the year, Chinese sex trafficking victims were reported on all of the inhabited continents,” the report found. “Traffickers recruited girls and young women, often from rural areas of China, using a combination of fraudulent job offers, imposition of large travel fees, and threats of physical or financial harm, to obtain and maintain their service in prostitution.”

However, the State Department also singled out the country’s epidemic of forced labor, in which both internal and external migrants are conscripted to work in coal mines or factories without pay, as well as its continued use of re-education hard labor camps for political dissidents.

However, it’s also worth keeping in mind that there are two common definitions of human trafficking in use, one of which is an outrage to common decency while the other is an attempt to conflate sex work with slavery:

1) The transport of unwilling people (usually women, but of course can at times be either men or children) into forced prostitution. This is of course illegal everywhere: it’s repeated rape just as a very start. It is also vile and we should indeed be doing everything possible to stamp it out.

2) The illegal movement of willing people across borders to enter the sex trade. Strange as it may seem there really are people who desire to be prostitutes. People would, other things being equal, similarly like to be in a country where they get a lot of money for their trade rather than very little. Given these two we wouldn’t be surprised if people from poorer countries, who wish to be in the sex trade, will move from those poorer countries to richer countries. And such is the system of immigration laws that many of them will be unable to do this legally: just as with so many who wish to enter other trades and professions in the rich world. You can make your own mind up about the morality of this but it is obviously entirely different from definition 1).

Addressing India’s rape problem

Filed under: India, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

In Reason, Shikha Dalmia looks at the reality of life in India for far too many women:

… the Indian government has been following the feminist script for nearly half a century with little effect. It would serve the cause of gender equity far better if it simply did its job and provided safe streets, timely justice, and other basic public goods for everyone. The absence of such amenities that are taken for granted in the West is arguably the strongest pillar of patriarchy in India.

India’s official rape statistics — which registered 1.8 rapes per 100,000 people in 2010, compared with the United States’ 27.3 — might suggest that India has no rape problem. But everyone knows that rape is vastly underreported in traditional cultures where women fear stigmatizing themselves and dishonoring their families, especially since the chances of justice are remote. Whatever the correct statistics, they can’t capture a crucial qualitative difference in the rape problem between India and in, say, America.

Setting aside incest and sexual assault by friends and relatives that unfortunately happens in all cultures, in America, a lot of rape is “date rape” that occurs when women exercise their social and sexual freedom. The police rarely have an opportunity to intervene in such situations and the only way of combating this problem is by addressing male attitudes. By contrast, in India far more rapes originate in public settings — parks, streets, and buses — as women go about their daily business. This is eminently preventable, which is why, unlike in America, every new episode triggers fresh protests in India.

The very lack of public safety that allows rape also strengthens patriarchy. For starters, it limits women’s employment options. It is too dangerous for them to take jobs that require evening shifts or long commutes. Some companies offer rides home to women who work late, but this makes women more expensive to hire. Single rural women rarely move to cities, where the bulk of job growth is occurring, as men can. All of this undermines women’s ability to maximize their earning potential and gain financial independence.

Above all, it forces women to rely on their patriarchal families for protection, opening them up to all kinds of restrictions. A woman who has to wait for her father or brother to pick her up from college or work — rather than taking a cab or a bus — can’t just meet whomever she wants, wherever she wants, whenever she wants. Everything she does becomes subject to time, place, and manner restrictions by her family and its moral code.

[. . .]

Feminism will never get rid of patriarchy without first getting rid of the need for it. Patriarchy’s staying power stems not just from backward belief systems but a gritty ground reality. The lack of basic law-and-order means that women have to rely on male physical strength for security making men socially more valuable and more dangerous. This makes men, as feminists point out, both protectors and rapists. Electing female politicians and demanding more gender equality won’t cut this Gordian knot—only good governance that promotes public safety for all will.

June 15, 2013

Moral panic of the month – sex trafficking

Filed under: Europe, Law — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:18

In Forbes, Tim Worstall explains why so many stories about sex workers being smuggled across borders and forced to work as prostitutes may be based on imaginary numbers:

The full paper is here. And I’m afraid that it’s a horrible mess. And not just because they rather gloss over the two meanings of “trafficking” that are used in the debate.

Those two meanings are as follows:

1) The transport of unwilling people (usually women, but of course can at times be either men or children) into forced prostitution. This is of course illegal everywhere: it’s repeated rape just as a very start. It is also vile and we should indeed be doing everything possible to stamp it out.

2) The illegal movement of willing people across borders to enter the sex trade. Strange as it may seem there really are people who desire to be prostitutes. People would, other things being equal, similarly like to be in a country where they get a lot of money for their trade rather than very little. Given these two we wouldn’t be surprised if people from poorer countries, who wish to be in the sex trade, will move from those poorer countries to richer countries. And such is the system of immigration laws that many of them will be unable to do this legally: just as with so many who wish to enter other trades and professions in the rich world. You can make your own mind up about the morality of this but it is obviously entirely different from definition 1).

There is a third possible meaning which is used by some campaigners which is any foreigner at all who is a sex worker. This is obviously a ridiculous one: especially in the EU given the free movement of labour.

We might paraphrase the two definitions as the “sex slavery” definition and the “illegal immigrant” one. I would certainly argue that the first one is a moral crime crying out to the very heavens for vengeance while the second leaves me with no more than a heartfelt “Meh”.

He also links to a Guardian story about a sex trafficking investigation in Britain from a few years ago called Operation Pentameter:

The UK’s biggest ever investigation of sex trafficking failed to find a single person who had forced anybody into prostitution in spite of hundreds of raids on sex workers in a six-month campaign by government departments, specialist agencies and every police force in the country.

The failure has been disclosed by a Guardian investigation which also suggests that the scale of and nature of sex trafficking into the UK has been exaggerated by politicians and media.

Current and former ministers have claimed that thousands of women have been imported into the UK and forced to work as sex slaves, but most of these statements were either based on distortions of quoted sources or fabrications without any source at all.

We could simply assume that there’s something wildly different about the UK. Something that means that there are, to a reasonable approximation, zero sex slaves in the UK while 30% or more of sex workers in Denmark, Sweden and Germany are all sex slaves. This isn’t an argument that’s likely to pass the smell test to be honest. The explanation is instead that the two different meanings of “trafficked” are being used here.

June 11, 2013

As if a pregnant woman doesn’t have enough things to worry about…

Filed under: Health, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

…there’s an entire industry devoted to the cause of warning pregnant women about possible, potential, unknown dangers all around them:

The only other real option is to take the position held by Joan Wolf, author of the excellent study about contemporary risk thinking, Is Breast Best? Taking on the Breastfeeding Experts and the New High Stakes of Motherhood. Wolf has explored how, in the US, pregnant women are frequently told: everything is potentially risky; you have control over fetal development, but we do not know how; actions that you think are innocuous are probably harmful, but we cannot tell you which ones; things you do or do not do might be more problematic at certain times in pregnancy, but we do not know when; what you do or do not do can produce disastrous or moderately negative effects, but we cannot predict either one.

Wolf’s assessment is that the only rational response is not a call for more information of this kind; rather, it is to recognise that there is far too much of it already. While science can tell us important things, what we need to come to terms with is the inevitability of risk, the fact that people do risky things all day long (in that there are outcomes of actions over which we do not have total control), but this is just life. It is not a problem, and we do not need to be ‘informed’ or ‘empowered’ about it.

The other sort of argument made by the critics of the RCOG report was that instead of ‘raising awareness’ of the theoretical risks of everyday chemicals, more advice and information should be given to pregnant women about ‘real harm’. Hence, instead of just focusing on making it clear to the RCOG what they should do with their report, the critics have engaged in a sort of ‘my risk is bigger than your risk’ competition. In the discussion so far, the risks we apparently really understand and should be even more informed about have included all the old chestnuts: coffee, alcohol, cigarettes and stress.

Indeed, an interesting ‘my risk is bigger than your risk’ theme is developing when it comes to ‘stress’. Here, the entirely legitimate point that it is not reasonable to worry people and cause anxiety for no reason has morphed into a claim about the apparently overwhelming evidence that ‘stress’ endangers the developing fetus. In reality, as the US sociologist Betsy Armstrong has explained, the ‘science’ supporting the idea that stress in pregnancy is a problem is far more contentious than such objections assume. The wider public discourse about this issue demands robust criticism not endorsement because of its scaremongering qualities. In any case, given that a pregnant woman can no more avoid ‘stress’ in her life than a she can a pre-prepared ham sandwich, it is worth asking quite where this line of argument takes us.

May 29, 2013

Why “every homicide perp on death row who is reasonably attractive has groupies”

Filed under: Law, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 14:37

In the Los Angeles Times, Charlotte Allen examines the phenomenon of women who fall in love with murderers, terrorists, and other assorted villains:

This, of course, goes against all current conventional wisdom about the kind of men that women want: sensitive, egalitarian, feminism-friendly guys who split the housework 50-50 (or better yet, do it all so their wives can “lean in” at work).

In fact, as any evolutionary psychologist can tell you, women, like other female primates, crave dominant “alpha” males who demonstrate the strength to protect them and pass on survival traits to their children. And in a society such as ours, where the phrase “head of the household” is anathema and men are forbidden to dominate in socially beneficial ways, women will seek out assertive, self-confident men whose displays of power aren’t so socially beneficial.

It’s not surprising, then, that every homicide perp on death row who is reasonably attractive has groupies. Consider the handsome (and widely philandering) Scott Peterson, sentenced in 2005 for killing his wife and unborn son and throwing their remains into San Francisco Bay. The day he checked into San Quentin, he received three dozen phone calls from smitten women, including an 18-year-old who wanted to become the second Mrs. Peterson.

It’s probably a good idea, if you are religious, to say some prayers for Dzhokhar, who is likely to need them. It’s probably a bad idea to feel sorry for him. The worst idea of all, though, is to imagine that the obsessive female attention, adulation and pity lavished on a mass-murder suspect such as Dzhokhar is a cultural anomaly.

May 23, 2013

Pornography isn’t the problem – you are the problem

Filed under: Health, Media, Science — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:43

In Psychology Today, David J. Ley explains that there’s no such thing as pornography addiction or sexual addiction:

Porn is not addictive. Sex is not addictive. The ideas of porn and sex addiction are pop psychology concepts that seem to make sense, but have no legitimate scientific basis. For decades, these concepts have flourished in America, but have consistently been rejected by medicine and mental health. The media and American society have accepted that sex and porn are addictive, because it seems intuitively true — we all feel like sometimes, we might do something stupid or self-destructive, when sex is involved. But, this false belief is dangerous, and ultimately not helpful. Because when people buy into the belief that porn is addictive, it changes the argument, and all of a sudden, it seems like it is porn and sex that are the problems. Porn addiction becomes a label, and seems to be an explanation, when in fact, it is just meaningless words and platitudes that distract from the real issue. But sex and porn aren’t the problems. You are.

People do have a strong response to video pornography. Internet porn is very good at triggering male sexuality. The economic forces of the open market have driven modern internet porn to be very, very effective at triggering male sexual buttons, to get them aroused. But women actually have a stronger physiological response to porn than men and based upon this research, women should be more addicted to pornography than men. But the overwhelming majority of the stories we hear about are men. Why is this? Because one part of this issue is an attack on aspects of male sexuality, including masturbation and use of pornography, behaviors which society fears and doesn’t understand.

Porn can affect people, but it does not take them over or override their values. If someone watches porn showing something they find distasteful, it has no impact on their behavior or desires. But, if someone watches porn depicting acts that they, the watcher, are neutral about, then it does make it slightly more likely that they express interest in trying that act themselves. Take anal sex for instance. If a porn viewer finds it disgusting, watching anal pornography isn’t going to change that. But, if they are neutral on it, then watching anal porn probably will slightly increase the chance that I would be willing to at least give it a try. But, there is the crux of the issue — the people who gravitate towards unhealthy, violent porn, are people who already have a disposition towards violence. So — the problem is not in the porn, but in those people. Regulating porn access really is going to have no impact on these people as they can (and do) find far more violent and graphic images in mainstream Hollywood films like Saw.

Here’s some often-ignored empirical science about porn — as societies have increased their access to porn, rates of sex crimes, including exhibitionism, rape and child abuse, have gone down. […] Across the world, and in America, as men have increased ability to view Internet erotica, sex crimes go down. Believe it or not — porn is good for society. This is correlational data, but it is extremely robust, repeated research. But, it is not a message that many people want to hear. Individuals may not like porn, but our society loves it, and benefits from it.

H/T to Radley Balko for the link.

May 21, 2013

Conflating rules for “sexual harassment” with “sexual assault”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:17

Wendy Kaminer on the issues of sexual harassment rules on campus:

What’s the difference between an unwelcome request for a date and rape? Pursuant to the Obama administration’s definition of sexual harassment, this is not an easy question to answer.

You have to read the administration’s latest diktat to colleges and universities to believe it. In a joint letter to the University of Montana (intended as ‘a blueprint’ for campus administrators nationwide), the Department of Justice (DoJ) and the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) define sexual harassment as ‘unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature’, verbal or non-verbal, including ‘unwelcome sexual advances or acts of sexual assault’. Conduct (verbal or non-verbal) need not be ‘objectively offensive’ to constitute harassment, the letter warns, ignoring federal court rulings on harassment, as well as common sense. If a student feels harassed, she may be harassed, regardless of the reasonableness of her feelings, and school administrators may be legally required to discipline her ‘harasser’.

They are also required to promulgate detailed policies parroting the DoJ/OCR definition of harassment, as well as procedures for reporting and prosecuting alleged offences: ‘Federal government mandates unconstitutional speech codes at college and universities nationwide’, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) accurately declares:

‘Among the forms of expression now punishable on America’s campuses by order of the federal government are:

  • Any expression related to sexual topics that offends any person. This leaves a wide range of expressive activity — a campus performance of The Vagina Monologues, a presentation on safe-sex practices, a debate about sexual morality, a discussion of gay marriage, or a classroom lecture on Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita — subject to discipline.
  • Any sexually themed joke overheard by any person who finds that joke offensive for any reason.
  • Any request for dates or any flirtation that is not welcomed by the recipient of such a request or flirtation.

There is likely no student on any campus anywhere who is not guilty of at least one of these “offences”. Any attempt to enforce this rule evenhandedly and comprehensively will be impossible.’

FIRE is right to note that fair, inclusive enforcement of this mindlessly broad policy is impossible. But I doubt it’s intended to be fairly enforced. I doubt federal officials want or expect it to be used against sex educators, advocates of reproductive choice, anti-porn feminists or gay-rights advocates if their speech of a sexual nature is ‘unwelcome’ by religious conservatives.

May 18, 2013

The “most balanced gender studies textbook available”

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

Cathy Young has some concerns with a popular gender studies textbook:

A few months ago, a post with a shocking claim about misogyny in America began to circulate on Tumblr, the social media site popular with older teens and young adults. It featured a scanned book page section stating that, according to “recent survey data,” when junior high school students in the Midwest were asked what they would do if they woke up “transformed into the opposite sex,” the girls showed mixed emotions but the boys’ reaction was straightforward: “‘Kill myself’ was the most common answer when they contemplated the possibility of life as a girl.” The original poster — whose comment was, “Wow” —identified the source as her “Sex & Gender college textbook,” The Gendered Society by Michael Kimmel.

The post quickly caught on with Tumblr’s radical feminist contingent: in less than three months, it was reblogged or “liked” by over 33,000 users. Some appended their own comments, such as, “Yeah, tell me again how misogyny ‘isn’t real‘ and men and boys and actually ‘like,’ ‘love‘ and ‘respect the female sex‘? This is how deep misogynistic propaganda runs… As Germaine Greer said, ‘Women have no idea how much men hate them.'”

Yet, as it turns out, the claim reveals less about men and misogyny than it does about gender studies and academic feminism.

I was sufficiently intrigued to check out Kimmel’s reference: a 1984 book called The Longest War: Sex Differences in Perspective by psychologists Carol Tavris and Carole Wade. The publication date was the first tipoff that the study’s description in the excerpt was not entirely accurate: the “recent” data had to be about thirty years old. Still, did American teenage boys in the early 1980s really hold such a dismal view of being female?

When I obtained a copy of The Longest War, I was shocked to discover that the claim was not even out of context: it seemed to have no basis at all, other than one comment among examples of negative reactions from younger boys (the survey included third- through twelfth-grade students, not just those in junior high). Published in 1983 by the Institute for Equality in Education, the study had some real fodder for feminist arguments: girls generally felt they would be better off as males while boys generally saw the switch as a disadvantage, envisioning more social restrictions and fewer career options (many responses seemed based on stereotypes — e.g., husband-hunting as a girl’s main training for adulthood — than 1980s reality). But that’s not nearly as dramatic as “I’d rather kill myself than be a girl.”

Update, 19 May: Welcome to all the visitors from Reddit. I think this is the first time one of my posts got linked from Reddit (and several thousand of you have dropped by in the last 24 hours). To mark the occasion, I’ve added a Reddit link to the Sharing options on all posts.

May 17, 2013

Zoe Fairbairns’ Benefits

Filed under: Books, Britain, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:55

Neil Davenport talks about the recent re-publication of Zoe Fairbairns’ dystopian feminist novel, Benefits:

Written in the febrile political atmosphere of late-1970s Britain, Benefits is about a future state’s sinister attempts to control women’s fertility, and to encourage responsible parenting, through the introduction of a universal ‘wages for housework’ benefit.

Although rarely out of print since it first appeared in 1979, Benefits has recently been re-issued, with a new introduction by Fairbairns, for the e-reader age. It is now being marketed as a political attack on ‘anti-welfarist Tories’, yet as Fairbairns points out, anyone who views Benefits as simplistically ‘anti-Thatcherite’ is missing its key point: that welfare benefits can become a weapon of social engineering and control. On top of critiquing aspects of welfarism, Benefits lays into radical feminism’s self-defeating slogan, ‘The personal is political’, while passionately championing women’s liberation and equal rights — feminism’s one-time aims.

Like many dystopian novels, Benefits is rooted in the fears, the panics and the politics of the period it was written in. So although it is set in the dying days of the twentieth century, it rather charmingly echoes the late 1970s: all tower-block grime; politico slogans on walls; squats; communes; poorly designed radical pamphlets. It also speaks to the more alarmist rhetoric of that period of the mid- to late 1970s. From ecologists predicting Europe-wide famine to the New Right’s panic over single mothers to respectable racists complaining about ‘coloured immigration’, the political feeling in Benefits is unmistakably mid-Seventies.

[. . .]

Equally prescient in Benefits is the way its fictional state believes that ‘poor parenting’ can have a corrosive impact on the individual and society; this has become an unquestioned orthodoxy today.

Many dystopian novels hint at a future in which pornography has become staple entertainment. Benefits does that, too, and this also speaks to the reality of twenty-first-century life, especially to today’s increasing separation of sex from genuine intimacy (it talks about ‘all that sex and no babies’).

In Fairbairns’ nightmare vision, women who want to receive benefits must undergo ‘a programme of education for motherhood’. This sounds suspiciously like parenting classes, which are increasingly common today, especially for poorer families, or what David Cameron calls ‘chaotic families’. Also, in imagining a future in which parenting is redefined as a ‘national service’, Benefits hints at today’s creeping nationalisation of individual families. The novel even features a supra-sovereign state called Europea, where British politicians willingly offload their own parliamentary responsibilities. Sound familiar?

May 11, 2013

Britain’s latest wave of snobbery

Filed under: Britain, Business, Food — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:05

Brendan O’Neill examines the worldview of the supermarket-hater:

A malady is spreading through the leafier bits of Britain. It’s causing fevered thinking among its sufferers, who can’t even walk down a high street without experiencing distressing symptoms: cold sweats, anger, an urge to shout rude things at dumb shoppers.

Their ailment? Tescophobia, an irrational loathing of Britain’s biggest supermarket.

A certain tranche of the middle classes hates nothing more than the sight of a Tesco store. Except perhaps the sight of Tesco patrons, whom anti-Tesco author Andrew Simms snobbishly describes as always looking “listless and depressed… slumping from place to place”.

It is nothing more than thinly veiled class disdain for the plebs:

But there’s a reason Tesco and other supermarkets have been a roaring hit: it’s because they’ve made people’s lives, especially women’s lives, so much easier.

Remember when we had to traipse from shop to shop almost every day of the week just to have enough grub and stuff to live on? I have vivid memories of going shopping with my mum, accompanied by my five brothers, back when supermarkets weren’t as common as they are now.

We’d go to the butchers, the bakers, the greengrocers, the corner shop, packing our wares into tatty bags and dragging them home, before having to do the same thing again in a couple of days’ time because the foodstuffs sold by small shops didn’t tend to last long. The arrival of the supermarket revolutionised all that.

Suddenly, everything you might need or want was under one roof. A family larder could be stocked in the space of an hour, where once it was a never-ending task. How much of mankind’s, or rather womankind’s, time has been freed up for other pursuits by the spread of Tesco?

May 10, 2013

Colby Cosh on “gendercide”

Filed under: Cancon, Health, Law, Liberty, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:53

Despite the federal government’s efforts to keep this debate from happening, we apparently are going to be having a big national debate about abortion. (For those following from outside the borders of Former Soviet Canuckistan, Canada doesn’t actually have any abortion law on the books at the moment, and Stephen Harper’s government of “bitter-clinging, right-wing, Bible-thumping, fundamentalist Christian” Conservatives is desperate not to have to bring one in.) Colby Cosh explains why the efforts by some back-bench MPs to use “gendercide” as a way to force the government’s hand won’t work:

Here, then, is my contribution to the big conversation.

(1) “Gendercide” is incoherent religious militancy in cheap drag. (Editors certainly shouldn’t be taking sides by putting it in headlines as if it were an actual thing.)

(2) However you feel about personal eugenics, which is an accurate name for “mothers choosing babies that are likely to be better in some respect they deem relevant”, the Era Of It is arriving now and will not be wished away.

(3) Sex-selective abortion perpetrated for reasons of religious superstition is, upon all evidence, a marginal phenomenon in this country, probably a fading one, and quite likely to be an inherently self-correcting one. It makes a shabby excuse for blowing up the political truce our country clings to when it comes to the topic of abortion. (It seems remotely possible that Stephen Harper has perceived this and concurs with it.)

(4) In particular, no statute is likely to be effective against sex selection by mothers. We had one, you know, and it actually made a hypothetical exception for parents at risk of X-linked gene disease. A Liberal government devoted to “reproductive choice” criminalized sex-selective embryo implantation by means of the Assisted Human Reproduction Act; a Supreme Court found that law offensive to the Constitution; and a Conservative government closed the agency that was supposed to enforce it because it had accomplished the sum total of jack squat ever.

(5) People who wish to police sex-selective abortion had better figure out what exactly kinds they don’t like. And why. And what other reasons for a woman to have an abortion don’t cut their brand of mustard. And whether they really want their wives, girlfriends, daughters or nieces to end up as a future Case 6 running afoul of the law.

(6) Fellow-travellers of Mark Warawa who think he makes an awesome test case for parliamentary purity should consider looking for one that, pardon the metaphor, doesn’t have quite so many oopsies in its DNA.

May 3, 2013

Wikipedia forced to re-examine categorization

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

In the New York Review of Books, James Gleick recounts the tale of Wikipedia’s “American women novelists” category:

There is consternation at Wikipedia over the discovery that hundreds of novelists who happen to be female were being systematically removed from the category “American novelists” and assigned to the category “American women novelists.” Amanda Filipacchi, whom I will call an American novelist despite her having been born in Paris, set off a furor with an opinion piece on the New York Times website last week. Browsing on Wikipedia, she had suddenly noticed that women were vanishing from “American novelists” — starting, it seemed, in alphabetical order.

[. . .]

At Wikipedia, all hell broke loose. (Let’s pause here to flag the phrase, “at Wikipedia.” Wikipedia is a notional place only. It is not situated in a sleek California corporate campus, like Google in Mountain View or Apple in Cupertino, but instead distributed across cyberspace.)

These kinds of debates are usually bruited and argued on Wikipedia’s “Talk” pages, which are set aside for discussion by editors. After the Filipacchi article, Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s cofounder, created a new entry on his personal Talk page under the bold-face heading, “WTF?” Wales does not give orders or directly cause things to happen. He is more of a noninterventionist god. He is often referred to simply as Founder (capital F) or Jimbo. Anyway, he wrote:

    My first instinct is that surely these stories are wrong in some important way. Can someone update me on where I can read the community conversation about this? Did it happen? How did it happen?

Heated argument broke out on a page set aside for discussion of changes to Wikipedia categories. Categories are a big deal. They are an important way to group articles; some people use them to navigate or browse. Categories provide structure for a web of knowledge — not a tree, because a category can have multiple parents, as well as multiple children. Wikipedia lists 4,325 Container categories, from “Accordionists by nationality” to “Zoos in the United States.” There are Disambiguation categories, Eponymous categories — named, for example, after railway lines like Norway’s Flåm Line, or after robots (there are two: Optimus Prime and R2-D2) — and at least 11,000 Hidden categories, meant for administration and therefore invisible to readers. A typical hidden category is “Wikipedia:Categories for discussion,” containing thousands of pages of logged discussions about the suitabilities of various categories. Meta enough for you?

May 2, 2013

ESR on the true meaning of moral panics

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:03

Eric S. Raymond on the difference between the claimed meaning and the actual, underlying reason for various moral panic incidents:

In my experience, moral panics are almost never about what they claim to be about. I am just (barely) old enough to remember the tail end of the period (around 1965) when conservative panic about drugs and rock music was actually rooted in a not very-thinly-veiled fear of the corrupting influence of non-whites on pure American children. In retrospect it’s easy to understand as a reaction against the gradual breakdown of both legally enforced and de-facto racial segregation in the U.S.

But moral panics are by no means a monopoly of cultural conservatives. These days the most virulent and bogus examples are as likely to arrive from the self-described “left” as the “right”. When they do, they’re just as likely to be about something other than the ostensible subject.

In Lies, Damn Lies, and Rape Statistics a college newspaper does a little digging through U.S. crime statistics and finds that the trendy “anti-rape” movement is exaggerating the rape risk of college women by two full orders of magnitude — as it concludes, “the ‘one in four’ chant should be abandoned and replaced with the more appropriate, albeit less catchy, 1 in 400.”

What can explain such gross distortion? I’ve looked into this issue myself and discovered a lot of flim-flam. Still, even the the best-case figures I arrived at apparently overestimated the actual risk on campuses by a factor of 50. (Barbarian zones — like, say, inner-city Detroit — might be a different story.)

If the rape panic runs parallel to the the now nearly forgotten drugs-and-rock panics of the 1950s and 1960s (and many others like them, before and after) we should expect it to actually be be rooted in an attempt to assert control of or cultural dominance over some threatening Other. And there is indeed evidence that points in that direction.

April 29, 2013

QotD: The critical importance of accurate audience assessment

Filed under: Media, Quotations, Sports — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:25

My favorite example of handling the loyal audience/new audience divide badly is when NBC decided they wanted to get more women to watch the Olympics, and thus large swaths of their prime-time Olympics coverage were devoted to documentary-style features about the hardships that the athletes had overcome — a seemingly endless cavalcade of relatives with cancer, or car accidents, or brutal injuries, or their dogs getting sick, or the Starbucks barista getting their drink order wrong — suddenly, every athlete’s life was like a country-western song. And the usual audience for the Olympics asked, with greater levels of irritation, “Hey, weren’t we supposed to be watching some actual athletic competitions? Wasn’t some skier supposed to be falling down a mountain by now?”

Jim Geraghty, “Spreading Our Ideas in the Era of Drug-Dealer Journalism”, National Review, 2013-04-29

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