Quotulatiousness

June 14, 2011

The SlutWalk double standard

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:41

Abigail Ross-Jackson wonders why SlutWalkers would want to “live in a world where women can wear what they want but men are never allowed to woo or whistle?”

Why should men be demonised for wolf-whistling or for attempting to chat up a woman whom they think is attractive? The Slutwalkers’ demand of the right not to be judged is profoundly backward and anti-social. Several of the banners on Saturday’s protest seemed to suggest that men are more like animals than rational human beings. One said: ‘Why am I dressed like a slut? Why are you thinking like a rapist?’ This is worrying, because it points to another serious problem with the Slutwalk phenomenon: its embrace of the widening definition of ‘harassment’. While most people would agree that stalking, groping and so on is unacceptable, amounting to harassment, the idea that looking, thinking, flirting and chatting someone up is also no longer acceptable, and that it amounts to ‘thinking like a rapist’, shows that everyday human interaction is now increasingly being labelled ‘harassment’. What next: no eye contact without written permission?

One woman who took part in the London Slutwalk later tweeted: ‘Thirty-seven people have taken my photo so far on #slutwalk. Just one sought consent first. (Of those I challenged, it’d not occurred to them to ask.)’ This just about sums up the preciousness, and the social aloofness, of Slutwalkers: they seem to imagine that even on a public demonstration at which they have dressed in the most attention-grabbing way, it is somehow a violation of their person for someone to take a photo. Feminists are warping the word ‘consent’, taking it from the realm of rape and applying it to such everyday actions as chatting and taking photos in public. But if we had to seek consent for every form of human interplay, nothing would ever happen; it would be a boring world indeed.

[. . .]

Many millions of us negotiate our relationships, sexual or otherwise, on a day-to-day basis; we don’t need contracts or written consent or any clearly established boundaries. In trying to formalise human relationships, the Slutwalkers’ attitude is actually quite arrogant: they seem to want to reshape the public sphere, and even parts of the private sphere, according to their own tastes and desires, with no regard for the rest of us. One Slutwalker said: ‘I wear what I want. Because I dress this way it doesn’t mean I’m a bad person. I get upset if a girl gets dressed up for male attention.’ This really gets to the heart of the double-standard in the Slutwalk phenomenon: they can wear what they like because they are apparently empowered and strong women, but if other women chose to dress in order to attract attention then they should be pitied and looked down upon. Meanwhile men can’t look, pass judgement or flirt for fear of being branded sexist and vile, while women apparently exist in a bubble where they are elevated and protected from the prying eyes and judgements of society.

June 6, 2011

SlutWalk arrives in Britain

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:32

Brendan O’Neill is not impressed with the SlutWalkers, calling them “the most anti-social sluts on earth”:

The most annoying thing about the SlutWalk phenomenon, which arrived in Britain at the weekend, is not its knowingly provocative name or even its attempt to make a serious political project of the frazzled Nineties pop trend of Girl Power (“I wear sexy stuff, therefore I am powerful!”). No, it is its inherently anti-social nature. These are the most anti-social sluts on earth. Where I grew up, the catty phrase “she enjoys the company of men” was often used as a euphemism for “slut”, but you could never say that of those taking part in SlutWalk. On the contrary, many of the SlutWalkers seem to see interaction with men — especially cocky, swaggering men — as a dangerous and risky thing, best avoided.

Of course, no one — except maybe Peter Sutcliffe — disagrees with SlutWalk’s spectacularly uncontroversial message that women should be free to dress as they please without getting raped. But it is quite different to expect to be able to dress as you please without attracting *any* attention from blokes. Yet that is what some SlutWalkers seem to be demanding: effectively the right to dress provocatively without ever being looked at, commented on, whistled at or spoken to by a member of the opposite sex. Unless such interaction is clearly solicited, of course.

[. . .]

The high-minded feminists who make up SlutWalk’s supporters and cheerleaders seem to want to opt out of this everyday social interaction, to dress as sluttishly as they like while also being surrounded by some magic forcefield, legally enforced perhaps, which protects them from any unwanted male gaze or whistle. They are prudes disguised as sluts, self-styled victims pretending to be vixens, astonishingly anti-social creatures who imagine it is possible to parade through society dressed outrageously without any member of that society ever making a comment about or to them. This is the highly individuated politics of fear — fear of men, fear of unplanned-for banter, fear of sexual licence — dressed up as radical feminism. But to update an old saying: no slut is an island.

June 5, 2011

Surely this “cure” is worse than the “disease”?

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Middle East, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:25

John Perry Barlow retweeted a link to this Kuwait Times post:

A female political activist and former parliamentary candidate has recommended the introduction of legislation to legalize the provision of enslaved female concubines for Muslim men in Kuwait in a bid, she says, to protect those men from committing adultery or corruption.

The activist, Salwa Al-Mutairi, suggested apparently seriously in a video broadcast online that she had been informed by some clerics that affluent Muslim men who fear being seduced or tempted into immoral behavior by the beauty of their female servants, or even of those servants ‘casting spells’ on them, would be better to purchase women from an ‘enslaved maid’ agency for sexual purposes.

She suggested that special offices could be set up to provide concubines in the same way as domestic staff recruitment agencies currently provide housemaids.

May 31, 2011

QotD: The paternalistic view of (some) crime victims

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 16:47

. . . there are certain regularities, and one of them is the way in which the victims of men such as Griffiths are described in the Guardian, the house journal of the British intelligentsia and its bureaucratic hangers-on. This is important because it illustrates the way in which a dominant elite — dominant de facto if not always de jure — thinks about social problems.

An article describing the victims of Wright, the Ipswich murderer, was titled THE WOMEN PUT INTO HARM’S WAY BY DRUGS. A similar article about Griffiths’s victims was headed “CROSSBOW CANNIBAL” VICTIMS’ DRUG HABITS MADE THEM VULNERABLE TO VIOLENCE. In other words, these women became prostitutes by force majeure, on the streets not because of choices they had made but because of chemical substances that controlled them without any conscious intervention on their part — no more than if, say, an abyss caused by an earthquake had suddenly opened up and swallowed them.

Now either we are all like this — no different from inanimate objects, which act and react mechanically, as Descartes supposed that dogs and cats did — or we are not. The view that we are brings with it certain difficulties. No one could live as if it were true; no one thinks of himself, or of those about him, as automatons; we are all faced with the need to make conscious decisions, to weigh alternatives in our minds, every waking hour of every day. Human life would be impossible, literally inconceivable, without consciousness and conscious decision making. It is true that certain medical conditions, such as temporal-lobe epilepsy during fits, deprive people of normal consciousness and that they nevertheless continue to behave in a recognizably human way; but if all, or even most, of humanity suffered from those conditions, human life would soon be at an end.

Assuming, then, that not everyone is driven to what he does by his own equivalent of drug addiction, the Guardian must assume that Wright’s and Griffiths’s victims were fundamentally different from you and me. Unlike us, they were not responsible for their actions; they did not make choices; they were not human in the fullest sense. Not only is this a view unlikely to find much favor with women who resemble the victims in some way; it also has potentially the most illiberal consequences. For it would justify us, the full human beings, in depriving such women of liberty. If “their hopeless addiction to heroin, alcohol or crack cocaine led them to sell their bodies in the red light district on the edge of Bradford city centre and made them vulnerable to violence,” as the article tells us, surely we should force our help on them to recover their full humanity, or, if that proves impossible, take them into preventive detention to protect them. They are the sheep, we the shepherds.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Murder Most Academic: A British Ph.D. candidate puts “homicide studies” into practice”, City Journal, 2011-05-31

May 29, 2011

QotD: The Yale fraternity prank and the feminist response

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:55

That wise precept, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me,” has obviously long disappeared among the sisterhood, however. So, too, has the idea of keeping things in perspective. The DKE brothers’ tasteless pledge prank was just that: a tasteless pledge prank. What is the most provocative thing you could say on a college campus today, the thing most likely to outrage the largest and most influential power bloc? “No means yes.” To inflate this incident into a symbol of anything beyond an unfunny effort at transgression on the part of a trivially small (and marginalized) number of individuals requires a willful blindness to the reality of Yale. (The administration doesn’t even recognize fraternities.) The university constantly sends the message that “no means no,” whether through such formal bodies as its Sexual Harassment and Assault Resources and Education Center, its Sexual Harassment Grievance Board, and a 24-hour sexual-assault hotline or through informal channels such as freshman orientation and public pronouncements. Yale president Rick Levin and Yale College dean Mary Miller condemned what they called the pledges’ “appalling language.” “We will confront hateful speech,” they stated in a press release, “in no uncertain terms: No member of our community should engage in such demeaning behavior.” Last week, Yale banned DKE from conducting any activities on campus, including use of campus e-mail, for five years on the ground that it had engaged in “harassment, coercion or intimidation.” Yale also announced that individual frat members had been disciplined for their speech. If the pledge chant represented official thinking on campus, or was in any way sanctioned by the authorities, obviously there would be cause for concern. Clearly, that is not the case.

To the civil rights complainants, however, the DKE incident and Yale’s allegedly inadequate response to it “precludes women from having the same equal opportunity to the Yale education as their male counterparts,” in the words of signatory Hannah Zeavin. (The signatories also want to gut further Yale’s already ludicrously inadequate due-process protections for those accused of sexual assault or harassment.) Yale has one of the greatest library systems in the world; it showers on students top-notch instruction in almost every intellectual discipline; it lavishes students with healthy food, luxurious athletic facilities, and rich venues for artistic expression. All of these educational resources are available on a scrupulously equal basis to both sexes. But according to the Yale 16 and their supporters, female students simply cannot take full advantage of the peerless collection of early twentieth-century German periodicals at Sterling Library, say, or the DNA sequencing labs on Science Hill, because a few frat boys acted tastelessly. Thus the need to go crying to the feds to protect you from the big, bad Yale patriarchy. Time to bring on the smelling salts and the society doctors peddling cures for vapors and neurasthenia.

Heather Mac Donald, “Sisterhood and the SEALs: How can women join special forces when they can’t even handle frat-boy pranks?”, City Journal, 2011-05-26

May 27, 2011

Badminton: moving against the tide

Filed under: Sports — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:38

If they’d wanted to be sure that the sport got more media attention, they sure chose an effective way to do it:

In an attempt to revive flagging interest in women’s badminton as the 2012 London Olympics approach, officials governing the sport have decided that its female athletes need to appear more, how to put it, womanly.

To create a more “attractive presentation,” the Badminton World Federation has decreed that women must wear skirts or dresses to play at the elite level, beginning Wednesday. Many now compete in shorts or tracksuit pants. The dress code would make female players appear more feminine and appealing to fans and corporate sponsors, officials said.

The rule has been roundly criticized as sexist, a hindrance to performance and offensive to Muslim women who play the sport in large numbers in Asian countries. Implementation has already been delayed by a month. Athletes’ representatives said they would seek to have the dress code scrapped, possibly as early as Saturday at a meeting of the world’s badminton-playing nations in Qingdao, China.

“This is a blatant attempt to sexualize women,” said Janice Forsyth, director of the International Centre for Olympic Studies at the University of Western Ontario. “It is amazing. You’d think at some point, somebody would have said: ‘Wait a minute. What are we doing?’ ”

There are about 85 players at my badminton club. Only two women regularly wear skirts to play. Despite this ruling, I doubt that many of our players will choose to switch.

May 19, 2011

Nathalie Rothschild: Britain’s debate on rape “is demeaning to women”

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:10

There is much sound and fury in Britain this week over some remarks by a Tory cabinet minister in a BBC interview. The leader of the opposition has demanded that he be dismissed from the government for suggesting that there are ‘other categories of rape’. Nathalie Rothschild wrote this article in response to a 2010 review of the rape law.

In 2007, Camilla Cavendish of The Times (London) found that rape allegations had jumped by 40 per cent between 2002 and 2005. While this can partly be put down to improved support for women, which facilitates the process of reporting rape, Cavendish argued that a widening official definition of rape also played a big role. Since the Sexual Offences Act 2003 came into force, the definition of rape has been expanded to include oral sex. But there has also been a profound attitude shift with roots in the second-wave feminist idea that heterosexual sex is an inherently violent and degrading act that women subject themselves to against their better judgement.

More than four out of five rape allegations are made against friends or acquaintances. As alcohol and/or drugs were involved in over half those cases, Cavendish puts this down to ‘the culture of binge drinking’. But this avoids the more complex picture. Today, various rape-awareness activists and state feminists are themselves helping to blur the boundaries between sex and rape, encouraging women to regard themselves as violated, abused and traumatised for having gone to bed with a man without thinking it through in minute detail.

The Sexual Offences Act 2003 declared that consent must be ‘active, not passive’; in rape cases, consent is now taken to mean agreement rather than the absence of a refusal. So if a woman goes along with sex, but doesn’t make it explicitly clear that she is actively consenting to it, it can be deemed to be rape. The government has even moved towards ensuring that no agreement can be taken as consent if it is given under the influence of alcohol. As Cavendish pointed out: ‘In our zeal to protect women, are we going to legislate so that a drunken man is accountable for his deeds, but a drunken woman is not? Why do we encourage women to see themselves as victims?’ Absolving women who engage in sexual liaisons — whether drunk or sober — of responsibility for their actions is not liberating; it’s demeaning.

There is no doubt that forcing someone to have sex is a heinous, violent and degrading act and victims of rape should indeed be treated with dignity and respect. But in the name of protecting women, the government is insisting that rape cases be treated differently from all other crimes, while interfering with the course of justice in a way that undermines defendants’ rights and undercuts the power of juries.

May 18, 2011

Neil Davenport: The cognitive dissonance of “SlutWalk”

Filed under: Cancon — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:35

It’s possible to feel a bit sorry for Michael Sanguinetti, whose anachronistic, ill-advised, yet well-intended caution to female students at Osgoode Hall in Toronto triggered the SlutWalk phenomenon. By phrasing his advice in such a retrogressive way, he became the poster boy for all that women perceive as being wrong with the criminal justice system’s approach to solving the problem of violence against women.

However, as Neil Davenport points out, the reaction seems to be directed at the legal system and attitudes of thirty years ago, not the system of today:

The legal system, at least officially, now takes any accusation of sexual assault against women very seriously. It’s ironic that SlutWalk is supposedly exposing the ineffectiveness of a legal system at a time of high-profile sexual assault charges made against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn. More than ever, law enforcers in Britain and the US are likelier to act on an accusation of assault, even if the alleged crime took place years previously.

Faced with such a gap between feminist thinking and how society actually views violence against women, the anger expressed by SlutWalk protestors and cheerleading feminists rings a bit hollow. Although the protestors are aiming to avoid being victimised on the basis of what they wear, their offence taken at one police officer’s comments suggests a willingness to claim the mantle of victimhood for themselves. In this case, women are victims of a patriarchal state that doesn’t take violence against them seriously, even though the evidence suggests that the state is all too keen to monitor and regulate any type of contact between men and women. Feminists used to have many issues on which to express genuine grievance on the unequal treatment of women in society: equal pay and employment rights, abortion rights and so on. But since many of these issues have been resolved, more or less, there seems to be an on-going search for examples of oppression to facilitate the elevation of women to the exalted status of victimhood.

It’s perhaps not helped that the frothy issue of sexual identity is at the heart of the SlutWalk debacle. Some feminists argue that the protestors are feeding into a wider ‘raunch culture’ that is having a debilitating impact on young women. The sexualisation of society, the argument goes, is pressurising more young women to make themselves available to men in order to be accepted. SlutWalk is simply buying into the old madonna/whore duality that was often cited as an example of women’s inferior status in society. Again, though, this ignores how far society’s attitudes towards sex and women have changed. Women’s greater independence in society and the depoliticisation of marriage and the nuclear family have all helped transform attitudes towards women and sex.

Wendy Kaminer: University students are “unlearning liberty”

Filed under: Education, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:18

Wendy Kaminer looks at the disturbing trend in universities that shows female students seeing themselves as helpless and in desperate need of protection from (and active suppression of) the free speech rights of others.

I don’t know the ages of Obama’s OCR appointees, but they seem to be operating under the influence of the repressive disregard for civil liberty that began taking over American campuses nearly 20 years ago. As FIRE president Greg Lukianoff remarks, students have been ‘unlearning liberty’. Concern about social equality and the unexamined belief that it requires legal protections for the feelings of presumptively vulnerable or disadvantaged students who are considered incapable of protecting themselves has generated not just obliviousness to liberty but a palpable hostility to it.

Sad to say, but feminism helped lead the assault on civil liberty and now seems practically subsumed by it. Decades ago, when Catherine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin and their followers began equating pornography with rape (literally) and calling it a civil-rights violation, groups of free-speech feminists fought back, in print, at conferences, and in state legislatures, with some success. We won some battles (and free-speech advocates in general can take solace in the Supreme Court’s recent decision upholding the right to engage in offensive speech on public property and public affairs). But all things considered (notably the generations of students unlearning liberty), we seem to be losing the war, especially among progressives.

This is not simply a loss for liberty on campus and the right to indulge in what’s condemned as verbal harassment or bullying, broadly defined. It’s a loss of political freedom: the theories of censoring offensive or hurtful speech that are used to prosecute alleged student harassers are used to foment opposition to the right to burn a flag or a copy of the Koran or build a Muslim community centre near Ground Zero. The disregard for liberty that the Obama administration displays in its approach to sexual harassment and bullying is consistent with its disregard for liberty, and the presumption of innocence, in the Bush/Obama war on terror. Of course, the restriction of puerile, sexist speech on campus is an inconvenience compared to the indefinite detention or showtrials of people suspected of terrorism, sometimes on the basis of unreviewed or unreviewable evidence. But underlying trivial and tragic deprivations of liberty, the authoritarian impulse is the same.

May 17, 2011

The Freakonomics approach to sexual research

Filed under: Economics, Randomness, Science — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:56

Inspired by the Freakonomics team and their “let the data lead the way” methods, Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam talk about their new book A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World’s Largest Experiment Reveals About Human Desire:

Since we’ve written a book offering new ideas about a very intimate and politicized subject — sexual desire — you may be wondering about our identities and ideologies. We’re both heterosexual males. Ogi is 40 and half-Latino, Sai is 30 and all Indian. We kicked off our controversial research project with one overriding principle partially inspired by Freakonomics: no agenda, no ideology, just follow the data wherever it leads.

And the data led us to some very strange places. Here are some of our findings: heterosexual men like shemale porn, large-penis porn, and fantasies of their wives sleeping with other men. Gay male sexuality is almost identical to straight male sexuality. Women prefer stories to visuals, though women who do prefer visuals tend to have a higher sex drive, exhibit greater social aggression, and are more comfortable taking risks. Men prefer overweight women to underweight women. Heterosexual women like stories about two masculine men sharing their tender side and having sex. Porn featuring women in their 40s, 50s, and 60s is popular among men both young and old. For women, online erotica is often a social enterprise, while for men it’s almost always a solitary one. Most men are wired to be aroused by sexual dominance and most women are wired to be aroused by sexual submission, though a large minority of straight men (and a majority of gay men) prefer the sexually submissive role, and a small minority of women prefer the sexually dominant role.

They then answer a series of questions posed by Freakonomics readers, some of which are quite hostile in tone.

May 10, 2011

Birth control pills = hope for less-masculine men?

Filed under: Health, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:56

Shirley S. Wang looks at some studies of the hormonal influences on a woman’s body when she takes hormonal contraceptives:

The type of man a woman is drawn to is known to change during her monthly cycle — when a woman is fertile, for instance, she might look for a man with more masculine features. Taking the pill or another type of hormonal contraceptive upends this natural dynamic, making less-masculine men seem more attractive, according to a small but growing body of evidence. The findings have led researchers to wonder about the implications for partner choice, relationship quality and even the health of the children produced by these partnerships.

[. . .]

Both men’s and women’s preferences in mates shift when a woman is ovulating, the period when she is fertile, research has shown. Some studies have tracked women’s responses to photos of different men, while other studies have interviewed women about their feelings for men over several weeks. Among the conclusions: When women are ovulating, they tend to be drawn to men with greater facial symmetry and more signals of masculinity, such as muscle tone, a more masculine voice and dominant behaviors. The women also seemed to be particularly attuned to MHC-gene diversity. From an evolutionary perspective, these signals are supposed to indicate that men are more fertile and have better genes to confer to offspring.

Women tend to exhibit subtle cues when they are ovulating, and men tend to find them more attractive at this time. Women try to look more attractive, perhaps by wearing tighter or more revealing clothing, says Martie Haselton, a communications and psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Research on this includes studies in which photos that showed women’s clothing choices at different times of the month were shown to groups of judges. Women also emit chemical signals that they are fertile; researchers have measured various body odors, says Dr. Haselton, who has a paper on men’s ability to detect ovulation coming out in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science.

Such natural preferences get wiped out when the woman is on hormonal birth control, research has shown. Women on the pill no longer experience a greater desire for traditionally masculine men during ovulation. Their preference for partners who carry different immunities than they do also disappears. And men no longer exhibit shifting interest for women based on their menstrual cycle, perhaps because those cues signaling ovulation are no longer present, scientists say.

So, contrary to what the evidence of the bar scene might imply, women who use birth control pills are actually less likely to being picked up by the alpha male, as they each see the other subliminally as less appealing due to the hormonal shifts caused by the pill.

It’s not all good news for beta males, however. While they may have statistically greater chances of forming relationships with women who use hormonal birth control, once the woman stops using the pill, the natural attraction cycle starts again:

Researchers speculate that women with less-masculine partners may become less interested in their partner when they come off birth control, contributing to relationship dissatisfaction. And, if contraceptives are masking women’s natural ability to detect genetic diversity, then the children produced by parents who met when the woman was on the pill may be less genetically healthy, they suggest.

“We don’t have enough research to draw a firm conclusion yet,” says Dr. Haselton. “It is certainly possible that if women don’t experience that little uptick in [desiring] masculinity that they end up choosing less masculine partners,” she says.

That could prompt some women to stray, research suggests. Psychologist Steven Gangestad and his team at the University of New Mexico showed in a 2010 study that women with less-masculine partners reported an increased attraction for other men during their fertile phase. Women partnered with traditionally masculine partners didn’t have such urges, according to the study of 60 couples.

April 18, 2011

The Magic Washing Machine, by Hans Rosling

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Health, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:49

H/T to Jon for the link.

April 11, 2011

Political grandstanding at the expense of Muslim women

Filed under: Europe, France, Law, Liberty, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:22

Josie Appleton points out the logical inconsistencies of the various European “Ban the Burkha” movements:

In spite of the grave crisis of the Euro, the French cabinet will today (19 May[, 2010]) find the time to discuss a draft law banning the wearing of full-face veils in public places. Spain has just slashed public wages and is on the verge of economic collapse, yet the minister of work yesterday made the effort to visit Lleida and voice his support for the mayor’s plan to prohibit full Islamic facewear in the streets. Last month, Belgium’s coalition government had dissolved and there was talk of splitting up the country, yet the parliament managed to unite 136 out of 138 deputies to vote through a law banning the burqa and niqab.

How is it that European leaders, in such difficult times, have invested such energy in the matter of women’s facewear? Why was a Spanish schoolgirl who insisted on wearing a headscarf so fascinating as to draw the media’s attention away from government cuts? Why such detailed discussions on the intricacies of Islamic veils? Newspapers feature pullouts on the different forms of Islamic veil, and commentators explain why the niqab is so much worse than the shayla or the chandor, and indeed how the hijab is fine and even liberating for Muslim women.

The burqa-ban laws were introduced with such displays of speechmaking that anybody would think the fate of these countries hung on this single point of principle. One Belgian deputy admitted that ‘the image of our country abroad is more and more incomprehensible’, but said this near-unanimous vote banning the burqa and niqab rescued ‘an element of pride to be Belgian’. A French commission on the veil said the veil was ‘contrary to the values of the Republic’ and the parliament should make it clear that ‘all of France is saying “no” to the full veil’. The Spanish work minister said this clothing ‘clashes fundamentally with our society and equality between men and women. The values of our society cannot go into retreat.’

Lovely sounding stuff in front of the microphones, to be sure. Good photo ops for ambitious politicians, to a clamour of general approval and risking the loss of very little: there were so relatively few women wearing these articles of clothing — and few of them or their husbands/fathers/brothers likely have the vote anyway.

Now, pay heed to the Law of Unintended Consequences. Many of these women now have a choice: disobey the family head by going out in public without wearing the niqab/hijab/burkha (and risk beatings or even honour-killing), or follow the dictates of the family head and risk being arrested by the gendarmes.

How, exactly, is this going to benefit those poor women?

Update: The ban in France was passed in October and goes into effect today:

The centre-right government, which passed the law in October, has rolled out a public relations campaign to explain the ban and the rules of its application that includes posters, pamphlets and a government-hosted website.

Guidelines spelled out in the pamphlet forbid police from asking women to remove their burqa in the street. They will instead be escorted to a police station and asked to remove the veil there for identification.

[. . .]

In Avignon, Vaucluse, Reuters TV filmed a woman boarding a train wearing a niqab, unchallenged by police.

“It’s not an act of provocation,” said Kenza Drider. “I’m only carrying out my citizens’ rights, I’m not committing a crime … If they [police] ask me for identity papers I’ll show them, no problem.”

France has five million Muslims, but fewer than 2,000 women are believed actually to wear a face veil.

Many Muslim leaders have said they support neither the veil nor the law banning it.

April 7, 2011

Australian Defence Force in the news . . . not in a good way

Filed under: Australia, Bureaucracy, Military, Pacific — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:07

Australia’s military have a reputation for brashness, but competence in combat. The bureaucratic side of the ADF has problems:

The Australian Defence Force found itself in the headlines for the wrong reasons when a young female member of the ADF Academy went public after having sex with a fellow cadet, only to find out later that he used a webcam and Skype to broadcast the assignation to his mates.

Okay, slimy action on the part of the other cadet. Action by the military braintrust should be some form of discipline against the cadet who violated trust, yes? No:

The ADF first tried to equivocate, saying that there was nothing it could use to charge the unconscionable bastard who thought the broadcast was a good idea, only to backpedal when Defence Minister Stephen Smith (who is an impressive sight when in full flight and fury) hit the roof.

Next, the ADF brasshats, in an outbreak of unbelievably insular stupidity, decided to go ahead with a separate charge against the traumatised female, to do with AWOL and drinking. Moreover, these same defence bosses also asked the woman to apologise for going public with her story.

Adding military insult to personal injury, check. The Defence Minister was even more displeased, of course. Richard Chirgwin points out that these actions are merely symptoms of a deeper institutional problem:

Now, I could write a serious and reasoned column about the chronic social problems of the ADF, which has, for as long as I can remember, acted as if it has institutional autism.

Or I could observe that the ADF seems entirely unable to instill even the remotest hint of good sense in how its members behave in the presence of computers. It’s less than a fortnight since we found out that Australian soldiers were posting racist messages about Afghanistan nationals on Facebook.

But I have a different question to ask: why the hell was the ADF permitting unrestricted use of Skype in the Academy?

March 9, 2011

ESR considers “game”

Filed under: Randomness — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:59

I’ve been a fan of Eric S. Raymond for years: he writes very well about things that interest him and we have some large overlap of interests. In this post, he talks about the “game” used by the Pick-Up Artist:

Slang dictionaries never fail to interest me. A few days ago I ran across one serving the PUA (pick-up artist) subculture, a network of men (and a few women) who have attempted to systematize and explain tactics for picking up women. Chasing links from it, I found a network of blogs and sites describing what they call “game”, which has evolved beyond mere tactics into a generative theory of why the tactics work; indeed in some hands (such as the ferociously intelligent PUA blogger Roissy) it seems to be aspiring to the condition of philosophy.

I’ve found reading about this stuff fascinating, if not quite for the usual reasons. I’m what PUAs call a “natural”, a man who figured out much of game on his own and consequently cuts a wide sexual swathe when he cares to. Not quite the same game they’re playing, however. For one thing, I’ve never tried to pick up a woman in a bar in my entire life. College parties when I was a student, yes; SF conventions, neopagan festivals, SCA events, yes; bars, no.

Also, and partly as consequence of where I hang out, it has been quite unusual for me to hit on women with IQs below about 120 — and it may well be the case that I’ve never tried to interest a woman with below-average intelligence. (Er, which is not to say they don’t notice me; even in middle age I get lots of IOIs from waitresses and other female service personnel. Any PUA would tell you this is a predictable and unremarkable consequence of being an alpha male.)

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress