Pick-up Artists of the Patriarchs

Why are these sociopathic displays only found on pick-up trucks? Don't other vehicles have back windows? There is plenty of glass on the back of a Prius, for instance.

Patriarchy has its roots in insecurity. To me it seems to be a strain in our culture that revolves around countering its inner fears by projecting menace and the ability and willingness to degrade and instill fear in others.


How safe would you feel around a dirt ball who thinks this window decal is funny? Who wants to be this guy's girlfriend? Who is desperate enough to bear that clod's child and what chance is there that child would be raised with out absorbing the lesson, as children do when steeped in bluster about bravely cavalier treatment of others, that he too should feel unsafe? Its not a joke unless everyone can laugh about it.

I can not think of an easy way out of a self propagating miasma like that. A solution matched to our sick era would be to stimulate the economy by giving these clueless souls large sums of money that can only be spent on psychotherapy. Cheaper I suppose would be to look into my own heart until I found a way to only feel how lost they are and then address them directly without any of my own fear or even reproach.

We all have a long way to go.

Where did the women go?

This article in NY Times has new numbers on the participation of women in the computing/programming work force. New and much worse than I had realized. The decline of the percentage of women who have jobs in software engineering was a shock to me perhaps because the particular place I work does have closer to 20% women and they work as both senior managers, researchers and engineers. The gains in technical fields by women stand in stark contrast to the decline in the computing related disciplines. WTF is going on? The article presents several theories but no consensus or even much breadth of agreement is reported for any of these ideas:

• The popular perceptions have changed from computer-as-tool in business or science due to the rise of computer gaming which is culturally male.
• The notion that computing is a geeky pursuit has become more wide spread and girls are turned off to that.
• Nursing, for instance, is more attractive in terms of employment prospects.
• In order for women to feel uninhibited about pursuing a computing career, it helps for them to have been raised in a home where both parents had careers in technical fields and computing was a visible activity in the household.

If that last notion held water, my daughter would be in computing instead of ecology...a well adjusted upbringing is a not a predictor of career outcomes but quite the opposite since it is the greatest granter of freedom to choose an interest.
I don't buy any of those explanations. The "build a computer game girls like and you will wind up with women programmers" seems a slight favorite among the researchers queried but it strikes me as terminally male-chauvinist: Just because the gaming route is an attraction to the field for men does not mean it should be for women.
I will buy and review Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming when I my projects at work stop spilling over into my hours at home;)

DOH! its the friggen hours! Its the unbalance of work and home life?

Antepartum Patriarchy

An interesting report in PNAS, also summarized in Nature, is not about the gender biases built into our culture but about the endocrine machinery that influences childbearing outcomes. Those outcomes have such dreadful weight in a society that prizes and promotes fecundity. It is we cultured apes who tend to lay these outcomes heavily at the feet of nurture and behavior. Very briefly, for the ultra lazy who won't even read the Nature explanation: extensive birth and marriage records, from a period and place where no modern reproductive choices or mores held any sway, have shown that females with a fraternal [that is male] twin were only getting married and if married only having kids at about 2/3 the rate of the women who had no in-utero testosterone exposure. The researchers went to some length to eliminate the likeliest sources that could skew such statistics. That is just an observation. What to make of it?

One can raise a lot of eyebrows and ire by offering mechanistic biology, dumb and billions of years amassing its complexities, as an explanation for any consequential difference in mating success. 50 pages into Louann Brizendine's book "The Female Brain" [which, plodding reader that I am, I will eventually review] it has become believable to me that hormones alone can account for much behavior by rewiring that spaghetti bowl of neurons that is the seat of behavior. I insist that if you pay any attention at all to this post, you go read at least the abstract of the paper. I will tease you with the most controversial claim about the findings:

...Nor are our results explained by after-birth social factors (females growing up with similarly aged brothers) because females born with a male co-twin have reduced success even when their co-twin dies shortly after birth and are raised as singletons after birth. Our findings suggest that hormonal interactions between opposite-sex fetuses known to influence female morphology and behavior can also have negative effects on daughter fecundity and, hence, maternal fitness, and bear significant implications for adaptive sex allocation in mammals.

When you consider the social pressure, the weight of convention and community expectations around marriage and having children, and you put that together with the crap shoot called conception which produces the people on whom these expectations weigh, it is a wonder we don't have more feminists, ... or more suicides.

When some one figures out a way to get clean and meaningful data about which in-utero effects alter male behavior [Anthony Bogaert has tracked down one phenomenon but there are perhaps others] so that we don't have a lot of whining "but you didn't study my situation", maybe we could all just lighten up on what people are "supposed" to do with their lives, reproductively speaking.

How not to put a lid on date rape

In Boston, the statistics I have heard on the news are that about one rape case out of every 100 involves a "date rape drug". I don't date any more and I never did like bars so I am probably the last person who should have an opinion. But I agree with the doubters about a proposed requirement that bars in Boston affix a doily-like cover over mixed drinks they serve. One city councilor is arguing for such a regulation.

The TV news "sampled" opinion in its usual way so I heard one woman for it and one against it. From this I know nothing. The bar owners think it is ridiculous. If they make it a customers-choice option, what kind of message would a woman on a date be sending if she tells the waitstaff "I'll take my Margarita with a lid please"? When you date someone you are excruciatingly aware of what impression you are making. Even after the first date, you don't necessarily know how trustworthy and sane a guy is. A guy who is sick enough that he would enjoy sex with a limp semi-conscious woman doesn't seem like he'd win a second date but like I said, its been years since I made any first hand observations of the dating scene. (wouldn't a Viagra+testosterone cocktail be more fun?) What I am getting at here is that even if this protection were an option, many women would have to overcome a strong natural inhibition against using it. I seems unlikely that city councilor has thought through how this would play out in real life. It would be much less obtrusive to slip a little Romazicon into a drink than to order it with a tamper-evident seal. Obtrusive is not good in the dating context if I remember correctly.

Those other 99 rapes? Booze was more likely a factor. And even if benzodiazepine is used, the alcohol increases its effect. And avoid the herb kava-kava if you were planning on dating a guy who looked like he might drug and rape you...[who the hell does that on purpose?]

UPDATE: I found the comments at the ABC website. Commenting is by a self-selected crowd so you always have to take it with a grain of salt but its vastly better grist for the mill than 10 seconds of soundbite from each of a "balanced" pair of "woman in the street" interviewees...pap from the TV. I was surprised by how many commented in favor any such move and found out about much better ideas that have already been tested. And, wouldn't you just know it: some commenter has the rabid patriarchal perspective of the dating game [and the diction]:

Why dont the address the reay problem in the bars -- it is not people rushing over each other to put drugs in drinks - but the real problem is chicks using guys and scamming them into buying them free drinks ... I say they should come up with laws -- any chick who uses guys should be liable!
Posted by:newshopper Jun-21

It is actually that comment, far more than any of the various opinions in favor, that makes me realize why something preventative probably should be available: it demonstrates there are men out there who lug around a self justified anger at a whole category of women...what remains to stop such a man from predatory dating? Perhaps the old saying should be "no such thing as a free drink"?

Annonymity is on trial

Anonymity will be on trial in the AutoAdmit defamation suit...because some mother f__king sexist law students got their jollies by cyber-trashing two women law students. I blog anonymously. If I named names maliciously exposing identities of others, and particularly if I attached false statements to the reputations of such others or made threatening or demeaning remarks, I would not deserve what little protection anonymity gives me.

The problem is one of how to judiciously pull back the covers, how to expose only those who have been abusive. I hope the judges are wise enough to value the rights of the pamphleteer, the writers on the wall and smart enough to see the difference between indefensible personal attack and public denunciations that would not take place if officials had easy recourse to retribution. That retribution can even silence the powerful.

Ann Althouse, a law professor with a blog, does her level best to be even handed about this AutoAdmit suit. Unfortunately her best is framing her remarks with this introduction: "Now, we have a fine opportunity to see how people think about free speech on the Internet when the politics are turned around. "...you'd get the impression that misuse of freedom of speech to attack people is hardly any thing to worry about compared to a threat to freedoms. She hints by example that small claims court is the right place to shush one's attackers. I too value those rights yet I do not dismiss the the harms done under their guise. There is even a strain of opinion out there that the plaintiffs have no substantial complaint. I do not think you can take that stand without tacitly condoning lying about others and threatening them. One ought to be careful going on record in support of trolls.

The web has made anonymity cheap. Both care and common sense will be needed to prevent it being lost because it has been cheapened. The medium is new, the problem of cowardly sexists is ancient.

What should be on trial? Not anonymity, not any honest freedom. There is no such thing, nor should there ever be such a thing as the "freedom to threaten and harm another" and particularly so if nothing but the gender, race or other distinction of the attacked person is smudged with the stigma of the attacked.

The funny thing about feminism

The funny thing about feminism is how many of us assume we have a useful amount of knowledge or even a fair set of working beliefs about it...I know I do. After all, isn't the subject matter close at hand for virtually all of us? Either you are a woman, or you live with one, or you work with one or perhaps your mother is one. What could you not know about women by now that you simply did not want to know? How many buy the venus/mars meme without even reading the book? The strength such works have in the market is in offering a free pass to avoid careful observation and strenuous deliberation. Just for reassurance, pat your round belly full of stereotypes and keep going.

I have one point to make and I will spare the clued in reader from the rest of this post by just stating it: Ideas that get into our heads about "the nature of women" or for those terminally inclined toward the borrowed truthiness of cross-species generalization, "the nature of the female" are often the end of the road for thinking, a "bridge out, Detour" sign behind which feminism sits largely unknown on the opposite shore. The operation of our ducts and glands, different and concrete as they are, do not in any uniform and straight forward way determine what we think or how we value the things, people and experiences in our lives. I think it likely too that if you have tossed your thinking in the narrow box of "the nature of women" you probably also have a category "the nature of men". The very worst excess of this tendency in thought is to fear or hate that which does not fit in your limited categories. Feminism is not about women or even about discovering things none of us yet know about women but rather it is about redressing the calamities and calumnies that arise because of the whys and ways we cling to what we think we know about women. The preservation of advantage or status is the chief and most despicable, if understandable, of the "whys".


The last nudge that moved me to a point where I thought I had an understanding worth writing up occurred when I began reading one of NY Times premium blogs written by Judith Warner. Her subject today was the review of two books on the topic of how women soldiers pictured among the torturers at Abu Ghraib did or did not shatter certain fond notions we harbor of women as gentler and less harmful by nature than men. I have to admit that some of what I say here is a bit repetitive of Warner: to me she makes perfect sense of matters some people willfully twist backwards.

Warner discusses One of the Guys, a collection of essays on the meaning of or the impact of women among those guilty of torturing prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The introductory essay there is from Barbara Ehrenriech, who comes in for demerits from Warner and some of the Amazon reviewers for even having a stereotype the events could challenge:

...she admits her shock that women were torturers. Her essay drips with essentialist tendencies, yet I think many would nod their heads in agreement thinking that "women are better than this, women would change the ethos in the military."

I agree with Warner's take on the matter and summarize it as "if inducted into an institution where brutality and the threat of it are what keep order and are the only model for doing business, women will not be any less successful than men: they acclimate to group norms and internalize the power structure just the same". Other essays in that book also concluded that the institution corrupted the persons rather than the persons failed to conform to stereotype.

A second more controversial book is Same Difference: How Gender Myths Are Hurting Our Relationships, Our Children and Our Jobs by Rosalind Barnett and Caryl Rivers. Warner appreciates the list of myths, particularly that women are innately kinder and gentler, which Barnett and Rivers take to task as "postfeminist essentialism" that "still have a certain hold over a certain kind of boomer-feminist imagination." Not all of the reviewers at the Amazon page agree with that assessment and many say the authors go too far in trying to blur or erase real differences.

The disagreements among the reviewers of "Same Difference" betray the existence of the strong need to have a mastery, an understanding of what the difference, if any, is. Most reviewers are of the opinion that the book downplays real, innate differences...yet here we are looking at pictures of the women torturers from Abu Ghaib demonstrating the absence of a precious difference. The best attitude I can think of is to not assume we know what the patterns are and especially not to assume the person you work with, live with or vote for is entirely an instance of any pattern. I am always wary of answers claimed where they are desperately sought...it is not a proper research environment.

I think it would be symptomatic of the misapprehension of feminism to presume that it has "a" prescription and policy on any personal choice, as if the woman would not have a well grounded idea of whether she wanted to be an army officer or have a child. On bearing children, for instance the conservative Christians portray feminists as having an across the board anti-procreation agenda.

Here are two posts by women reflecting on the complex weight of the decision to have a child when indeed a child is wanted but a hundred other devils are in on the deal. Here is an equal number of devils to pester a woman equally sure she wants no child. I consider both of those essays to come from feminist points of view because the deliberations take in social pressures explicitly and subject them to questioning. Both are thinking as if the choice were theirs although they must make it in an unsupportive world.

If the examples of Water Baby's ruminations about her friend and of Amanda's story cause your head to explode by some kind of "it cant be both ways!" logic, then you should know you don't get it and you are probably suffering some form of essentialism. It takes work to be unburdened of the unchallenged tacit model that women are innately this, therefor they can't be that. Women are humans and that, DD will agree with me more than I agree with myself, means that many aspects of their behavior are subject to circumstances and upbringing. The Talmud provides advice to the faithful is favored in many christian sects as well...but not used where it is really needed: "know before whom you stand" is the right attitude in which to behold and connect with any human being. Much as we may need stereotypes to get by in our world, they are nearly the opposite of "thinking" when you are weighing the wishes and ways of another person.
Feminism begins with resistance to stereotyping but that is only the beginning.

---

This may conclude a spate of commenting and linking posts at Pandagon and Feministe.
I have been on a bit of a "what is this feminism stuff" kick of late. It winds up being, in terms of my reading, my writing and my changed perspectives, rather like taking a course. I have half a mind to offer this post as my term project. In that light, I should thank my teachers, too numerous to credit if we include the commenters I run into but at the very least, Amanda Marcotte, Pam Spaulding and Ilyka at Pandagon and Jill, Zuzu and Piny at Feministe. I will be delighted with a C+. I always get marked down for my split infinities. My hit counter will miss the attention

The social pyramid: conservatives climb it, liberals flatten it?

I go away for a few days and I feel like I am a month behind. I get rusty quickly. I was so itchy to write that I blew up a comment into a post. Pam has post over at Pandagon that she figures people were afraid to touch. Being as I am just an avatar, I am somewhat immune to peeing on third rails. When Pam asks "where is the sympathy" between oppressed groups and why is the MSM so seemingly stupid when it covers stories that turn on common biases against women, blacks, gays etc, I attempted to answer in spite of some handicaps I gladly accept:

Being too white to ever do anything but imagine the hurt of being disliked or distrusted simply because of my skin,

Being too male and too straight to have ever experienced even my least comfortable moments as a sexual being as anything but "normal",

Being too old and too hard of hearing to find anything but din and celebration of antisocial values in Rap and Hip Hop, [really, it hits me like a musical "keep out" sign, the most salient demonstration that I am too old to blog with a bunch of gen-Xers]

Being too well off and too comfortable in the bosom of the establishment to have much insight into the "poor life choices" hardship might necessitate,

I can offer no authentic answer to Pam's basic question.

As to the idea that the silence of those who do not enjoy my privileges and whose comments Pam had hoped to see is simply the result of her a posing too controversial a topic, I just add another question: Are those who have submitted to the pervasive and not always subliminal persuasion that their social credentials for having opinions are of a lesser sort therefore too timid to take the open stands against bullshit conventions and notions? Or are they really that conservative? I do read criticism and review, so I know that folded into the spirit of some rap music is exactly that willingness to call convention a lie. But as a genre, it is fatally undisciplined in doing this service. And it is so strongly the label of a particular generation that questioning its values almost instantly becomes a battle of generations rather than a battle between groups who suffer different kinds and degrees of bias.

Pam speaks out on GLBT issues and oppression but Pandagon is primarily known as a feminist blog. That alone seems to provide an example of one group that is sensitive to its own oppression, i.e. feminists, recognizing common cause and value in alliance with another group. I would ask another question to try to pick apart why a similar recognition has not occurred or borne much fruit going the other way between advocates for equality for blacks and advocates for equality of gays. Which group has the hardest time turning loose of the "advantages" they have over another group?

By "advantages" I mean the superficial, but at times iron bound, conventions of our social pyramid: no matter how many dimensions or categories you use to measure the place a person occupies in our society, each dimension becomes a way to make people suffer and to keep them in their place and only political correctness downplays the "greater than" symbols in the equation-of-place for our social pyramid that might be organized something like this:
More people think in such terms than would ever admit it.
Any such "space" has corners of greatest and least esteem: In the US after two centuries of "all men are created equal" we have white-christian-male-straight-rich at the top of the pyramid and black-atheist-female-lesbian-poor at the bottom vertex. Now and then, liberals sometimes congratulate themselves for slight dents and blurrings they force upon this scheme but it is still in place, as of old.

Now, who least wants to cede their rung to someone on a lesser rung? One up from the bottom might be the scariest place to be: In that place, one knows from experience what vulnerability is and they can spot an even more vulnerable place just below them. A conservative mind, in that position, does not reach downward for alliances. A conservative mind is primarily wary and focused on guarding what it has and fears it could lose. That's my theory. It means we can have conservatives all the way to the top of society, and the only place where conservative positions become clear and complete insanity is at the lowest station in the pecking order of convention. MSM, or any "media" for that matter, barring explicit admissions to the contrary, are claiming to be above all this weighing of souls. But if their income is dependent upon retaining a certain audience segment, they won't stray far from the view of that pyramid held by the audience...do not expect leadership from market driven media.

The current issue of Atlantic Monthly paints a disturbing picture of how putting an entire society "in the closet" has the ironic effect of weakening the pyramid. By contrast to Saudi social norms with their "values" harshly imposed on all media, our more open society, especially as embodied in the rap music, seems to actually allow the pyramid to hold us all more rigidly in our places. That is not implausible to me because I think it is our own individual consciences and consciousness, or lack thereof, that is really the enabler for the elites we tend to scapegoat. We do not live in a country where the government or the media operate oblivious of the desires of all us little pay checks. In fact, if you have been following the fascinating and very educational discussions on framing, you might be persuaded that both government and media cling to their jobs by always saying things in a way that tacitly ratifies the desires and views that inhere from our perch in the hierarchy. The constant work of corporation and religion, often via the media, is to shape those desires. We are the pyramid until the day we stop believing in it.

Ma nishtanah halailah hazeh mikol haleilot?*

Last night was the first night of passover. We attended a Seder at a friend's house. Indeed, it was "different from all other nights".

It was a vegetarian Seder, a night no lambs would die. It was sumptuous and strange to me but hardly unprecedented. The singing and the sharing were spirited and transporting.

As was the wont of our hostess, it was a feminist Seder. Haggadot, the scripts, if you will, for passover celebrations exist in a thousand varieties and making up our own is a family tradition at Casa Greensmile. Feminist and egalitarian Haggadot predate the blooming of counter cultures of the 60s from which time the Haggadah in hand last night, was a relic. In last night's Seder, there was more Miriam and water metaphors and less Moses and miracles. I do not consider this excess license. The Exodus proof texts need no stretching to be seen as inspired struggles by disenfranchised classes of people against their oppressors. And, clearly, the tradition calls for adaptation of the story's spirit of struggle for freedom to whatever slavery we may find imposed on us in our own lives.

The center of the Passover table is a "Seder plate" with a fixed set of symbolic items, an egg, a raw chunk of horse radish root, and so on. Discussion of the meaning of each is a required, though wildly interpreted, part of the custom. An orange is added at feminist Seders and, in sympathy to that custom, it appears on the table at many of the liberal reform Seders I have attended. Being a "new tradition" it prompts more prominent mention than the items of more traditional ritual. Reading and reciting always pass around the table. Participation of all is an obligation. Had the turn to explain the orange fallen to me, I thought I could, off the top of my head, provide its place in the narrative of passover:**


Wrong! At last night's Seder, a dogeared printout of an email was at the hostess's elbow during the meal. It described a conversation in which Susannah Heschel sets the record straight about why the orange got onto the Seder plate. Who put that story back in the closet? So I discover in my googling this morning that the correct version of the history of the orange on the Seder plate is not at all unknown information but rather that, in ten years of encountering that orange, only the "cleaned up" version has circulated within my hearing. Where is the liberation it that?

More often than not all that is "new" is our personal rediscovery of what is in fact old.
It seems that no matter how much is said, and no matter how much tolerance a group collectively professes, there are still some truths they will not speak. The intensity of many Seders reaches its peak with a wish or affirmation that all people should be free from oppression. I see that even we who pride ourselves on our fairness do not recognize every form of oppression and know every injustice that works its harms on strangers and even our own neighbors. While that jot of revelation is still one of its possible outcomes, this is one tradition that really should go on indefinitely.

---

* the traditional question that begins the telling of the passover story: "why is this night different from all others?"

**I do not want to be party, via search engines, to the further propagation of a bowdlerized version of the justification for the new tradition of an orange on the Seder table. By using a paint program to imagize the text of the inaccurate version I would have otherwise put in quotes, I make mis-quoted or out of context search results very unlikely. Its a technique I would recommend to bloggers who work the border territories of contested public and parochial opinion and can expect to be actively quote mined.

I don't dig this "well we are just a mean culture" alibi

Aside from the fact that no body has ever used the damn things, there is another reason why my brief experiment with "Digg" recommendation buttons is now terminated. Robert Scoble, one of the bigger names among those who blog professionally about software, left a comment on his own blog post that just stunned me:

John: anonymity is a big part of it, yes. But, there’s just a culture of acceptance of making sexually crude degrading jokes online. You especially see it in the chat room on Justin.TV as well as on Digg.com and Slashdot.com’s discussion areas.

I think it +is+ a tech industry problem, by the way. Women quickly learn that they can’t participate in online forums (and, probably don’t feel safe coming to things like my Photowalking or geek/blogger dinners, which decreases their participation in this industry).

I reached that comment because it trackbacked to Kathy's post on how threats of sexual and other violence against her have mounted to the point that she is cancelling speaking engagements at technical conferences. I got to Kathy's post by way of my usual morning's read at Majikthise. Though I work in software, I had yet to encounter Kathy's clear and valuable insights on UI technology. So it its a pretty bad wreck in the Internet that casts flotsam and netsam that far across the hyperlinks. Its not new with Scoble and it wasn't new with me when I threw my two cents onto all the comment threads churned up in the wake of the hounding of Amanda and Melissa when they were elevated briefly to Edwards campaign staff: the anonymity is a little too abusable.

I say "stunned" because though I knew it was bad, I knew that flame wars and generally inflamed arguments do break out in situations where anonymity is used as cheap insurance against being accountable for antisocial behavior...I didn't have the sense, as Mr. Scoble does, that antisocial and misogynistic behavior are wide spread and enjoy any degree of a "culture of acceptance". That is some busted shit of a "culture". If community standards and a modicum of respect and self restraint are not part of the culture then what you get is a casting about for police powers to quash abuse or, as Scoble has done in protest and sympathy with Kathy, just drop out of the community and the conversation. Both of those are the death of the party. If that is all the options the abusers have left us, I am gunning for some abusers. This little party of engaged minds that has been the blogging and surfing experience as I have known it is too much a part of my life and my liberty. Those who disrupt it are the only fly in this ointment that needs any swatting.

Beyond issues of endangered freedoms, this abuse is directly an assault on the careers and incomes of its victims...which clearly appear to include a disproportionate number of women. I have worked on some software teams that had brilliant people doing the UI, and, they were, like as not, women(that is for you, JC, I know you are out there somewhere). So I went and read a few of Kathy's posts. She is now on my short list of RSS feeds for software. She is that good. I like her better than Jakob Nielsen, she is on a par with Apple's wizards and I see she's been at it as long as TOG. So scaring her away from a an O'Reilly [the publisher of great software manuals, not the fount of flatulence for Focksnooze] conference presentation is money out of her pocket the same as bowing out of the Edwards gig was money out of Amanda's pocket.

The mystery to many will be "what did she do?". If you seriously ask that, you ought to check in with a therapist. You just can't get by with presuming in all cases that gods and rapists alike are logical and apply their power only for cause. Quite simply, the existence of a victim is NOT like a marker down on the field where you should wait to hear some referee tell you what foul provoked it. Only if you think a post like this justifies death threats is there any "cause" to be found. That would be a cause found only in the festering brain of the person making the threat.

I was telling a blogging friend, Sister Novena, that Digg made my ass look fat and proved to the casual observer they had stumbled upon an unpopular blog. Always happy to find that I agree with giants, I think Scoble's characterization of Digg "culture" a far better reason to drop DIGG than my own embarrassing unpopularity. DIGG is gone from the template. You never noticed it anyway.

While I was squinting at URLs and typing this with my labored arthritic blogger-fu, Sheelzebub and Zuzu got in ahead of me but I think, for a change I am at least as annoyed and angry as that hornet's nest of bloggers. Maybe its the software connection, whatever.

If the anonymity all by itself is the only root of the problem then why isn't a professional/social site like AutoAdmit as plagued by slanderings of male law school grads as it is by slanderings of female grads? The culture cannot be dragged into court. The anonymity can only be destroyed. Some other way must be found. Unitil better norms are observed, those tools that invite the worst abuse of the anonymity should be shunned. The pushback on AutoAdmit,after the dead reputations were found in its refrigerator and the back seat of its car, did force at least one resignation. And who knows, perhaps in booting Digg, I am doing something rather than complaining and passing around other's complaints. It would be a bigger deal for some blog that depends on links for its author's living to cut some of these link inflating ties. But on the other hand, we seem to be facing a growing crisis where the lower quality and greater prevalence of abuse might become the reputation of the reputation brokers themselves and so they have links but no clicks. As of right now, I am not a user of any of these "services" like Digg. If I add any in the future, I will go read first and see if any kind of honesty or decency seems to be a norm among those who provide links and opinions.

And as for the culture...I wrote this in an E-mail of support to Kathy:
I think conservatives feel personally unsafe if any of their idols or strictures are belittled. The difference is subtle but profound: us liberals are inclined not to feel unsafe ourselves but rather to feel sympathetically, the fear of our fellows if any one of our number are threatened.

I hope the difference, finally, will be in the response: correction rather than repression is how cultures progress.

A hoplessly child-prone person tries to make the case for childlessness

I admit that I could not make much sense of my own life without reference to bringing up children, and particularly, my children. If I pointed you to the dozen or so posts in this and other blogs wherein I confirm my own opinions with emotion and logic it would only waste your time. I am not even thinking about convincing anyone else that they should feel as I feel about having kids. I do not ascribe this core value of mine to religious training as it can be shown clearly that any and all such training has been a complete failure in my case. Besides, there has been little enough such training, coming late enough in my life that success was unlikely. I can recount events that revealed to me early in life that I simply felt this way or "just knew what I wanted". So what! If one's ultimate recourse in supporting a policy is nothing more than "I feel it is so", then they have no authority beyond sympathy in persuading others to consider their position on the matter.

In fact, I am beginning to see that so deeply held an opinion about children when, in a reasonably egalitarian society, having children is optional, must be mirrored by others who lack that urge and are, as I am in my own way, lucky enough to know children are not their fate or future. Repeat after me: the assignment of this urge is arbitrary. The assignment of this urge is arbitrary. And it is but one of many that may glow within the pilot lights of our midbrain. The fact that only one sex actually bears children is the link between failing to recognize we are dealing with a wish only some people bear in their heart and failing horribly to operate as a just society around procreation roles and issues.

It is sometimes difficult to detect the feelings that give rise to the reasons. One should always be suspicious at their seeming absences and look carefully. Science tries to proceed on that basis but the rest of our pursuits should be engaged in the certainty that we don't necessarily know why we want the things we want. As the best of scientists has put it “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” All I can do then is to speak of rationalizations and not of reasons because I am damn sure feelings are running this show.

I am going to sort out all the rationalizations I am aware of to see if any have a hope of bearing the load a reason could carry.

The rationalizations for biological parenting come armored in the appearance of flawless logic: you would not be here and we humans, by simple induction, would have no future without people having babies. There are gaping chinks in this armor. The confusion of the race communally and its fate with the individual and her obligations is a sufficiently deep flaw to put this away for good. Attempts to couple these two are an affront to individuality and were always a pretext for the dominance of some creed or other. The most common rationalizations for baby making have been inflexibly entombed in religious dogma, to our unending strife: multiply and be fruitful is a dreadful law to all who don't actually happen to enjoy the same feelings I have. The urge to have kids, whether you have positively felt it and see it as a natural gift or you are comfortable with it in spite of considering it a learned appetite, is desperately in need of liberation from dogma.

The rationalizations for biological parenting have non-bioparenting analogs that a person might prefer:

• Following Carl Sagan's observation : We have evolved enough brain that extra-genetic heritage in our arts and sciences mean a person leaves more to posterity that his or her brats.
• I personally suspect some pet owners of sublimating or of needing a partner who just never talks back but still, maybe all the more needs you feel can be sopped up from your Dachshund...go for it. [You do realise that some conversations are actually interrupted monologues because you needed to rehearse a line of thought or model a feeling, don't you?]
  
• Easily the most morally supportable analog is to actually parent and provide the resources that turn a baby in to a productive and happy human:adoption

I am not so familiar with the rationalizations against. And my reaction to them is generally emotional and negative. Of the rationalizations Amanda Marcotte offered against, most to me seem selfish or flippant. They only say what I expect: "this person does not feel like having babies". No quarrel with that. Its a right but its not a reason. It is certain that fools can have babies but I have to question how many prospective parents** don't know about diaper changing and procreate, in affluent America, with the idea that it will make the wealthier or leave them more time to indulge their hobbies. Few if any, I'd say. Still, Amanda gets the prize. She has the rationalization that stands like a reason: there are too damn many of us on this planet and the decision to have even one child is an enormously vain and selfish calculation. To her rationalization, I could only add the medically obvious: you should not breed if you are likely to produce sick and miserable creatures with diseases that will cost you, your partner and all society money and tears.

So, there you have the table of rationalizations, weighed and one reason found. BUT just remember: None of these,pro or con, are morally binding because the root of the matter arises from emotional wiring you can't do much about and have a perfect right to act upon.

**BTW, I explicitly exclude accidental parents from this line of reasoning...they should have emergency room priority but that's not happening in our fecundamentalist society.

I really miss Wendy Wasserstein

...meanwhile back at one of the other revolutions...

I didn't know I was missing her but I just read The Heidi Chronicles. She died too soon to finish telling a version of the American post-war cohort story that I found sad, recognizable and compelling. I ache to see how it all turns out and I shall never quite know.

It is not a lie to characterize a cohort by putting in their mouths the words they only wish they had said.

Its a drama. Nearly everything is in caricature in this play. But it is like seeing an Al Hirschfeld drawing. All the uninformative average features and filler have been left out so effectively that the stylish blobs and swept lines of the remaining picture, which no computer could match to the person, are instantly mapped to the subject by us humans. Wasserstein seems on the surface to have only a little pity for herself and even less for the somewhat iconic characters that play through her life in flashbacks.

The sadness is not in the wistful recounting of uncommitted lives that miss their potential to connect. Such stuff could fuel the drama's of any age. The sadness is the way the self-anointed generation who rang doorbells for Eugene McCarthy and who flooded the streets to shout down the establishment folly of the Viet Nam war gradually became the establishment, turning their own slogans into babble and losing their souls. There is no one line in the play where such things are said and yet that was very much the impression that had settled into my mind before the last scenes. Critics knocked this Pulitzer winning play for its contrived ending. I don't see how it could be honestly called that since this is an impressionistically autobiographical play and that last scene is, at the plot level, an exact quote from Wasserstein's life.

I'd like to imagine that everyone of a certain age and inclined to browse about in the left lobe of the blogosphere has read this play. Not really a baby boomer, not New Yorker enough, not Jewish enough or feminist enough to have picked it up yet? Such labels are almost characters in this play but it is not about any of those identities. Nor should one treat it as foreign for its reliance on period rock music or names from the news of each decade: every generation grows up. Do get the play and enjoy looking in on a generation, as it would have expressed itself.