Thoughts on Gov. Spitzer

Well, if you haven't heard by now, Governor Spitzer of New York has been exposed in connection to a prostitution ring. We'll know more as the day and week goes on, I'm sure. A few initial thoughts:
1. Bad move, Governor Spitzer. I pretty much agree with Scott here:

If poor sex workers are thrown in jail under existing laws, then affluent white johns sure as hell should be too. This goes double for people who have positions that might allow them to work to repeal laws they don't feel are just.

2. I don't really have an opinion on whether, prima facie, prostitution should be legal or not. I don't really see what's wrong with the idea of selling sex, if it's done safely and consensually, so I suppose I would err on the side of making it legal, like any other service. On the other hand, I do think that whether or not prostitution is legal, there needs to be a way to ensure it is safe for everyone involved, particularly the prostitutes. That may be much easier if it is legal. This is all relevant because Governor Spitzer's record on the subject of prostitution is short, but it indicates that he mostly just sought to protect the prostitutes themselves, rather than punish them or the johns. He isn't in particularly deep shit on the hypocrisy front here, although his anti-corruption stance rings vaguely false in light of his criminal behavior.

3. The comparison will inevitably be made to the Republican sex scandals of 2006-07. It's a poor comparison. What made the Republican scandals so deliciously bad for the politicians involved was the hypocrisy they exposed on social issues having to do with sex. Governor Spitzer wasn't really a hypocrite here: his public policy stance on prostitution was limited to punishing sex trafficking. I don't see anything more than a tenuous connection to his anti-corruption stance, since hiring a prostitute isn't unique to being a politician—it's hardly as if his office shielded him from the consequences.

4. Via feministing, Dana Goldstein makes a good point (actually, she makes several, but I though this was particularly on the mark):

When politicians are caught cheating, I wish they'd leave their wives in the green room while they address the press. You're in the dog house, and it should look that way. Those "stand by your man" visuals are tired and demeaning.

Seriously. She shouldn't have to stand there and take responsibility for your fuck up. Also, you aren't fooling anyone with the display of marital solidarity: she's pissed.


UPDATE: Looks like Spitzer may have mistreated the sex workers. If that's true, all bets are off—he's a hypocrite and an immoral douchebag.

UPDATE 2: This is hilarious:

"Summer's here and the time is right/for dancin' in the streets!"

The radical Islamists, the al-Qaida … would be dancing in the streets in greater numbers than they did on Sept. 11 because they would declare victory in this war on terror.

This was what Steve King (R-IA) had to say about what would happen if Barack Obama were elected president. One funny thing about this little quip of Steve's is that he wasn't even basing it primarily on Barack's stance on the war in Iraq; rather, King's special brand of reasoning led him to this conclusion:

his middle name (Hussein) does matter. It matters because they read a meaning into that in the rest of the world. That has a special meaning to them. They will be dancing in the streets because of his middle name. They will be dancing in the streets because of who his father was.

Beg pardon? "The al-Qaida" will be dancing in the streets because Barack's father was Kenyan? Huh?

But really, the most absurd thing about Steve King is that the doomsday scenario he identifies is really not all that bad. In fact, it says something about the neo-con mindset that making sure Islamists are never happy is their primary goal. Never mind the human cost in American and Iraqi lives: it's more important to make Islamists angry. Let's think about this "dancing in the streets" concept for a second. Islamists are happy, and it didn't (unlike Sept. 11) cost us anything, especially not any lives, to get them that way. Happy Islamists are less likely* to go blow themselves and/or their neighbors and/or American troops up. So really, Steve King thinks that his own pride in not having other people think they've won is worth the continued deaths of American troops. (Once again, the right demonstrates that it hates the shit out of our troops). In reality, Bush's war on terror is a lose-lose situation. We can never win, because we're trying to stamp out the people who hate us, and the more we do that, the more people hate us. They can never win, because they want us to stop being douchebags in our foreign and economic policy, and the entire premise of the war on terror is foreign and economic douchebaggery. The world King proposes actually transforms this lose-lose situation into a win-win. We win because we are no longer hated, and therefore no longer attacked—and let's be clear, this is a war to defend our way of life, according to Dear Leader. The moment we are no longer attacked, we win by the Bush administration's definition. They win because...well...according to King, they think they've won. They're dancing in the streets declaring victory. I don't really care why they think they've won as long as they stop attacking us and their countrymen and -women.

King cares though, because at the end of the day, the lives of Americans, Afghanis, and Iraqis just don't matter very much to him.


*This is one situation where the "embolden the terrorists" scenario is even less credible than usual. Let's think about why Islamists would dance in the streets. Well, it would be because they perceive the U.S. as having installed a president who was Islam-friendly. Is there any mindset in which it would make sense to then turn around and attack the entity that you just celebrated?

Dear second-wavers who keep saying feminists have to vote for Clinton:

Fuck you, and please stop hurting our movement by framing it as a gender war. Don't get me wrong. I would love to see a woman in the White House, and I would be pleased to see Hillary Clinton in the White House. I support Obama because of his better foreign policy stance, his in-depth knowledge of domestic issues like farm policy, and his profound star power (which will be valuable in the general election and in office). Claiming that I am not a feminist because I am supporting a man is so deeply problematic I hardly know where to start.

Supporting Obama does not imply the belief that we live in a postfeminist world in which candidates run without gender. That assumes an insulting level of naivete on the part of young feminists. It implies that someone's genitalia determine her political stance. Isn't stepping beyond that determinism, I don't know, the point of feminism in the first place? Ann Coulter, while a woman, has a stance almost diametrically opposed to mainstream feminist view on almost every issue. Should I vote for her simply to prove a woman can become president?

Supporting Obama does not imply that I am uncomfortable with women in power, any more than supporting Clinton would imply that I am uncomfortable with men in power. That is just silly. The essentialism that produces that line of thought boils Clinton down to an objectified stand-in for her gender.

Supporting Obama doesn't make us afraid to be feminists. It makes us wary of anyone who tells us that feminism is as simple as being pro-choice, pro-equality, and pro-women-in-male-dominated-workplaces. It makes us hesitant to believe that feminism stops at women's liberation, that there isn't a tremendous amount of work to be done reparing the damage patriarchy does to men as well. It makes us reject the notion that feminism is about a SCUM-manifesto-style gender war in which every contest between a man and a women is a battle.

Whether or not we support Clinton isn't the same as whether or not we see her as a walking vagina we need to get into the White House, and it's insulting to Clinton's supporters to say so. It means we evaluate policy issues and electability issues, and make political decisions based on those evaluations.

So I never thought I'd say this, but fuck you, Gloria Steinem, and get out of the way while the rest of us try to repair the political damage you've done.

Love,
Will

P.S. It's worth pointing out that I don't mean to direct this to all second-wavers, or even imply that this "gender war" is a viewpoint that the mainstream second wave espoused. It is a viewpoint that can be traced back to submovements of the second wave, though, and it's a viewpoint that increasingly frustrates the third wave.

Strange Bedfellows

The other day, in a class on Ethics in Public Policy, I found myself saying something that felt extremely strange coming out of my mouth. I said "I agree with the Bush Administration." I know, right? Those aren't words I'm used to saying. Before I get calls to turn in my pinko leftist card, let me specify that I wasn't agreeing with their entire policy stance on the issue at hand (Affirmative Action) but I thought aspects of their approach—considering socioeconomic background as a factor in equalizing admissions instead of race—were unusually thoughtful and made sense. So let's do a thought experiment. Let's assume affirmative action is really important to me. It's important to me like abortion, LGBT rights, or taxes are important to some voters—a make-or-break issue. Do I support Bush in the 2004 election? Since affirmative action isn't that important to me as a voter, it's not a dilemma I have to confront. I oppose Bush on so many more significant grounds that the off-chance that my thinking aligned with his on one is pretty irrelevant.

But for some people, this becomes an extremely relevant dilemma. They are forced to make political friends out of political enemies, enemies out of friends, and to sort out the mess that that can create practically. One of the best historical examples of this kind of behavior is the women's suffrage movement pandering to racists by excluding black women from marches and protests. These awkward little collisions of interest are fascinating to watch play out in contemporary politics. Here are some examples.

#1—Wisconsin is a stew of interests, what with hippie haven Madison and union refuge Milwaukee butting heads with rural-family-values everywhere else. Typically, it's the state that gave the nation both Bob LaFollette and Joe McCarthy. We are currently represented by one of the most progressive senators out there, Russ Feingold, but he's got an almost-perfect record in opposing gun control. It's along the "guns" line that a pretty absurd political hot button came up a few years ago. The DNR introduced introduced a bill in the state legislature that would make it legal to hunt cats. Yes, that means exactly what you think it means. If Mittens doesn't have a collar on, she's fair game (literally).

Now this little bill's strange bedfellows stemmed mostly from the fact that the environmental lobby was behind the bill. Feral cats killed off local birds, making them a nuisance for conservation efforts. The gun lobby was way behind it, because it meant they got to shoot stuff more often, and farmers were fans, because they considered feral cats a pest. That meant that the environmental lobby was against the animal rights fans. (As it worked out, legislators didn't want to go on the record as being pro-kitten-hunting, so the bill didn't pass.)

#2—Then there's this story. The upshot is that assholes want first amendment protection for their assholery, and the ACLU is helping them out. Now the ACLU tends to be pretty anti-homophobia, but they also like to protect your right, in certain circumstances to be an asshole. They're also big fans of second-amendment rights ("you mean I can have a gun, but I can't use it to shoot the queers?"). In any event, they're defending a church's right to picket military funerals—the church thinks deaths in Iraq are due to our tolerance of gays. So apparently you get to carry a sign at someone's funeral that says "thank God for dead soldiers." (But seriously, the left hates the troops).

So what are the implications of that kind of odd behavior? Well, an upside is that it makes people cross partisan boundaries and cooperate on issues that matter to them, and may create some kind of horse trading and compromise that is probably good for politics. People stop disagreeing with each other as a knee-jerk reaction and start actually considering their positions carefully. In theory, at least.

The downside is that it makes life awfully confusing for those of us who like to dedicate our time, money, or other resources to organizations that usually do really nice things, but don't want that money to go to protect, say, homophobic speech (I reluctantly think you can be a homophobic asshole whenever you want, but probably not at someone's funeral, and I'm certainly not going to give money to perpetuate it).

What about y'all? Have you encountered any interesting cases of strange bedfellows in your political life? How did you traverse that political space?

Mukasey appointed as attorney general.

Read about it here.

In other breaking news, women like pink.

Why doesn't anyone seem to think through their assumptions when doing research on gender differences? Proceedings of the Royal Society just did a study on women, men, and shopping. Like most studies that deal with gender, the science seems shoddy and the reporting (in this case, The Economist) is worse.

Here's the study:

[Yale Psychologist Joshua New] recruited 41 women and 45 men and led each of them individually on a merry dance around the chosen market. In the course of this peregrination, each participant visited six of the 90 food stalls in the market. At each of those stalls, participants were given a piece of food to eat. They were asked their preference for the taste of the food, how often they ate that food in normal life, how attractive they found the stall and how often they had made purchases from that stall in the past. After visiting all six stalls, they were taken to the centre of the market and asked to point toward those stalls, one at a time, using an arrow on a dial. In addition, they were asked to rate their own sense of direction.

And here's what they found:

On average, women were 9° more accurate than men at pointing to each stall—a significant deviation if you have to walk some distance to get to a place. This was not because those women had more experience of visiting the market than the men had. Nor did the women rate themselves as having a better sense of direction—indeed the men rated their own navigating skills more highly....Among both the British and the Chinese, women preferred reddish hues such as pink to greenish-blue ones. Among men it was the other way round.

Now, this is all very interesting, but then you get to the conclusions:

Dr New suggests that these results show women are better than men at the particular task of relocating sources of food. That contrasts with the idea that men are better at navigation in general. In other words, women's minds are specialised for their ancestral task of gathering the sort of food that cannot run away....Moreover, though anatomical sex is binary, mental “gender” is more pliable. To see how masculine or feminine the brains of their participants were, Dr Hurlbert and Dr Ling used what is known as the Bem Sex Role Inventory, which asks about personality traits more often associated with one sex than the other. This showed that the more feminine a brain was, regardless of the body it inhabited, the more it liked red and pink.
All this suggests a biological, rather than a cultural, explanation for colour preference. And Dr Hurlbert and Dr Ling have produced one. They suggest that their result may be connected with the fact that the colour of many fruits is at the red end of the spectrum. An evolved preference for red, pink and allied shades—particularly in contrast with green—could thus bring advantage to those who gather such things. And if they can also remember which tree (or stall) to go and visit next time, then so much the better.

Lets start with the test Hurlbert and Ling used. Their test points to which individuals identify more with culturally constructed gender traits, right? Because all their test associates gender with is certain common traits that appear in a given gender. Is it really a surprise, then, that they found that individuals who identify with female-associated traits, identify with a specific female-associated trait, pink? The Bem Sex Role Inventory is descriptive, not prescriptive. Here's wikipedia:

In 1971, [Dr. Bem] created the Bem Sex Role Inventory to measure how well you fit into your traditional gender role by characterizing your personality as masculine, feminine, androgynous, or undifferentiated. She believed that through gender-schematic processing, a person spontaneously sorts attributes and behaviors into masculine and feminine categories. Therefore, an individual processes information and regulate their behavior based on whatever definitions of femininity and masculinity their culture provides.

So it's not really surprising that a test designed to measure traditional gender roles produced traditionally-gendered results.

But that's not even the beginning of the problems with the "biological proof" conclusion. Let's also ignore for a second that the article makes the error of assuming that anatomical sex is binary. This experiment does nothing to control for the decades of social conditioning these women had to a) be good at shopping and b) like pink. Women (and, probably, "effeminate" men) simply have more practice at shopping than men (and, probably, "masculine" women) have. And they have been dressed in pink and red since birth, where little boys get blue and green. Why, then, is this all assumed to be based on a history of women gathering? My guess is that New et al went looking for a prehistoric answer and found one, but that doesn't make their control problems less grave (and having someone "rate themselves" as a control for their sense of direction is almost laughable).

Why do sloppy experiments with specious conclusions get press? Hearing about biological roots to our gender assumptions is interesting—it certainly caught my eye. Our daily lives are constantly inflected with gendered expectations, and it's hardly surprising we want to know those expectations' source. But it would be awfully nice to get that information from better hands.

This just in

They're dropping like flies. Madison's own Russ Feingold says it best: the next attorney general must have his foremost loyalty be "to the law, not the president." Wouldn't that be something new.

Two things that are not get-out-of-homophobia-free cards

There are two common ways in which homophobia gets masked, and both of them piss me the hell off. One of them has been in the news, because Mayor Jim Naugle of sunny Fort Lauderdale, Florida has been under fire for proposing that Fort Lauderdale install porta-potties on its beaches to "deter homosexual activities." Now even a conservative FL retiree can tell that's a strawman, and that not too many fags are getting it on in the public toilets of Fort Lauderdale beaches (perhaps Naugle was thinking of his Tampa neighbor, State Rep. Bob Allen—who is now crying, "I'm not gay, I'm racist!"), but that isn't even the issue anymore. In face of criticism, the honorable mayor stuck to his guns and kept firing new rounds, saying that he didn't like to use the word "gay" because homosexuals are such unhappy people, and calling a GLBT section of the public library pornographic. And then—this is the best part—he made fourth graders everywhere proud by issuing a fake apology, saying essentially "I'm sorry you all are so stupid you can't see that this is a problem."

What is Mayor Naugle's defense against people who claim his behavior may indicate some homophobia? "I have longtime friends in the homosexual community." Now granted, they're clearly deeply unhappy friends whose collective presence in a public bathroom represents a threat to children everywhere, and whose taste in literature is utter smut, but the guy has friends who are gay!

Thing number one: having gay friends doesn't mean you aren't homophobic. Wagner loved Mendelssohn, a jew, but he was still f*ckin anti-semitic. That a few individuals have jumped your homophobia hurdle in order to get to your friendship finish line doesn't mean the hurdle isn't there, and doesn't make that hurdle the fault of the other queers who keep tripping over it. Having gay friends doesn't even guarantee you are only a little homophobic, and using it as an excuse might hurt. Most people, even most queers, are a little bit homophobic, but they are aware of it and try to work against it. Not so for those who write off their homophobia—they think there's nothing to work against.

A close friend of mine just came out as queer to his girlfriend, who freaked out. She's not a queer-hater, apparently, except when it comes down to the guy she's sleeping with, and then she can't stop thinking about how uncomfortable it makes her that he hooked up with another guy once.

Thing number two: A NIMBY homophobe is still a homophobe. Saying otherwise is like saying "oh, I'm fine with black people, except when they're around me. Then I get really freaked out." If that happens, you're racist. If you don't mind empowered women, as long as all the women around you act subserviant, you're sexist. Similarly, if you don't mind homosexuals, as long as you get to pretend they're all straight, you're homophobic. And if you let go of a boy who loves you right now, just because he f*cked someone else back then, you're just dumb.


PS—while we're on the topic of sexuality, the superlative Savage LoveCast included a call this week that proposed people use "scrotum" as a synonym for "weakling," rather than "pussy." It's a great idea: the reasoning is that while pussies aren't actually all that weak—they give birth, for god's sake—scrotums are pretty fragile, and don't take pain very readily. Plus, they're kind of gross. I wouldn't want to be called a scrotum. And, despite the chip on my shoulder about the way we construct masculinity, I think using "scrotum" to mean "weakling" actually does a lot to queer the way masculinity is understood. It's not likely that we'll be seeing the ideal man portrayed as weak in the near future; the same is not true for women. So get working and stop being such a huge scrotum! Or, alternately, stop scroting out!

Padilla Convicted

Jose Padilla, the terror suspect who was arrested in May 2002 amid cries from John Ashcroft that the government had foiled a dirty nuke attack in the works, was convicted on all charges in federal court yesterday. There's good news and bad news here. The good news is that this conviction makes it harder for the Bush administration to claim that terror suspects need an extra-constitutional process for trying and sentencing. The bad news...well...

Y'know the charges he was arrested on, the ones that John Ashcroft was so excited about? Those weren't mentioned at all in his federal trial, since for some silly reason federal courts don't like to use evidence that was gathered by rendering suspects outside the U.S. justice system. Instead, Padilla was prosecuted as part of an existing case against two other terror suspects, Adham Hassan and Kifah Jayyousi. The evidence? He met them at a mosque at one point, he talked with them on the phone during seven out of thousands of wiretapped calls, saying nothing of significance (the other phone calls, the ones with just Hassan and Jayyousi, had what prosecutors claimed was code), and his fingerprints were all over an Al Qaeda recruitment document that he could easily have handled while confined in military prison. The end result, though, was that the more persuasive evidence against Hassan and Jayyousi stuck to Padilla as well. Padilla might appeal.

But at least now everyone knows that the Bush administration doesn't need a special process to unjustly convict terror suspects--they can do that just as easily with federal courts. And maybe—just maybe—this will put pressure on the Bush administration to give terror suspects federal trials. That would be great, because then they'd have to stop getting evidence through extraordinary rendition and start getting it through better methods: y'know, the kind that don't involve getting other countries to torture individuals who haven't been accused of a crime. The end result would be more reliable intelligence, since the information gathered from torture is hideously unreliable.

A caveat: Padilla might be guilty. I certainly don't know. But the verdict he received seemed to rest more on his having the wrong friends than on any actual proof of terrorist activities.

UPDATE: The NYT agrees—Padilla was basically sentenced to life in prison for a thought crime.

Oh my.

As of about a half hour ago: Karl Rove resigned.
He says he needs to spend more time with his family. (What a sweet guy!) Of course, he is one of what is becoming a lengthy string of Bush administration officials to suddenly need some heart to heart time with the spouse and kids. He chose to break the big news to Rupert Murdoch's new pet project, the WSJ. The big question, of course, will be why he actually resigned. Infighting? Had Bush become a lost cause? Was Rove more controversy than he was worth with a year and a half left to go in a lame-duck presidency? Is it to skirt the soon-to-be-breaking news about his and Dick Cheney's torrid affair? (I wish.) Is he working for a 2008 presidential campaign??

Updates to come when the news is a bit more detailed.

UPDATE: Lauren asks, will he be indicted?

Just don't get married, have kids, or move to the suburbs.

Or, as an alternative, be a man.

Via Feministing and Lawyers, Guns and Money, the New York Times has a report on how young urban women are actually outpacing men in wage-earning. New York men make 85 cents on a woman's dollar, and Houston men make 83 cents. Then that women becomes a mother, and she falls behind men in earning again.

I don't think any of this is good news. First of all, fathers still make more money than anyone, single young women included. So apparently becoming a father increases your earning power, but becoming a mother torpedos it. Second, that women fall off drastically when they leave their twenties only confirms the existence of a "glass ceiling" that seems to keep women out of the upper echelons of job advancement. And finally, single young urban women are the only group that is ahead of men. Everywhere else, they seem to still be ten or twenty cents behind on the dollar.

And what is wrong with young urban men? The Supreme Court is certainly doing everything it can to help them out. And a couple hundreds of years of old-boy networking and being the traditional figure in every higher-paid job can't hurt. The article has a couple of answers. One is that women may start earlier, because they plan out time from their career to have a family. The other—and this statistic bothers me every time I hear it—is that young women just tend to be better educated nowadays.

Women are attending 4-year colleges at higher rates than men, which raises some interesting questions about masculinity, and especially about how male gender roles affect high-schoolers. Is it just because men are more likely to feel welcome in skilled blue-collar work, like construction work or electrical engineering? Or are men embracing a less bookish self-image because only queers like English class? Or maybe a little of both? Either way, it's just as unacceptable for men to be systemically discouraged from higher education—if indeed that's what is happening—as it was for women to be shut out. I'll rant about the masculine mystique some other time, but suffice it to say that I think we talk a lot more about femininity's problems than we do about masculinity's, and it might be necessary to try to fix both to fix either.

The NYT article ends frustratingly. What's the important kernel the Times leaves its reader with? What "sums it all up and blows it all wide open?" (Extra points if you know what musical that is). Well, apparently being richer than men their age is making it harder for women to get married. Figures.


UPDATE: Zuzu also posts on this topic.