February 2006 – Page 14

Sunday Dog Blogging

Miss Miss was being boring this week at the park, so no really good photos of her doing action stuff at the park. She didn’t even bother Bella the Boneless Puppy. But here she is in repose, on my bed:

I spent several hours this afternoon watching Puppy Bowl and trying out my new rice cooker. I suppose someone won the Super Bowl.

More on religion, free speech, and those cartoons

I touched on this issue a few days ago, focusing mostly on the stupidity of criticizing Muslims’ boycott of Danish products as an assault on free speech. But given the fact that this situation is much broader than just that, I should probably clarify what I actually think.

1. Running the cartoon was racist, bigoted, and stupid. The editors and the paper staff absolutely knew that this would cause an uproar; they would have had to be incredibly dumb not to. If they had any taste or common sense, they wouldn’t have run the cartoon — not out of fear, but for the same reasons that we generally try and avoid running editorial content that is explicit bigotry. However,

2. Their right to run a cartoon like this should not be infringed upon, and the fact that I have to be clear on that point is a little sad. That right should include the ability to run the cartoon without legal punishment, as well as without intimidation by way of violence. And,

3. The people who are rioting, burning embassies and consulates, and demonstrating their discontent either through violence or tacit approval of that violence (hello, Syrian government) deserve full and thorough condemnation. But,

4. It would be a mistake to write them off as “crazy Arabs” and not seek to understand, at least a little bit, why this cartoon has spawned such a reaction. That isn’t to say that in the future newspapers should review their editorial content based on what they’re sure won’t make anyone angry, or that this kind of violence is at all justified by trying to understand it. I just think that major boil-overs like this one are never the result of a single incident; like the LA riots after the Rodney King trial, they’re usually the result of a long-brewing frustration and anger over many little events, which finally explodes after a final straw. When we don’t bother to look at all the smaller issues underlying these boil-overs, we miss valuable opportunities to prevent them in the future. Finally,

5. A simplistic view of this issue — either “The Europeans brought this on themselves” or “Anyone who thinks this cartoon shouldn’t have been run is like an anti-choice zealot” — is a big mistake. For the record, I agree more with Steve on the basic idea that Europeans should be more respectful of multiculturalism and their fellow citizens. I don’t think he’s even coming close to saying that European newspapers should be legally barred from running cartoons like this in the future, or that their right to free speech should be infringed in any way. I also partially agree with this (edited) comment of Jeff’s:

The point is, there is a balance you have to strike between fidelity to your faith-based beliefs and living in a pluralistic society.

Which is why many Muslims resist pluralism… But when they start making demands that violate the letter and spirit of the social contract that allows for actual tolerance, things get hairy. Ditto when they use their religion as a doctrine of expansion.

I think the issue is how one goes about making these demands. I’m not sure that it is problematic to demand that your faith, race or other characteristic not be thoroughly disrespected, as Islam was in that cartoon. I think it’s perfectly valid when Jews call people/publications out on anti-Semitic content; I think it’s pefectly valid to call homophobes and homophobic companies out when they institute anti-gay policies; I think it’s perfectly valid to criticize racist editorial content. The line, of course, gets drawn at the point where you are no longer just criticizing or calling attention to or shedding light on — it gets drawn when you’re trying to legislate your own morality/offensive level, or when you’re trying to forcibly remove someone elses’ rights in order to suit your own. That’s why Jeff’s abortion analogy in the post fails. And that’s why, if people had simply criticized these cartoons — heck, if they had raised hell and written in thousands of letters to the editor, if Muslim leaders had gone on TV and renounced this kind of bigotry, if they had organized a protest outside of the newspapers’ office, if they had used their own right to free speech to raise a big stink — I’d be all for them making their demands, as members of a free society who deserve to be respected. I have little patience for those who exercise their own free speech rights, and then complain when their speech is answered by others’.

But violence crosses the line, big time. Let there be no mistake about that. I just think it would be foolish to write the whole situation off as “Crazy Arabs” and not examine the deeper discontents and how we can all deal with them.”

UPDATE: Amanda says it perfectly.

The Week in Review

Things have been crazy lately. School is busy, as usual. I’m still trying to find a summer job. And, because I’m apparently a masochist to the extreme, I’ve decided to start training for a triathalon.

Goodbye to Betty Friedan

I think perhaps Rox says it best.

Like most notable feminists, Friedan’s passing will undoubtedly be met with criticisms from all sides of the aisle. But we cannot ignore the simple fact that Friedan ignited a revolution, and it was one that was good for all of us. Some conservatives have complained that she was scornful of housewives; other critics have pointed out that her version of feminism was remarkably middle-class and white. While those are certainly fair statements, Friedan leaves us with a legacy that confers more value onto women — all women — than would have existed should she have never had her “ah ha!” moment and written The Feminine Mystique.

Because the focus of her most famous work was the role of the housewife, I think it’s worth addressing what Friedan left us with in that area. She was certainly critical of the view that housework was a woman’s life calling, and that women were somehow flawed if they didn’t enjoy their domestic role. In her criticisms, she is often perceived to have attacked the housewife herself — anti-feminists will toss out Friedan quotes about housework being suited for the simple-minded and boring as “proof” that Friedan believes stay-at-home moms to be stupid. But I’m not sure that was her point. Housework is boring and repetitive. It isn’t stimulating. Most people do not enjoy it. But it still has to get done. Recognizing that it sucks, and that it’s pretty unfair to hold up members of a particular gender as failures if they don’t enjoy it, isn’t the same thing as disparaging the people who, out of necessity, do it. Criticizing the system is not the same as criticizing the individuals who do their best to operate within that system.

I also don’t buy the idea that Friedan’s work and the feminist movement were bad for stay-at-home women, or that they constructed the stay-at-home woman as a negative thing. If anything, the fact that staying at home is now much more a choice than it was 50 years ago confers a good deal of value onto it — women who are staying home are doing it because they want to, not because they’re mandated to do so. They see it as a viable lifestyle choice, and one that they want for themselves. That breeds an understanding of staying home as one in a series of valid life choices, as opposed to something that, by virtue of having a vagina, some second-class citizens are simply expected to do. Of course, how much of this “choice” is actually made freely is debatable, but it’s certainly much more of a choice, for many more women, than it was before. And our construction of staying home as a valid choice remains fraught with problems. Women who don’t stay home with their young children continue to be branded as selfish, because self-sacrifice continues to be one of the defining characteristics of womanhood. And while women who do stay home with their kids are largely lauded in principle, their day-to-day work is ignored and undervalued; to compound that, they’re often assumed to be submissive, uneducated or simply not that smart, politically conservative, and/or dull. Men who are stay-at-home dads are applauded for their sacrifice, and fawned over for being so family-oriented. Women who stay home get little of this, since they’re simply fulfilling a role that’s still sort of expected. So the situation is by no means perfect. But it’s a heck of a lot better.

Friedan also drew attention to the fact that home-based work, though it may be repetitive and fruitless, is exhausting, taxing and stressful — that women at home are workers who don’t get pay or recognition. And it’s important to recognize the legions of women who never had such a choice to begin with: the low-income women who, even in Friedan’s time, didn’t have the option of staying home with their kids or focusing their efforts on mop-n-glow. These are the women who were invisible in Friedan’s book.

But in the aggregate, I think most people would agree that Friedan’s work was good. It was better than good — it was transformative. Feminism may have quickly surpassed Friedan’s politics, and many of us may be ideologically very far from where Friedan was, but her contribution to the movement and to the lives of women everywhere cannot be emphasized enough. She is, and will remain, high on the list of women who helped to instigate major social shifts. We can all be grateful for what she left us.

Betty Friedan just died.

This has been an awful week for losing brilliant women.

(And thanks, Marian, for letting us know in comments. I can’t imagine this being OT.)

Margalit Fox of the New York Times says it as well as I could:

Betty Friedan, the feminist crusader and author whose searing first book, “The Feminine Mystique,” ignited the contemporary women’s movement in 1963 and as a result permanently transformed the social fabric of the United States and countries around the world, died yesterday, her 85th birthday, at her home in Washington.

That’s a good start, isn’t it?

She spent her life identifying and attacking the ways in which women are taught to live only for others. She tore the mask off of June Cleaver. She made it so that women like my mom could have real live careers and be proud of them.

I was supposed to be in bed several hours ago, but I wanted to mark her passing if only in brief. I’m sure zuzu and Jill will have their own posts. She had a long and complex activist life, and there’s a lot to talk about.

Sick

Have you heard of Jocelyn Wildenstein?

She’s had a lot of work done.

(Note: the links are frightening, and maybe not work safe.)

Flea had a mocking entry on her blog about la Wildenstein, with lots of ridicule and disgust from commenters, and it got me thinking. At first I couldn’t come up with anything stronger than, “problematic,” which is progessive-speak for, “This offends me, but I haven’t yet figured out why.”

I think I know why I’m bothered, though.

Jocelyn Wildenstein is in a very select group of plastic surgery patients, people who are often referred to as cosmetic-surgery addicts, but there are women who have begun to edge into her territory. Cher, Joan Rivers, Mary Tyler Moore, Farrah Fawcett, Charo. And you hear the same thing: Ewwwwww. They’re hideous. They’re sickening. They’re grotesque.

It’s results-oriented, this nastiness. It insults these women for the same reason that the beauty industry insults unmodified women: they’re not attractive to us. Those stung lips, those pithed noses, those frozen faces, those rock-hard tits. What were they thinking? Don’t they know how ugly they are? Don’t they know how much prettier they were before? Who’d want to fuck that?

Don’t get me wrong, these women make me uncomfortable, too. I look at Wildenstein and I remember the momentum of my own disorder. I remember what it was like to need work. I worry for her and for all of them. But would we be holding Wildenstein up as an example of everything gone wrong with beauty as our culture defines it if she’d undergone fifty-odd procedures and come out the other end looking preternaturally beautiful instead of strange? Would we have a problem with one painful face lift or a couple painful collagen injections? If plastic surgery in general were just as painful but not as distinctive, would we be as vituperative towards the women who undergo it?

Update: I don’t want to see anyone in comments making cracks about Wildenstein’s appearance. Yes, she’s no longer conventionally attractive. Yes, the operations she’s undergone signal a body dysmorphic disorder that probably warps her sense of self out of any resemblance to reality. None of those things are controversial, so they don’t really need to be pointed out again. No viciousness, okay?

Friday Random Ten

1. Jay Z – Lucifer
2. Ani Difranco – Fixing Her Hair
3. Billy Holiday – Strange Fruit
4. Pearl Jam w/ Neil Young – Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World
5. Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane – Epistrophy
6. Bjork – Bachelorette
7. Musrafa Ozccan Gunesdogdu – Adhan
8. Van Morrison – In the Afternoon
9. Damien Rice – Weather Man
10. Pavement – Stereo

Family Research Council Taking Credit For Scrubbing LGBT Pride References From HHS Website

The Rude Pundit (as a member of the super duper prayer team) gets an email from Tony Perkins at the Family Research Council taking credit for having the webpages on the Department of Health and Human Services site devoted to LGBT pride, diversity and health scrubbed:

“We’ve reported to you on the homosexual website at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). When some of you wrote to HHS to criticize this misuse of taxpayer dollars, you received anonymous, abusive, and even threatening responses. I protested this vigorously in a letter to HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt. Recently, I received a call from Rick Campanelli, legal counsel to Leavitt. He acknowledged that the website had been taken down and that the unidentified contractor employee responsible for the abusive replies had been fired. “

Better News From Kansas

The Kansas Supreme Court temporarily stopped AG Phil Kline’s efforts to paw through the private medical records of patients at two Kansas abortion clinics.

In 2004, Anderson issued subpoenas at Kline’s request for the records of clinics operated by Dr. George Tiller in Wichita and Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri in Overland Park, a Kansas City suburb. The records involve 90 women and girls.

The Supreme Court said the subpoenas could infringe on the patients’ rights to maintain privacy about personal and sexual matters, to receive confidential health care and to obtain a lawful abortion without an undue governmental burden.

Writing for the court, Justice Carol Beier agreed with Kline that the state needs to pursue criminal investigations, but said ”the type of information sought by the state here could hardly be more sensitive, or the potential harm to patient privacy posed by disclosure more substantial.”

The Right to Refuse To Treat

How far should conscience clauses be taken?

More than a dozen states are considering new laws to protect health workers who do not want to provide care that conflicts with their personal beliefs, a surge of legislation that reflects the intensifying tension between asserting individual religious values and defending patients’ rights.

About half of the proposals would shield pharmacists who refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control and “morning-after” pills because they believe the drugs cause abortions. But many are far broader measures that would shelter a doctor, nurse, aide, technician or other employee who objects to any therapy. That might include in-vitro fertilization, physician-assisted suicide, embryonic stem cells and perhaps even providing treatment to gays and lesbians.