In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Month: March 2006

Conservative School Discriminating Against Conservatives?

This article made me roll my eyes so hard that they almost got stuck up inside my head. Baylor denies tenure to a professor because he is “openly conservative”? Baylor is an unabashedly conservative Christian school. Not every professor gets (or is deserving of) tenure. And I understand that it’s easy for conservative academics to cry “viewpoint discrimination” and whine that the big mean ivory tower liberals have it out for them, but that doesn’t really work at a school like Baylor. Nevertheless, this one has already become a pet project for the poor-me Christian right (who, apparently, are taking a break from crying about the “war against Easter” to cover this important issue).

This is the school that pulled certain Starbucks cups from its campus because the cups had a quote from a gay author that supposedly “promoted homosexuality.” The quote:

“My only regret about being gay is that I repressed it for so long. I surrendered my youth to the people I feared when I could have been out there loving someone. Don’t make that mistake yourself. Life’s too damn short.”

Oh, the horror. This is the same university that wanted the George W. Bush Presidential Library (warning: the article is somewhat incoherent). This is the same university that banned dancing until 1996. This is the same university that prohibits homosexuality in its student handbook, and doesn’t offer benefits to same-sex couples. This is the same university that revoked a scholarship to a seminary student for being gay.

Not given tenure for being conservative at a school like Baylor? I don’t think so.

Cue the MRAs!

New York is closer than ever to dragging its divorce laws into the modern era.

While most other states have some kind of one-step “no fault” divorce provision, New York still requires most couples to figure out who caused the marriage to fail. Under present law, a marriage cannot merely die. It must be killed by one spouse or the other, through adultery, cruel and inhuman treatment, or abandonment — even when none of these things have actually occurred, and even when both people agree on all the particulars.

This means, in effect, that people have to lie; they have to go before a judge, swear to tell the truth and then not tell the truth. Those who deal with these issues day in and day out have concluded that pointing the finger at one spouse makes negotiations uglier, costlier and longer.

And it makes Raoul Felder a very, very wealthy man.

Last month, a commission appointed by New York’s chief Judge, Judith Kaye, recommended that New York go to a one-step, no-fault divorce procedure and overhaul its child custody rules. For a very long time, efforts to do this were blocked by various groups, including (predictably) the Catholic Church and (less predictably) the Women’s Bar Association. The Church ain’t coming around, but the WBA is.

In the past, with opposition from conservatives and the Catholic Church, some legislators in Albany have resisted changes in a divorce law often said to be one of the strictest in the nation. Some women’s groups have also resisted any changes, fearing that the “vulnerable spouse,” usually the woman, will fare poorly once no-fault comes into being. Others have argued in favor of incremental change, like an adjustment a few years ago that allowed couples to get a divorce by mutual consent if they lived apart for a year and then filed for divorce — an overly long and complicated process.

However, one important study for the National Bureau of Economic Research has shown that in states with no-fault divorce laws, where women can get out of a bad marriage more quickly, there were fewer suicides among women, less domestic violence and fewer women murdered by spouses. The Women’s Bar Association, which earlier had opposed this shift, now endorses the no-fault option for New York couples.

Even the “easy” procedure can be horribly stressful, because one spouse can derail the whole thing and throw the divorce into the courts. A friend of mine had to go through that last year, after discovering on the day she thought she’d be getting divorced that New Jersey, a no-fault state, no longer had jurisdiction over her divorce because both she and her husband had moved out of state, so she had to start again in New York. She had a hard time hunting down her husband and getting him to actually sign all the paperwork — he resisted, I believe in part because she was getting ready to marry someone else. It wasn’t enough that he’d gambled away all her money; he had to mess with her future as well.

At least with her divorce, child custody was not an issue because the kids were teenagers and he’d never asked for custody. But any reforms that can make divorce a less adversarial process for people who just want to put things behind them and start over has got to be better for the kids in the long run.

Unfortunately this, like all the other reforms Judge Kaye has proposed, has to go through the Legislature, which is in its way even more of a Tammany Hall-era relic than the court system is. But with the backing now of the WBA and other women’s groups (and the lessening of the influence of the Church to some extent), it stands a chance.

Problems at Pandagon

Pandagon’s host server has suspended them. But never fear, word from Amanda is that the crack Pandagon geek squad is on it, and the blog should be back up and running soon.

The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy

A really interesting policy paper (pdf) evaluating the power of the pro-Israel lobby in influencing U.S. foreign policy. It’s been making some waves, and is definitely worth a read.

My thoughts: I can see why this paper is upsetting a lot of people. The authors’ choice of language unfortunately smacks a little too much of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, like the Elders of Zion or ideas that Jews control the media/banks/government/whatever else they supposedly control. However, that doesn’t make the facts that they present untrue, and they’re fairly clear in explaining that they aren’t suggesting that this is a big conspiracy — just that the pro-Israel lobby works like any other lobbying group, except it’s far more well-funded and well-organized, and not challenged in any real way.

That, though, leaves me to question exactly what the problem with the lobby itself is. Lobbying groups exist for just about everything. Some happen to function more effectively than others. Is the pro-Israel lobby “bad” simply because it happens to be better organized and better funded than just about any other lobby? Isn’t the onus on politicians and policy-makers, not lobbying groups, to resist pressures that are damaging to U.S. interests?

There are a great many lobbying groups whose goals I don’t like: the NRA, the “moral majority,” the anti-choice lobby, or big oil. But I can’t fault their existence any more than I can fault the existence of the AARP, or the AFL-CIO, or the pro-choice lobby. I can, however, fault politicians and policy-makers for folding to demands from special-interest groups. That’s how the modern American political system works. We can certainly criticize the existence of lobbying groups in general, but it seems a little ridiculous to criticize one particular lobbying group because (a) we don’t agree with everything it advocates, and (b) it’s really, really good at what it does.

I may not always love what the pro-Israel lobby pushes for, and I do think it’s problematic that there is no other group pushing back the other way or even balancing out the conversation. The authors of this paper posit that the pro-Israel lobby is simply too intimidating and too powerful for any other group to take a stand against them, lest they be labelled anti-Semitic. And I think they have a point there — questioning Israel’s policies as a nation is too often conflated with arguing that Israel’s very existance is unjustified (something that almost no one is saying), or with anti-Semitism in general. That’s problematic; it’s further troubling that we can’t even have a public conversation about it.

Israel should be treated like any other country: If they’re our ally (and they certainly are), then we should work together for our mutual interests. I don’t have a problem with sending aid to Israel, as we send aid to many other countries. But that aid should be accounted for, like it is in every other nation. And we should use our financial influence to push Israel — and all the other countries we’re invested in — to uphold human rights norms and democratic values. We should not be compromising our own interests and values for another nation.

Anyway, check out the article. It’s long, but worth a thorough reading. I’d love to hear more thoughts about it.

Thanks to Kyle for the link.

Global Gendercide

One United Nations’ estimate says that between 113 million and 200 million women around the world are “missing.” Every year, between 1.5 million and 3 million women and girls lose their lives as a result of gender-based violence or neglect. As the Economist, which reported on the policy paper, put it last November, “Every two to four years the world looks away from a victim count on the scale of Hitler’s Holocaust.”

Zuzu reminds us: “Just to put it in a little perspective, that’s about the number of women and girls in the US.”

Go read this article. Now.

• In countries where the birth of a boy is considered a gift and the birth of a girl a curse from the gods, selective abortion and infanticide eliminate female babies.

• Young girls die disproportionately from neglect because food and medical attention is given first to brothers, fathers, husbands and sons.

• In countries where women are considered the property of men, their fathers and brothers can murder them for choosing their own sexual partners. These are called “honor” killings, though honor has nothing to do with it. Young brides are killed if their fathers do not pay sufficient money to the men who have married them. These are called “dowry deaths,” although they are not just deaths, they are murders.

• The brutal international sex trade in young girls kills uncounted numbers of them.

• Domestic violence is a major reason for the deaths of women in every country.

• So little value is placed on women’s health that every year roughly 600,000 women die giving birth. As the Economist pointed out, this is equivalent to the genocide in Rwanda happening every 12 months.

• Six thousand girls undergo genital mutilation every day, according to the World Health Organization. Many die, and others live the rest of their lives in crippling pain.

• According to the WHO, one woman out of every five worldwide is likely to be a victim of rape or attempted rape in her lifetime.

All these figures are estimates; registering precise numbers for violence against women is not a priority in most countries.

I don’t love some of the language she uses (like “Third World”). But at its heart, I think her op/ed is correct. We need to be raising our voices and screaming about these abuses.

Three initial steps could be taken by world leaders to begin eradicating the mass murder of women. A tribunal like the International Court of Justice in The Hague should look for the 113 million to 200 million women and girls who are missing. A serious international effort must urgently be made to precisely register violence against girls and women, country by country. And we need a worldwide campaign to reform cultures that permit this kind of crime. Let’s start to name them and shame them.

Yes, yes, and yes. The one thing that I think she misses the mark on is assuming that some cultures permit these kinds of crimes, and some don’t. That’s simply not true. All cultures in existence today permit violence against women to some degree. Some permit it to a much greater extent than others — some outwardly encourage it, some do so more tacitly — but it’s present everywhere. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t come down harder on the places where it’s worse, but it’s irresponsible and innaccurate to assume that it’s a problem with “those people” and that it isn’t on your doorstep, too.

Who says feminism isn’t necessary?

Meals That Moms Can Almost Call Their Own

…because only Mom is responsible for making dinner.

Although women still do 80 percent of the food-related work at home, the amount of time Americans spend cooking dinner has declined to about 30 minutes from about two and a half hours since the 1960’s, according to market research by Mintel International and the NPD Group. At the same time, the country is showing signs of restaurant fatigue. Spending in restaurants, which had been growing steadily since World War II, has been flat since 2001.

And so the solution is… a food center where mom can put together dinner in about two hours. As opposed to, say, splitting the cooking between mom and her partner (if she’s partnered), or having her partner and/or kids help with cooking and clean-up. That, apparently, would not sufficiently satisfy the cult of female domesticity and self-sacrifice.