I’m not a big protest or demonstration person; the large Midwestern portion of my personality frequently makes me feel vaguely embarrassed about such group efforts when I’m not rolling my eyes at certain protests that seem more an opportunity to pat oneself on the back than to actually do anything to change the situation.
The national Day of Silence (to bring attention to the way LGBT students are silenced) is a demonstration I certainly support, but have never participated in. Nevertheless, I was very moved to read about the Golden Rule Pledge, and how it played out at Appalachian State University:
Many Christians are confused about how to respond to this day because they do not agree with homosexuality, but they do agree that hatred based on it is not acceptable. [...] The slips I made said this:
“Today I am pledging to be silent to bring attention to the name-calling, bullying and harassment experienced by LGBT students.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Luke 6:31
As a follower of Christ, I believe that all people are created in the image of God and therefore deserve love and respect.”
Yesterday morning, when I went to the SAGA (Sexuality and Gender Alliance) table to receive my piece of duct tape, I showed them my slips and told them that several ministries would be participating as well. The look on their faces was priceless. They were shocked, but ecstatic. This alone would have been enough to make my day. …
The pledge made a real impact on both groups. That’s great!
(via Culture Watch)
The October Atlantic’s Primary Sources feature has a bit titled “Mrs. Pascal’s Wager?”, about research into why women are consistently more religious than men; a new study contradicts the popular argument that women, being more risk-averse than men, attend church out of fear of going to hell.
Researchers studied people who believed in an afterlife and people who didn’t, and found not only that women who don’t believe in life after death are more religious than men who don’t expect an afterlife, but that the gap between the sexes was larger among those who don’t anticipate an eternal reward or punishment.
So far so good; it’s an interesting finding in itself and consistent with my impression that the gap is larger in less-traditional religious groups.
The next sentence was what made me do a double-take:
Women who don’t believe in the afterlife are nearly twice as likely as men with similar beliefs to view the Bible as the literal word of God…
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to access the full text of the paper, because I want to know, just how large is this population of Biblical literalists who don’t believe in heaven or hell? If this is a significant number, and the reporting is accurate, this is a pretty interesting finding. Maybe women are more willing to tolerate contradictions and inconsistencies, either in their own belief systems, or between what they believe and what their church dictates. Why this would be the case, I have no idea, but it could go a long way towards explaining a gender gap in religiosity.
I’m spending a lot of time in the hospital now that my clinical rotations have started, which is leaving less time and energy for other things like blogging, and I decided to simplify my life by just not doing anything that I’m not finding necessary or fun, hence the paucity of posts. I am very much liking the rotations though. The first month I was on outpatient medicine, which is supposed to be kind of a vacation but actually turned out to be half inpatient medicine and quite the challenge, but I loved the work. For the past five weeks I’ve been on inpatient medicine, first general internal medicine and now cardiology. I really like this too; taking care of patients is interesting and fulfilling. So that’s good.
Other good stuff (some a bit belated since my internet surfing has been curtailed):
Why blogs should provide full-text RSS feeds: it’s good for business. You’re not going to keep people from using RSS readers (especially the high-volume readers who, really, are who you most want reading your blog), and providing partial text is more likely to just make them stop reading than click over every day. There are some great blogs that I used to read before I made the RSS switch, but their crappy feed quality means I haven’t really kept up - there is so much else out there. And there’s more than one blog where I’m not interested in all the posts, but I am interested in many of discussions in the comments, so I usually do click over if there are interesting posts, even once I’ve already read the whole text.
The Pantsuit Paradox: “How do women signal power at the boys’ club?” It’s an excellent article about a real dilemma: women have no equivalent of the suit and tie, an outfit that projects professionalism and authority and nothing else. We have to worry about whether we look too girly or not feminine enough, too sexy or too matronly, too trendy or too stodgy-librarian. (I do think there’s an excellent role for the businesslike pantsuit well-cut for the female shape; I am not sure why female politicians don’t seem to use them more, but then the viewpoint that for women, dressing up = skirt is still definitely out there.) Luckily a white coat and stethoscope go a long way toward projecting professionalism and authority, so I don’t have to worry too much about this anymore. Although I did see in one of the dress codes that women are supposed to wear T-shirts under scrubs; no word about men. I guess risking a hint of cleavage is much more unprofessional than letting all your chest hair hang out.
My mouth literally dropped open when I read this article on the “gender bending” birth control pill that stops periods.
It’s unclear whether women will embrace this new pill, which contains the same formulations of estrogen and progestin used for birth control pills for decades, but its arrival marks yet another step toward the blurring of the genders.
As 21st century women dominate the universities and continue to climb the executive ladder, and metro-sexual men explore their feminine side, it’s harder to define what it means to be a woman.
If being a woman doesn’t mean being discriminated against, bleeding every month whether you want to or not, and having a monopoly on caring what you look like, what DOES it mean? I’m having an identity crisis here.
(H/T Amanda.
This article bemoaning what young doctors and doctors-in-training wear seems to have kicked up some controversy. It mostly just made me roll my eyes.
First, it took me a bit to figure out what exactly was objectionable about all the pictures at the beginning of the article. Obviously it’s inappropriate to display your navel or your entire sternum down to the xiphoid process (particularly if your ribs are countable), but I’m still not sure what’s so bad about the second picture. Open-toed shoes? Painted toenails? The pigeontoed pose? The slight glimpse, thanks to camera angle, of thigh?
Nearly a decade later, my impression is that more young physicians and students are dressing like that resident. Every day, it seems, I see a bit of midriff here, a plunging neckline there. Open-toed sandals, displaying brightly manicured toes, seem ubiquitous.
It’s true that open-toed shoes are a poor choice for any place you might be exposed to a biohazard; I wouldn’t wear them to the hospital (or probably to work at all, as I don’t find sandals comfortable for extended walking), but I wouldn’t think it strange if an internal medicine physician wore them. (And the biohazard objection is a bit flimsy anyway; nobody objects to doctors showing their wrists or ankles.)
Another complained about a male student who came to class unshaven, even though he hadn’t been on call the night before.
He came to class unshaven? The horror! I hope this physician never visits my school, where male students regularly have beard-growing contests during finals and females often turn up with wet hair (at least you know it’s clean!).
In a study published last year in The American Journal of Medicine, patients surveyed in one outpatient clinic overwhelmingly preferred doctors photographed in formal attire with a white coat to photos of doctors in scrubs, business suits and informal clothes — jeans and a T-shirt for men, an above-the-knee skirt for women.
Above-the-knee skirts are considered informal on the level of jeans and a T-shirt? I guess someone should have told me and thousands of other women before our med school interviews… (Very few people wore what I would call “short” skirts, but many wore skirts an inch or two above the knee. Your average twentysomething woman looks frumptastic in a suit with a below-the-knee skirt.)
Seriously, I know that the way we present ourselves is important, and I take care with my dress. When I’m seeing patients, I usually wear dress trousers, a shell, sweater, or button-down blouse, and closed-toed shoes. I don’t display cleavage or wear casual khakis, very trendy clothes, or jewelry beyond a simple necklace. I take note of what female physicians wear, and I always ask myself, “would I wear this to visit my grandma?”
The problem is, while my grandma is certainly a proper older lady, she doesn’t see anything wrong with her granddaughters looking attractive. Evidently, some of the doctors who will be evaluating me do:
Her research has also found that physician clothing can influence scores on board certification oral exams, in which a senior doctor assesses a younger doctor’s medical knowledge.
“You don’t want to look too attractive to be serious,” she said, adding that “a certain amount of the nerd factor” can help a doctor’s performance.
I’m nerdy, for sure. But I don’t always look like it (though the white coat helps). After having observed the nastiness that resulted when Jill from Feministe dared to dress in such a way that onlookers could tell she has breasts, I’m a bit concerned that simply dressing tastefully and seriously isn’t good enough. Who knows when someone is going to decide that I look too attractive? Maybe I should start shopping at Coldwater Creek.
Over at Language Log, Mark Liberman has been on a roll debunking claims about gender differences found in the popular press. (That link goes to a post that has a list of all his posts on the subject at the bottom.)
Shockingly, it turns out that when you read a claim about gender differences (like “women say 20,000 words a day and men only say 7,000″) and decide to go check the research, most of the time the research says nothing of the sort. That particular claim appears to have been made up out of whole cloth; the available research is not totally conclusive but tends to show that men actually speak slightly more.
There are also many instances of actual studies being reported in so misleading a fashion as to make the news stories essentially lies. (Any time you hear somebody claim that men really do have trouble hearing women, don’t believe it.)
In a few cases, there are fairly-well-supported findings of gender differences, with the typical caveats that while the means are different, there’s a ton of overlap, and other traits besides sex are also good predictors of differences. Liberman concludes that post by stating:
But the most important lesson, in my opinion, is that the facts matter. Where the facts turn out to support consequential cognitive differences between human females and males, let’s try to look clearly at what those differences are, where they come from, and what individual, social and political conclusions we should draw. But let’s not let popularizers of brain-sex differences bring overgeneralizations and outright fallacies into the discussion as if they were scientific results.
Bravo.
For whatever reason, “scientific” findings about gender differences are more popular than just about anything else (except maybe diet claims). People find this stuff fascinating, and can’t seem to help projecting their prior commitments about gender onto the research, no matter what (if anything) it actually says. The chaff so greatly outweighs the wheat in this field that anyone committed to scientific accuracy really shouldn’t believe any claims without taking a look at the research.
Confession: girly magazines are one of my guilty pleasures. I love looking at clothes and shoes I can’t afford. The embarrassing confessions, silly relationship advice, never-ending sex tips, and shocking true-life stories never fail to amuse. I don’t take anything in them seriously, and certainly don’t expect much of a feminist sensibility. (Though I have to say that Glamour’s health reporting has recently risen well above average mainstream media levels.)
The current issue of Cosmopolitan, though, has some relationship advice that crosses from merely silly to actually kind of offensive. And I know it’s an easy target, but I couldn’t resist sharing.
The article is about how to help your man handle it if you’re more successful than he is. One featured woman makes significantly more money than her boyfriend does, but it’s working out all right for them:
The crucial factor: He carries the relationship in other, nonmonetary ways. “I may own my own place and have a steady 9 to 5, but there’s no question that Nate is the dominant one. He is athletic and passionate, and he goes out of his way to protect me, like rushing to my place at any hour of the night if I’m scared or calling to make sure I got home okay after driving alone. He also has more romantic experience and teaches me.”Explains ["clinical psychologist Alon Gratch, PhD, author of If Love Could Think"], “Every masculine trait the woman possesses outside the relationship must be balanced out with a masculine trait for him inside the relationship.”
So it’s OK if you make more money, as long as he’s in charge at home. Just make sure you’re a whiny baby who needs to be protected and taught (ew), and his penis won’t fall off when he looks at your bank balance. And don’t forget to keep the “masculine trait” tally even. (What’s a masculine trait, anyway? Do burping and leaving the toilet seat up count?)
Every week my summer research program has a Friday lunch talk meant to enhance our career preparation. Today it was about “Balancing Work and Family.” I was interested to see how they’d address the subject - I often get frustrated with these talks because they’re generally put on by women’s associations and feature only female speakers, which perpetuates the idea that only women have to worry about balancing work and family (because they’re the ones deciding to add work to their traditional task of running the family, presumably).
This one was actually quite good. It addressed the issues faced by dual-career couples, which is really the way to look at it. The issue isn’t being a woman who works, it’s being a person who works while your spouse also works. Men who don’t have stay-at-home wives also have to deal with it. Accordingly, there were two speakers, a male surgeon and a female gastroenterologist, both married to fellow physicians.
Unfortunately there wasn’t a whole lot of advice given (somehow they had the impression that the audience was largely made up of undergraduates and that nobody was actually trying to plan out when to have children or how to manage staying in the same city yet). But there were interesting statistics: apparently 22% of male physicians are married to physicians, and 44% of female physicans are. (I’m not totally sure how that works, maybe the percentages of physicans who are married, and fewer female physicians are married at all?) Comparing physicians in dual-doctor marriages to physicans married to non-physicians, the dual-docs were more involved with their children, made a little less money individually but more as a family, and felt their careers didn’t take precedence as often. I think that makes sense - when the other person is just as career-oriented as you are, things have to be equal and you can’t push all the childrearing duties onto the other person.
Both of the speakers were very encouraging, and I thought it was great to hear from people who were happily and successfully living in dual-career families. The surgeon mentioned that he and his wife make sure to be home by 6, they leave work at work on the weekends, and so on. And it sounded like maternity leave and that sort of thing is becoming standard even during residency.
At one point an audience member asked whether it’s common for people to take some time off while their kids are young. Both speakers said that it can be done if that’s a priority. Then the female speaker talked about the fact that women tend to feel a lot of guilt about not being there as often as their friends or neighbors who stay at home are. She said you just have to work that out and realize that nobody spends 24 hours a day with their kid, and children never get confused about who’s their mom, dad, nanny, or other caregiver. They love them all, but parents are always special. I thought that was pretty reasonable.
Then the male speaker said his wife had found it really difficult to deal with the guilt feelings, and ended up cutting down to working three days a week so she could be home with the kids some days, rather than always feeling guilty that she wasn’t taking them to play dates or whatever like the stay-at-home mom next door. He said she was very happy with her decision, which is great (and heaven knows three days a week as an academic surgeon is still a far more high-powered career than most people will ever have), but I think it’s really unfortunate that women still so often feel such guilt about having a career. It’s not like she was neglecting her kids before, but there’s still such a big cultural push for women to be primary caregivers that it’s difficult to ignore that.
Anyway, it was a good presentation and I found it mostly very encouraging. Though this was the second time a speaker told us they had brought in a newborn to sleep under the desk while they finished a grant application! I guess that is definitely a way to combine work and family.
Via Matt Yglesias, I find this rather goofy article, Polygamy Versus Democracy. Apparently there’s a prevailing opinion in legal circles that polygamy should be legally recognized, and this is Stanley Kurtz’s argument that it shouldn’t be recognized because it isn’t compatible with democracy.
I tend to agree that traditional patriarchal polygamy isn’t compatible with a liberal society - certainly not if it’s a cultural norm. Strangely, Kurtz never mentions one of the primary reasons this is so: the fact that, by definition, patriarchal polygamy involves making women a lesser class than men. When half your society doesn’t have the same rights as the other half, truly liberal government is pretty much impossible. The closest thing I can find to an acknowledgment of women’s oppression in polygamous societies is the remark that “polygamy opens the way to marital discord, divorce, and the consequent destitution and abandonment of women and children.” Of course, this phrasing implies that women are something to be taken care of, just like children, so I’m still not at all sure that the subjugation of women is a factor in Kurtz’s dislike of polygamy.
So why does he dislike it? Supposedly, of course, because it’s incompatible with democracy. He uses the Mormon society of the 19th century to demonstrate this.
Brigham Young was simultaneously head of the church, governor of the Utah Territory, and a member of the boards of major businesses. Young decided where his followers lived, the crops they grew, where they shopped, the professions they chose–and who they married. There was little government beyond the church’s structure. Religious leaders schooled their families privately, while most of the territory’s children remained illiterate. Elections were understood not as forums for debate and decision, but as occasions for popular acclamation of God’s choice.Underlying all this was a deeply communal ethic: Men and women were willing to defer to the church’s leadership for the sake of the broader Mormon society, even in so personal a matter as marriage–within which, of course, wives deferred to husbands.
(There’s another hint at women’s subjugation… but no exploration of how this might harm a society.) It seems fairly clear here that the theocracy was the problem, not the polygamy per se. I guess the argument is that polygamy fostered a communal ethic, which then led to acceptance of theocracy. But there’s not too much explanation of how that works, and I’m pretty sure it’s not a necessary condition. (See: Scientologists - not polygamous as far as I know, but happy to let their crazy church control their lives.)
Sure enough, Mormon resistance was broken by taking apart the theocracy first:
Attending to the social and economic foundations of Mormon power, Congress set out to break polygamist rule. By 1833, the disestablishment of churches in the American states was complete, and it had been accomplished partly by state legislatures’ setting limits to the churches’ business and property holdings. Congress now applied these standards to the Utah Territory, modeling its legislation on the original “mortmain” laws that had curbed church power in England. In this way, church control of Utah’s economy was dissolved, and erstwhile church property was used to fund public education, with a curriculum designed around democratic values.The result was capitulation. With the economic and social foundations of theocracy destroyed, a shooting war unwinnable, and the quest for statehood hanging in the balance, the Mormons renounced polygamy and set themselves on the path to democracy.
Perhaps theocratic rule by a nut was what led to the polygamous practices? No mention of that possbilitiy.
Some time later, Kurtz argues that successful polygamy depends on giving up individual autonomy:
This same emphasis on rules and hierarchy within a tightly bound group explains why the Bedouin children studied by Al-Krenawi turn out all right. Things get better when Bedouin kids grow up and receive surrogate parenting from their extended kin. But that depends on giving up what Al-Krenawi calls “the Western liberal conception of individual autonomy.” To get all that surrogate parenting, the Bedouin adopt an “authoritarian and group-oriented” identification with an extended family and tribe.
Cognitive dissonance at hearing “individual autonomy=good” and “identification with extended family=bad” from a conservative aside, this is probably the most persuasive argument he has. But two paragraphs later, we get this:
Yet the weakening or even disappearance of extended kinship groups from family life in the West poses a problem. If families aren’t going to be held together by collective honor, mutual obligation, and shared economic interest, how will they cohere? The answer is love. Exclusive affection for a unique individual is the structural foundation on which Western families are built. In polygamous societies, where marriages are arranged and wives and children live collectively, too much individualized love (for spouses or children) endangers group solidarity. Yet in a democratic society, individualized love is praised and cultivated as the foundation of family stability.
Wait just a minute. Families aren’t held together by collective honor, mutual obligation, and shared economic interest? I thought those were a huge part of why people do form families! While love is a wonderful thing, it can’t be the only basis for a marriage or family. Love doesn’t conquer all, folks. Expecting it to do so is a significant factor in the current high divorce rate - if you don’t love each other any more, why stay married? Especially if you’re not supposed to hold your family together with honor, obligation, or economic interest!
After reading that, I had to google to make sure this guy is actually a conservative. He is! And in an NRO article from just last week, I found the following:
Consider Anthony Giddens, the most influential sociologist in Britain, and arguably all of Europe. Giddens’s 1992 book, The Transformation of Intimacy, with its famous notion of “the pure relationship,” is the text most frequently invoked by European demographers to explain trends like parental cohabitation and same-sex unions.Giddens’s point is that modern marriage is slowly being divested of connections with anything beyond the purely emotional bonding of adults. It used to be that the love of husband and wife was only part of the picture. Men and women were held together by love, but also by economic interdependence, and a shared commitment to parenthood. But gradually, says Giddens, the marriage alliance is becoming less and less about a shared project of prosperity and parenting. Increasingly, marriage is being reduced to a strictly emotional connection between two adults: “the pure relationship.”
For Europe’s demographers, Giddens’s idea of the pure relationship makes sense of why so many parents now avoid marriage. When having a child turns into an experiment that might possibly lead to marriage, rather than a reason to get married in the first place, you know that marriage has been narrowed into an identification with the adult love relationship. Gay marriage fits in here, as well. When gay-marriage advocates define marriage, they carefully confine themselves to the adult love relationship, insisting that parenthood has no intrinsic connection to marriage.
He goes on to argue that this trend is undermining the traditional family, which, after all, does require commitment and economic interdependence beyond just love. If you accept Kurtz’s argument in the Weekly Standard article that “individualized love is … the foundation of family stability” and individual autonomy is key in a democracy, maybe it’s gay marriage and not the traditional family that’s truly compatible with democracy!
My head is hurting from trying to wrap my mind around these arguments. So that’s the end of the substantive criticism, but there are two more ridiculous quotes that I can’t resist including.
Of course, liberal law professors aren’t defending polygamy out of affection for patriarchy. Their goal is to establish the principle that individuals have the right to create and define their families as they see fit. Ultimately, that would put same-sex marriage, polyamory, nonsexual group partnerships, and even singlehood on a par with traditional marriage, resulting in the effective abolition of marriage itself as a legal status.
O NOES! Singlehood might become just as accepted as marriage? The horror! (I thought we’d long ago stopped calling people old maids and bachelors….)
You can’t send the message that marriage means fidelity when even a small portion of recognized marriages are polyamorous.
Sorry to break it to you, but currently a small portion of marriages ARE polyamorous. There are a whole bunch of people out there who are legally married to each other but sleep with other people. (Many of them even organize their marriages that way on purpose.) I don’t think that’s harmed the general conception of marriage. Oh, the problem would only happen if the outside relationships were recognized by the government? Mr. Kurtz, what kind of conservative are you?
Via Amanda at Pandagon, I find that apparently, a fairly sizeable proportion of the feminist blogosphere has been expressing discomfort at the news of a new no-period birth control pill. You see, periods are natural, and so we shouldn’t suppress them. Furthermore, doing so would be giving in to the patriarchy’s definition of female=gross. Amanda’s takedown is good. (My quick and dirty summary: what’s “natural” anyway? A way of dodging actual arguments, is what. And I don’t need a man to tell me that blood-soaked clothing is, yeah, kinda yucky.)
Reading comments at Pandagon and some of the linked blogs, I find that several people took the position that if a woman has really painful periods, it’s OK to stop them, but if she just wants convenience or thinks blood is gross, that’s not a good enough reason. Um, isn’t feminism supposed to be all about not judging women’s choices and giving them control over their own bodies?