Obsidian Wings

Not So Long Ago

by hilzoy

Hendrick Hertzberg has a good piece on the fortieth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. In it, he quotes a 1966 article from Time called "The Homosexual in America". It's worth reading as a stunning reminder of exactly how far we've come in the last forty three years. For instance:

"Both [male homosexuality and lesbianism] are essentially a case of arrested development, a failure of learning, a refusal to accept the full responsibilities of life. This is nowhere more apparent than in the pathetic pseudo marriages in which many homosexuals act out conventional roles -- wearing wedding rings, calling themselves "he" and "she."

And:

"Homosexuality (...) is a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality, a pitiable flight from life. As such it deserves fairness, compassion, understanding and, when possible, treatment. But it deserves no encouragement, no glamorization, no rationalization, no fake status as minority martyrdom, no sophistry about simple differences in taste -- and, above all, no pretense that it is anything but a pernicious sickness."

For some reason, the tone in which this is written bothers me almost as much as the content: it's somehow curdled. The condescension, the fake knowingness, the pervasive underlying "heh heh heh" -- it sets my teeth on edge.

As long as one gay man or lesbian is denied the right to marry, or legally discriminated against because of his or her sexual orientation, or asked to leave the military after honorable service, we haven't come far enough. But we have come a long, long way.

Obligatory Sanford Post

by hilzoy

Well, someone has to write one.

I watched his news conference, and I thought he looked at or near the end of his rope. I admire him for taking responsibility for what he did, though I don't at all admire what he did, either the 'betraying your wife and four kids' part or the 'leaving your state in the lurch and putting your staff in a completely untenable position' part. 

I wonder who leaked the emails? And why? And why did the paper hold them for months?

I think about his sons. The youngest is ten. This has to be excruciating for them. I hope they don't have the kinds of horrible classmates who might make the next weeks and months a misery. 

Strangest Sanford-related fact I've seen: he digs holes "to unwind".

Quote I wish he wishes he'd either borne in mind or not said in the first place:

"But I think the Bible says, "Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father that's in heaven." Hopefully, by the way in which you act. The way in which you make decisions. They’re going to see that something’s there. (...) If you have a religious view, it's incumbent upon you and it’s real to have that. The Bible talks about the fruit of the spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control. There ought to be certain things that are clearly observable by your actions."

The two silliest defensive responses from before he fessed up:

"It is refreshing that Mark Sanford is secure enough in himself and the people of South Carolina that he does not view himself as an indispensable man." (Erick Erickson)

And:

"Are [Cassie] and I married to the only real men left in the entire freakin' country? Do we only want Momma's boys or Daddy's girls in the White House from here on out? Teddy Roosevelt is doing backflips in his grave right now: apparently no one is allowed to go on a writing retreat, take a road trip, or hike, hunt, or fish if they have any political ambitions at all. Unbelievable." (Little Miss Attila)

Mark Sanford: secure enough in himself to to leave his state without a governor, his wife without a husband, and his sons without a father; enough of a real man to willfully torpedo his closest relationships. Family values in action.

Discuss.

"They Just Poke, Poke, Poke"

by hilzoy

It's worth bearing in mind the alternative to legal abortions:

"BEREGA, Tanzania — A handwritten ledger at the hospital tells a grim story. For the month of January, 17 of the 31 minor surgical procedures here were done to repair the results of "incomplete abortions." A few may have been miscarriages, but most were botched operations by untrained, clumsy hands.

Abortion is illegal in Tanzania (except to save the mother's life or health), so women and girls turn to amateurs, who may dose them with herbs or other concoctions, pummel their bellies or insert objects vaginally. Infections, bleeding and punctures of the uterus or bowel can result, and can be fatal. Doctors treating women after these bungled attempts sometimes have no choice but to remove the uterus. (...)

Worldwide, there are 19 million unsafe abortions a year, and they kill 70,000 women (accounting for 13 percent of maternal deaths), mostly in poor countries like Tanzania where abortion is illegal, according to the World Health Organization. More than two million women a year suffer serious complications. According to Unicef, unsafe abortions cause 4 percent of deaths among pregnant women in Africa, 6 percent in Asia and 12 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean. (...)

The 120-bed hospital in Berega depends on solar panels and a generator, which is run for only a few hours a day. Short on staff members, supplies and even water, the hospital puts a lot of its scarce resources into cleaning up after failed abortions. (...)

Dr. Mdoe (...) said rumor had it that many abortions were done by a man in Gairo, a town west of Berega. In some cases, he said, the abortionist only started the procedure, knowing that doctors would have to finish the job.

Dr. Mdoe said he suspected that some of the other illegal abortionists were hospital workers with delusions of surgical skill.

"They just poke, poke, poke," he said. "And then the woman has to come here." Sometimes the doctors find fragments of sticks left inside the uterus, an invitation to sepsis."

"Poke, poke, poke." With sticks. In the uterus. With any luck, if abortion were legal here, illegal abortionists wouldn't use sticks; just rusty and unhygienic instruments of other kinds. Goody.

70,000 dead women is an awful lot. And that, not a world without abortions, is the alternative. 

Ugly

by hilzoy

Matt Yglesias:

"As anyone who knows me can attest, I don't have what you'd call a strong "Hispanic" identity. (...) But for all that, I have to say that I am really truly deeply and personally pissed off my the tenor of a lot of the commentary on Sonia Sotomayor. The idea that any time a person with a Spanish last name is tapped for a job, his or her entire lifetime of accomplishments is going to be wiped out in a riptide of bitching and moaning about "identity politics" is not a fun concept for me to contemplated. Qualifications like time at Princeton, Yale Law, and on the Circuit Court that work well for guys with Italian names suddenly don’t work if you have a Spanish name. Heaven forbid someone were to decide that there ought to be at least one Hispanic columnist at a major American newspaper.

Somehow, when George W. Bush affects a Texas accent, that's not identity politics. When John Edwards gets a VP nomination, that's not identity politics. But Sonia Sotomayor! Oh my heavens!"

Julian Sanchez:

"I'll cop to sharing some of Yglesias' irritation at the treatment of Sonia Sotomayor, and if Republicans are managing to get a rise out of my pallid ass, I can only imagine the kind of damage they’re doing to their brand among, you know, real Latinos. (...)

Look, it's not racist to oppose a Latina judicial nominee, or to oppose affirmative action, or to point out genuine evidence of ethnic bias on the part of minorities. What we're seeing here, though, is people clinging to the belief that Sotomayor has to be some mediocrity who struck the ethnic jackpot, that whatever benefit she got from affirmative action must be vastly more significant than her own qualities, that she's got to be a harpy boiling with hatred for whitey, however overwhelming the evidence against all these propositions is.  This is really profoundly ugly. Like Yglesias, I don't think I'm especially sensitive to stuff like this, or particularly easily moved to anger, but I'm angry. I don't think Republican pundits really appreciate the kind of damage they're probably doing, for no reason I can discern given the slim odds of actually blocking the nomination. Which, perhaps, goes to Sotomayor’s point: They really have no idea how they sound to anyone else."

I don't think they do either. 

Look: I'm angry, and I'm not Hispanic at all. For the record, I am not writing about Sonia Sotomayor because I think she's the greatest thing since sliced bread. I don't. I think she's a fine nominee and will be a very good Supreme Court justice, but she does not make my heart go ding-a-ling. I'm writing about her because when people tell lies about someone who does not deserve it, it makes me angry. And if there's any point to blogging at all, it's that it gives me the opportunity to do things like actually read the Ricci case and write about what I find, thereby making it just that little bit less likely that those lies will work.

This is what comes of letting crazy people run a party. It's what comes of making pissing off liberals into a goal in itself. And it's what comes of fine-tuning ways of dismissing all criticism and all contrary evidence, so that you end up living in an epistemic cocoon. Bad news? It's the liberal media. Someone claiming that Bush did something bad? Quick: look for evidence that that person is writing a book, and disregard the fact that while some people will say anything to sell books or promote themselves, other people will not. Someone criticizing any Republican policy anywhere? That person obviously hates America/white people/success/whatever. If nothing else works, try thinking about kerning.

Go down that road and you lose the capacity to actually consider the facts. All you have left are your own preconceptions, floating free of any actual connection to evidence or reality. And if your preconceptions lead you to think that any Latina must be "some mediocrity who struck the ethnic jackpot", then no amount of actual achievement -- graduating at the top of her class, editing the Yale Law Journal, sitting on the Second Circuit -- will dissuade you.

A fantasy world in which your own preconceptions are always confirmed is a pretty sorry substitute for the actual world around us, in all its unexpected richness. But it's even worse when your own preconceptions are so very, very ugly.

And Another Thing ...

by hilzoy

In my post last Friday on domestic violence, I wrote: "I will also refer to abusers as 'he', and to their victims as 'she'; this is accurate in the overwhelming majority of cases." I think this was a mistake. I could just as easily have written that I would use these pronouns because while writing s/he is relatively easy, writing 'his or her', 'himself or herself', etc., throughout what I knew would be a very long post would be awful, or because I know the dynamics of relationships in which women are the victims of abuse better than others. I should have. 

Some commenters provided cites to statistics about the relative frequency of abuse of men by women as opposed to abuse of women by men. (I had checked the Department of Justice statistics before I posted, but some commenters questioned them.) I can think of a lot of reasons why any statistics on this topic might be wrong: reasons why either gender, or both, might underreport abuse; questions about whether violence in self-defense was being counted as abuse, and if so which gender was more likely to be overreported as abusive; etc. These cut both ways, and working through the arguments on both sides would take time. And I stopped, because on some level, I don't really care what I would find. It's not a contest. If anyone, of any gender, is being abused, that's awful; and that, it seems to me, is what I need to know.

What mattered more to me were the comments by men who had suffered abuse at the hands of women. As I thought about it, I thought: I'm not particularly interested in sorting out who has it worse. Surely there are especially bad things about being a woman who has been beaten up by a man -- the fact that men tend to be stronger leaps to mind -- but one thing that must be especially tough about being a man in that situation is that it is nearly invisible, especially when compared to domestic violence committed by men against women. Imagine being in this situation: who would you tell? And how? It's tough telling people if you're a woman who has been beaten by a man, but at least you don't have to wonder whether everyone will think it's funny, and you certainly don't have to worry that no one will have heard of such a thing.

I hate the fact that I added to this, and I apologize.

I think it's important, in thinking about this, for those of us who are feminists not to be distracted by the fact that there are also men out there who are using the idea of male victims of domestic violence as a sort of rhetorical club to use against feminism and the battered women's movement. ("What about battered men??? Huh???", said in the same tones in which one might say: but what about the white victims of racism???) They certainly exist, and I ran across a number of them before I stopped trying to wade through the statistics. I don't much care for them. 

But their existence does not imply that there are no men out there who are married to, or romantically involved with, abusive women. Pick the human tragedy of your choice: somewhere, there is probably someone trying to fake that tragedy to make some political point. It's bad enough that there are such people; we should not compound that problem by dismissing the concerns of quite different people who deserve to be heard. People who use tragedies that way have already hardened their hearts; we should not let them harden ours.

Battered Women: The Sequel

by hilzoy

As a followup to my last post on this topic, I wanted to consider this passage from Linda Hirshman's post. She's discussing Leslie Morgan Steiner, author of a memoir about her abusive relationship:

"It is difficult to understand why she stayed in this awful relationship, given that she was not risking starvation and had no children with her abuser. Which is why, no matter how many times Steiner and Marcotte and the others tell them not to, people keep asking the question. And it's terribly important to do exactly that. Asking why women participate in destructive relationships is a mark of respect. The amazing thing is that, four decades after the birth of feminism, we are still arguing about it."

Is it "terribly important" to keep asking why women stay in abusive relationships? And is it true, as Hirshman says, that "the current love affair with understanding stops feminists from calling victims on taking responsibility for their own well-being"? I want to break this topic down into several parts, which I will consider below the fold.

Why Do They Stay?

by hilzoy

In a post on a book about a violent relationship, Linda Hirshman writes:

"It is difficult to understand why she stayed in this awful relationship, given that she was not risking starvation and had no children with her abuser. Which is why, no matter how many times Steiner and Marcotte and the others tell them not to, people keep asking the question. And it's terribly important to do exactly that. Asking why women participate in destructive relationships is a mark of respect."

I worked in a battered women's shelter for five years, four as a volunteer, and one as a full-time staffer, so I might be able to answer this question. I'll try to get to the respect part in a subsequent post. Obviously, this will be too general: people stay for lots of reasons. I knew someone once who had a bad heroin habit, and while getting involved with a guy who beat her up if she tried to leave the house would not be my preferred method of detoxing, it worked for her. (She was still clean the last time I heard.) But generalizations might be better than nothing. I will also refer to abusers as 'he', and to their victims as 'she'; this is accurate in the overwhelming majority of cases.

In some cases, understanding why someone stays is easy. A lot of women are afraid that their abuser would try to harm them if they leave. And with good reason: about a third of female homicide victims were killed by a spouse, lover, or ex-lover; and that's not counting the women who are "merely" beaten, stalked, and so forth. Staying in a case like this, at least until you had figured out how to leave safely and cover your tracks, is not mysterious or perplexing.

Moreover, while I think the assumption that battered women stay because they are just dumb, or have staggeringly bad judgment, is wrong and insulting, there are a whole lot of battered women, and it would be very surprising if none of them stayed for such reasons. We asked women who came to our shelter when the abuse had started; one woman told me that her husband had thrown her from a moving car on their first date, at which point I wondered silently why on earth there had been a second date, let alone a subsequent marriage. But in my experience such women were a vanishingly small minority.

What is hard to understand, I take it, is why women who do not have obviously bad judgment, and who do not take themselves to be in serious danger if they leave, stay anyways. So I turn to them.

Galston On Rawls (Wonkish)

by hilzoy

As I wrote last night, I have been reading John Rawls' undergraduate thesis. Having almost finished it, I wanted to say a few words about William Galston's article on it, because I think it's wrong in several respects. 

Rawls' thesis was written during a period in which he was intensely religious, and it shows. His first basic presupposition is that "there is a being whom Christians call God and who has revealed Himself in Christ Jesus". (Having been an undergraduate in the same department at the same institution forty years later, I tried to imagine turning in a thesis with this basic presupposition. My head exploded.) Galston notes this, and writes:

"If it turns out that early faith commitments constitute the unexpressed but indispensable basis of Rawls's thought, then one may wonder whether there are other grounds on which those of different faiths, or no faith at all, can affirm the validity of his conception of justice as fairness."

This is true. But it's not clear, to me at least, why one might think that Rawls' early Christianity, which he had abandoned long before he published A Theory Of Justice, would turn out not just to illuminate that work (which it does), but to be indispensable to it -- to call into question the extent to which non-Christians could accept it. For that to be the case, the arguments in TJ would have not just to be informed by Rawls' experience of religion, but to require religious presuppositions. And it's not clear why one would think that that is true.

Galston's main example is this:

Kids In The Back Seat

by hilzoy

The Washington Post has a story about people who accidentally leave their kids in the car, where they die from the heat. I often say that things are worth reading, but this one is more than usually so: for the detail, the understanding, the neurological explanation for how this could happen even to loving and attentive parents, the stories of how, incomprehensibly, the parents who do this go on living. It's really, really good, and really, really tough to read. But it's worth it.

I remember the first time I heard about someone who had done this. I have a vivid imagination, and the idea of a child slowly baking to death in a carseat, of the moment when the parent realized what he or she had done, of all the moments of apparent normalcy that preceded it, of how you could possibly try to live with the knowledge that you had done that, or (a quite different form of torment) that your spouse had -- one ghastly detail after another kept unfolding in my mind, each of them revealing new and unexpected dimensions of horror. But for all that, I know that I cannot begin to imagine this.

A molecular physiologist quoted in the Post story explains how it happens:

"The human brain, he says, is a magnificent but jury-rigged device in which newer and more sophisticated structures sit atop a junk heap of prototype brains still used by lower species. At the top of the device are the smartest and most nimble parts: the prefrontal cortex, which thinks and analyzes, and the hippocampus, which makes and holds on to our immediate memories. At the bottom is the basal ganglia, nearly identical to the brains of lizards, controlling voluntary but barely conscious actions.

Diamond says that in situations involving familiar, routine motor skills, the human animal presses the basal ganglia into service as a sort of auxiliary autopilot. When our prefrontal cortex and hippocampus are planning our day on the way to work, the ignorant but efficient basal ganglia is operating the car; that's why you'll sometimes find yourself having driven from point A to point B without a clear recollection of the route you took, the turns you made or the scenery you saw.

Ordinarily, says Diamond, this delegation of duty "works beautifully, like a symphony. But sometimes, it turns into the '1812 Overture.' The cannons take over and overwhelm." (...)

The quality of prior parental care seems to be irrelevant," he said. "The important factors that keep showing up involve a combination of stress, emotion, lack of sleep and change in routine, where the basal ganglia is trying to do what it's supposed to do, and the conscious mind is too weakened to resist. What happens is that the memory circuits in a vulnerable hippocampus literally get overwritten, like with a computer program. Unless the memory circuit is rebooted -- such as if the child cries, or, you know, if the wife mentions the child in the back -- it can entirely disappear."

I believe this now, as I sit here writing this post. I do not think I would be able to believe it if I had left my child to die. In that situation, I don't think that all the neurological evidence in the world would convince me. But, as I said, I can't imagine.

***

Here's one detail from the article: 

"For years, Fennell [head of a group called Kids and Cars -- ed.] has been lobbying for a law requiring back-seat sensors in new cars, sensors that would sound an alarm if a child's weight remained in the seat after the ignition is turned off. Last year, she almost succeeded. The 2008 Cameron Gulbransen Kids' Transportation Safety Act -- which requires safety improvements in power windows and in rear visibility, and protections against a child accidentally setting a car in motion -- originally had a rear seat-sensor requirement, too. It never made the final bill; sponsors withdrew it, fearing they couldn't get it past a powerful auto manufacturers' lobby."

Can you imagine being the lobbyist who went to work against that? Or the executive who decided to hire that lobbyist? How would you explain to yourself, let alone to others, that you have deliberately tried to block a measure that would prevent infants and toddlers from being cooked alive in cars? Unless adding a sensor would cause some truly horrific problem for the car, it's hard to see how you could look yourself in the mirror. 

Race Since The 80s

by hilzoy

Matt Cooper has a really interesting post at TPMDC, on the difficulty of explaining to people who weren't around (or old enough) at the time just how different, and more troubled, race relations were like in the 80s and early 90s. He asks: "Why is America's racial atmosphere less poisonous than it was then?" And he offers a few answers: the drop in black crime and teen pregnancy, the disappearance of issues like school busing,the mainstreaming of hip-hop, Bill Clinton's ease with African-Americans and Bush's cabinet picks. Josh Marshall adds: "American mass culture found a more useful scary other: Arabs and Muslims. That's a key thing that isn't pretty but I think is also true." 

Since I seem to be around the same age as Cooper, I thought I'd offer a few more possibilities, which I've put below the fold.