Intersectional look at some of the Free-Amina protests

A few things upfront:
a) This is a post about FEMEN. Therefore, there will be boobs. Don’t do what I did, and look at the below pictures while in class. :-p
b) FEMEN has an undeserved reputation as sex positive because they call themselves “sextremists” and are using their naked bodies to protest. However, apparently they don’t think that the right to do with your body whatever you want extends universally: they are supporters of the Swedish Model, for example. In fact, at least one of the Free Amina photos on their site is against the background of a self-portrait-mural in which one woman holds up a sign saying “not a sex toy” and has “no prostitution” written on her chest. So yeah. Fail on that account.
c) A lot of the comments on FEMEN’s site are assorted attempts at dismissing the protesters as sluts, whores, etc., which gets mostly ridiculed and aggressively defended against on their page; that I think shows that their “sextremism” style activism has a place, in the same way that the aggressive New Atheist style of defending the right to be openly atheist does. But that doesn’t mean that either is unproblematic, or that either fits every issue and every context.
d) There were other noteworthy instances, posted in other places on the internet, but I really just wanted to work with the images FEMEN had on their facebook, and pull out a couple interesting examples. Otherwise, this post could have gone on forever.
e) All pictures are from the FEMEN facebook page.

Alright, let’s get to the actual point of this post:

1) Activists got into a closed conference at the Institute of Arab Culture in Paris, where the president of Tunisia was giving a presentation:The target here is directly relevant: The Tunisian government is absolutely co-responsible for Amina’s disappearance, and is part of the problem she was protesting against in the first place. On the other hand, none of the pictures I’ve seen showed the activists having anything Amina-related written on their bodies, making this appear far more generically anti-Islam, and not primarily pro-Amina.

2) Free Amina protesters in Berlin climbed a fence and took photos of themselves in front of a mosque, holding signs:Muslims make 5.4% of Germany’s population. Anti-Muslim xenophobes make anywhere from 21% (wouldn’t want to have Muslims as neighbors) to 58% (believe that Muslims’ rights to practice their religion in Germany should be considerably limited). So I’m thinking a bunch of Germans trespassing on private property of a targeted minority might not exactly send the right message; plus, what did that random mosque have to do with Amina?
One of the women in this action is of Arab descent, and had “Arab Women Against Islamism” written across her front. A number of the other protesters had directly Amina-related things written on their bodies. That reads like solidarity with Amina, and with Arab women in general.

3) A large group of activists protested near the Tunisian embassy in Paris, got arrested for their effort:Two pictures this time, because the visuals of that protest were amazingly evocative of suppression of women’s right to speak up (especially the first one). Images like this are why I think the FEMEN style of protest can be quite powerful; but primarily, it is powerful in exactly this way: speaking to the right of women to express themselves.
The protesters gathered near the Tunisian embassy, a clearly understandable connection to Amina’s plight; they also had Amina-related things written on their bodies, and a number of them had stylized portraits of Amina in her now-famous photo on their backs. This could be very easily read as solidarity with Amina.
The wider context of having this protest in France could potentially muddle some of the clarity of the message. Protesting for the right to naked boobs in public spaces in a country that banned veiling in public spaces might not read as “freedom” so much as “freedom to be like us”; not quite the same thing.

4) Many Middle Eastern/North African women also participated in the Free Amina protests (pictures from FEMEN, grouped together by me for easier viewing): The women in the pictures are Egyptian, Iranian, Moroccan, Algerian, and Bahraini; at least one of them is a Muslim. All their messages refer to Amina. In all these cases, their actions directly attack a form of oppression they themselves are subject to.

5) One more from France. French-Arabic women protest in front of a mosque, burn Salafist flag. As with the German protest… why this particular mosque? That point aside, this protest of Arab women, including one Tunisian FEMEN member, standing up against their oppressors is a powerful statement; that image is a powerful visual of that fight against one’s oppression. This too looks less like a pro-Amina rally, but given the context, it’s noticeably in solidarity with her: Arab women fighting together against common oppressor.

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bonus screenshot — a piece of advice: if you don’t want to look like you’re just being ignorantly islamophobic, it would help to do a basic google search before going out to protest:

There’s a post on sex work on Feministe, and it is Teh Fail

Jill wrote a blog post titled Supporting Sex Workers’ Rights, Opposing the Buying of Sex. Reading it, I once again did that thing where I start arguing with an online article in my head, and then I realized this is blogging material. So here you go:

I am an anti-sex-trafficking feminist. I think sex work is incredibly problematic. And I also support the rights of sex workers. I think you can do all those things at once.

Sure one can. The question is really rather whether one’s actions on all these are consistent and synergistic, or whether one’s undermining one set of actions with another. Oh, and whether the actions actually are helpful, of course.

Also, sex work is “problematic” only in the same sense that manufacturing is problematic: it sits at the intersection of multiple axes of oppression and is made invisible/marginalized by the kyriarchy. And since the kyriarchy is abusive and oppressive, people who do this work are abused and oppressed (and no one cares/notices, because it’s all invisible/marginalized). But neither manufacturing nor sex work are problematic per se; their place in the matrix of oppression is problematic.

My view is basically that sex work wouldn’t exist in the feminist utopia. Why? Because sex wouldn’t be this commodified thing that some people (mostly woman) have and other people (mostly men) get. Sex would be a fun thing, a collaborative thing, always entered into freely and enthusiastically and without coercion.

That doesn’t follow. Unless Jill is a marxist feminist and wants to abolish commodities and the “selling”* of labor in addition to abolishing the patriarchy, everything that people do with other people will still be also offered as a paid service; even the fun stuff. Sure, abolishing the patriarchy would abolish the myth of sex being something women have and men want, but it would also destigmatize a lot of behaviors currently marginalized as a result of a patricular, heteronormative, patriarchal-religion-propagated view of what sex, love, relationships, etc. are. These changes would definitely shift the patterns of demand (and supply) for sex work, but it wouldn’t make it go away, any more than abolishing the class system will make the demand for mechanics go away.

As long as people in relationships have differing sex-drives, different and not-fully-compatible kinks, kinks that include sex (or watching peep-shows, or watching a stripper, or whathaveyou) with people not involved in that relationship (by yourself, or with together with your partner(s)), no-strings-attached-single-sex, etc., there will be demand for sex as a paid-for service; because amazingly enough, not everyone who wants to get laid finds social interaction pleasant enough to want to have to find a mutually interested partner in the wild, on short notice. Plus, if we got rid of the patriarchy, we’d also get rid of many stupid, shaming ideas about sex, which means the role of sex-workers could expand to workshops, counseling, private training or whatever for people interested in learning how to do different kinds of sex. Because goddamnit, sex absolutely should come with training sessions. We’d all be spared the awkward fumbling that is reinventing sex from scratch every time someone has sex for the first time.

Anyway, what I’m basically picturing here is the Licensed Sex Therapists from Beta Colony in the Vorkosigan Saga.

While that view would leave room for some types of sex work — sexually explicit performance, for example, if that performance were no longer primarily a looking-at-women’s-bodies-as-stand-ins-for-sex thing, which is what it mostly is today — it doesn’t leave room for offering money in exchange for sex

Again, unless this feminist utopia is also a marxist utopia, the service industry will still exist, and therefore the option of paying for sex still will exist too.

it doesn’t leave room for offering money in exchange for sex, especially as we see it now, with men being the primary consumers and sex being seen as something you can buy.

Well no, the primary clients might indeed not be men then. And sex wouldn’t be something one “buys”, any more than one “buys” car repair; sex is not a product, it’s a service. However, I see no reason to think that the idea of sex as a service will disappear just because the patriarchy did.

I don’t think there would be McDonalds or Wal-Mart in the feminist utopia either;

“McDonalds” and and “Wal-Mart” are not equivalents to “sex work”, or even “prostitution”. McD and Wal-Mart are specific businesses; the equivalents to “sex work” would be “food service” and “retail”. Will neither of those two types of service work exist in this feminist utopia, either? Because if so, we’re back at “marxist feminist utopia”. But if so, why single out sex work? It would be abolishing doing anything for pay, altogether.

And as a side note, the title of the post is “Supporting Sex Workers’ Rights, Opposing the Buying of Sex”, so would Jill oppose the “buying of food service” with the same methods which she’d suggest for sex work? Should we have a “swedish model” for restaurants, in which the cooks, waitstaff, etc. are not penalized, but the customers are?

Yes, of course women should have the right to do what they want with their own bodies, and of course there are many sex workers who aren’t trafficked or forced into the trade. But that smacks a bit too much of “I choose my choice!” feminism, which I find to be incredibly intellectually lazy.

There’s a difference between “I’m a woman therefore all my choices are feminist choices”, and “I have the right to navigate the matrix of oppression as I see fit”. All of us make choices that aren’t feminist, or that support and aid the patriarchy in maintaining itself, because a)most of us don’t have such options available due to external social structures, and b)our mental structures are such that what we enjoy/want/need are often entwined with patriarchy and lend it support, and it’s impossible for everyone to change all their desires. We don’t have contracausal free will (i.e. the ability to change and create desires and preferences at will), we only have agency (the ability to choose between available avenues towards fulfilling our desires). Desires change only slowly, as our character changes; and no one can rid their mind of all imprints of their society.
And lastly… as I mentioned previously, sex work is problematic because of its location in the matrix of oppression. Shift the matrix, or shift sex work out of that position, and sex work no longer functions as patriarchy-supporting, problematic work.

sex worker advocates have cast a similar too-wide net — arguing that sex work is a job like any other, that every job is coercive, etc etc. Both narratives erase the vast grey area of the entire idea of “consent” when money is involved.

Marxist feminist utopia, blah blah, this is getting boring. And in any case, that argument does make other service work different from sex work only in the degree of intimacy, not in any qualitative sense.

I too often see a similarly reductive argument — that while a small number of women and girls are actually enslaved, the rest are there voluntarily and we should support their choices.

It’s only reductive because “voluntarily” is a shitty word with too many related meanings. A better phrasing is that they are where they are because of the exercise of their agency. Social structures, both those external and internal to ourselves, are present for sex workers as much as for others. Change the social structures, and agency will be exercised differently: people who chose sex work because it’s the best of a range of shitty options might choose an option they see as better than sex work, should it become available; others however might chose sex-work if it became less marginalized, or allowed for different kinds of sex services (“training” for sex-n00bs or couples wanting to learn something new, for example) than currently exist/are in demand.
Still, even changing social structures won’t change the mind of those for whom sex-work is the best means to pursue their desires (or even, their desire itself), i.e. those who do it “voluntarily” in the sense of choosing without structural pressure or limitations**

But from a birdseye feminist view — from a sex-positive view — sex work is different because it’s commodifying something that should ideally be a basic pleasure, entered into entirely freely and at will.

That’s what the service industry is: commodifying things people do with other people; even the fun stuff. That’s what dance instructors do, too, for example. They take something people do together for fun (dancing) and that one ideally should only do with others who freely and voluntarily return the sentiment, and they provide that and related activities as a service one can pay for. Again, we’re really just talking about differences in the degree of intimacy, not a qualitative difference.

From a practical point of view, there are a whole lot of women in the sex trade who are technically there voluntarily insofar as they aren’t kidnapped and chained up, but who are coerced into sex work in ways that most of us would find intolerable — owing large sums of money to traffickers, psychologically and physically abused by pimps, cast out by their families and communities for doing sex work and believing there are no other options.

Emphasis mine. Because a)”no” other choice is often not true; only that the other choices are considered even shittier; and b)that’s the difference between “voluntarily” and “by exercising agency”: if sex work is the best option given the (internal and external) structural limitations, then changing the structures would change the results of exercising agency, but this makes sex work the same as other forms of labor in an intersectionally classist system: remove socioeconomic “pressures” that let people accept horrible work-conditions because the alternatives are worse, and the work conditions for that form of labor become worker-friendly (compare manufacturing in, say, Germany to sweat-shops in China, for example)

Putting them [economically oppressed sex workers, and economically privileged sex workers] all under the umbrella of sex work is helpful in advocating for recognition and certain legal changes, but ultimately it doesn’t mean that more women’s voices are heard; it means that the most privileged of the group dictate policy.

This is an intersectional problem, not a problem somehow inherent in sex work. Yes, if white, upper-class, sex- and gendernormative sex workers from countries where sex work isn’t illegal are the sole or even the dominant voices heard, that’s a problem in the same way that it is a problem when white, upper-class, sex- and gendernormative feminists are the only or the dominant voices in feminism. But how is that an argument for sex work being somehow qualitatively different?
Plus, many sex worker advocates ARE women who are affected by multiple axes of oppression. Whence the assumption that this isn’t so? Is it just because the voices of relatively privileged sex workers are the only voices that penetrate deeply enough into the mainstream feminist landscape? Because I find it extraordinarily easy to find the narratives of sex workers in India, the narratives of trans sex workers, etc.***

And while a small percentage are relatively privileged and fairly compensated, most aren’t. And most sex workers face very real barriers to basic rights like bodily autonomy, workplace safety, and freedom from violence.

This is true for most women in the world; it is also true for most work in the world; it is especially true for most work that women do. Again we’re dealing with sex work’s location in the matrix of oppression, with intersectionality, not with anything inherent to sex work.

There are some methods that can best serve most of these women — safer sex supplies, legal rights. But what serves a 14-year-old in a Cambodian brothel whose clients are mostly middle-aged white guys from Europe and the U.S. is not the same as what serves a 22-year-old in New York advertising on Craig’s List.

True, but once again an issue of intersectionality; something that sex work advocates are showing less problems with than mainstream feminism as a whole does; just sayin’.

And none of these issues of intersectionality (including the ones I didn’t quote, because how often can you point out the same mistake?) address the core of the supposed issue here: nothing here supports the argument that sex work (and prostitution specifically) shouldn’t exist. All of this is a good argument to not repeat mistakes of other social justice movements and make the most privileged members of the movement the sole or predominant voices in it; it’s a good argument to remember that intersectionality demands solutions suited to individual cases, based on the specifics of the intersections. It’s not an argument against sex work.

When you’re talking about sex for money, you can’t take money and international economics out of it.

That’s a strawman of epic proportions, given that sex work advocates talk about class-based oppression more than any other women’s rights advocates who aren’t also socialists/marxists/anarchists.

I’m troubled by the migration of sexual labor and what it says about who “deserves” sex and who provides it.

Right. Troubled by the class-based problems involved in sex work, and how they intersect with sex and gender based problems. Still not an argument against sex work, tho.

I do think it’s immoral and unethical to buy sex.

“Buying sex” is what men did when they purchased a wife. Anyway, contributing from a position of privilege to maintaining/reinforcing an axis of oppression is always “problematic”, and consequently I wish people would not shop at Wal-mart or procure sex services from exploitative sources; and maybe any kind of shopping or procuring of sex services contributes to maintenance of oppressive class structures. But the way to end exploitation is not to drive the victims of it underground by outlawing the purchase of their labor; rather, it can be done by giving them the tools they need to a)widen their choices within the social structure, and b)to change the social structure by attacking the forces that oppress them. Which aren’t always the individuals who pay them for their services; and which won’t end sex work, but rather end (or at least diminish) exploitative sex work.

I think it speaks to a view of human sexuality (and women’s bodies in particular, although of course there are men who pay for sex with men and boys) as purchasable;

“Buying sex” does, but like I said, that’s not a feature inherent in sex work, since sex work is the provision of services for pay, not the “selling” of sex (because selling something intangible like a service is only possible by selling the provider, and that’s slavery, not service work.) I keep repeating this distinction because the idea of buying sex is tightly coupled with the idea of the “unrapeable”: when you buy something, it’s yours to do with as you please, without the previous owner of it having a say in it. That was, and often still is, the attitude towards sex in patriarchal culture. But it’s not inherent to sex work, since the provision of a service always entails the possibility to cancel the deal, as well as the fact that it’s a one-time agreement, to be re-negotiated, and that the ownership of the means of providing the service never changes hands. It’s the equation of the provision of a sexual service with the buying of sex that’s the problem, and it’s one that must be solved without negatively affecting sex workers (i.e. not by curing the disease by killing the patient).

I’m personally a fan of capitalist marketplaces because I don’t think there’s a better system out there

So, no marxist feminist utopia, then? How then is the provision of services or the commodification of human interactions to disappear?

We can respond to the basics of supply and demand while not giving corporations outsized power; while building a social safety net; and while instituting physical, legal and financial protections for workers. We can critique the forces that establish patters of exploited migrant labor while advocating for the rights of migrant laborers. Can’t we?

Sure we can. But that’s what sex work advocates do, not what “end demand” does. The equivalent of “end demand” would be to insist on the end of demand for any industry**** in which workers are exploited. Which is all of them. Which is marxism.

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*”selling” is a misnomer, I recently realized. More like renting out, though the idea that labor is “sold” is what leads to a lot of abuses of workers, since the “buyers” of labor believe that they actually own the worker for the time they’re at work (and often even beyond that).
**Marx, species-being, etc. That’s an entirely separate blog-post tho.
***some examples: Don’t Talk To Me About Sewing Machines, Asia Pacific Network of Sex Workers, Barred by U.S. Restrictions, Sex Workers Hold Alternative AIDS Summit in Kolkata, India, HIV and Sex Work – The view from 2012(pdf)
****the whole industry, not just a specific business or a specific model of providing the products or services of this industry

The WSJ has opinions on non-rich folks again

Donald J. Boudreaux and Mark J. Perry at the Wall Street Journal would like you to know that the shrinking middle class is a mean and “spectacularly wrong” progressive trope; or rather, a “progressive” trope. Scare quotes are apparently necessary (link). Wanna have a look at their arguments?

First, the CPI overestimates inflation by underestimating the value of improvements in product quality and variety.

The what now? Variety I can understand, because increased variations on the same crap are how this consumer economy works. But how is making Planned Obsolescence into a basic production model, and how is lowering quality of products so they can be sold at a profit at Walmart an “improvement in quality”?

Would you prefer 1980 medical care at 1980 prices, or 2013 care at 2013 prices? Most of us wouldn’t hesitate to choose the latter.

1980′s care I can pay for, vs. 2013 care I can’t? Yeah, let me think about that one.

Asides from that, it’s complete BS that the increase in costs has anything to do with the increase in quality, since the US does not in fact have the best healthcare in the world, yet has the most expensive healthcare in the world. Quite the contrary, the US is below average in many aspects of healthcare as compared to other OECD countries, while at the same time spending 2.5 times the OECD average on healthcare costs. And many of the procedures cost more than in other countries, as well:

And lastly, it’s not actually relevant that current care is more technologically advanced. A middle-class by definition should be able to afford a middle-level of care, regardless of its level of advancement.

Second, this wage figure ignores the rise over the past few decades in the portion of worker pay taken as (nontaxable) fringe benefits. This is no small matter—health benefits, pensions, paid leave and the rest now amount to an average of almost 31% of total compensation for all civilian workers according to the BLS.

You mean the ridiculously more expensive healthcare makes up a larger chunk of a paycheck? Shocking. Also, pensions are rarely pensions anymore, they’re 401k, which just became nearly worthless during the world economic crisis, regardless of how much money people put into them.

Third and most important, the average hourly wage is held down by the great increase of women and immigrants into the workforce over the past three decades. Precisely because the U.S. economy was flexible and strong, it created millions of jobs for the influx of many often lesser-skilled workers who sought employment during these years.

You can tell this is ass-backwards bullshit by the part where women are unskilled workers (the impressive sexism of that aside for a moment). The reality is once again the opposite: jobs entered into by women have become de-skilled as they entered them.
Aside from that… when a job that used to be a highly trained union job, but is now classified as a low-skilled non-union job, that means fewer middle-class jobs. When these jobs disappear entirely, and are replaced by non-unionized, unskilled service industry jobs, that’s once again fewer middle-class jobs. It’s not the magical appearance of uneducated wimmins and furriners that is causing this shift of the US workforce. It’s the lack of affordable education, de-skilling, and de-unionizing of jobs that did that; and those jobs were then filled by people entering the workforce, including women and immigrants.
And on the note of “unskilled labor”… you know what an easy solution to that problem is? Providing training and education for said labor; another thing that’s increasingly hard to come by, because education is becoming more expensive, because apprenticeships for union-jobs are becoming scarce, and because ever higher levels of education are required for ever lower-skilled work.

Since almost all lesser-skilled workers entering the workforce in any given year are paid wages lower than the average, the measured statistic, “average hourly wage,” remained stagnant over the years—even while the real wages of actual flesh-and-blood workers employed in any given year rose over time as they gained more experience and skills.

apparently only people who’ve been in the middle-class in the 1980′s count. O.o
Dudes, having a larger proportion of people in poverty jobs by definition shrinks the Middle Class.

No single measure of well-being is more informative or important than life expectancy. Happily, an American born today can expect to live approximately 79 years—a full five years longer than in 1980 and more than a decade longer than in 1950.

which is also still below OECD average, by a whole year. It also rose slower than in other OECD countries, and slower than in the 40′s, 50′s, and 60′s. But once again, this doesn’t actually tell us shit about the Middle Class, since this is an U.S.-wide average. What might tell us something about the situation of the Middle Class is the fact that the life expectancy gap between the poor and the rich is growing; and unless we assume that the rich have gained enormously and/or poor people are dying much younger at much higher rates, the most likely explanation is a shifting of people out of the middle-ground. You know, a shrinking middle class.

According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, spending by households on many of modern life’s “basics”—food at home, automobiles, clothing and footwear, household furnishings and equipment, and housing and utilities—fell from 53% of disposable income in 1950 to 44% in 1970 to 32% today.

I notice that housing, education, and healthcare are not listed.

while income inequality might be rising when measured in dollars, it is falling when reckoned in what’s most important—our ability to consume.

consumption is what’s most important?! *barf*

Despite assertions by progressives who complain about stagnant wages, inequality and the (always) disappearing middle class, middle-class Americans have more buying power than ever before.

Considering the ridiculous degrees of indebtedness of Americans, this is a horribly callous thing to say. And kind of wrong, since increased debt accounts for the increased consumerism; it’s not an indicator of Middle-Class-ness.

They [...] have much greater access to the services and consumer products bought by billionaires.

like 1st class education, 1st class healthcare, protection from volatile energy prices and increased natural disasters? Oh, that’s not what you meant, is it. You meant gadgets. Oh well then: since both Bill Gates and a college student can afford an iPad, that must mean the Middle Class isn’t shrinking. WTF?

Incidentally, I looked at income distribution in the U.S. in 1980 and 2010. in 1980, median income was $44000; in 2010, it was $49000. The percentage of people living in neighborhoods between 80% and 125% of that median shrunk in that time from about 55% of the population to just over 40% of the population.

Looks to me like the middle segment of income earners in the U.S. shrunk. Huh.

An interesting MRA argument

…and by “interesting” I mean that I’ve personally not run into it before, and that it’s actually one that deserves dissection rather than merely being laughed out of the room for sheer dumbosity. Somewhat unfortunately, this post has been incubating in my brain for so long that the blog in which I originally found the comments (No, Seriously, What About Teh Menz) seems to have moved to a new host, and now I can’t find anything there. So, this will be written from memory and therefore I can’t guarantee the full accuracy of the examples used to support the MRA’s talking point.

Anyway, the argument goes as follows:
We know that women have a higher status than men because women who “descend” into masculinity are tolerated , but men who are trying to do things “above their station” and adopt feminine things/behaviors are punished*; this is similar to the way rich people can affect the “ghetto” look and be cool, while poor people affecting upper class style and behavior are posers and fakes**; or similar to the way blackface is cool, but a black person trying to “pass” for a white one is considered to be transgressing.

The reason I find this argument interesting is because at first glance, that kinda sorta makes sense. Privileged people have more freedoms, and one of them is to appropriate things from the oppressed classes. Cultural appropriation for example is a huge problem with imperialism/colonialism/white culture***. But a closer analysis of the two claims in this argument makes it clear that that’s not quite how it works. So, let’s have a closer look at these claims:

1)The oppressors are permitted to be like the oppressed
This is only superficially true. As I mentioned, affecting and appropriating things that culturally belong to oppressed groups is certainly quite common. But there are “rules” about how you’re supposed to do that. For example, there’s a difference between appropriating/devaluing and adopting/supporting someone else’s oppressed identity. Wearing a hipster headdress is not the same as “decolonizing” and becoming involved in Native culture and society as an ally and/or as a spouse and parent to tribal members; donning blackface is not the same as becoming a student and promoter of Critical Race Theory; dressing up as a woman for Halloween, for a comedy show, or for a pride parade is not the same as living as a trans woman; and I’m willing to bet affecting a lower-class accent is not the same as abandoning your upper-class social ties and becoming a miner and moving to a working-class neighborhood. Point being, it’s ok to mock and play pretend, but it’s absolutely not ok to actually become part of, or a supporter of, the oppressed group. And in many ways, this can be seen by how the privileged classes define themselves, which is often by what they are not****. For example, pale skin was a sign of nobility when it meant that you were not a peasant; and then the Industrial Revolution happened, labor moved indoors, and suddenly suntanning became a sign of not being working class. Another example is Upper Class Etiquette (AKA “being classy”), which is basically an elaborate set of completely superfluous rules designed specifically as an artificial Upper Class Habitus setting the Upper Classes apart from the lower classes; and, sure, you can occasionally adopt what you think is a lower-class habitus, but only when it’s kinda obvious that it’s for shits and giggles; otherwise, it may well be perceived as a giant faux pas. A third, and probably the best-known example, is the one drop rule: whiteness being treated as such an endangered commodity that a single drop of black blood contaminated it permanently and made you non-white. Masculinity works much the same way, i.e. it identifies itself as what it is not, i.e. feminine. That’s why enforcement of transgressions out of masculinity and into femininity exist: they threaten the established hierarchy, and unlike in the cases of racism and classism, there isn’t even an equivalent ideology in the broader culture equivalent to “colorblindness” or “meritocracy” that would temper old-fashioned***** gender-policing the same way it sometimes does temper old-fashioned race- and class-policing.

2)The oppressed are forbidden from being like the oppressors
It is true that in order to properly maintain a hierarchy, it’s necessary to make sure the oppressed don’t just weasel out by becoming or passing for the oppressor. Further, since I just explained that the oppressor group often defines itself by what it is not, making sure that the oppressed don’t start doing oppressor-stuff is a way of preserving for oneself the permission to do these things^#. However, internalized oppression and the hierarchy itself make it so that the stuff that “belongs” to the oppressor is seen as good, moral, “classy”, etc. while the stuff that “belongs” or identifies the oppressed groups is seen as inferior. Consequently, internal hierarchies within oppressed groups emerge, which state that even while being in the oppressed group, it’s “better” (more moral, more civilized, more normal, etc.) to be more like the oppressor and shun/abandon those things that mark one as a member of the oppressed class. Colorism is one such example, in which lighter skin color is higher in a racial hierarchy than darker skin, even among people of color themselves; similarly, African-Americans who have internalized a white habitus are considered more cultured than those who have a habitus associated with an African-American subculture (it’s probably not a coincidence that the first black president of the US is a biracial man raised by white people. Or, as Joe Biden noted is his typical foot-in-mouth kind of way: a “mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”). Another one is the “normal gay” and “flamboyant gay” bullshit: gay men who are otherwise performing masculinity are seen as better, i.e. higher up on the hierarchy, than gay men who are seen to share more “feminine” attributes than just being attracted to men (incidentally, this is also where the weird thing about how it’s not “gay” to receive a blowjob from a man comes from: receiving blowjobs = manly, while giving blowjobs = womanly; and gay = womanly)^##. In the trans community, this internal (self-)oppression based on how closely someone manages to conform to cisnormative and heteronormative rules is called the Harry Benjamin Syndrome.
And exactly the same happens to gender-roles. Because men are higher in the hierarchy, masculine things have higher status, whereas feminine things have lower status. The consequence? Femmephobia: the belief that feminine self-expression and things associated with femininity are inherently less good, moral, fun, valuable, etc. than masculine self-expression and things associated with masculinity. This is why women who do traditionally masculine things can sometimes be perceived as being “better” than those doing traditionally feminine things.
It should be noted that a lot of this “it’s better to be like the oppressor” stuff is a symptom of a transitional culture: in a static hierarchy, “upward mobility” of this kind is strictly punishable and control and suppresion of it seen as absolutely necessary for the survival of society. When it occurs within segregated minority communities, it’s only tolerated insofar as it’s invisible (or useful in a divide-and-conquer sort of way) to the oppressor group; the moment it spills out into the “mainstream” (read: the oppressor-dominated culture), it will be swiftly punished. In a transitional culture on the other hand, the oppressor culture becomes a “norm” and “ideal” that becomes a requirement for acceptance into a supposedly egalitarian/democratic/colorblind/whathaveyou mainstream. And when these two aspects clash, you get the faliliar Catch-22 that is being a member of an oppressed group: if you act in ways identified as belonging to your group, you’ll be shat on because of the low status of those social signifiers; if you instead act in ways identified with the oppressor group, you’ll be perceived as “uppity”, bitchy, a trap, a poser, etc., unless you somehow manage to do this while also helping maintain the hierarchy. See also “not like other women” and “model minority”.

So, to sum it up: oppressors are only allowed to appropriate oppressed-group-signifiers for the purpose of mockery and “play”, but not actually adopt them in any meaningful way; conversely, in transitional cultures with delusions of egalitarian ideals, the hierarchy itself mandates that acceptance into the “mainstream” requires emulation of the oppressor class on behalf of the oppressed. Therefore, the fact that women wearing pants is cool, but men wearing skirts is not isn’t a sign that women are the oppressor class; it’s a sign that masculinity has higher-status than femininity, and that we’re in a transitional culture which both enforces the masculinity-over-femininity hierarchy and uses the language of meritocracy and equality, thus basically saying that women have the right to abandon their shitty, feminine qualities and exchange them for the better, more masculine ones, while at the same time assigning lower status to anyone choosing to be more feminine than masculine^###.

Conclusion: another MRA being wrong, albeit more creatively and cleverly than usual.

P.S.:I apologize for the ridiculous amount of footnotes. The topic got away from me a few too many times, and there’s entirely too many tangents kinda-sorta-relevant to this topic.

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*women wearing pants vs. men wearing skirts; the fact that trans men face less violence than trans women; etc.
**to use my own example of this, take for example British class consciousness. It’s kinda fashionable for upper class Brits to affect lower-class accents; OTOH, someone from a lower class background trying to affect an upper class accent could be interpreted as uppity, fake, a poser etc. Also, from what I understand, there’s also a thing among younger folks of “dropping” aristocratic titles to be cool; but you’d get your ass handed to you if you instead wanted to take one on when you don’t have one. So, down-classing yourself = cool; up-classing yourself = punishable
***for example, here’s an entire excellent blog about appropriations of Native American culture by whites, especially by hipster culture: Native Appropriations
****that’s actually one of the identifying characteristics of being a privileged group: being the default, the un-modified state; being defined in common language as that which lacks distinguishing characteristics. That’s why “ethnic” never refers to WASPs, even though that’s technically a kind of ethnicity, and a human figure lacking secondary (or tertiary) sexual characteristics is interpreted as male.
*****”old-fashioned” vs. “modern” bigotry is a discussion in and of itself, but basically it’s the difference between being a blatantly prejudiced and discriminatory bigot (what we traditionally call “a racist”, “a misogynist” etc.) and someone who perpetrates microaggressions. Don’t know where dogwhistles fall here; probably the former masquerading as the latter
^#and actually, it just occurred to me that of course appropriation is a way to allow the oppressor-group to do oppressed-people-stuff without losing their status and identity: Pat Boone’s career is in fact based entirely on this principle.
^##the issue with “lipstic lesbians” vs. butch lesbians doesn’t neatly fit here because of the intersectional nature of it: on the one hand, feminine lesbians are considered “straighter” and more gender-role-conforming than butch lesbians, and thus are rewarded for that; on the other, femmephobia means that a feminine form of self-expression is considered lower-status than a masculine AKA butch one.
^###while simultaneously still enforcing the old gender-roles. this intersectionality means that gender-non-conforming cis women and gender-non-conforming cis men both end up suffering along two axes of oppression while being in the oppressor category on one; and it’s also this intersectionality that synergistically ends up super-shitty for trans women, because they suffer from femmephobia (pretty much regardless of how butch their self-expression; but femme trans women tend to get more of this), gender-non-conformity (when they’re treated as supergay or superfeminine men), and misogyny.

Of wedding rings and red herrings

The NYT has published an article bemoaning inequality; which would be great if it didn’t basically amount to: “if those silly women would just marry, most of their problems would go away”.

Mind you, I don’t dispute that unmarried women are generally hit worse by the ravages of the US economy (and incidentally, so are single fathers), nor that being unmarried seems to cluster in economically poorer social strata. However, the article is being ignorant and/or dismissive of systemic problems it even mentions (that dropping out of college tends to result in lower income; that having inadequate and expensive child-care makes things worse for those who need it more often; that hourly workers are massively underpaid in the US; that workers can’t get paid sick-leave even for severe injuries/recovery from surgery; that in the US, extra-curricular activities for kids cost and arm and a leg, and due to lack of safe public transportation, require a parent who can shuttle said kids to said activities; etc.), in favor of pointless hand-wringing about moral decay, lack of “marriageable men” in lower economic strata*, and other similarly moralistic complaints.
It uses such deeply problematic lines** as “their odds were not particularly good: nearly half the unmarried parents living together at a child’s birth split up within five years, according to Child Trends” to imply that if only people married right away, things would get better; as if it weren’t equally well-known that single-parenthood is actually healthier than the sort of extremely conflict-ridden marriages that would have resulted if all those couples that had split up had married instead and had insisted on “staying married for the children”. Bonus for whining about “children from multiple men”, despite the utter insignificance of that to the issue at hand; after all, being a single mother because one dude left you is not objectively better than being a single mother because several of them did (and I’m NOT touching a couple other possible reasons why a woman might have children by multiple men).
Another doozy: “Forty years ago, the top and middle income thirds had virtually identical family patterns”. Well that’s nice. 40 years ago, unions weren’t almost dead yet, minimum wage was higher, economic exploitation of workers was less, education was cheaper. All of this is far more relevant than whether people are married. And I know this because Sweden has a marriage rate lower, and an out-of-wedlock childbirth rate higher than the USA, and yet, inequality is low and children aren’t “doomed” to anything. Trying to guilt-trip women about their single-parent status by blaming their poverty on their singleness is pure, unadulterated bullshit.

Anyway, the article keeps on mentioning class and educational differences at childbirth, but it insists on focusing on marriage instead of getting women educated and providing better childcare services and worker protections. Why? Because writing about responsible social policy is a snooze compared to slut-shaming; which is why we get conclusions like this: “That is the essence of the story of Ms. Faulkner and Ms. Schairer. What most separates them is not the impact of globalization on their wages but a 6-foot-8-inch man named Kevin”, when in reality what separates them is that one has a college education and a salaried job, while the other is an hourly worker with a community college degree; and a special needs child.

- – - – - – - – -
*Classism and promotion of toxic masculinity FTL.
**Another favorite: “Ms. Schairer has trouble explaining, even to herself, why she stayed so long with a man who she said earned little, berated her often and did no parenting.” Hm. Might that ‘why’ have something to do with the kind of “single motherhood = teh ebil” atmosphere that makes women cling to seriously flawed men because the alternative seems even worse?***
***And since I’m quoting depressing signs of sexism making people’s lives harder, read this exchange and weep:

“I’m not the only boy anymore; we’re going to do boy stuff!” Ms. Schairer recounts him saying.
“What’s boy stuff?” she asked.
“We’re going to play video games and shoot Nerf guns and play Legos,” he said.
“We do that now,” she said.
“Yeah, but you’re not a boy,” he said.

Paula Kirby wrote stupid shit

This is how Paula Kirby tweeted about her essay* in re: the Harassment Policy discussion:

I’ll wait until you’re done laughing and/or rolling your eyes.
Done? Alright, let’s get on with this blogpost**. And btw., I’m ridiculously late to the game. Others have competently dismantled large parts of that ridiculous essay about Teh Ebil #FTBullies, but there’s just so much incredibly ignorant and untrue crap in this essay, I figure I’ll have a stab at it, too. But do read the other commentary on it, if you have time. Like I said, there’s so much crap in this, a single essay doesn’t do it justice: atheist logic, Ophelia Benson pt. 1, pt. 2, and SUIRAUQA (there’s probably more, but those are the ones I know about)

First, since I gather this has touched a nerve in some quarters, I shall deal with the terms “feminazi” and “femistasi”. As a general principle, I oppose the use of any kin dof name-calling. But sometimes an apparently rude term is doing more than being rude: it is conveying a meaningful point in shorthand form. For the record, I am categorically NOT suggesting that the people I have applied these terms to are, in fact, Nazis or Stasi members, or would ever have sympathized with either of them.There are many of us who are proud to be called Grammarnazis and who know perfectly well that no aspersions are being cast on our intentions towards either Jews or Poland. It might be considered distasteful that the suffix -nazi has come to be used simply to mean “extremist” or “obsessive”, but nevertheless, it has come to be so used, and The Sisterhood of the Oppressed cannot legitimately chalk it up as yet another example of their alleged victimization.

This is the first paragraph of the essay, and it’s already complete crap. And here’s why:
1)To be “proud to be called Grammarnazis”, and even to refer to oneself like that, is an act of Reappropriation; something that was used as an insult to try to shut someone up by making them feel bad for doing what they do by calling them -nazis is now being worn proudly as a banner, in a way similar to the way the Queer community has reapppropriated the term “queer”. And, in fact, in exactly the same way that many of Teh Ebil #FTBullies have for years now worn the worst epithets thrown at them as titles behind their handles, including the word “feminazi”.
2)A reappropriated word is still an insult/slur though, and so when it is used negatively against someone else, it is not used in the reappropriated, positive (or at least, non-negative) sense, but in its original, negative sense. Therefore, comparing being proud to be called a Grammarnazi to calling someone else a Feminazi in order to compare them to Nazis*** is worse than comparing apples to oranges (at least, apples and oranges are both fruit, and are both good for you).
3)The main difference, of course, between something like “Grammarnazi” and “Feminazi” or “Queer” is that being called a Grammarnazi is not an act that flows down a power-gradient, nor is it used to shut down anything too particularly important****. As such, you wouldn’t even be able to reasonably compare the insult-use of Grammarnazi to actual slurs used as insults, since they perform entirely different kinds of cultural work.
4)Regardless of any truth value to claims that the suffix -nazi has merely come to mean “extremist” or “obsessive”, this is obviously not true for the suffix -stasi, since that suffix doesn’t have a culturally acquired meaning other than the literal one, since it’s not in common use. As such, points 1-3 aren’t even necessary to establish the BS in that paragraph, since even if everything she said about the suffix -nazi were true, she didn’t just use that one. Calling someone a Femistasi is actually literally comparing someone to the East German Homeland State Security.

In both “feminazi” and “femistasi” the allusion is to certain totalitarian attitudes and the intolerance and suppression of dissent. Indeed, it was this, and eminently not their politics, that the Nazis and the Stasi had in common, which further underlines my point that no comment about anyone’s wider political views is being made.

This is part of the previous line of thought, but it’s crap in a different way, so I’m quoting separately. Paula here seems to imply that running a totalitarian state is not politics. Because a form of government is not political? I’ve complained in the past about such incoherent restrictions on what can be considered “political” so I won’t get into that here, but really. Suppression of political dissent, being part of a totalitarian state government, and being often the enforcing arm of the politics of the government is not political?

In the case of the -stasi suffix, it draws attentions to behaviours associated with the thought police, for whom anyone who dares to hold non-approved attitudes is automatically persona non grata and to be treated as an enemy of the people. I am referring, of course, to the unfailing response on certain blogs whenever someone has had the temerity to challenge the claims that have been made there. Any suggestion, no matter how mildly phrased or how in keeping with the principles of skepticism, that The Sisterhood might not be automatically and wholly right by default has been met with torrents of abuse, and a pot-pourri (actually, dung-heap would seem a more appropriate metaphor) of accusations ranging from troll at the lower end, through slimebag, douche etc, right up to misogynist or even rape-apologist.

“Thought police” is an Orwellian term. Originally, it referred to an actual police actually making sure that no unapproved thoughts happened, since people caught thinking the unapproved thing were brainwashed to “fix” the problem, and ultimately killed. Obviously the Stasi couldn’t quite achieve that level of efficiency, but they certainly tried, by arresting and/or killing people they’ve found expressing unapproved sentiments, even in the “privacy” of their own homes. So, what does Paula compare this to?
To argument. To people disagreeing, often with long-winded explanations and links to evidence, and doing so while liberally dispensing invective. In writing. On their own blogs, as well as in comment sections on other blogs. Most of these “oppressed” dissenters aren’t even banned from commenting on these blogs, and they certainly are free to express themselves in the privacy of their own public blogs without any repercussions (other than maybe having someone disagree with you (publicly even! *gasp*), or say that they don’t like you anymore, and maybe won’t give you their money) or restrictions. That’s stasi-like behavior. But apparently only when Teh Ebil #FTBullies do it, since the antiFTB contingent indulges in exactly the same behavior (plus occasional threats and extensive use of bigoted slurs; minus the evidence), but when they do it it’s just “calls for balance” and “challeng[ing] the claims”.

Good heavens, we have even seen Ophelia Benson describe DJ Grothe’s call for more balance in the discussions as “sticking a metaphorical target” on her!

This “call for balance” btw. was Grothe’s silly-ass, evidence-free claim that talking about harassment has caused a drop in female attendance at TAM, and therefore talk about harassment should stop. I fail to see “balance” here, except in the “Fair And Balanced” sense (more details about this, from Ophelia herself).

Let’s not forget the abuses of speakers’”privilege” at certain conferences, where audience members holding “the wrong attitudes” have been picked on by the speaker from the platform.

Elevatorgate is never going to die is it? Also, Paula is in business, not science… but really. It has never been a bad thing for a speaker to analyze and criticize an attendees public writing. Most of the time, this bit of whining is some sort of “the internet isn’t real” luddism. In this case, it seems more generic hypocrisy in the service of “when we criticize, it’s just criticism; when you criticize, it’s ‘picking on’ and being the thought police”, as noted above. Also, she’s just plain bullshitting when she claims Stef McGraw was “picked on” for her “attitudes”. She had a publicly stated written argument deconstructed. An argument is not an attitude, by any definition of the word.

Let’s consider 1930s Germany for a moment. How did the Nazis gain popular support? By exploiting a sense of grievance post-Versailles, by continually telling the German people they’d been treated abominably, had their noses ground in the dust,been unfairly penalized, that they were the victims of an international, Jew-led conspiracy, that they needed to rise from the ashes and gain their revenge and their proper, god-ordained place in the world.

Yeah, let’s consider this. And by “this”, I don’t actually mean the historical inaccuracies in this paragraph, because they’re not relevant just now. For starters, as Paula herself reluctantly admits in a later paragraph, it’s not actually a case of the Nazis “telling the German people they’d been treated abominably”, since the German people were well-aware of that fact (and a fact it certainly was), Nazis or no. But let’s consider the political situation in 1930′s Germany. Here we have an abysmally poor, systematically oppressed people, who end up becoming radicalized and a totalitarian state results. Happens all the fucking time. What’s the solution to the problem?
Well, according to Paula, it seems to be “Oh you silly Germans. Stop feeling oppressed and pull yourself up by your own bootstraps”, and “Don’t talk about systemic oppression, don’t try to eliminate oppression, and don’t ever dare publicly and openly argue with those who say there isn’t any. Because if you do, you’ll be propagating a victim mentality and also being Nazis yourself.” Where in the goddamn universe has being silent about systemic oppression and telling people to instead fix themselves ever worked?
The real solution to the existence of systemic victims is not cries of individualist empowerment, but deconstruction of the oppressive system. The French learned this lesson, which is why WWII was followed by the creation of the Council of Europe and the EEC instead of another oppressive Treaty of Versailles.

So is the Sisterhood’s sense of victimhood also justified? No.

Fuck the evidence from years of social science*****. Paula says there’s no oppression of women, therefore there isn’t.

In my experience (and I’ve attended and organized a lot of conferences in my time)there’s a sexualized atmosphere at all conferences involving an overnight stay:people are away from home, probably drinking more heavily than they would at home, *cough* networking, surrounded by people who share a common interest, whether that’s in secularism or buttercups or ball bearings, and who are equally letting their hair down and out for a bit of fun, and, moreover, with hotel rooms conveniently located right above their heads.

What a sorry world Paula lives in, if she’s never experienced collegiality not laced with sex. It’s a bit like eating all foods drenched in Ketchup (or any other condiment of your choice).
Well, I have experienced plenty of friendly, collegial drunkenness, fun, and “letting your hair down” while away from home, too. Some of it involved sex and an atmosphere that could be described as “sexy”. Some of it however was just hanging out with awesome people and shooting the shit, without sex appearing anywhere on the horizon. It’s awesome (it also oddly seems to be clustered around Poland). Why, last October I spent an entire weekend in mixed company away from home, sleeping in the same room with two dudes, and somehow no one got propositioned. We must be all prudes; or asexual. Or, maybe, we prefer some variety in our life, and are therefore capable of sometimes not thinking about getting laid. Seems there aren’t that many people like that in Paula’s life, if she’s never experienced anything like that.

Anyway. What do you want to bet that most, if not all, of these conferences has sexual harassment policies (after all, this is what this latest “ZOMG Stazinazis” is about)?

I simply do not accept that any reasonably mature, rational adult does not know exactly how to avoid getting into this kind of situation if he or she would prefer not to,or how to deal with it if it occurs.

This is quoted just to laugh at it. Because really, she just finished saying that this happens at all conferences and that anyone can find themselves propositioned. Which I guess means “how to avoid getting into this situation” = “not going to conferences” :-p

And, of course, she’s being very disingenuous when she implies that we say people don’t know how to deal with propositions (or harassment; because let’s remember, this is about harassment policies, dissembling on Paula’s part notwithstanding). but you know, knowing how to deal with stupid shit because you’re constantly exposed to it is not actually a valid reason for stupid shit to exist.

Note that I am talking about normal, non-violentsituations in which no assault takes place. I am talking about the kind of normalinteraction that, whether you like it or not, goes on wherever you get a group of adults letting their hair down while away from home.

False dichotomy which denies the existence of harassment which is not assault.

but to give the impression that such assaults are commonplace is to do a disservice

Boring lie is boring, but at least explains why the preceding false dichotomy exists.

To tear a movement apart, [...] over something that is just a feature of life in general and not specific to the movement itself

Translation: atheists and skeptics shouldn’t strive to be better. Average is fine. Doesn’t matter that average is pretty fucking horrible.

I did a sociology module as part of my degree many years ago: I know the arguments about socialization and normative values, and structural discrimination and all that malarkey.

This was hilarious the first time, and it’s never stopped being hilarious. Paula knows better than social scientists with years of work and experience and science to back them up. Because she took one sociology module. Is there any better demonstration of the Dunning-Kruger effect?

So there is an alternative, and it is this alternative that I would urge women to seize with both hands – whether we’re talking about how we interact in our jobs, in our social lives or in the atheist movement. And that alternative is to take responsibility for ourselves and our own success. To view ourselves as mature, capable adults who can take things in our stride, and can speak up appropriately. To really start believing that we can do whatever men can do. To stop seizing on excuses for staying quiet and submissive, stop blaming it on men or hierarchies or misogyny or, silliest of all, “privilege”, and start simply practising being more assertive.

And the way to fight poverty is to stop “externalizing” the causes of poverty, and instead tell people to stop being so goddamn lazy and to view themselves as “mature, capable adults who can take things in our stride” and stop blaming their poverty on rich people or hierarchies or classism or “privilege”.

Libertarianism is such tiresome bullshit.

Anyway, she’s repeating the bullshit trope that non-libertarian feminists are saying that women aren’t capable of doing what men do. This is of course bullshit. Women are just as capable as men, and they are often far better able to deal with adversity since they don’t get shit handed to them on a silver platter and have to constantly fight against stupid sexist bullshit. Men faced with even a fraction of the shit a woman who shares their other social statuses has to face tend to dissolve into incoherent puddles of self-pity rather quickly (see: MRA), because they lack the practice and have never acquired the requisite hardened skins. However, as noted above, being able to deal with stupid shit is not actually a good reason for stupid shit to exist. Plus, as everyone should realize, two people with identical ability but different stressloads will rather obviously not perform equally at the one task they have in common. All we’re trying to do is a)undo some of that damage of the extra stressload in the short term, and b)equalize the stressload.

But I am saying that we women do ourselves no favours by assuming that the system is malevolently weighted against us

And here Paula says that women shouldn’t know the truth, because it does us no favors. And she says we’re belittling women?

Yes, there’s the occasional Neanderthal, in any walk of life. But it’s up to us whether we let him put us off doing what we really want to do. Let’s not give him that power over us! We can choose to rise above him (or sidestep him) and continue pursuing our own goals.

Here Paula is being anti-scientific, because this comment basically amounts to “willpower is an unlimited resource”, which we know isn’t true.

In almost any fieldyou care to consider, the women who have made it to the topare generally not sympathetic to the view that men or the system were desperately trying to hold them back. They havesimply adopted the tactics I am describing here, and have refused to let anything stop them.

Women who mold themselves to and make bargains with a patriarchal system are more successful within the patriarchal system than those who try to dismantle it for the benefit of all women?

Shocking.

They certainly haven’t diverted their focus from their goals to worrying about how men are treating them, and they haven’t waited for men to give them permission to succeed.

indeed not. Other women (and their allies) have done this for them and done something about some of the structural barriers that exist so that these exceptional women could succeed. How is this an argument for not continuing to dismantle these barriers, so that even more women can succeed?

Activism is by definition controversial: we don’t need activists for causes that are already widely accepted. This means that conflict comes with the territory. Activists need to be able to cope with that, we need to be able to deal with people who really do want to silence us and discredit us at any cost. It can turn nasty.

I quote this specifically because it’s so fucking hilarious that this comes from the woman who whines about feminazistasi oppression because she and others are being criticized. As I said before, she’s basically saying that other people mustn’t speak up when they’re mistreated and instead they “need to be able to cope with that” and “need to be able to deal with people who really do want to silence [them] and discredit”. But she and the other antiFTB-whiners should be totes encouraged to whine all day and night about Teh Ebil #FTBullies, because they apparently don’t need to learn to cope. Not even with the much smaller amount of unpleasantness that they are receiving, as compared to what they’re dishing out.

Look in the pages of any self-help book you care to pick up.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Self-help books. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Paula is advising skeptics to read the quackery that is self-help books. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

What we have seen endlessly on the pages of the worst of the blogs over the course of the last year-plus is just a tedious, counterproductive, alienating, divisive, pointless self-indulgence.

Don’t care to argue “alienating” and “divisive”, but the fact that WIS happened, WIS2 will happen, and harassment policies are being adopted, is boringly obvious refutation of the claims of “counterproductive” and “pointless”.

How many of those speakers [at WIS] were not already well established in the movement? [...] Talk about “Four legs good, two legs better”!

This is hilariously incoherent. A conference that previously didn’t exist and doesn’t cannibalize other conferences in terms of speakers can by definition not provide less exposure to these speakers (and the group they belong to) than its nonexistence. Also, it should be noted that Paula doesn’t actually know what these women who spoke at the conference talked about (other than the speeches they gave; she might know that, but I doubt she’s seen all the videos), and what kind of networking happened at the conference.

Far from encouraging new women to get involved, all this hysterical and unjustified insistence on how dangerous our conferences are for women, how hostile our movement is to them, the indignities and humiliations they will be exposed to should they dare to set foot over the skeptical threshold could have been calculated to scare them away.

I note she provides precisely zero evidence for any of this. Also, bonus point for using “hysterical”.

Ophelia Benson herself wouldhave us believe she’s been scared away from attending a conference because of the exaggerated and over-the-top messages she got about the terrible risks she’d face if she went.

Another boring lie. Paula here is basically claiming that “nice business, would be a shame if it burned down” is a warning about fire hazards.

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*Incidentally, posted on scribd by hoggle. Nice allies she’s got.
**After sufficiently complaining at the fact that the link in her tweet can only be accessed with a google account**. because really, wtf? (in case you’re wondering, a previous tweet had the link to the scribd document. still a dumb format, but at least it doesn’t require anyone to log in anywhere to read it)
***she’s actually lying when she’s saying she’s using the suffix to mean “extremist” or “obsessive”, since she DOES compare FTB to actual, real, 1930′s Nazis later in the essay.
****being a stickler for the use of grammar where it actually helps communication, I still very much acknowledge that knowing the difference between you’re and your, and knowing when to use the word “whom”, is piddly bullshit compared to social justice activism.
*****a sample this, as well as other scientific articles and essays, are of course collected in the comments of this post

Homework blogging, episode two

This is my semester-long project on social inequalities in Laos, minus the poster-presentation (if anyone wants me to, I can post the poster in a separate entry). It’s epically long for a blog-post, with an epically long resource-section for a blog-post, but fuck it. I’m a child of the net-generation, and therefore if it’s not on the internet, it wasn’t worth writing in the first place :-p

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Economic Development and Inequality in Laos

Laos is an extremely poor country which has for most of its history been (and still is) a peripheral country both economically and politically, and has therefore not seen much development in terms of education, health, infrastructure, and economic well-being. And while the country has been experiencing impressive economic growth and development over the last 20 years, it has done so in ways that have increased inequalities within the country along gender lines and especially strongly along ethnic lines. The reasons for this growing inequality are a complex interplay between Laos’ status as a peripheral nation within the Modern World System with its resulting dependence on foreign aid and foreign markets, and its internal stratification system which privileges lowland, ethnically Lao (and closely related) populations over ethnic minorities living higher up in the hills and mountains of the country, and which privileges men over women.

Introduction to relevant concepts

The Modern World System(Kerbo, 2009, pp. 467-478), a concept that extends the class system internationally, acts upon countries like Laos by means of political, military, and economic influence directed at it from various Core Nations. For Laos, these influences begin with its colonial history, and continue with its use as a source of cheap natural resources and a business location for businesses that have encountered resistance and critique elsewhere, be it Thai logging companies(Rigg & Jerndall, 1999, pp. 151-152), or Scandinavian dam-construction companies(Usher, 1999, pp. 136-139), and includes the US government(Baird & Shoemaker, 2007, pp. 870-871) as well as a host of aid agencies and economic groups all of which have their own idea of how to shape Laos.
The ethnic aspect of this internal stratification system is based on racialization, meaning the process by which previously not existing racial categories and attributes are assigned to all members of a newly defined racial group. In Laos, the issue is the racialization of lowland vs. upland/highland populations into “civilized lowlanders” vs. “primitive hill tribes”, as well as an increasing conflation of Laotian national identity with Lao ethnic identity, via governmental, educational and other institutions(Ireson & Ireson, 1991, pp. 925- 926).
Similarly, the gender aspect of this internal stratification system is based on gender construction, i.e. the social creation of the male/female dichotomy which assigns specific, dichotomous definitions of what it means to be male or female. In Laos, these constructions of gender are traditional, patriarchal constructions based for one in agricultural life, which often makes women’s work and women’s needs invisible, and also in Theraveda Buddhism, which places the male above the female because it considers women closer to the material world(Ireson-Doolittle & Moreno-Black, 2004, p. 15).
Lastly, the concept of intersectionality allows us to look at how different inequalities have been affecting each other. Intersectionality is a term for interactions of different kinds of social disadvantages and discrimination working together in a matrix of oppression to mutually reinforce each other. In Laos, the main intersections happen at the level of poverty, ethnicity, and gender.

Laos – An Overview

Laos, officially called the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, is a landlocked country in Southeast Asia, which shares borders with China and Burma(Myanmar) to the North, Vietnam to the East, Cambodia to the South, and Thailand to the West. It has an area of ca. 91428 square miles, only 4% of which is arable land, with the rest being mostly thick mountain forests. The total population is approximately 6368000 people, with one third of the population living in urban areas. Its economy is still largely agrarian, with 80% of the labor force employed in agriculture, the remaining 20% working in services and industry. The official language is Lao, but French, English, and various ethnic languages are also spoken(CIA, 2011). There are 47 currently recognized ethnicities within the country, with the ethnic Lao the largest of these groups. These ethnic groups are variably grouped either by geographic association into Lowland Lao (Lao Loum), Upland Lao (Lao Theung), and Highland Lao (Lao Soung) (Cao, 2009, pp.183-184), or by ethno-linguistic groups roughly into Lao-Tai, Mon-Khmer, and Tibeto-Burman/Miao-Yao(UNICEF, 1992, Table 1.3).
The history of Laos as a distinct political entity begins in 1535, with the founding of the Lao kingdom of Lan Xang after the conquest of Luang Phrabang (in the North of modern Laos) and Vientiane two years prior. It was a predominantly Buddhist, multi-ethnic kingdom similar to its neighbors, but unlike its neighbors it was isolated from the outside world for most of its existence. It lasted until 1571, after which it repeatedly fell under the control of its various neighbors, and by 1782 was absorbed by Siam(Evans, 2002, pp. 9-25), to eventually become a tributary state with overlapping suzerainty (meaning they paid tribute to more than one overlord), a sort of buffer-zone between Siam and Vietnam(Evans, 2002, p. 40).
At the end of the 19th century, colonizing European powers played an icreasingly dominant role in Southeast Asia. France laid claim on part of the former kingdom of Lan Xang as a tributary to Vietnam, which was under French control. It took control over the area in 1893, at first directly incorporating the South as a colony into “French Indochina”, while in the North the Kingdom of Luang Phrabang was indirectly incorporated as a protectorate. This arrangement was changed in 1899, when Laos finally became a single colony. Laos remained a French colony until 1945, but the French did not show much interest in Laos, which was unprofitable. It was loosely administered, mostly by imported French and Vietnamese bureaucrats, and the French established little in the way of public education for Laotians. There was also virtually no industry, very little land used for commercial crops, and little trade with the rest of French Indochina because of bad road infrastructure, thus providing little revenue for development in the country. In fact, opium grown by ethnic minorities in northern Laos was the only profitable income to the colony’s budget(Evans, 2002, pp. 41-50), and is to this day grown in the area, sparking occasional attempts by the government to eradicate it, usually with no other effect than economic and social damage to the tribes inhabiting the areas(Baird & Shoemaker, 2007, pp. 870-871).
In September 1945, Laos declared independence from France. This did not last, and even though in 1946 Laos became a constitutional monarchy within the French Union, from the late 40′s to the mid 70′s the country was in a state of civil war between the US-supported Royal Lao Government and the communist Pathet Lao. Throughout that time, the royalists controlled the part mostly inhabited by ethnic Lao, while the communists controlled areas mostly inhabited by ethnic minorities(Pholsena, 2006, p. 2). During this time, especially early on, plenty of foreign aid flowed into Laos from the USA. However, the money went primarily to maintaining a military, and the rest fueled an unsustainable boom for the Laotian urban elite, with none going towards development of the country. This created great resentment towards the USA (Evans, 2002, pp. 101-103). The divisions escalated as Laos became a “secret” battleground in the Vietnamese-American war. The RLG depended more and more on military support by the USA, while the PL depended on support from North Vietnam. By 1963 any pretense of neutrality in the conflict had disappeared(Evans, 2002, pp. 146-147).
After the end of the Vietnamese-American War in 1972, several years of negotiation and attempted coups followed, resulting eventually in the collapse of US military support as well as a military victory of the Pathet Lao(Evans, 2002, pp. 166-172). Since then, Laos has been a single-party communist state. Despite economic reforms begun in 1986 (decentralizing the economy and courting foreign investment and trade), and a new constitution written in 1991, the main political structure remains communist: while members of the National Assembly are elected, the candidates are selected by the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party. All other parties are forbidden, and no official pressure groups exist. The current president of Laos is Lt. Gen. Choummali Saignason, elected by the National Assembly in June 2006. The current Prime Minister is Thongsing Thammavong, nominated by the president and elected by National Assembly last December(CIA, 2011).

Modern Challenges

Today, Laos is one 49 countries on the United Nations’ “Least Developed Countries” list created in 1971 to designate countries seen as most disadvantaged in their development because of, among other things, low per capita income and low human capital, i.e. a lack of an educated, skilled workforce(Gore & Kozul-Wright, 2011). Despite having had a high economic growth rate averaging 6% since (except during the Asian economic crisis in the late 90′s, and now again during the Global Economic Crisis after 2008), Laos is still a very poor and underdeveloped country, with an economy dependent on export of natural resources such as timber and electricity(CIA, 2011), as is typical for peripheral nations.
The biggest challenges facing Laos today are the inequalities along ethnic and gender lines. For one, there’s a pressing question how to eliminate ethnic inequalities and integrate the multitude of ethnic groups into one Laotian society without further disrupting or destroying the cultures and communities of these various groups in misguided attempts at acculturation and development. And two, there’s the question of inequality between men and women, which has always been great in Laotian society and which has already improved in some areas, especially education, but at the same time has caused new problems, such as the so-called “feminization of agriculture”(Ireson-Doolittle & Moreno Black, 2004, p. 106) or the undermining of traditional inheritance rules which often favored the youngest daughter by new land-registration and distribution regulations which will often list the “head of household”, who is almost always considered to be a man, as the owner of a property(Viravong, 1999, pp. 155-161).
Both these challenges are made even more difficult by Laos’ position as a peripheral country dependent on foreign resources and foreign markets for its development. As such, Laos is constrained in its development by the demands of such foreign organizations, as well as the types of economic and developmental help offered by them. Nor can minorities wield any influence on what projects are undertaken in Laos, because they are severely underrepresented in government(Ireson & Ireson, 1991, p. 925) and language and educational barriers make it difficult for these minorities to communicate with the outside to make their plight heard by the constituencies and regulatory organizations to whom all those international organizations may be responsible.

Ethnic Inequality

The opening of the markets in the late 1980′s has brought many businesses as well as NGO’s and aid organizations to Laos. The development resulting from this inflow, while theoretically meant to lift the whole country out of poverty and improve the lives of men and women alike, has in reality concentrated most development in cities and surrounding areas, typically inhabited by ethnic Lao and other closely related populations. On the other hand, most supposed rural development, especially in mountainous areas, has more often than not resulted in cultural and economic disruptions.
Despite the previously mentioned high economic growth rate over the last two decades, the rate of poverty reduction has been only 1% per year, and economic inequality has been on the rise. In 2002, 36% of the population was still living below the poverty line, with the capital of Vientiane having the lowest rate at 12.2% and the highlands having the highest with 52.5%. The mountainous areas inhabited by the Lao Theung and Lao Soung, who make up 80% of Laos’ poor despite only making up 1/3 of its population, have continued suffering from underdeveloped infrastructure and poor access to services such as healthcare and education. For example, the travel distance to the nearest health center increased for the poor from 6.64 miles in 1993 to 7.27 miles in 2003. During the same time frame, the travel distance to the nearest health center decreased from 4.6 miles to 4.04 miles for the non-poor(Dowling & Yap, 2009, pp. 439-447).
Part of the reason for these growing inequalities is the remoteness of some of the areas in question. However, some of it is due to political and historical reasons that put the ethnic minorities on a different political side than the ethnic Lao majority(Cao, 2009, p. 184; Pholsena, 2006, p. 2). These divisions, among other things, have contributed greatly to the racialization process of the non-Lao ethnicities, which are still often denigrated as traitors and forbidden from migrating freely to different parts of the country(Baird, 2010). The population of Laos has undergone multiple rounds of racialization, starting with the French attempt to differentiate the population on their side of the Mekong from populations on the Siamese side, and ending with the constant redefinition and reclassification of Laotian populations, first into the three geographical categories of Lao Loum, Lao Theung, and Lao Seung (which were meant to foster unity among the ethnic groups as all being part of a Lao population, as well as give the dominant cultural group a majority at 68% of the population), and then into ethno-linguistic categories, and lastly into separate ethnic groups (which for the first time showed that Laos in fact does not have a true ethnic majority, as ethnic Lao make up around 49% of the population, which is a plurality). More specifically, racialization of non-Lao populations has been occurring as part of the process of trying to create a national Laotian culture. Laos as a country is a very modern creation, and not at all congruent with what most people would consider “natural” nations, i.e. a geographical region with one dominant culture or ethnicity, which is also the place where most of the people of that culture or ethnicity reside. Half of Laos’ population does not belong to the largest ethnic group (ethnic Lao), while at the same time, most of what could be considered ethnic Lao live outside the borders of Laos, in Thailand. Because of this, Laos seems to be fighting of doubts about its legitimacy as a country, and is therefore seeking to find a national identity to use as a weapon against such doubts(Evans, 1999). That, combined with the predominance of ethnic Lao in powerful and visible positions in major institutions, has led to a conflation of a national, Laotian identity with the identity of ethnic Lao. Conversely, the cultures of the non-Lao populations have been defined as primitive, environmentally damaging, and possibly outright un- or anti-Laotian. The customs, language, and lifestyle of the ethnic Lao are seen as the standard to which ethnic minorities must adapt to become more “civilized”, and more “Laotian” for the sake of cultural integration as part of “nation building”(Baird & Shoemaker, 2007, p. 872). So, despite the fact that the constitution of modern Laos specifically refers to Laos as a multi-ethnic country and society, defining Laotians by nationality rather than ethnicity; and despite the fact that it specifies the different ethnic groups’ right to protect and maintain their own cultural heritage, while at the same time promising to improve the socioeconomic conditions of the minority groups(Pholsena, 2006, pp. 5-6), very little attention is paid to any rights to self-determination of ethnic minorities, and their lives are often disrupted in the name of progress, which has been defined as adopting ethnic Lao language, lowland rice paddy cultivation, and living in sedentary villages(Ireson & Ireson, 1991, p. 926). The worst example of such disruption is internal resettlement.
Some reasons for resettlement are internal to Laotian politics. In the 1970′s and early 1980′s, such internal reasons would include resettlement for security reasons. Populations potentially allied with anti-communists would be removed from borderlands. Today, security is rarely considered a reason for resettlement. More often, the cause are either attempts at cultural integration of ethnic minorities into a lifestyle more closely resembling ethnic Lao lifestyles, or attempts at bringing infrastructure to rural populations cost-effectively, by concentrating the populations around roads, hospitals, etc., instead of attempting to bring those resources to small, widely scattered settlements(Baird & Shoemaker, 2007, pp. 871-872). Sometimes, such resettlements are entirely the consequence of foreign influence: dam construction prompted by foreign companies no longer able to do business in their home-markets(Usher, 1999), attempts at eradicating swidden-agriculture partially prompted by foreign logging interests(Ireson & Ireson, 1991, pp. 929-930; Rigg & Jerndall, 1999, pp. 149-154), or attempts at eradicating the farming of opium poppies prompted by the US “War on Drugs”(Baird & Shoemaker, 2007, pp. 870-871). Support among the foreign organizations working in Laos for such resettlement practices is mixed. Some forms of resettlement were outright actively encouraged by foreign organizations, especially in the case of opium eradication. In other cases, the resettlement was either “tolerated” as fact (because criticizing the government actions would have been seen as “too political” for an aid organization), or the organizations had no understanding of the situation and were ignorant of resettlement practices. Commonly, international agencies frown upon what they perceive as “involuntary” resettlement and claim not to support it, while either tolerating or outright supporting “voluntary” resettlement. However, the reality of the situation is rarely this clear-cut, as most of the “voluntary” resettlement is initiated by the government rather than the village, with threats and empty promises being used to manipulate people into moving “voluntarily”(Baird & Shoemaker, 2007, pp. 878-882). In other situations, while no official resettlement is taking place, people are forced to move by changing environmental conditions. Such was, for example, the case after the construction of the Theun-Hinboun dam. There project was hailed as a non-disruptive small-scale project, and indeed no villages were going to be inundated by its construction, and so no plans for resettlement were made. However, the dam caused declines in local fish-catches ranging from 30%-90%, as well as inundation of garden plots, loss of access to drinking water in the dry season, and various transportation difficulties. As a result of these and similar problems, many people felt it necessary to abandon their homes and relocate elsewhere, without adequate financial compensation (since no resettlement-money was set aside for the project)(Shoemaker, 1998, pp. 6-11).
Resettlement or relocation of this sort has strongly negative effects on the affected ethnic minorities. According to Evrard & Goudineau(2004, pp. 948-952), villages that resettle straight from the mountains to the lowland areas can lose up to 30% of its population due to malaria and other diseases in the first year after resettlement. It also often causes economic disruption, when lifestock also succumbs to diseases or when promised rice-fields don’t materialize. As a result of such negative effects, some people migrate back to their original settlements. They either settle permanently and in defiance of government orders in their old villages, or, more commonly, they officially settle in the new location but live in their old village, and migrate to the new site during the rainy season and when official visitors are expected. In any case, the disruption of people’s lives contributes to, and in some cases even creates, the poverty in which members of these ethnic minorities find themselves.

Gender Inequality

Laos is largely a patriarchal society, though at least in the case of the Lao Loum less so than neighboring countries and cultures. Gender construction is primarily based on traditional, religious definitions of masculinity and femininity and their social rank in regard to each other, communist claims to striving for gender equality notwithstanding. A large part of the gender construction and gender stratification in Laos comes from a mix of Buddhist and spiritual religious traditions. Ethnic Lao religious background is one of a mix of strongly patriarchal Theraveda Buddhism which devalues women and considers them more attached to the material world than men, and animism in which women play active roles as spirit mediums. While this gave women a certain status in their villages, it also cut them off from formal education, since until 1975, such education was mostly provided to boys by Buddhist monks, while girls learned skills from their mothers. After 1975, the traditional balance begun to shift due to war and communist politics, but the results were mixed. On the one hand, the importance of secular education as a tool for national integration helped send more boys as well as girls to school. On the other hand however, the ban on the sale of contraceptives as well as other encouragements to larger family sizes put women in greater danger, since healthcare in Laos has been very rudimentary and hardly improved upon under communist rule, creating one of the highest maternal death rates in the world at 653 deaths per 100 000 births, and contributing to general deterioration of women’s health. It also put an extraordinary, additional burden on mothers as well as oldest daughters, since child care of all kind is still considered to be almost exclusively women’s work, and siblings are expected to take over a large portion of the mother’s child-caring duties(Ireson-Doolittle & Moreno-Black, 2004, pp. 15-17, 80-83). Since the economic liberalization of Laos, the structures have changed once again, leading to what is called the “feminization of agriculture”: for one, better road access, as well as increased work opportunities outside of agriculture, have increasingly been drawing more men than women away from rural areas, leaving increasingly many women with the sole responsibility for farming; two, the introduction of farming machinery such as small tractors and irrigation pumps has eased the field-labor of men, while doing nothing to ease traditionally female tasks such as transplanting seedlings or weeding (Ireson-Doolittle & Moreno-Black, 2004, pp. 76-81, 105-106). Another consequence of liberalization is the rush to privatization of land, and registration thereof as private ownership. While the laws regarding land registration are generally phrased in gender-neutral terms and even acknowledge traditionally matrilocal inheritance, registration itself is often made in the name of the “head of household”, who is generally considered to be a man. This practice actively undermines traditional ethnic Lao inheritance patterns, which usually left household land to the youngest daughter. This combination of traditionally matrilinear inheritance patterns and new patriarchal registration patterns create situations in which wifes lose their houses to their husbands, who retain their wife’s heritage after a divorce and may even acquire even more land by repeated remarriage. Some women do manage to get property registered in their own name, but these are often better educated women in urban areas, thus reinforcing inequality between the poorer rural areas and the more wealthy urban areas(Viravong, 1999, pp. 157-161).
Unlike in the case of ethnic inequality however, the communists actually acted on their claimed commitment to equality at least to the degree of creating the Lao Women’s Union to represent the needs of women and work for their equality. So, unlike in the case of ethnic minorities, women do have a means of having their issues heard by both the government and the international community. The LWU was founded as the Lao Patriotic Women’s Association in 1955, primarily as a tool of the Pathet Lao to organize women in the fight against Royalists. However, the LWU was also meant to promote equality between the sexes, and it has been doing so with a certain degree of success: it was partially responsible for gaining women the right to vote in 1958(Ireson-Doolittle & Moreno-Black, 2004, pp. 18-19) , and after the economic reforms in the late 1980′s, has promoted various programs meant to improve women’s lives in the same way that mens lives were being improved. One such example is the Luang Phrabang Women’s Development Project that run from 1988 to 1993, which reduced water-carrying time for women by creating running water systems, and eliminated the need for rice hulling by creating rice mills; helped with basic necessities such as mosquito nets, or building materials for child-care centers; and providing training and resources for more marketable production-practices which increased the women’s incomes(Ireson-Doolittle & Moreno-Black, 2004, pp. 154-167).
Still, traditional patriarchal culture and sexism in government as well as international and foreign organizations, most of which are predominantly staffed and led by men, mean that gender inequality iremains a great problem despite recent improvements in some areas and attempts by the LWU to stop the erosion of already existing rights of women in others(Viravong, 1999, p. 162).

At the intersection of gender and ethnicity

Intersectionality is another important aspect of social stratification in Laos. For ethnic women in Laos, the previously described ethnic and gender inequalities intersect to create an even heavier burden, and a second layer of stratification in which ethnic Lao women are more privileged (both traditionally and through modern development practices which favor the Lao Loum over other populations) than minority women, and minority men are more privileged (both through traditional patriarchal social structure, and through modern developments that improve labor conditions and work opportunities primarily for men rather than women) than minority women.
Education is an excellent example of the how the intersection between gender and ethnicity plays out in Laos: by 1989, the enrollment rate at the primary level was 66% for all of Laos, with the highest rate in Vientiane Prefecture at 95%, and the lowest in Sekong (a highland province primarily inhabited by Lao Theung) at only 6%. 80% of students enrolled in primary schools were Lao Loum, 16% were Lao Theung, and only 4% were Lao Soung, even though these groups make 68%, 22%, and 10% of the population, respectively. The ethnic inequality expressed itself even stronger in terms of gender, since girls made only 26% of the Lao Soung students, but 40% of the Lao Theung and 46% of the Lao Loum students(UNICEF, 1992, pp. 83-88).
By 2005, literacy and overall enrollment in education had vastly improved from the late 1980′s, but inequalities remained: while the net enrollment rate in primary education for Lao-Tai populations was around 76%, Ethnic minorities still enrolled at less than 50%. Similarly, the literacy rate for adults (age 15+)in 2005 was 82.5% for men but only 63.2% for women, and 85% for Lao-Tai but only 61% for non-Lao-Tai populations(Phetsiriseng, 2009, pp. 271-272). In terms of higher education, the inequalities become even more glaring. In 1995, Laos combined its 3 existing universities into a unified system now called National University of Laos (NUOL). Then, two smaller, “regional” universities were established: Champasak University (CU) in 2002, and Souphanouvong University (SU) in 2003. 93% of the students at NUOL are Lao Loum, while students at the much smaller and newer CU and SU are predominantly Lao Theung and Lao Soung. In total, as of 2005, 92.8% of all public university students were Lao Loum, 2.5% were Lao Theung, and 4.7% were Lao Soung. And again, we see the intersectionality of gender and ethnicity play out: while 34.2% of those Lao Loum students were women, only 20.5% of Lao Theung and 14% of Lao Seung students were. Or, to put it differently, 96.4% of all female students were Lao Loum, 1.5% were Lao Theung, and 2.1% were Lao Seung(Ogawa, 2009, pp. 288-295). This shows that ethnic inequality in higher education is even higher among women than among men, a clear example of intersectionality at work.
These stark differences in terms of educational achievement have multiple reasons. For one, primary education is funded similar to the way it is done in the U.S, with local taxes. Theoretically, areas that have a surplus are supposed to pass this surplus on to areas that are experiencing a shortage, but in reality this does not happen. The result is that even though teachers are supposed to get bonuses for working in poor, rural areas, the shortfalls in tax income often mean that teachers don’t get any pay at all for extended periods(Phetsiriseng, 2009, pp. 276-278). As a consequence, fewer teachers are willing to teach in those areas, and those that do are less well educated. Another reason for the inequality are language barriers. Most teachers are ethnic Lao, and teach in Lao. Most ethnic minorities however speak their own languages, and are not fluent in Lao(Ireson & Ireson, 1991, pp. 927-929). At the level of higher education, the simple lack of universities in minority areas has been the main contributing factor to inequality.
For women, the inequalities can be explained to a large degree by the above described “feminization of agriculture”, as well as traditional gender-roles which consider formal education less important for girls than for boys, and which see more need for a girl to stay at home and help(Ireson-Doolittle & Moreno-Black, 2004, p. 17). The latter also help explain the greater ethnic disparity for women than for men: ethnic minorities in Laos have stronger patriarchal cultures, and as such these gender-roles are more strictly enforced and followed among minority populations than among the ethnic Lao populations(Ireson-Doolittle & Moreno-Black, 2004, pp. 81, 167). Also, distances to schools are greater and many schools for ethnic minorities are organized as boarding schools(Ireson & Ireson, 1991, p. 928), thus creating larger absences, which once again are less accepted for girls than for boys.

Conclusion

While Laos has always been a nation with ethnic and gender inequalities in terms of status and political power, economic inequality was less prominent simply because Laos was universally underdeveloped and poor, with very little diversification in terms of labor (a consequence of being a peripheral nation). Recent reforms however have exacerbated economic inequalities because development coming from the outside had to go through government channels, and thus was directed into areas beneficial to those who already held the political power in Laos: men of ethnic Lao or closely related ethnic backgrounds. Thus, many policies that would not be acceptable in countries with a vocal populace were introduced into Laos for the economic benefit of the local elites (as well as the incoming organizations and businesses, who had to worry less about local resistance) to the detriment of ethnic minorities who had no power to prevent the projects, nor any organizations to speak for them and address their issues. Similarly, new regulations were shaped and used by men, who had greater access to the public sphere, to gain advantages to the detriment of women’s traditional but inofficial rights. New technologies also helped increase inequality in terms of the amount of labor performed by men and women in agriculture. However, women did have the Lao Women’s Union to work with them and speak for them, and so many negative effects could be tempered and some of the international money diverted to support infrastructure that improves women’s lives as well.

References

Baird, I. G. (2010). The Hmong come to southern Laos: Local responses and the creation of racialized boundaries. Hmong Studies Journal, 11, 1-38

Baird, I. G., & Shoemaker, B. (2007). Unsettling Experiences: Internal Resettlement and International Aid Agencies in Laos. Development and Change, 38 (5), 867-888

Central Intelligence Agency. (2011). The world factbook. Retrieved from https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/la.html

Cao, H. (2009). Ethnic minorities and regional development in Asia: Reality and challenges. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press

Dowling, J. M., & Yap, C. F. (2009). Chronic poverty in Asia: Causes, consequences, and policies. Hackensack, NJ: World Scientific

Evans, G. (2002). A short history of Laos: The land in between. Crows Nest, NSW: Alan & Unwin

Evans, G. (1999). Introduction: What is Lao culture and society? In G. Evans (Ed.), Laos culture and society (pp.1-34). Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books

Evrard, O., & Goudineau, Y. (2004). Planned resettlement, unexpected migrations and cultural trauma in Laos. Development and Change, 35 (5), 937–962

Gore, C., & Kozul-Wright , Z. (2011). An overview of UNCTAD’s least developed countries report 2010: Towards a new international development architecture for LDCs. European Journal of Development Research Vol. 23 (1), pp. 3–11

Ireson, C & Ireson, D. (1991). Ethnicity and development in Laos. Asian Survey Vol. 31(10), pp. 920-937

Ireson-Doolittle, C. & Moreno-Black, G. (2004). The Lao: gender, power, and livelihood. Boulder, CO: Westview Press

Kerbo, H.R. (2009). Social stratification and inequality. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill

Ogawa, K. (2009). Higher education in Lao PDR. In Y. Hirosato & Y. Kitamura (Eds.), The political economy of educational reforms and capacity development in Southeast Asia (pp. 283-300). [S.I]: Springer

Pholsena, V. (2006). Post-war Laos: The politics of culture, history, and identity. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press

Phetsiriseng, I. (2009) Education reform context and process in Lao PDR: Focusing on basic education. In Y. Hirosato & Y. Kitamura (Eds.), The political economy of educational reforms and capacity development in Southeast Asia (pp. 265-278). [S.I]: Springer

Rigg, J & Jerndall, R. (1999). Plenty in the context of scarcity. In M.J.G. Parnwell & R. L. Bryant (Eds.), Environmental change in South-East Asia (pp.145-162). New York, NY: Routledge

Shoemaker, B. (1998, April 1). Trouble on the Theun-Hinboun. Retrieved from: http://www.internationalrivers.org/southeast-asia/laos/theun-hinboun/trouble-theun-hinboun

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My Economics Textbook (part two)

Let’s start today’s post with the following quote(emphasis mine):

Some economists say that ghe distribution of annual consumption is more meaningful for examining inequality of well-being than is the distribution of annual income. In a given year, people’s consumption of goods and services may be above or below their income because they can save, draw down past savings, use credit cards, take out home mortgages, spend from inheritances, give money to charities, and so on. A recent study of the distribution of consumption finds that annual consumption inequality is less than income inequality. Moreover, consumption inequality has remained relatively constant over several decades, even though income inequality has increased.

after reading that, I had to go check when this book was originally published. I mean, we’ve just been through a massive economic crisis caused in part precisely by consumption being greater than income. And we’ll be spending a LOT of time recovering from it! At the end of that article is an even more stupid quote from The Economist:

More than 70 percent of Americans under the official poverty line own at least one car. And the distance between driving a used Hyundai Elantra and a new Jaguar XJ is well nigh undetectable compared to the difference between motoring and hiking through the muck. … A wide screen plasma television is lovely, but you do not need one to laugh at “Shrek”.
Those intrepid souls who make vast fortunes turning out ever higher-quality goods at ever lower prices widen the income gap while reducing the differences that really matter.

First, that must have been written by someone who has never driven a used anything; because my experience with old cars is that they have a very bad habit of breaking down when I need them to get to work most. And of course 70% of poor people have a car; there’s virtually no public transportation system, and living near jobs is unaffordable. In fact, virtually every application I’ve ever had to fill out asked whether I had “reliable transport”, which translates to “do you have a car that won’t break down” in most circumstances. And yet, 30% DON’T have a car, and when oil-prices spiked a few years back people had to quit their jobs because they couldn’t afford putting in enough gas to get to their jobs. To praise America’s car-dependence is some sort of perverse (and the same goes for the “even homeless people have cellphones” argument: of course they do, how else are they supposed to stop being homeless? cellphones have become a necessity for many of them), and so is the “reducing the differences that really matter” comment. The ability to watch TV is “what really matters”? The ability to drive a car is “what really matters”? Really!? And here I thought that would be affordable housing, nutrition, healthcare, and education. You know, the things more and more Americans are simply not able to afford. And I could write a rant about “higher-quality goods at lower prices”, too, since for the ACTUAL things that matter this is often not true. My ancient cast iron pans are worlds better than any newfangled teflon-coated piece of shit I could buy from Walmart and which will fall apart in a year or two. Electronics might be the only exception here.

Anyway, the entire chapter on inequality is like the quote, a longwinded attempt at pretending it’s not so bad. For example, they explain that the rising inequality since the 70′s was primarily caused by a sudden increase in the need for highly skilled workers in biotech, IT, etc instead of blue-collar workers. And then smoothly transitioning into explaining how this increased demand for skill explains the astronomic rise of CEO pay. Which, as far as I can tell, are actually two entirely separate things, but whatever. Also, I was under the impression that the demand for blue-collar work was replaced by a demand for service-industry jobs, which are mostly even less skilled and more importantly not unionized. That, combined with their claim that “incomes have risen in all quintiles, income growth has been fastest in the top quintile” (is that so? I was under the impression that the lowest quintiles were barely, if at all, keeping up with inflation, nevermind an actual rise in incomes) seems to indicate that they want to claim that rising inequality means that no one got poorer, but that plenty of people got richer. Which is pure and unadulterated bullshit.

And then they top this off with a beautiful tu quoque: “Second, increased income inequality is not solely a U.S. phenomenon. The recent rise of inequality has also occurred in several other industrially advanced nations”. Indeed it has. And? It’s still a bad thing. And “in several” implies that it didn’t increase in ALL of them. Did these other nations not have an increased need for IT, biotech etc. professionals? Do they have no need for highly skilled CEO’s and highly paid athletes and entertainers? Or is it maybe that these things alone don’t explain the rising inequality?

Then there’s a chapter on healthcare. In the beginning paragraph is this sentence: “Those with insurance or other financial means receive the world’s highest-quality medical treatment, but many people, because of their inability to pay, fail to seek out the most basic treatment.” While the second half of that sentence is correct, the first is only true for a subset of the insured. Plenty of people with insurance get shitty care, get denied treatments or payment for treatments, have their treatments delayed while the hospitals and the insurance fight over what is or isn’t covered, etc. And then there’s the fact that many insurance plans still don’t cover preventive care (The insurance plan for NDSU students for example only covers visits to the doctor when you’re sick).

Then they do some “international comparison”: they admit that “for whatever reason”, the U.S. has the highest spending, but at least, “there’s general agreement that medical care (although not health and not “preventive care treatment”) in the United States is probably the best in the world.” and what the bloody fuck does it mean to have the best medical care in the world if your preventive care and your health sucks? Anyway, then they list all these awesome things brought to you by the U.S. medical system. And they’re the very same things that the not-best-in-the-world systems in Europe have achieved as well, at much lower costs: rising life expectancy, “most advanced” equipment and technology, virtual elimination of polio, angioplasty, bypass surgeries, transplants, prosthetics, joint replacements, etc. The only point I’m willing to give them is that most of the medical research funding comes from the U.S.

And then comes the section that talks about the Moral Hazard Problem of health insurance. Now, I know that this is hypothetically relevant, but come on… “if their insurance covers rehabilitation programs, some people may be more inclined to experiment with alcohol or drugs”? Really? I’m thinking that belongs into the “hypotheticals I pulled out of my ass” category. Plus, they list people going to the doctor more often and requesting more test as a negative effect of health insurance.

In the chapter on Supply and Demand, we get the following essay:

Ticket prices for athletic events and musical concerts are usually set far in advance of the events. Sometimes the original price is too low to be the equilibrium price. Lines form at the ticket window and a severe shortage of tickets occurs at the printed price. What happens next? Buyers who are willing to may more than the original ticket price bid up the ticket price in resale ticket markets.
Tickets sometimes get resold for much greater amounts than the original price – market transactions known as “scalping”. For example, an original buer may resel a $75 ticket to a concert for $200, $250, or more. Reporters sometimes denounce scalpers for “ripping off” buyers by charging “exorbitant” prices.
But is scalping really a rip-off? We must first recognize that such ticket resales are voluntary transaction. If both buyer and seller did not expect to gain from the exchange, it would not occur! The seller must value the $200 more than seeing the event, and the buyer must value seeing the event at $200 or more. So there are no losers or victims here: Both buyer and seller benefit from the transaction. The scalping market simply redistributes assets (game or concert tickets) from those who would rather have the money (and the other things that the money can buy) to those who would rather have the tickets.
Does scalping impose losses or injury on the sponsors of the event? If the sponsors are injured, it is because they initially priced tickets below the equilibrium level. Perhaps they did this to create a long waiting line and the attendant news media publicity. Alternatively, they may have had a genuine desire to keep tickets affordable to lower-income, ardent fans. In either case, the event sponsors suffer an opportunity cost in the form of less ticket revenue than they might have otherwise received. But such losses are self-inflicted and separate and distinct from the fact that some tickets are later resold at a higher price.
So is ticket scalping undesirable? Not on economic grounds! It is an entirely voluntary activity that benefits both sellers and buyers.

Yes, this is a defense of scalpers. As an explanation of supply and demand, using scalping would have worked; but actually defending it? It doesn’t even work “on economic grounds”, since the scalpers don’t provide a service that wouldn’t be available to the buyers otherwise: the tickets they sell are not tickets that magically add capacity. Rather, scalpers remove tickets from the original supply-pool, and distribute them back to the pool of people wanting the tickets, to whom these tickets are now not available at the original price. They get something for nothing. (and what’s with the implication that scalpers sell “their” ticket? If it’s an event the scalper actually wants to attend, they will. Scalpers sell additional tickets, i.e. ones that have no value to them beyond the price they themselves paid for them).

And lastly, this is another instance of “assume robots”. Imagine for example that the sponsors of the Soccer World Cup decided to price their tickets at “equilibrium price”, which would mean the tickets would go for hundreds of thousands of dollars. The result would be worldwide riots, not a calm “oh well, I can’t afford it, I guess I’ll watch it on TV instead”. NO ONE wants that kind of publicity, especially since it would be likely to result in dead people.

And even in less drastic situations, you REALLY don’t want to price yourself out of theoretical range of too many of your fans. After all, very few sports teams and musical entertainers primarily earn money from their shows. Most of it comes from sales of merchandise and advertisement, with the live performances being more like the “free gift with purchase” enticement that mostly is just supposed to cover the costs of maintaining/renting the venue. With musical events, there’s of course some balance necessary between the need of the venue owners to make a profit and the performers to maintain mass appeal, but only venues that actually strive for a certain level of “elite” appeal would use high pricing to limit the number of people who will show up, in my experience. The entertainment business simply cannot be reduced to its economic components only.

In the same chapter you get another essay, this time proposing a legal market for human organs. Their main arguments for it are that people should be free to make any transaction they want, that this would increase the number of people who sell their bodies at death(!), and that not making it legal just means the trade goes on illegally.

Goddamn robots again. After all, the same argument could be used for selling oneself (or one’s children) into slavery. After all, that also happens on the black market already, it’s economically viable-ish, and will increase the availability of cheap human labor. It’s also still a really shitty idea once we remember that we’re talking about human beings, not robots and their spare parts. Besides, the claim that it would increase the number of people who give their bodies away after death is disingenuous, since it blatantly ignores that there’s already better ways to do that (opt-out instead of opt-in policies), and that no one gives a flying fuck about what people do with their dead bodies; it’s the sale of organs out of still perfectly alive bodies, which actually might still need those organs, that’s the problem.

Lastly, a possibly minor point is also the selectiveness on some of their graphs. For example, when showing examples of countries on the Index of Economic Freedom, they use Hong Kong, Ireland, and the US as examples of “free” countries, but not Denmark; similarly, they use Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea as examples of “repressed” countries, but not Zimbabwe or Syria. This isn’t much, but it still makes it look like you need to be a neo-con country to be free, while all (and only) socialist countries are repressed. Also, that graph is sourced to The Heritage Foundation; not exactly the world’s most unbiased source.

There’s still about 1/3 of the book I haven’t looked through. I expect the same problems to crop up there. If they piss me off enough, and are interesting enough to write about, I might make a third post about them in the future. But I think this is quite a lot of clusterfuckery already, and certainly pretty good evidence that these sorts of textbooks are what produces so many libertarians in this country :-/

Cooperation vs. Competition

****I’m fully aware that this entry is entirely passive-aggressive. I’ve decided that some people just aren’t worth arguing with, but their mad ravings still sometimes touch on issues that are at least worth talking about. So that’s what I’m doing****

Humans seem a species of extremely contradictory impulses: we cooperate and help each other, but also compete in the most brutal, violent ways with each other. Part of this can simply be explained by in-group vs. out-group behavior, since all social animals behave more cooperatively with their own, while at the same time fiercely fighting other groups. However, to my limited knowledge, animals are usually consistent in how this plays out. For example, bonobo groups seem to consistently be “tolerant”, cooperative, and relatively non-hierarchical, whereas chimpanzee groups seem to be consistently combative (though this seems limited to threats rather than real violence), and strongly hierarchical. Humans on the other hand seem to be able to form both kinds of in-group behavior, to different degrees, and in different combinations. I’m not going to speculate right now why humans have more plasticity in this regard, but I do want to look at what circumstances cause (ohhh fine, “are correlated with” ;-) ) such differences in in-group interaction styles.

For starters, let’s get the racist trope out of the way and admit that the type of interaction doesn’t seem to be genetically correlated; rather, it seems a cultural meme, but one that is extremely deeply ingrained in us, possibly from very early on, and possibly one of the most difficult to alter once it’s taken root. Further, it seems a cultural meme correlated with socioeconomic systems***, as well as the cultural narratives that go with them (for example, the Dutch narrative of “being in it together”(because it they don’t cooperate, they get flooded); vs. the USAmerican narrative of “rugged individualism” and stories of “rags to riches”).

And how precisely do the narratives correlate? Let’s just say that “it’s complicated”¹*: human societies aren’t monolithic, static “cultures”, but rather complex webs of more or less dominant and predominant subcultures, with different socio-economic situations and different combinations of narratives. However, most societies do tend to have a dominant narrative that permeates most, if not all, subcultures. And it’s these dominant narratives I want to look at right now**

As I said (and as the link in the last paragraph says), the dominant narrative in the States is that of individual achievement. This doesn’t automatically mean that it’s ruthless, violent, unfair, or whatever, but the focus of the narrative is on hard work and on earning all one’s achievements. Rights and entitlements are limited to the freedom to do something, and the “equality of opportunity”, i.e. freedom from being discriminated against in comparison to others. As I’ve written before, this results sometimes (and especially in subcultures with white, male, middle-class privilege) in the disappearance of systemic explanations. From this is born the perspective that everything that interferes with individual equality is unfair, even if it exists to fix systemic imbalances. Similarly, it is only considered fair to have gotten something by earning it****, and any sort of support from the government is considered cheating others². IOW getting something with assistance for which someone else had to bust their ass is automatically considered unfair. This creates the paranoid narrative of slashing social programs because somewhere someone will be cheating the system.
It doesn’t help of course that individual achievement, in the context of capitalism, means competing with absolutely everyone else for everything. Again, the only rule of fairness is “freedom from discrimination”; beyond that, it’s every person for themselves. The cultural empathy begins to break down at this point, and people with whom you were previously merely in competition within the hierarchy of your in-group begin shifting out and becoming more and more members of an out-group. I’m not even going to contemplate the degree of sociopathy possible in a situation when virtually everyone you see in your daily life is a “them” rather than an “us”, but the virulence of the teabaggers and of USAmerican religious groups aren’t what I’d consider a sign of a healthy society.

On the other hand, certain European cultures (most notably the Scandinavian ones, but it varies) have, to varying degrees, narratives of cooperation. Because they are still capitalist countries, these narratives are somewhat muted, but they do show up in regards to issues that are not part of the market economy, such as education, healthcare, and welfare provisions (and in some cases even law enforcement; a contrast between the way the Swedes approach this issue and the way the States do makes that pretty damn clear, I think). In such narratives of cooperation, all people are considered to be equally entitled to a certain level of service as an inherent right. As such, they are provided on a collective basis (taxes), and those who are disadvantaged are expected to receive extra assistance, so that they can take advantage of these services in the same way and to the same degree that the already privileged do. The sense of fairness is not violated by this, because everybody expects that they would receive the very same assistance if they found themselves in that situation. On the other hand, refusing to contribute one’s fair share is seen as unfair, and will result in hostile feelings or actions against those who are perceived as cheating (this is also why these systems only work with taxes, rather than voluntary donations: voluntary participation always leaves behind that sneaky feeling that others aren’t contributing their fair share)
This collective narrative of “we’re all in it together” can provide bridges between disparate groups, or at least weaken the competitiveness between subcultures within a society (the existence of violent subcultures is a pretty damn good sign that something somewhere failed in the system, as far as I’m concerned). Even if a particular individual may not empathically identify with their society and the people they share that society with (in the sense of feeling part of a real community), they still will not see others as their competition, as part of “them”. The othering only happens when, like I said, some people are perceived as not contributing a fair share to the common good, hence the occasional outbreak of the “Tall poppy syndrome”, and general hatred of people who use tax havens and cheat on their taxes.

And now, finally, to the point: the clash between these narratives of cooperation and competition is what causes certain people to starfart about “leeches” who are trying to steal other people’s spots on the employment ladder by wanting (or worse yet, feeling entitled to) advantages others didn’t get. When in reality, there is no “wanting advantages others didn’t get”, but rather the feeling that everybody is entitled to these advantages, according to their needs, which of course includes oneself.

Besides, I couldn’t give a flying fuck about climbing the employment ladder. I already have a job, and one which blissfully avoids the need for ladders and bosses and co-workers. The reason I want that university degree is because I want a job in which I can actually help make the world a bit better. My current job, as nice as it is, is completely meaningless and useless. I’d like to do something constructive, to basically make people better, not compete with them. Competition is stressful, and therefore not good for my mental health. Fuck competition.

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*this one is from a book, so it’s long and it’s missing 4 pages due to preview restrictions, but it’s very interesting; also, pp. 85-92 have a discussion of the terms/concepts, but there’s two pages missing there, too. Also, I so need to buy that book someday, I think!

**though, thinking about how dominant narratives combine with alternative ones to create some truly fucked up combinations made me think about the teabaggers (the ones that aren’t just plain old racist assclowns, that is); but I’ll write about that tomorrow ( or the day after :-p), because it’s already late, and I haven’t gotten any work done yet.

***this may be true in different ways. For one, there’s a strong correlation between inequality and competitive interaction (most noticeably physical violence, but also predominance of libertarian and/or macho attitudes, as well as punitiveness), and inequality itself is obviously caused by the proportions of socialism and capitalism in any given mixed economy; but it is also possible that cultural narratives shape both the type of interaction AND the socioeconomic model.

****but of course not being aware of one’s own privilege makes it difficult or impossible to perceive the advantages one got a priori, without having earned them.

link-dump

1) “success oriented planning”, Big Oil edition: remote shut-off? we don’t need no stinkin’ remote shut-off!

2)The Arizonan immigration-law is sparking calls for boycotts on multiple fronts: baseball, businesses, other cities, foreign countries

3)random obligatory anti-corporate link: two simple statistics