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Lean In - A sort of review

Discrimination has multiple aspects. And there are different kinds of discrimination. I wonder sometimes if, despite our presumed universal commitment to fighting discrimination in forensics, we are doing that good a job of it.

We always begin by thinking about things in terms of rights, this being a very elementary way to understand human entitlements. It’s built into our civics lessons from probably the first time we hear about US history in grammar school, that we are all endowed with certain unalienable rights; it’s a concept built into the value premise of the Declaration. It is an easy path from there to believing in civil rights for all. The Bill of Rights started it, and in our own educations we simply recapitulate it on a personal level. Legally we accept that everyone ought to be free to do and be whatever they want. So why, then, can’t everyone do and be whatever they want?

What we think, the very ideas in our head, do not arise there without context. Some of that context is our own experience. And a lot of that context is the social sphere in which we live. From the day we are born we are surrounded by information. That information, and how we process it, defines our selves. That information is, to wit, the culture in which we live.

Culture can be understood via meatballs. If you are born into a family from an Italian culture, your parents like meatballs. The day you are born, perhaps, your parents share a meatball sandwich while you’re taking your first nap. There are often meatballs cooking in your family’s kitchen, and in the kitchens of all of your relatives. Meatballs are taken for granted. They are a part of your culture. This doesn’t mean that they are always front and center, or that you personally like them or dislike them. It just means that they are there. Meatballs are an indisputable part of your existence.

All culture is meatballs. Religion? If your parents are observant, their religion surrounds you from day one. If your country is religious (e.g., you live in Pakistan), your country’s religion surrounds you from day one. Living in Pakistan doesn’t make you a Moslem, but you live in a space that’s Islamic. It’s a part of the information that surrounds you from birth. It and all the other aspects of culture, like language and art and climate and everything other thing you can think of, define the world that surrounds you; you as an individual are defined by how you act in and react to that world. If individuality itself is minimized by a culture, so be it. If individuality is maximized, so be that. It all varies, but the process is the same. The point is, all of us are products of our culture. Culture is the source of all information around us, including even the most natural of sensory data (we smell the meatballs). We can be separated from our culture, perhaps, but we cannot be separated from the fact that we as individuals are the end result of our responses to that culture. Most of it, we internalize our culture. That is, we accept it and it becomes part of us. Before you know it, we are sitting around eating meatballs with our own children.

One of the aspects of culture is perception of other people. This is not us as individuals reacting to others, but our culture actually defining the others. Obviously, if we are in a meatball-centric culture, cultures that are vegetarian are going to be radically different from our own. And our meatball-centric culture tells us what to think about vegetarians. Value judgments are made on a cultural level. Vegetarians are not as civilized as meatball eaters (or vice versa). We go on from there.

This is all basic stuff, Culture 101 if you will. And at the end of the course we understand that there are cultural prejudices that are built into us as individuals because we have been surrounded by them from Day One. And regardless of how enlightened we might be as individuals, stripping our selves of these prejudices on a personal level, the prejudices remain at a cultural level, unless we figure out a way to strip our entire culture of them.

The reason I think that we in forensics aren’t doing that great a job in this area, not simply of stripping prejudices from our selves but from our culture (the smaller culture of forensics and the larger culture of America as a whole), is that we look at it the wrong way. For one thing, and this is perhaps the biggest thing, we have some of the godawfulest literature to draw on. And worse, we aggressively use that literature in cases and in our self-education. We know just enough about, say, feminism, to think that what we need to do is read and cite Judith Butler. Even if we only look her up and just take a few shots off the bow of her impenetrable writing, we look to her, and others like her, as the source of our ideas. And we proceed accordingly, in an academic and ultimately jejune approach to a subject that is, frankly, neither academic nor jejune.

Sexual discrimination is real. Racial discrimination is real. LGBT discrimination is real. They are built into us as individuals and into our culture. We can establish as a goal the absorption of as much philosophical text as we can, in an attempt to understand it, or we can simply blink a few times and realize that there’s not much here to understand. For one reason or another, and yes, the histories here are different but the results are the same, people in positions of power often maintain that power by exercising it over others in a discriminatory way, often because they believe that their own position in society is more culturally “correct.” On the other side of the coin, the disempowered can be dispirited and, worse, even buy into the cultural biases themselves. The disempowered will alter their expectations based on the arbitrarily insignificant reasons for which they are disempowered (race, gender, sexual orientation).

There is need for two-pronged attacks against discrimination. On the one hand, we have to attack discrimination on the cultural level, removing it from the culture itself. I’ve always felt that education is one answer to this, and I would like to see lots of energy aimed in that direction. On the other hand, we have to attack discrimination on the personal level. And by this, I don’t mean that we have to not discriminate ourselves, although obviously that is a necessity, but those who are being discriminated against need to change themselves and not buy into their disempowerment.

All of which is prelude to my comments on Sandberg’s Lean In. I have to admit that I went into this book, having read the reviews, thinking that it might be a useful tool for debaters. I mean, since I started doing this job back in the Paleolithic Era, I have seen the culture of adolescents in general, and the role assignments that were being made, and the work that needed to be done to combat the bad stuff. (I’ve never particularly subscribed to the idea that debate is somehow worse than high school in general, aside from perhaps the idea that one would expect a little more enlightenment from tournament rats versus mall rats.) As I said above, I’m not a fan of the average sexual politics literature in the activity, so I was looking for something that would relate better to the average reader, something I could point out to a high school sophomore. Let’s face it: most of us couldn’t read Butler if we wanted to. How about something we could read? That was the goal.

Unfortunately, I was a little disappointed by the book. What I did like is the fact that she spends a lot of time talking to women directly, on how they have to change themselves and to combat the bad assumptions that is part of their enculturation. I think that is good stuff, and can be useful to young women, especially those starting out in careers. In other words, there’s some good stuff here for college students and young professionals. At the same time, there’s a certain hifalutin aspect to the book that keeps the reader from truly engaging. Sandberg’s personal story is so unusual, and her career is so high level, that sometimes it’s hard to push down the message she’s sending to a real level.

Probably it’s best that one take the book as a slogan and a concept more than, well, a book. It’s certainly an easy concept to understand; I’ll bet that watching Sandberg talk for half an hour would be more rewarding to almost anyone than reading the book, which ultimately just sort of slogs along. Still, in our little parochial world, where most of the literature is too old—feminism in 2013 is radically different from feminism in 1973, for instance, and Ms. magazine’s inaugural issue was closer to suffragist concerns than today’s, if you ask me—or too arcane, this may be the best book around to put in a young person’s hands, at least until the point is driven home. It won't hurt to take most of Sandberg's advice, and a lot of the facts and figures need to be seen. Just put aside that she was the top student in her Harvard class and after getting her MBA at Harvard Business she was a cabinet level chief of staff and VP at Google and COO at Facebook and that you, dear reader, are just another schmegeggie trying to find a place to park your bike out of the rain. She still has stuff to say to everyone; she just doesn't happen to be everyone.

Feminism: Domestic goddesses

The passage of time from my college days, at which point feminism was a major political issue, to today, where we keep redefining the idea into post-feminism or third-wave feminism or whatever, has tended to keep one on one's intellectual toes. Unfortunately, though, things may not have changed much when all is said and done. Societies have given different roles to males and females pretty much since the dawn of creation. Birds do it, bees do it, even chimpanzees do it: gender differences, that is. Some are essentialist, some are cultural, but at the bottom, there is a scary realization that, in that passage of time from when feminism was up front and loud, to today, we still have things like the recent issue of the abuse of women in the videogame universe. Really? We haven't come even that far? It's depressing, really. You think that all the lessons have been learned, and it turns out that this might as well be the Eisenhower era, except now the goons are really good at WOW and resent it when "girls" are good at it too.

Jeesh.

Anyhow, a fun article: A Brief History of Domestic Goddesses. It outlines the differences of women in the home from Colonial times to today. The thing is, change may happen, but we still do have homes. How we live in them may seem like something unworthy of study, but when you come down to it, it may be one of the most study-worthy things about us.

Viva la difference!

I don’t get sick very often, but when I do, it’s a doozy. Yesterday was my doozy day. But the good news is that I recover from my bouts of doozitis within 24 hours, returning to my usual, tottering at death’s door self, so here I am.

Apparently among the few things I was able to do yesterday in my delirium was add articles to the Feed (thank you, iPad). Which brought up that point about my not particularly supporting the things I put up. If you’ve been following the Feed, you would have seen good arguments in favor of SCOTUS putting a gun in each of our pockets, for instance, which I think is about as far from what the framers would do today as [enter your own metaphor here, preferably humorous, for some really unlikely occurrence; I’m still recuperating]. Some principles are timeless, like freedom of speech. Some principles are not timeless, like slaves are equal to three fifths of free persons for legislative purposes. Although I guess one could make the argument that, if we don’t want everybody carrying heat, we could put together an amendment to overturn #4. Sigh. Sometimes law is so…law-ish. It manages to evade common sense on all fronts. Anyhow, the article that got me posting this apologia was about gay marriage, where the argument was that it evaded the role of gender, and that gender is meaningful in the raising of children. The thing is, gender is a very interesting subject, and one that has scientifically been redefined in my lifetime. Historically there was always a belief or set of beliefs that men are different from women beyond obvious physicality. Feminism in its earliest stages was a rebellion against these beliefs, stating that women were entitled to the same treatment as men because they were no different from men. Aside from not being a guy, in other words, women were exactly the same. Their minds were the same, and any differences from men were from enculturation. This is a pretty strong argument for feminism, and was embraced, as I say, by early feminists. It was certainly the rallying thought of the 60s and 70s, and it was certainly what I believed. The problem is, it turns out not to be true. There is strong science that men and women are, indeed, different, and their minds work differently. This is not some sort of evidence that women can’t do math or something idiotic like that, but simply that our minds don’t work the same way. The problem with contemporary feminism then becomes not to believe in gender equality because of the lack of differences between the genders, but regardless of them. After all, they are not hierarchal, I’m better than you differences. They’re just differences. It is a lot more complicated to accept someone as an equal who is different than someone who is the same. The article I cited made an argument that the raising of children requires the balance of the differences of gender. You can read the article yourself if you want, and you might detect the central flaw in the argument, or not, but it is certainly well argued. The thing is, all of the articles in the Feed are, at least, thought-provoking. Some of them are very resolution specific (or potentially resolution specific, like the postings on net neutrality vis-à-vis the Google-Verizon proposal), some of them are philosophical, some of them are just bloody interesting pieces on items of current interest. If you scan no other articles on the net to keep your mind sharp as a debater, you could do worse… But don’t confuse them with my own opinions. My opinions are what I say here, not there. Those are just the fodder that my opinions feed on.

Meanwhile, I did crawl out from under yesterday late in the day to meet with the Sailor Speechies, who will be under my care for a while. My IE background is a little spotty, but, let’s see, I’ve been a book editor and book cutter for a bazillion years, and I sort of know a little bit about literature and drama and the like, so that should help. I’m not up on the latest trends, of course—do they have piece disclosure in Duo?—but I can pick that up. We are looking for someone who does know what to do; if you’re interested, give me a poke. In the interim I’ll be both hither and thither, for a while. I mean, I did have all this spare time I didn’t know what to do with…

And I have to admit that I’m disappointed that O’C doesn’t wish to embrace Princess Sarah. Then again, maybe he sees her more as a Disney Villain, a Maleficent for the new millennium. I could live with that. Come to think of it, I’ve heard rumors of a live action Cinderella coming down the pike from the Disney folks. They might want to take this casting tip. It is, so come full circle, a doozy.

FEED: More on Sarkozy and burqas

Laurie Fendrich has, as always, an interesting perspective.

French hostility toward the burqa is said to lie in their concern that the women who wear it are forced to do so (usually by their husbands). Obviously, hidden in this attitude lurks a hefty amount of anti-Muslim sentiment as well. The French are intolerant toward — even suspicious of — religion of any kind spilling over into secular life. Their revolution, unlike ours, was deeply anti-clerical (as well as anti-monarchical and anti-aristocratic), and they used their national razor with a frenzied joy to slice off the head of more than one priest. More...

FEED: What Happened to Sisterhood?

I'm hardly a Sarah Palin fan, but the idea behind this article is pretty solid.

It took David Letterman a week and a few false starts, but the late-night comedian finally apologized for joking on national television about the statutory rape of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's 14-year-old daughter. Claiming that his crack about Palin's daughter being "knocked up" during a Yankees game by third baseman Alex Rodriguez was "misunderstood" because he intended to mock Palin's 18-year-old daughter rather than her younger one, Letterman ceded that "it's my fault that it was misunderstood." ... It's hard to imagine Letterman making similar cracks about President Barack Obama's daughters, who are not much younger than Palin's, or about Obama's mother, who was an unmarried teenager when she conceived the future president.

More...

FEED: Sarkozy v. burqa

I consider this to be one of the most interesting conflicts around. Religion versus women's rights? Are you willing to say that one side or the other is categorically right? The Times brings us up to date.

President Nicolas Sarkozy addressed Parliament on Monday, laying out a vision of France that included a withering critique of burqas as an unacceptable symbol of “enslavement.”

Speaking at the Palace of Versailles, Mr. Sarkozy confronted one of the most hotly debated social issues in France, saying there was no room in the republic for burqas, the garments that some Muslim women wear to cloak their bodies and faces.

“The issue of the burqa is not a religious issue. It is a question of freedom and of women’s dignity,” Mr. Sarkozy said. “The burqa is not a religious sign. It is a sign of the subjugation, of the submission, of women.”

More...

Well, smack my gob!

I am gobsmacked. (Which, by the way, could be your word too some day. Use it once, use it twice, use it three times, and it’s yours. Although it is intrinsically not one that you’ll use often, unless you’re exceptionally gobsmackable, so getting to the third, possessive usage might be difficult.)

The normal course of Plebe events is that a certain number of newbies shows up for orientation, and then that number minus 10% shows up again the following week, then by the first tournament we’re down to that number minus 50%. By the beginning of sophomore year, we’re down another 20% or so of the remainder. But that hasn’t happened. Almost every second-year Sailor is back, one way or the other, and few of them had ever dropped off in the first place. And almost all of the returning horde are already signed up for something, including but not limited to PF. Strange.

But that’s not the big news. At the orientation this year we were inundated with students of the female persuasion, which has never happened before. The sea of debating Sailor faces has never been exclusively male, but it hasn’t exactly been Hockaday either. But this year the first batch was entirely female with one exception, and last night, rather than entirely disappearing as I had feared, there were even more of them, and they were still mostly all female, including the new ones. This is a remarkable happenstance. As you well know (or should well know), there is nothing about the nature of the activity that is gender-tilted, but going into it it’s probably about 60/40 male/female overall. And over time it does continue to tilt up on the testosterone scale, as there does seem to be some gender bias at the varsity level, especially on the $ircuit, for a variety of reasons that have been discussed here and elsewhere (although, to be honest, I mostly ascribe it to the losers who go to college and can’t find anyone to hang out with so they show up at high school tournaments every weekend pushing their latest discovery in their philosophy classes as proof of their intellectual superiority instead of hanging out with college girls who won’t give them a tumble because, well, they’re not intellectually superior and they can’t tell a burro from a burrow, which comes out in their misogyny, but one way or the other you’ve heard that from me before too). Still, for the Sailors’ gene pool to shade over to so many XX chromosomes is a new one on me. Maybe it marks a whole new generation of us. Maybe the same thing is happening throughout Westchester. Maybe even Scarsdale is Xing up.

I love the whole idea of it.

Sister Emily visits once a year; my cocktails with O'C (action figures sold separately)

Emily J points out that I seem hung up on feminism. She’s right. By my estimate, roughly half the people I come in contact with are of the female persuasion, so if I have some question that they are being treated somewhat strangely because they are female, it strikes me as worth mentioning. Also, I am not alone in that business of running into females fairly often, making feminism a very easy way into the (philosophically?) popular area of Critical Theory. Since academic feminism is not all CT, especially if you start with, say, J. S. Mill, a student of the game can follow an entire literature from orthodoxy through all its schisms with some personal interest in the situation. There are also, of course, critical theories about race, gays, law, etc. I'm probably equally interested (or perplexed) in these areas, especially as they relate to debate (at least in this blog), and I have yapped on about all of them a little bit—a lot, if you count Caveman—but the feminist issues just seem to have come up more often lately. And since Sister Emily only seems to visit CL as an occasional avoidance therapy, that may explain why she thinks I'm obsessive.

I met with O'C on Friday for an update on everything that's been going on since my last event in March. One can never get enough gossip, needless to say, and much of what he said was substantial, and in some cases even true. I'm not quite sure if I prioritize veracity over quantity in acquiring the latest poop, but either way, it was a pleasant affair. We also discussed WDW at length, and I learned that his brain had been shaken loose by Mission: Space. Since, unlike O'C, on that particular ride I took the wimpo option with no spinning, my brain remained nicely fixed. Which may account for all the differences between O'C and myself. You be the judge.

The Seinfeld bracketology is from LPW. I'm not as up on Seinfeld as a lot of other people, so I'm trusting he's hit all the high points. (And don't you wish you had someone on your team nicknamed LPW?)

Sixteen Candles

(I’m not sure which of the Sailors is responsible for today’s bracketology. Peanuts sent it, but Ewok had warned me about it. Whatever. I’m totally lost with it, not watching the show myself, but I do wonder about Richard Alpert [!] and Rousseau…)

Life is a series of milestones, each of them marked by rituals. Insofar as these milestones are universal to humans as humans, they are reflected in virtually all cultures. We are born, we reach adulthood, we mate and reproduce, we die. These are universals for the species, and they are universally ritualized by the species’ cultures. We may make more of some of these than of others, given the nature of that culture, but we mark them all as important events. Curiously enough, being born probably gets the least play, at least for the person being born. There’s no real cross-cultural tradition of birth rites, although lots of us like to commemorate birthdays, both our own and those of various cultural icons. On the other hand, reaching majority, and the rite of passage from childhood to adulthood, looms quite large. Initiation rituals, circumcision, the whole maturation song and dance—these are about as universal as you can get, from religion to religion and from culture to culture. Mating rituals are obviously also universal. And we’ve been ritualizing death since at least the Neanderthals.

Not all of our milestones live up to expectations. We might say to the 13-year-old Jewish boy, now you are a man, but then the next day he goes back to middle school. Marriages in many cultures are not the life-affirming end-all be-all they’re supposed to be. And no doubt dying won’t be any great shakes, if I measure it from the point of view of the center of attention at the funeral. Yet despite the failure of various rituals to measure up to what they’re ritualizing, we have, at least in our culture, created even more rituals to celebrate life’s milestones than just the obvious ones shared across all cultures. I would suggest that complex, post-Industrial civilizations like ours might all create these extra rituals as a result of their complex post-industrialism, but I’m not arguing that at the moment. I’m simply saying that, for one reason or another, we’ve created a lot of extra baggage for ourselves on the ritual side, by finding more and more occasions worth ritualizing. And, of course, those occasions fit in with the culture in which we live. We celebrate the occasions that our culture has created, in addition to those native to humanity. We do this with varying degrees of commitment and energy, but we do it. And as I say, not all our milestones live up to expectations, so if we’re adding new milestones as part of our cultural development, we are probably adding new failures in living up to them. Which leads me to the one that I’ve been thinking about after reading a piece in Sunday’s Times, to wit, the occasion of the Sweet Sixteen birthday party at the Ritz.

A little history first, although you already know this. Turning sixteen years old has been around for a while now, as has the expression sweet sixteen (although I was unable to track down a clear etymology in a cursory attempt through Google). In my particular high school dark ages, girls turned sixteen and there might be a little party or something, but that was about it, and when anyone turned any age, there might be a little party or something. In the ensuing millennia, the Sweet Sixteen birthday party has become, for some, a Christian Bat Mitzvah, not insofar as the ritual is concerned (cf. Confirmation), but insofar as the party is concerned. There are rooms rented, meals catered, fancy dresses donned, extravagant gifts bestowed. (Maybe it’s an atheist bar mitzvah? Evidence suggests otherwise, but it’s worth considering.) And as I’ve implied, it’s only for girls. Guys don’t turn any particular milestone age comparable to girls turning sixteen. How has this happened? Why did this event come into being in recent years? What’s going on here?

First off, it’s not the sixteen-year-old girls that made this happen. It’s the parents of the sixteen-year-old girls. If teenagers could simply will themselves into a situation when they’re treated like royalty, they’d be doing it all the time. But this is the only situation where that happens that I can think of, short of the traditional cultural rites of passage. So parents, for some reason, celebrate their daughter’s theoretical majority with an all-out blast comparable to the most serious celebrations, spending as much on the affair as many people spend on weddings, and inviting as many people. They’ve made this into a major event. They’ve created a secular rite of passage that raises the question: a passage from what to what? And by the way, keep in mind that traditionally the bride’s family pays for the wedding, the other big traditional blowout in the female life, which means two big parties for the girls in the family. The feminist implications are clear. And frightening. What we’re seeing is the institutionalization of the princess concept, fostered by the parents. Those little Disney princesses were cute, going to their little banquets with the “real” princesses in their little princess dresses. But what, exactly, is a sixteen-year-old princess if not a virgin offering to society, the opening salvo in an anti-female proclamation to be concluded by the wedding that secures the older virgin to wedlock. You’ll be the princess at your SS party, and later the princess at your wedding. The bad news, that they won’t tell you, is that it’s not real. I’m sorry to say it, but you’re simply not a princess, no matter how much money you spend, and in fact, there may be some detrimental aspects to this belief you’re holding that you are some sort of royalty, given what that really means. You should be treated as special, they say. But you’re not special. It’s okay to think you’re special when you’re a little kid. But when do you grow out of it? More importantly, when are your parents going to grow out of it?

You could compare this to the old “coming out” tradition (read your Wharton or, for that matter, watch GWTW), but that at least really did introduce you to society in that it allowed you to commune with young men for a couple of years with a clear intention of marriage before hitting the ancient age of twenty. So while there are parallels to what I’m saying here, the rationales no longer exist that at least made debuts make some sort of social sense, however class-oriented.

Anyhow, I’m trying not to be merely curmudgeonly here. Since there is no analog to this phenomenon for boys, thinking there is a feminist undercurrent is a natural assumption, especially if the pre-feminist debutant is a historical precedent. If something unessential affects only one sex, it bears study. If that something fosters unrealistic expectations in someone because of their sex, it bears serious study. I would suggest that any belief in fairy tales is not a good thing at the point where one can no longer tell the difference between the fairy tale and reality, or when the fairy tale makes the reality worse. How many marriages are harmed, I wonder, by unrealistic expectations of the princesses who learn that they only married some guy, and not prince charming. The SS party is, theoretically, sending you off officially on the road to finding that prince charming. Today you are a sixteen-year-old princess, but tomorrow you’re the same schlub (female persuasion) that you were two days ago. You’ve accomplished nothing special by surviving sixteen years. People do it every sixteen years, regardless of who they are. Now you’ve done it too. Huzzah?

The Aztecs did things differently. When they had a sixteen-year-old virgin, they killed her as a sacrifice. I’m not suggesting this as an alternative to SS parties, but at least this particular culture had a handle on exactly how many princesses one ethnological group could support. We like to believe that every girl is a princess. And since there’s no comparable rite for boys, then I guess every one of them is…a subject. Isn’t that great?

I worry about girls. What I'm saying here is garbled, and I'm groping more than usual. But some things drive me crazy. I would have hoped to see a more feminist-informed society in my lifetime, but I don’t think I really have seen all that much. Some growth, but nothing exponential. And there’s plenty of institutionalized social norms that go on despite all logic that would seem to undermine them. Sexual identities and mores and roles are so ingrained, it seems so hard to move expectations even the slightest inch. And the fact that change is hard does not justify not changing.

Yeah. I worry about girls.

Tostada and Fugue in Claire Minor

Tostada

Twenty-nine days to WDW, which has become the only principality in the New World to condone—nay, to insist on—gay marriage. I’m going to be honest: the whole idea of getting married at WDW borders on the bizarre to begin with. This ties back into my notes earlier on Disney princesses. By the time you’re old enough to get married, you should have put the whole princess idea behind you a bit. But to maintain not merely the substance of the princess fallacy but also the form? That goes beyond delusion into what can only be considered serious dementia. Let me tell you: I know a lot of guys who are married and not one of their wives thinks that any of them are any sort of Prince Charming. Yet the deluded WDW bride can arrive at the chapel in a white carriage, and the groom can arrive on a white horse. Whoa, Nellie! And don’t even ask how much all of this costs, but then again, weddings aren’t cheap even when they’re at the local 7-Eleven. Obviously I’m not quite in the spirit of this thing, gay or straight.

Speaking of not being in the spirit of things, yesterday the father of Juan, Kwan and the Stoners: The Next Generation managed to wreak yet a new kind of havoc on the chez. I’d already met Dad one morning as he surveyed the landscape. Dad is retired, but he likes to keep his hand in, and JKS:TNG comprises his entire progeny, or at least the ones who have taken to the family trade. When I ran into Dad (it was about 4:00 a.m., and I was out tending the sheep on the back forty and I’m not quite sure what Dad was doing there), he patted the chimney fondly and told me that he had built this one himself, way back when. Fire having been recently invented, apparently, the building of fireplaces was considered quite avant garde at the time. Of course, JKS:TOS had covered up all Dad’s brickwork last year with the new stones, but Dad was undeterred, and proud as punch over the original work, the new work, his sons, me, the sheep, and life in general. Dad’s day is, apparently, not exactly brim-filled with incident. Anyhow, last night when I came home from a business dinner, no amount of clicking could get the garage door to open. Cleverly trying to outwit the clicker, I tried the door on the other side of the garage. Still nothing. At which point I noticed there was no outdoor light welcoming me home, and also that Liz’s car was on the outside of the garage looking in, a most unusual position. It turns out that yesterday morning Dad, in a covert attempt to help JKS:TNG, had begun working solo on some drainage for us, and managed to cut the electricity to the garage. I guess we’re lucky he didn’t fry himself, but for the moment, the mews is off-limits. Fortunately the JKS:TNG progeny include a full contingent of electricians, one of which will pop by today and set things aright. With luck, the progeny include a prison guard who will lock Dad up until the work at the chez is concluded.

Jeesh!
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Fugue

Or, let’s finish up this feminism stuff.

The question raised by the princess fallacy (and my calling it that begs the question of what value I give it) goes to the core of feminist thinking, or more to the point, thinking about females. An article I read this weekend about the Brooklyn Museum, which is opening a center for feminist art, succinctly explained the situation, citing the range of thought from the essentialist (represented by the essential physical aspects of the female, the case in point being Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party, which is currently on display) to the social construct of the feminine. That is, the idea of female lies somewhere between the fact of the female side of reproduction and the beliefs we have in our culture/society about women. We know what makes women primarily different from men physiologically. That one’s easy. But what makes them different culturally? And is there anything about the cultural difference that is real, and not merely an ephemeral social construct? Or to phrase it in a way even a Plebe can understand, are men and women really different, aside from the naughty bits?

I have no glib answer, but I offer the Larry Summers Dilemma for helping evaluate the question. And I strongly recommend some reading on the subject aside from what I’m saying; it would behoove you as a debater to have some academic material under your belt (maybe O’C can recommend something). Anyhow, the Larry Summers Dilemma suggests you to take any situation and look at it from every angle. Summers, while the chief Hot Dog at Harvard, famously posited that women were bad at science because their brains weren’t inherently hard-wired for the stuff, presumably as an excuse/rationale for his university’s lack of women in the science area. Yeah, he’s not working there anymore, almost entirely because of the ensuing flap over this statement, but that’s not the point. The one fact in this that was clear—and this one clear thing is the starting point you must find first in any pursuit of the subject—was that, given the percentage of women in the world, roughly half the general population, women were not roughly half of Harvard’s science population. Why not?

Well, let’s see. First, we can accept that either men and women are equally adept at science, or that one or the other group is more adept. If we accept that they are equally adept, then perhaps Harvard is simply discriminating against women in its policies relating to its science departments. The same fact of discrimination would be true if we accepted that women are more adept at science than men. And it would not be discrimination if men were more adept at science than women; in this case the actual numbers would be merely a reflection of the general adeptness of the two groups.

So we need to discover the relative adeptness of men and women in the sciences. And here is the next problem, which is whether or not we’re willing to believe that Harvard’s policies are discriminatory. Theoretically, the number and type of students studying something is presumably a reflection of the number and type of students interested in that thing. For instance, if in a university 5% of the population studies architecture and 30% of the population studies computers, this can be seen as a measure of the percentage of architects and computists in society at large rather than a discriminatory policy against those interested in architecture. So the number of women in sciences may not be a result of discriminatory practices, but simply a measure of the percentage of women in science in society at large.

If we’re willing to accept this non-discriminatory reflective idea, we start approaching the core of the issue, which is why there are more men than women in science in society at large. There are three possibilities, and we’ve already in a sense discounted one, which is that educators discriminate against women in science (although this could indeed be true, but we want to proceed beyond this question for a moment). The other two possibilities are that men are better at science because they are inherently better at science (i.e., Summers was right, and their brains are hard-wired for it and women’s brains are not), or that men are better at science because they are socially accepted/acculturated/developed/perceived as being better at science (that is, society’s brain, if you will, is soft-wired to believe that men are better at science, regardless of the truth of the matter). Obviously, if the latter is true, that society believes men are better at science than women with absolutely no basis in fact, then the number of men versus the number of women is reflective of a social issue which, if not exactly discrimination, nonetheless is part of a cycle of self-fulfilling prophecy.

So, are men better than women at science? And if so, are they better than women at science because of essential innate abilities or because of society’s beliefs about those abilities?

We can boil this down further. Are men different from women at X? And if so, are they different from women at X because of essential innate biology or because of society’s predisposition to believe in that difference? This is the feminist test you can apply to any situation. Are we acting this way because of our biology or because of our culture? That, in a word, is what feminism is all about. How do we discover the innate differences between men and women, and deal with those, and how do we discover the artificially constructed beliefs that separate men and women, and deal with those? We need to seek truth, of course, and accept that truth, whatever it is, but what separates feminist theory different race theory or legal theory or the like is that there really is at least some meaningful biological differences between men and women, whereas there are no meaningful biological differences between blacks and whites. (I assert that last point, but nonetheless I stick by it.)

So maybe we should leave this here. Solving the feminist question is a deeper, more academic pursuit henceforth. But at least I think we’ve managed to frame what the question ought to be. As I’ve said in the past, you are the philosopher, learning the meaning of existence in order to create a better world. Your job now is to figure out how to do it in a way that makes sense. Otherwise all we’re doing is trying to win debate rounds qua debate rounds. And what would be the point of that?

Feminism Part 3

I just happened to look over at VBD, and apparently the female RR had inspired them to bloviate too. I quickly tire of endless comments on a thread, but I did find this from Stacy Thomas, which is part of their invitation:

“Over its first two years, this round robin generated a lot of discussion, which is one of its goals. I have come to decide that pinning it down to a particular mission is difficult. This tournament means different things for different people. Some have told me that they think it is important because girls aren’t invited in equal numbers to other competitive round robins or that they don’t receive equal recognition for their successes. Some people have told me that it is important to them because they think that within the debate community we have constructed our own gender norms in terms of stylistic and behavioral expectations both inside and outside rounds that impact the experiences of those involved. Some people have told me that this event is important because for whatever reason many of the top young women in the activity choose to quit after high school while many of the young men stay well into college to help educate the next generation of debaters. This tends to result in seeing fewer female judges in late elimination rounds, at least on the TOC circuit, and can become a self-fulfilling cycle since it is hard to stay in an activity in which one feels a sense of isolation. Some coaches, especially, have expressed concerns to me about their talented female debaters, even when experiencing early success, giving up on the activity over time, leaving all together or losing their love for the game as they progress through high school.

“All of these statements are debatable in their own right and should be discussed in our community. I still am evolving in terms of my own opinions. Personally, this year, I’ve decided to continue this tournament because many people I care about in debate have asked me to hold it again, from students to coaches to judges. And, the letters I received from girls who attended last year made me feel the importance of this event even if I can’t always articulate those feelings. I know this tournament meant something special to many of the girls who came last year, that it generated new friendships, and that it helped motivate some debaters, coaches, and judges in their passion for an activity that I truly believe is life-changing. For me, that is enough. I guess it is unavoidable that this tournament make some kind of political statement. It is near impossible to avoid flame wars online these days on the debate boards. Last year, I was told simultaneously that this tournament didn’t allow for enough discussion about gender in debate and that it focused too much on the issue. What I hope isn’t to create some kind of revolution in debate or even really to make some grand statement to the community at large. What I hope is to create an important personal experience for those who attend. It is about the participants for me. It is a weekend for them. It is their space. So, I hope you will choose to join us for a unique competitive experience that is both intellectually and socially stimulating, supportive, memorable, and fun.”

Girls hanging out with girls, in other words. At that level, it’s hard to argue with. Sometimes I like to hang out with the guys, some times I don’t. No difference, really. Take it on the face value. That’s pretty much what CLG’s comment is speaking to. At the point where it’s just people of like hanging with people of like, it is not only unobjectionable but pleasant. (BTW, in the recent Sailors trivia quiz, no one was able to locate the Islands of Langerhans, so I feel CLG’s pain. So does Pip, the Diabetic Wondercat.) Stacy’s articulate explanation of what she’s doing, as well as her summary of the general issues that may or may not surround the activity as a whole should answer any questions about the purpose, need or goals of the RR per se. As she says, however, those issues raised, remain.

The WTF thread, which as I say I didn’t read all of, covers all sorts of territory. There’s a belief that Digressive debate is inherently male, which is pretty silly, unless it’s a veiled insult (i.e., only guys would be so dumb as to run this bloody nonsense). I mean, all the classic ethical philosophers lived in much less enlightened times than these pomo/CT authors, and we don’t claim that as a result girls are inherently hampered when they run Kant or Locke (or that they are inherently aided when the run the proto-feminist Mill). There’s claims that the Digressive judges are blatantly anti-female, and I might be willing to accept that at some level, if only insofar as I can’t figure out why all these college guys aren’t hanging out with college girls, if you get my drift. In other words, do I detect a sort of loser-ism in the college kid who spends every available moment of free time back in the high school environment? Graduate, for pete’s sake. Move along, there! Could these judges harbor some true anti-female feeling based simply on their social maladroitness? Do cod salt well? Come on, now. But this isn’t sexism, it’s just sort of sad. Give back to the activity, yes, but get a life, too. If you’re not planning on being a secondary school educator, your presence is suspect, even if your actions are pure. Unless someone is paying you an awful lot of money, and even then… But I’ve been down that road before.

The question remains, as Pajamas (AKA Pyjamas) brings up and CLG echoes, whether we lose all but the top of the female population after the first blush. Someone on the WTF thread tried to offer statistics to support this theory, but the sample was too small and too politically weighted (TOC attendance) to be meaningful. But the perception is there, and it may reflect reality. I just wonder if it’s endemic to debate, or if it pervades other high school activities as well. While it’s self-satisfying to look at debate in a vacuum, it is
part of a very active, very complex system known as high school, peopled by very active, very complex individuals known as adolescents. I would wonder if there are not factors aside from those intrinsic to debate that cause this drift, but that could only be proven if the drift exists in the first place, and then if it exists in other activities as well. Given the former, I’d be surprised if not the latter. But I have neither statistical nor anecdotal data to offer one way or the other. I believe it, nonetheless; just don’t ask me for a card on it. The point being, why should debate be any different from anything else? No relevant difference having been shown, I go with the lack thereof.

As I read Stacy in her later posts (on the “moved” thread in WTF’s forums, and again I apologize for not reading everything too closely but, you think I’m long-winded?), she too seems to believe that the problem of sophomore drift does exist, and is not limited to debate. More to the point, she calls to task the sexism in the culture as a whole, which is as it should be. I mean, as a feminist I would expect her to be knowledgeably attacking the status quo if it were worth attacking. What I see from my personal-history perspective is what I can only call backpedaling by the movement itself, or at least by women themselves, whereas from her perspective she just sees not that much gain. But we’re seeing the same things, and only theorizing upon them differently. Equal pay for women, for instance, may still be an issue, but when I was in knee pants, unequal pay for women was expected. Women in power positions may be far from reflective of the number of women in the population, but again, when I was in knee pants, powerless women were the expectation. We’re talking poor representation today, but we’re no longer talking flukes. But again from my perspective, as my pants have gotten longer, why haven’t we moved further along than we have? In other words, I’m not pointing out the difference between now and then to say I’m satisfied with the numbers we have now; I’m only showing that they’re better than they were. But they are not good enough. Where did the momentum go? What happened?

There are some possible answers. First is that women are not suited to power and have failed at it. This is laughable on face, but think about it. The single biggest factor that mitigates against an individual woman’s momentum in the world is child-bearing. It’s not that having children turns a woman into a lesser person, but that having children sidetracks a woman from her career. Sometimes it’s a matter of weeks or months, sometimes it’s a matter of years, and if you factor in economic status, sometimes it’s forever. This is a hard issue to overcome, and until we provide at the very least a measure of universal childcare that does overcome it, it’s not going to go away. Further, we need systems in place to allow women the freedom to control the early years of child-raising however they see fit: this needs to include not going back to work at the earliest possible moment, but giving a few years to formative childrearing. This may be simply too utopian, but until we reach a point where a woman can be away from the job for a considerable amount of time without penalty either to herself or her children, the problem will persist. The richest, most competent, most powerful women going into childbirth with those advantages of money and and competence and power will probably do okay, but the rest are going to be set back. Until the setback is culturally erased, it is going to have its effect. Either we accept that this is the way it is, or we find ways to fix it. It’s as simple as that.

Second, we can blame the slowness of feminism on the fact that incorporating civil rights is just by its nature a slow process. Well, yes and no. It is a slow process to change the way people think, but if people are thinking wrongly, how much time do we give them? One only need look at blacks in America for an answer to that. It took a hundred years post Civil War to seriously institute rights protections, and fifty years after that we still live in a racially divided country. What part of that is the way it should be? What part of that is permissible because that’s just its nature? If anything, the way people think about women is even more entrenched than thinking about race, if such could be imagined. We prioritize sex higher than we prioritize race in virtually all aspects of culture. Does that mean 150 years from now we’ll be marginally better off than we are today, but we will not have solved the problem?

Third is that the culture that feminism is fighting against it is almost too powerful to break. As I said, beliefs about gender are about as entrenched as any beliefs we have, prioritized in culture above almost all others. Among the reasons for this is the simple biological aspect of male and female, all that chemical stuff that goes on in the nether regions of our brain that connects us to the amoeba. Didn’t Sagan refer to that as the lizard brain? The instinctive, animal, innate, unthinking us? Okay, then, that may all be true. My brain reacts to gender on a totally instinctive level. Fine. I’m instinctively afraid of the dark as well, being a diurnal mammal, but ever since we’ve invented light bulbs, I stay up sometimes until 9:00 or even 10:00 at night and hardly ever trip over anything. The point is, if we are philosophers, working to understand ourselves, with that growing understanding of our natures ought to come a purpose of directing those natures however we can to acting in an ethically sound and just manner (which sounds vaguely like LD to me, so you may be just the right audience for this). We ought to seek to know ourselves in order to build a better world, not simply to accept the world we’re in with shrugging resignation. I didn’t buy on for that particular interpretation of the animal. (And part of my brief against pomo/CT is its shrugging resignation, plus its self-satisfaction at its cleverness at finding something to shruggingly resign itself to.)

But of course I’m not talking about feminism anymore, and I want to get back to that. I want to look a little more closely at girls and how they are raised. If everything above is true, than how we raise our children may be the most important test of our beliefs, and the best way we have to change the world. And as educators, we get an extra shot or two at it because of all the other people’s children who come our way. Interesting…

Feminism a la Disney

I loved Norway. The real one. I also loved the Norway attraction at Epcot. So imagine my dismay on learning that the restaurant has been turned over to, of all things, Disney princesses. Even setting aside the irony of the history of Norway vis-à-vis princessness, the mind boggles. I guess there weren’t enough people visiting WDW who wanted to sample different herring, so an extra added attraction was needed to pull them in. Disney princesses. Oy.

If I am steeped in anything I am steeped in the critical literature on Disney. For a variety of reasons Disney is a major weenie on the cultural studies landscape, and the women’s issues of Disney are, as a result, heavily covered. Again, without doing an academic analysis of the literature, it is interesting to look at the general situation.

Disney (and I’m concentrating now on the Disney that informed the baby boomers, and therefore the Disney corporation that existed under Walt Disney, and not the diffuse corporate entity that has evolved in the generation since his death) gets a heavy rap for its portrayal of women. Looking only at the animated features, which makes sense, one is surprised to see that they are not all princesses and evil stepmothers, given one’s presumptions about the oeuvre. Still, excepting only Fantasia and Lady and the Tramp, one can see similar threads.

Snow White: orphan princess vs evil stepmother queen/witch, into the arms of Prince Charming at the end.
Pinocchio: virtual orphan redeemed through divine female intervention to become child of single parent (a good father)
Dumbo: child of single parent (a good mother)
Cinderella: Orphan vs evil stepmother (Lady Tremaine is, by far, the scariest villain in all of Disney history, having no power aside from sheer unadulterated malice), divine female intervention, into the arms of Prince Charming at the end at which point she becomes a princess
Alice in Wonderland: No parents in sight but definitely there’s an evil queen.
Peter Pan: No parents in sight, a rare male villain (usually the same actor as the father in the play, although Barrie had originally planned for the role of Hook to be played by the mother!) and divine female intervention.
Sleeping Beauty: Virtual orphan vs evil queen/witch, divine female intervention (times three), into the arms of Prince Charming at the end.
101 Dalmations: Threat of dogs becoming fur coats at hands of (virtual) evil witch
Sword in the Stone and Jungle Book: No princesses but orphan heroes.
(One probably should throw in the latest incarnations of Disney Ps just for coverage: Ariel, single male parent, evil witch, into the arms of Prince Charming at the end; Jasmine, single male parent, evil wizard, into the arms of boy who becomes Prince Charming at the end; Belle, single male parent, into the arms of beast who becomes Prince Charming in the end—the Disney Renaissance films are nothing if not identical, which is one reason why the South Park film parody was so funny.)
Mary Poppins: Only semi-animated, but I just throw this one in to point out another world of absent parents and divine female intervention.

So, as often as not, evil in the Disney universe is personified by a female. The critical literature tends to highlight this over most other aspects of the works. Personally I think they’re reading too much into it (duh!), because all children’s literature plays with the absolutely prime idea of child/parent relationship. A child is totally reliant on parents, so stories with no parents or evil parents play on the core of what children are interested in, even if only subconsciously. You will have to work to list classic children’s literature featuring fully “functional” traditional families. That the mother (or mother surrogate) is the evil one simply fits into the model discussed yesterday of the perfect family, with the father out working and the mother at home raising the family. The storyteller has more of a field day with the mother gone bad because the mother is a more key figure in the existing family circle. Dad is out all day hunting or accounting or whatever, and is already a tangential figure to the child. Mom, on the other hand, is omnipresent. Make mom evil, and you have omnipresent evil. What more could a storyteller want?

So I’m reluctant to accept that the evil women in Disney are representative of an anti-female sentiment and thus worthy of much feminist interest. They are more of a storytelling device used in all the comparable literature or fairytales and children’s books. Disney simply played with the same material in roughly the same way. No surprise there. The idea of the divine female intervention is not particularly interesting either in a feminist sense, although I’m surprised to see so much of it. Some are elderly, and there’s a bit of Joseph Campbell in that: in male stories, we have the Gandalfs. In female stories, we have the Fairy Godmother. Both are surrogates, the wise old grandparent (and for that matter, in much children’s storytelling we literally have the wise old grandparent), and we have one sex or another simply because our hero is a boy or a girl, and boys have boy old-timers and girls have girl old-timers mostly for convenience’s sake. I wouldn’t bother exploring that too deeply. A sage is a sage is a sage.

Which leaves the redemption of the poor, helpless heroine falling into the arms of the masterful Prince Charming and living happily ever after. At least, that’s what the critical literature would have us believe. And more importantly, that was the gist of the material from the point of view of the baby boom feminists. And it was twofold, the poor, helpless heroine plus the resolution with Prince Charming. These two, in fact, are the underlying evil. Young women are, one, helpless and two, meaningless without husbands. Your classic Disney princesses do indeed fit this mold: Snow White (a little ditz who sings to the sparrows and is innocence personified), Cinderella (whose clothes are made either by mice and sparrows or a Fairy Godmother), and Sleeping Beauty (who, simply, sleeps through the whole enterprise). In the world of classic Disney, the classic Princesses are not female role models by any measure. In the world of Disney 2.0, Ariel, Belle and Jasmine are pointedly females of wherewithal. They have brains, spunk, character (although as an aside, the spunkiest female character of all time is Dorothy in the rather large library of Oz books; Baum should be a hero to feminists everywhere), as a clear response to the lack thereof in their predecessors. Presumably Jeffrey Katz gets credit for that one. And getting back to the underlying evil there are, secondly, all those Charming husbands, which haven’t really gone away (Ariel, Belle and Jasmine all get one) but are perhaps less objectionable than the characterless heroines. After all, your most avid feminist is not anti-male in that sense, i.e., the paradigm of feminism is not virulent anti-male lesbianism (although many anti-feminists have painted it as such). So it’s those blank-headed heroines that are the main problem, and not necessarily their husbands who were forced to attempt a happy life forever afterwards with some blank-headed bimbo.

And therein is the key to much anti-Disney sentiment among baby boomer feminists, the portrayal of heroines as good-looking blanks. Much talk was conducted about women not setting Prince Charming as their goal in life, but more importantly we are talking about women who were raised with, at least in this arena, a serious lack of role models, and who therefore revolted against one of the most obvious sources of that lack of role model, the Disney princess. To pretend to be a Disney princess, therefore, is to aspire to, as I’ve put it, ditzy, incompetent somnambulance. It was to design your life to be a good-looking blank, and to consider yourself to have failed if you weren’t good-looking or blank. Brains were frowned upon. Non-beauty was a non-starter. With this in mind, how will you raise your daughters?

Any wonder why I won’t be signing up for a character lunch with the Disney princesses at the Norwegian restaurant?

Feminism

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t quite get the concept of an all-female round robin. I consider myself a hell of a lot more feminist than the average bear, but not in the academic sense—not unsurprisingly to the VCA, I have not immersed myself in the latest critical literature on the subject—and I have to wonder what exactly the situation is that such an event is bringing to light. Are there teams out there that exclude girls? Granted that the percentage of girls in the activity is smaller than that of boys, but they succeed in accordance with their percentage. So is what we’re talking about a general feminist critique of society in general insofar as it acculturates fewer females into the debate milieu? If so, it’s pretty oblique, and the idea that there is feminist training at the RR is, shall we say, if not exactly preaching to the choir than at least attempting to convert the faithful. But I can draw no other conclusion that this general feminist critique is exactly the point.

So I’m extrapolating quite a bit here, and there may be some other rationale for this altogether. But it looks like me that it’s simply a statement of feminism against a broad-based entrenched antifeminism in society, as compared to prejudice against females in debate. I would love for someone to straighten me out on this, if I’ve gotten it wrong.

From my perspective (the oldest living person in the universe), the subject of feminism is an interesting one. I’m not going to outline the literature of the subject, aside from pointing out to the newly hatched that good old J. S. Mill (the Digressives shiver in their timbers!) was among those who dipped an oar into the water early on. You’ve probably read more on the subject that I have. But I have lived through various stages of feminism that have kept me very interested, because of the vast changes from one short era to the next. There’s a whole big mix of events and thought that have colluded to get us where we are today, and I’ve been a part of a lot of them.

So, absent the literature on the subject, let’s look at the narrative as it unfolded in the last few generations. (As a post-contemporary philosopher, the narrative matters to me more than anything. Read Caveman if you don’t believe me.)

Whatever the roles of women had been up to World War II, there is no question that those roles changed on the homefront in the ‘40s. Many of the young men were off fighting, and many of the women who stayed behind took on their jobs. Numbers notwithstanding, simply the image of Rosie the Riveter is arresting in comparison with earlier images of women in the popular imagination, which are demur or matronly or floozyish flapper but seldom if ever competent characters doing “men’s” work. Women were not accepted as equals in the realms of men. Women as professionals were a rare breed. The remnants of hunting/gathering society aren’t all that far off in a modern societal concept of men working, women tending the home. The industrial revolution brought women into the workforce, but in a second, subsidiary tier, as machines in the manufacturing cog. It was an aspiration of women to move on from those jobs into rearing families full-time (although economics weren’t always so sunny as to allow it). It was an aspiration of men to support their full-time wives. How often that happened notwithstanding, that was the ideal, the cultural paradigm.

The working homefront WWII women demonstrated the ability of women to do the jobs just as well as men would do them. Some of these jobs, in war-related manufacturing, were such that women were responsible for manufacturing the tools that protected fighters’ lives. Not only were women now obviously as capable of men of doing any job, they were capable of doing the most important jobs on which the war relied! From this, one would expect a major paradigm shift in the feminist dynamic when the war ended, but this is not what happened. Other factors trumped this real-life demonstration of feminist potential.

The return of the soldiers from the homefront meant that a lot of young men, after years of war, were back and hungry for their perceived cultural normality. They wanted and needed jobs, and they wanted and needed women. And society had not changed as much as some people might have thought. On the one hand, the women were pushed out of the jobs to make room for the men, and on the other hand, the women hooked up with the men and together they began creating families. There was also pent-up energy in the post-war economy and the Fifties boomed with more than just babies. For middle class white American, this was mostly a great time. The men had jobs, the women had babies, everyone moved to the suburbs and watched television. A pretty good deal in many ways, at least relating to the creature comforts of life.

The baby boomers who lived through these Fifties, who you would have thought would have been raised for lives of ease, ended up in lives of protest. Not every teenager in the Sixties was a hippie by any means, but for whatever reasons there truly was a meaningful generational gap between this group and their parents. Much of it was caused by the Vietnam war. The older generation had fought their war, but the younger generation wasn’t going to repeat the process. The older generation had known what they were fighting for; the younger generation couldn’t figure it out. So the younger generation became politicized in new ways, many of which were only tangentially related to Vietnam. Feminism was one of these new politicizations.

The feminism of the Sixties was truly political, based mostly on an idea that men and women should be treated as equals. In fact, much feminist belief went beyond the political, claiming that men and women were identical not only in their claim to rights but in their physiology (with one or two essential differences). This claim was made for every disenfranchised group, and if it was certainly a given in race it was also something of a given in sex as well. The belief in the core identicalness, if you will, of men and women was based not merely on the politics of the time but the sociology and, to a great extent, the science. You learned this in college. Men and women were the same. Therefore, they should have the same entitlements. It informed almost all of feminist thought at the time.

The growing political power of women, fed by new writers and thinkers and leaders, was flamed by the sheer numbers of new women arising from the baby boom and coming into their majority in the Seventies. The stay-at-home mom, which was not simply a theory but a reality for a vast number of boomers, was no longer a relevant model. Women entering the marketplace of the Seventies hit the political ground running. Equal rights. Equal pay. Equal everything.

There was always, of course, a vocal anti-feminist movement claiming that women were meant to be mothers and not CEOs, and that feminists were denying their womanhood. The image of the mother-woman was conflated with images of saintliness, while the image of the business-woman was conflated with unnaturalness. It was hard to understand this anti-feminist movement, rooted as it was in values that seemed meaningless to a lot of young people on the move. Because women had babies they should have smaller salaries for the same work? It was hard to find the logic in that at any level, unless you believed that women shouldn’t have salaries in the first place. That much of the anti-feminist movement was led by powerful women was an irony not unmarked at the time.

Time, and society, do not stand still. Nor do they move in what we like to call progress. Dialectics ensue, false steps are taken, giant steps backwards are taken…

Contemporary feminism is quite different from the first bloom of modern mass feminism in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Science has demonstrated ineluctably that men and women are seriously different in ways beyond the simple reproductive. The python’s dinner of the baby boomers moved along the digestive system from newly graduated power-hungry twenty-somethings to parents balancing all the responsibilities of life and family. Radical young people turned into conservative old people. Today, feminism is way more complex than either the women-in-the-home model or the women-in-power model. Women almost have financial parity with men, but not quite: there are plenty of women in positions of fiscal power, but not in proportion to their numbers. They almost have political parity with men, but not quite: there are plenty of women in positions of political power, but not in proportion to their numbers. In general, though, we do not any longer believe that women can’t do “men’s” work. No one seriously says Hillary should not be elected because she’s female; it’s because she’s Hillary that some folks are agin’ her. For that matter, no one seriously says that Obama should not be elected because he’s not white. Oh, sure, there are racists and anti-feminists out there—I’m not that naïve—but when I was a kid governors blocked black students from attending white schools by standing in the doorway barring their entrance, and the President of the United States had to call out the National Guard! I could be wrong on this, though. Maybe the fact that people are seriously saying that Mitt should not be elected because he’s Mormon are nothing more than pent-up hatred that’s too embarrassed to express itself in sexual or racial arenas, but somehow feels comfortable in a religious arena. I remember serious discussion about Lieberman’s Jewishness in ’04; would he need some sort of shabbas goy to run the country on the Sabbath?

In today’s world little girls are not identical to little boys (which would have been the expected world of the empowered ‘70s feminist). They are not raised the same way, or play with the same toys. Girls do girl things and boys do boy things, and for me to even write that sentence gives me the willies. To what extent are these sexually dimorphic things inherent, and to what extent are they socially imposed? This, ultimately, becomes the question we must ask, and must always ask. I think that, maybe, the world today is not afraid of women, nor does the world think they are simply inferior men. And women do very well for themselves in the (American) world at large, for the most part, although there is still some room for improvement. Or at least women do as well as men, and can’t blame society as a whole too much for their lack of success (as they very clearly could at other moments in our history). But at the point where society does distinguish between male and female in any way aside from reproductive (and even there, of course, there are arguments), we have to be very, very careful that the distinction is a correct one. I was formed to make no distinctions at all, which may not be the best position to hold. But at least it’s not a horrible position, and I would suggest that any position that distinguishes between male and female ought to be held to a standard that the distinction cannot in any way lessen the personal, political or social power of the people involved.

Which is why, I guess, I don’t understand Round Robins for girls. In my mind, girls=boys in debate. I don’t mean to suggest that I feel that it’s wrong to have such an event, but I just don’t get it. As I said, I would love for someone to set me straight, especially in light of what I’ve said above.