White Male Victimization Makes Sense If You Think White Men Are Superior

Jonathan Chait has a nice little post slashing to tiny little bits the assertion by one Joseph Epstein that Barack Obama and, if she is elected, Hillary Clinton would be "affirmative-action Presidents." He notes that Epstein educes precisely zero evidence that Obama or Clinton are unqualified on the merits to be President, or especially that they are uniquely so in American history. Moreover, he notes that the period when Epstein thinks Presidents were chosen purely on the basis of merit just happened to produce 43 white men in a row, the last of whom was the son of a different President. Epstein's argument that these 43 men were elected because of their "intrinsic qualities" rather than on the basis of "accidents of [their] birth" is flatly absurd. Chait goes on to note that the general thrust of the piece, viz. that white men have become a "subaltern class," is hard to square with the fact that today's elite is still overwhelmingly comprised of white men. All of this is true.

Unless, of course, you believe that white men are categorically superior to people who aren't white men. Which, y'know, used to be a pretty mainstream position. "White supremacy" is not just the belief that white people ought to subjugate non-white people; it's the belief that white people are better than non-white people. Now, this belief is what we might, if we were being polite, call "demonstrably false," and if we were not being polite we might call "crazy." But that doesn't mean plenty of people don't still believe it. And if you have this belief, and the analogous, equally crazy belief vis-a-vis women (and mind you, the belief in its truest form isn't just that most white men are superior on the merits to most non-whites or non-men, it's that there's a categorical distinction between white men and others in terms of merit*), then the fact that any of the social elite aren't white men is evidence of a great big problem. Specifically it means that they must have attained their position through "social justice" and "victimization" politics, not through merit, because it is impossible that they have merit. If you believe in white supremacy as an axiomatic principle of reality, then Barack Obama is not, cannot be a counterexample that disproves white supremacy. He is still an inferior black person, and therefore something must be wrong with any system that allows him to be President. And when that system elected 43 white guys in a row beforehand, that was it functioning well, and on the basis of merit, since all the merit resides with the white guys.

So any time someone talks about how Obama or Clinton don't really deserve to be President, and are just "affirmative action" candidates, they're tipping you off to the fact that they are a good old-fashioned, totally unreconstructed bigot who really, truly believes that white men are superior to everyone else. Nice of them to let us know, really.



*Specifically the kind of merit that's required for things like holding public office or otherwise wielding power in society. Women are perfectly meritorious, for some things; those things just aren't being President, or anything remotely resembling being President. (...is what the crazy bigots, think, of course.)

On the Politics of "They"

Kevin Drum just posted a little note on his blog announcing that he has "gone over to the dark side" and started routinely using "they" or "them" as gender-neutral singular third-person pronouns. I say, hooray! slash, why is this the dark side, exactly? I've long been an advocate of this as both the most natural way to talk, even putting politics aside, and essentially requisite once you take the politics into account. Anyway, here's Drum explaining his decision:

I'm not proud of this. But he or she has always grated on the ear. Likewise, using he some of the time and she some of the time is just too damn much work. And it's kind of confusing too. How careful are you going to be to use them equally? How much attention are you going to pay to make sure you aren't using them in gendered ways (he when you're writing about doctors, she when you're writing about nurses)? Etc.

 I would go a lot further as to both he or she and the alternation method: I think they're both flatly unacceptable for political reasons. The basic impulse here is that separate is not equal. Imagine, for instance, that for some reason we lived in a world where it was just baked into our language that we had to use a different third-person singular pronoun to refer to someone based on whether they were white or black. Or gay or straight. We wouldn't be okay with this, would we? I don't think we would, not even a little bit. And we most certainly would not be okay with either of these alternatives Drum identifies, the "X or Y" approach or just trying to mix and match. Because that would suggest that every time we referred to anyone, even a fictional person the details of whose persona are not important, we must give them a race, or an orientation, and make a special note of it in how we refer to them, and go out of our way to note that we're not doing that. Similarly, the way our language actually works, if the grammar pedants who oppose the "they" solution have their way, it is simply impossible to refer to a person without either giving them a gender or making an explicit, out-loud statement that you're not going to give them a gender. There is simply no natural way to just refer to someone as a person and as nothing else. Even "he or she" doesn't really refer to someone as a person, even awkwardly, because it's telling you that, while we're not assigning this person a gender, they have one (of course, everyone does, that's not the issue) and, more to the point, whichever gender they have is so important, so fundamentally definitional of their entire existence, that if we knew which one it was we would have to incorporate it into the way we refer to them.

In other words, a world where "he" and "she" are the only valid third-person singular pronouns valid for use as to human beings is a world which insists that all people are inherently defined by their genders. That's basically a denial of the common humanity of men and women and to me that's just flatly unacceptable. There's plenty of stuff to say about why the grammar pedants should lose on their own terms (Shakespeare uses the "they" construction, I'm pretty sure), but that's not the point. If the case were absolutely ironclad that using "they" this way was incorrect as a matter of linguistics, that wouldn't matter. At some point there's got to be a kind of popular sovereignty over language, a right of the people to amend their language if it no longer serves their need, and if we must accept that the English language as of today simply doesn't include a sufficiently egalitarian third-person singular pronoun, well, that's just an area that's crying out for amendment. And guess what! We've already been making that amendment (if it was ever needed in the first place; see above re Shakespeare), albeit in sort of a gradual, common law-y way. Good for us!

Every Sperm is Sacred, Declare Five Old Catholic Dudes In Robes

So apparently in the batch of orders issued the day after the final actual day of the Supreme Court's term, they basically indicated that yesterday's Hobby Lobby decision doesn't just apply to those methods of birth control which certain religious groups choose to describe as abortion-y. Apparently closely-held companies whose owners are Catholic, and particularly the kind of Catholic who thinks contraception and the recreational sex it makes possible are sinful, can get out of giving their employees health insurance that covers any kind of contraception. Basically, this:

Oh, and did I mention that the particular five Justices constituting this majority are all Catholics? Hmmm, interesting coincidence ya got there.

Hobby Lobby is About Sex, not Abortion

One of the questions in the Hobby Lobby litigation was whether the exemption sought by these companies could be extended to things other than contraception. Could companies whose owners held somewhat less mainstream religious beliefs decide to stop covering, say, blood transfusions, or vaccines? Could religious "freedom" become a shield for racial discrimination? Nope, says Justice Alito. The ruling is strictly limited to contraception. Other medical things like transfusions or vaccines he essentially said would have to be considered in later cases, and might or might not survive the same test that the contraception mandate failed. And he specifically said that racial discrimination in employment practices cannot find support in this decision, that the government's interest in eradicating that evil is strong enough and direct enough that "religious freedom" is no shield against it.

Kevin Drum comments that the logic behind limiting the decision to contraception seems to be about abortion:

I think it's important to recognize what Alito is saying here. Basically, he's making the case that abortion is unique as a religious issue. If you object to anything else on a religious basis, you're probably out of luck. But if you object to abortion on religious grounds, you will be given every possible consideration. Even if your objection is only related to abortion in the most tenuous imaginable way—as it is here, where IUDs are considered to be abortifacients for highly idiosyncratic doctrinal reasons—it will be treated with the utmost deference.

I don't think that's quite right.

Sexiness and Empowerment: A Study in Contrast

This past Friday I went to see the movie Frozen. This post is inspired by that experience, so if you haven't seen the movie, don't read any further.

A Follow-Up To The Thing About That Starved Look

I just read this post at Slate about someone else's article bemoaning the supposed culture of shaming women for being too thin while celebrating fatness. It (the Slate post, not the pro-thin article) is really good, and it makes a good point as a follow-up to my recent post about how the supposed celebration of public figures who don't adhere quite as closely as some to the norm that says women are supposed to starve themselves as a method for being beautiful takes place in the context of not challenging the idea that those ultra-thin women are still the standard of female beauty. What it adds, I think, that I didn't emphasize very much in the original post but which is very important, is that the people who do have that skin-and-bones underweight look are in a very real sense the victims here. Of course they play an important role in perpetuating the standards that are victimizing them, but that doesn't change the fact of their victimization. And, accordingly, a large part of the point of insisting that the Gweneth Paltrow-Heidi Klum look isn't actually that attractive is to make it easier for people not to try and attain it, because it's not remotely healthy and, as the poor woman writing the article being critiqued in Slate keeps saying in a Stockholm Syndrome-y way, being that thin makes life kind of unpleasant in a lot of ways. But, in my opinion, the thing where a lot of women try to look like that to be "beautiful" won't go away just by saying that it's unhealthy, or that people who don't conform like Jennifer Lawrence are also hot, but that people who starve themselves fail to become hot themselves. That isn't, of course, to say that thin people can't be hot. For instance, I personally find both Michelle Wie and (especially in Seasons 3 and 6 of Buffy) Alyson Hannigan to be very attractive, and they're both really thin, but neither of them gives that feeling that they're thinner than they should be. That's the problem, and it shows, and it doesn't look good. Those of us who want to free society from the tyranny of forcing women to emaciate themselves need, I think, to put a lot of emphasis on that last part, for the sake of the very women who ruin their appearances by getting themselves too thin.

Jennifer Lawrence Is Only "Not Thin" In The Sense Of Being "Not Starved"

This is kind of random, but recently I've seen a few things about Jennifer Lawrence, presenting her as being, like, an exemplar of good-body-image or whatever. And I don't exactly disagree, but I'd just like to point something out: Jennifer Lawrence is not fat. She is not chubby. She is not overweight, I don't think, although I don't know her actual height/weight numbers; at the very least she does not appear to be overweight. She's a rather slender young woman. What she is not, however, is someone who looks like she starves herself (which is what a lot of her quotes are about). She does not look gaunt, she does not seem to be just skin and bones, or even just skin, a bit of lean muscle, and bones. She does not, in short, look underweight. But that is not a bad thing. It's right there in the word "underweight," which on its face seems to suggest a sense of being under the ideal or desirable weight. If you are underweight, forgetting for a moment about any particular definition of the term in terms of Body Mass Index or whatever and focusing on the word itself, you weigh too little, and it's a bad thing. Jennifer Lawrence is by no means underweight, but let us all remember that that does not make her fat, or overweight. She looks, to my basically untrained eye, like someone who is at quite a healthy weight, and also one that makes her look very vibrant and, well, hot.

And I kind of feel like the treatment of Jennifer Lawrence as this body-image icon is really emblematic of the original problem here. An awful lot of women who are famous in whole or in part for being considered attractive, like Heidi Klum or Gweneth Paltrow, do have that starved look, and I personally find it really really unappealing. I think that's much of what's behind how I find fairly few of those public hotties to be actually attractive. Some women in that category, though, like Lawrence and like Christina Hendricks, do not have that look, but rather look a bit more like actual people. And these people tend to get discussed as the exceptions, the people who are doing something weird and controversial by not starving themselves in some bizarre attempt to look hot or something. Meanwhile, you don't often hear people actually saying that Heidi Klum or whoever is too thin to be attractive. Until that happens, I think, and until the discourse is more "what's wrong with all these hyper-thin people?" than "oh look, these slightly-less-thin people are so admirable!" the basic premise that women are supposed to be pencil-thin will still be there in the background, unchallenged even when those who rightly defy it are being lauded.

The Irony of Christina Hendricks

Read the following paragraph from Wikipedia, about the cultural influence of the extremely voluptuous Christina Hendricks on perceptions of female beauty:

Hendricks has been credited as having an ideal shape for a woman. British Equalities Minister Lynne Featherstone praised Hendricks' hourglass figure as an ideal shape for women, saying "Christina Hendricks is absolutely fabulous... We need more of these role models. There is such a sensation when there is a curvy role model. It shouldn't be so unusual." Los Angeles Times television critic Mary McNamara says her portrayal of Joan has revolutionized perceptions of beauty on television. She has been called the "new modern ideal of Hollywood glamour—full figured, voluptuous; a throwback to the days of Marilyn Monroe, Jane Russell and Veronica Lake." British designer Vivienne Westwood selected her to represent its "Get A Life" Palladium jewelry collection in March 2011. Westwood described Hendricks as "the embodiment of beauty." A study by the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons attributed a 10% rise in 2010 of the number of British women receiving breast augmentation surgery in part to Hendricks' influence.

Spot the irony? All but the last sentence are trying to champion Hendricks as a role model of non-conformity to mainstream stereotypes of female beauty. The idea is that popular culture sends a message that the only way to be beautiful is to be extremely thin, and Hendricks, by being commonly considered highly beautiful despite not being particularly thin, helps subvert that message and replace it with the better one, that women with lots of different body types can be beautiful.

Then, of course, in the last sentence, we see that in fact a large part of the message of Christina Hendricks that has in fact gotten through to people in general is not that different body types can be beautiful but that you should look more like Christina Hendricks, and specifically you should go get a boob job.

Obviously I'm not criticizing Hendricks herself for this. The point is more that mainstream culture around female appearance is so twisted that you basically can't send that good message. If someone manages to be hot while not conforming to the stereotype of hotness, all that means is that we need a new stereotype of hotness to pressure everyone into conforming to. Great.


(In case anyone's wondering why I decided to write this particular post on this particular night, it's 'cause I just watched the episode "Our Mrs. Reynolds" of Firefly with my family.)

On When to Get Married

For some reason there have been a lot of posts on the internet recently arguing about the correct time to get married. Should people get married young? (I.e., like, 23, whereas "marrying young" used to mean more like 19.) Should people get married at the currently-more-conventional late-twenties time? After that? People are advancing arguments in various directions, some of which take the form "I did X, and it worked for me" and others of which are trying to be more general economics or morals arguments. But I feel like they're all kind of missing the obvious:

Get married if and only if you have met someone with whom you have fallen in love, and who has fallen in love with you; you both want to spend the rest of your lives with each other, possibly including raising a family; and you both feel sufficiently confident about all that that you want to take advantage of legal institutions that provide a broad variety of benefits if you remain together but will make your lives pretty miserable if you ever split up.

On this view, marriage is a symptom, not an effect. And it's a symptom of a really good thing! Finding someone you love enough that you want to spend the rest of your life with them, and who feels the same way about you, is a huge, huge positive for your life. (Of course, one or both of you might be wrong, or turn out to be wrong eventually, but that's where the part about confidence levels comes in.) This makes, for instance, studying the effect of marrying early or late or whatever difficult: insofar as people are doing it the way I'm saying they should, obviously people who get married young will be happier, for the intervening years at least, because they've happened to find a massively happiness-generating situation sooner.

Now, I think it's possible some people might disagree with my approach to this question. Most criticism, I think, would focus on the word 'love,' and suggest that one might want to get married even if you don't feel a passionate romantic love for your partner. (I once read an article, on Huffington Post of course, titled something like 'Why You Shouldn't Marry For Love,' although I think it should've replaced the last word with 'lust' based on how it's written, which makes it obviously right.) These arguments, when they're not just flagrantly anti-feminist and thus not worth addressing, are usually economical in nature, or trying to be. Life is just easier with multiple earners, or whatever. In my opinion, it's a pretty important policy priority for society to make these economic arguments for marrying someone you don't love as empirically invalid as we can manage. Marrying not for love has obvious massive psychological costs; insofar as possible, people should never feel compelled or incentivized to do it.

But if we like my approach, and I do quite like it, it raises an interesting problem for the whole "when should you get married?" question: different people will meet the criteria at different times. Some people might not meet it at all. If you meet your soulmate* in college, or even in high school, and feel absolutely confident (even after acknowledging the perils of young love) that you want to be with them by the time you're both 23, go ahead and get married: good for you! If you don't meet someone like that until your late twenties, or your thirties, or your forties, don't get married until you do, and good for you as well. If you never meet someone like that, well, that's unfortunate for you, but, you know, don't get married, and good for you. Hopefully the non-married existence of those of us who haven't met the right person yet, and had them reciprocate the feelings, won't be too terribly miserable, both because we'll be able to support ourselves and because we'll be able to, you know, have a social life and have a sex life if we want to, and so on. Ideally, there is no answer, defined in non-relativistic terms, to this question, because the answer is, get married iff you find someone worth marrying.


*Use of this word not meant to imply anything about destiny; I'm just using it as shorthand for the thing I described in my marriage criterion above.

Congress Can Criminalize a Romantic Weekend Across State Lines

In 1910, the United States Congress passed the White-Slave Traffic Act, better known as the Mann Act, prohibiting the transport of women across state lines for "immoral purposes." The intention behind the law was to strike at interstate prostitution networks and human trafficking. This is a fairly ambitious use of Congress' Commerce Power to begin with, but what happened next was even more striking. The "immoral purposes" phrasing is absurdly ambiguous, after all, so it's no surprise that prosecutors started bringing charges against people who crossed a state line merely to have sex. Consensual sex. With no money involved.

Some time in the three years after the Mann Act was passed, Farley Drew Caminetti, a married man, traveled from Sacramento, California, to Reno, Nevada with his mistress. A friend of his did the same. Their intent was very much to have sex with their mistresses in Reno. Their wives alerted the police, and Caminetti and his friend were arrested. They were then found guilty of violating the Mann Act, despite the fact that there was no prostitution involves. Extramarital affairs, after all, are considered immoral by plenty of people, and in 1913 by just about everyone. They then appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States, which, in 1917, upheld the conviction. The case was mainly concerned with statutory interpretation, i.e. did the Mann Act mean to encompass non-commercial sex in its "immoral purposes" framework, but implicitly there's a constitutional question lurking here as well. After all, two people having sex is not particularly commercial in nature, unless it's prostitution, which this case wasn't. Some readings of the Commerce Clause power might say that, while interstate crossings for commercial sex may be prohibited through that power, interstate crossings for free, consensual sex cannot be. The Court didn't read it that way, though. That's not really surprising, given that it had already upheld the Mann Act and that it has never embraced the view that "commerce" only means the narrow, economic sense of exchange of goods for other goods and/or money.

Still, I think it's kind of remarkable that Congress could, if it so chose, prohibit a young unmarried couple traveling across state lines to some resort place or whatever for a romantic weekend together. Now, perhaps these days the Court would wheel in the various individual rights provisions to limit this apparent power. Nothing in the alterations of Commerce Clause doctrine would preclude such a result, however: this is a state line crossing we're talking about, and no case has yet backed down from the notion that Congress can hit anyone or anything that crosses a state line with as much force as it wants for whatever reason it wants. Pretty striking.

(In case you're asking yourself why I just wrote a blog post that seems to bemoan the limitless scope of Congress' powers, I'm beginning to work on a paper for school in which I plan on arguing that Congress' enumerated powers should be limited even in their most concrete applications by various structural principles and through relation to individual-rights provisions.)

It's About Dishonor

So, here was an absolute gem of an interview exchange featuring the Republican candidate for the United States Senate in Pennsylvania, Tom Smith:

Interviewer: How would you tell a daughter or a granddaughter who, God forbid, would be the victim of a rape, to keep the child against her own will? Do you have a way to explain that?

Smith: I lived something similar to that with my own family. She chose life, and I commend her for that. She knew my views. But, fortunately for me, I didn't have to.. she chose they way I thought. No don't get me wrong, it wasn't rape.

Interviewer: Similar how?

Smith: Uh, having a baby out of wedlock.

Interviewer: That's similar to rape?

Smith: No, no, no, but… put yourself in a father's situation, yes. It is similar. But, back to the original, I'm pro-life, period.

Here's his spokesperson trying to explain these comments:

"Tom Smith is committed to protecting the sanctity of life and believes it begins at conception," she said in a statement. "While his answers to some of the questions he faced at the Pennsylvania Press club may have been less than artful, at no time did he draw the comparison that some have inferred. When questioned if he was drawing that comparison, Tom's answer was clear, 'no, no, no.' Tom was speaking to the difficult decision faced by his family, not the nature of his daughters conception.”

Sorry, but that's not good enough. Yes, it's true that Smith wasn't actually saying the extramarital sex his daughter had that resulted, accidentally or otherwise, in a pregnancy was akin to rape. (Pun really not intended, at least not until after I typed it.) But let's analyze that last comment. It confirms what I said in my previous sentence, because he's not talking from his daughter's perspective. He's talking from "a father's situation." Now, you might hope that a father would, in that situation, adopt a more or less wholly empathetic view, and be trying to view the situation from his daughter's perspective. Tom Smith, it's clear, doesn't want us to do that, so what other view of the situation does he have in mind? Well, it's hard to avoid thinking that he's thinking about questions of honor.

I suppose it's not exactly news that lots of people think out-of-wedlock pregnancy is dishonorable, and that having one's daughter get so situated is dishonorable for a father. And I suppose it's also not news that some people, at least, aren't willing to make an exception for this judgment of dishonorableness when the pregnancy is the result not of anything your daughter did but of something that was done to her. But at this late hour in human history I think it's a bit past time we still had candidates for U.S. Senate hawking the view that premarital sex is shameful, which, let's be clear, Tom Smith did in this interview, even though he didn't actually say that it's the same as rape. And one also doesn't typically think of the whole "being raped is dishonorable" thing being prevalent in this country, but rather in various Islamic countries with which the whole "honor killing" thing is generally associated. It's edifying, I suppose, to learn that respectable (well, almost respectable) political candidates hold a very similar worldview right in our own nation.

So let's be clear about what Tom Smith said: no, he didn't say that having premarital sex is like being raped. He just said that having premarital sex, especially if you get pregnant, is shameful, and that being raped shares that shamefulness.

Gee, I wonder why so few rapes get reported.

A Liberal Man's View of the Gender Gap

It sucks! Why should women get to have all the fun of being responsible for re-electing President Obama? Don't get me wrong, it's great that women are clever enough to figure out that voting for a Republican would be very very bad for them, and are hence planning to support Obama by landslide margins over the now-officially-inevitable Republican nominee Mitt Romney. But it's not like a Romney Presidency wouldn't also suck for those human beings in this country who happen to have a Y chromosome. We should be giving Obama a landslide, too! Guys, what's wrong with us? Shape up!

(This, of course, being just one facet of the generally-frustrating experience of being a member of quite a few oppressor groups, but being utterly opposed to those groups continuing to have their oppressor status.)

Not Good Enough

Yesterday, Mitt Romney said, of Rush Limbaugh's despicable comments about Sandra Fluke, that they were "not the language I would have used." Today, Limbaugh himself issued an "apology," again for his choice of words. Meanwhile, the better part of the outrage I've been seeing about Limbaugh's comments themselves has been about his use of the word "slut." That's not the point. I'm not saying it wasn't offensive of him to use that word, because it was. What I am saying is that focusing on that particular word, on that quirk of language, means you miss the actual content of what Limbaugh said.

WARNING: The following post both refers to some extremely vile attitudes that were expressed by Rush Limbaugh recently, and gets quite heated in condemning them and the mindset they represent.

Yep, We Wanted to Destroy Your Way of Life

I just had the delightful experience of reading an essay about antebellum (white, male) Southern ideology. Specifically this article tried to link the inegalitarian pro-slavery ideology with the more broadly inegalitarian philosophy of Southern life as a whole, particularly as it related to women. In the course of the article you really get a sense of how repulsive this culture was. I particularly love the quotes from Southern politicians talking about how abolition of slavery would just be the thin end of the wedge, and once the North had managed that change they'd soon destroy all of the relationships upon which a proper Christian-republican society rested. The Northerners weren't just coming for slavery, they warned, they were coming for the entire Southern way of hierarchical life.

Yep! Or, if we weren't then, we certainly should've been and are now. The antebellum Southern social structure sucked! In many ways and on many levels! Millions upon millions of people were treated like dirt, and if not, it's because I'm being unfair to the way we treat dirt. The oppressive nature of marriage in the antebellum South needed abolishing every bit as much as slavery. So did the oppressive nature of parenting. It was just an oppressive sort of place. Southern society, at least insofar as it was defined by that oppression (and I think it was defined pretty far by that oppression), needed to be destroyed wholesale.

No, Infidelity Doesn't Mean Newt Would Be A Good President

Keith Ablow, a so-called psychiatrist who appears on Fox "News" saying silly things, is at it again. This time his claim is that Newt Gingrich's history of infidelity and wife-leaving ought to improve our estimate of how good a President he'd be. Essentially his argument is that hey, three whole women have been way attracted to this guy, so he must be pretty awesome. Now, let's set aside some of the basic logical problems here: I'm pretty sure a lot of people we just would not want as President have been pretty popular with the ladies. Ablow is using "number of wives" as a proxy for "number of women who've been deeply attracted." This is a mistake. I'd bet you anything that far more women have been attracted to Barack Obama throughout his life than were in Newt Gingrich's first fifty years of life, and probably in Gingrich's entire sixty-eight year life. The difference is, Obama decided he was interested in one of those women, and has stuck with that decision for the past nineteen years, while Newt's changed his mind twice (at the marriage level; who knows how many mistresses he's had). Why should deciding to take advantage of a higher proportion of the female opportunities offered him make us think Newt would be a good President?

(Not that it necessarily ought to make us think he'd be a bad President, although the specifics of the way he's left his wives does make it seem that he's kind of a jerk.)

On Newt's "Open Marriage" Request

Apparently the second Mrs. Gingrich (of three) gave an interview, to be aired later tonight as a palate-cleanser from the Republican debate (yes, another one), from which the so-called "bombshell" headline is that Newt asked her whether she'd be okay with an open marriage. This would be around the time when he was cheating on her with the third and current Mrs. Gingrich, an indiscretion he says he's sought forgiveness for from god, etc. etc. But I can't see why this would be that much of a bombshell: don't we already know he was, you know, cheating on her? That's old news, right, and fully priced into everyone's opinions of Newt already? Isn't it kind of de minimis at worst, and arguably not even a negative, if he also, you know, asked permission to cheat? I mean, for me anyway it's an emphatic positive (although the part where, on being told "no," he goes ahead and cheats anyway is not so hot): having clandestine affairs without telling your spouse/partner is a genuine wrong that you've done them, whereas asking if they're okay with your having an affair and then, with permission, having said affair is not a wrong at all. Perhaps it'll sound all San Francisco-y to South Carolina Republicans, but I still think that it's just not categorically different than the existing body of Gingrich sex scandalousness.

Maybe they'll prove me wrong, but I'd be a bit surprised.

Further Thoughts on Porn

For the record, I'm doing readings for a class about the First Amendment and obscenity. That's why the stream of posts on the subject.

We ban child pornography. I don't think very many people protest this fact on freedom of speech grounds, including First Amendment absolutists like Justices Black and Douglas. Why? Well, I think it's because we recognize that, while the dissemination and consumption of porn may be just plain expressive, its production is not. We recognize in the production of child pornography an element of sexual abuse. And this is perfectly legitimate. But, wait a minute. Doesn't this suggest a really easy way to justify banning pornography wholesale? After all, we criminalize prostitution. Certainly we think that the state may criminalize prostitution if it wants to.

Isn't there a pretty hefty element of prostitution in pornography? A person is having sex in exchange for money. The only difference is that it's not their partner who's paying them, but rather the producers of the "film" pay all participants. But should that make a difference? Only if the justification for banning prostitution is that those wicked women are seducing men out of their money, which I'm pretty sure it isn't, at least not in 2011. (And that's certainly not the justification for criminalizing the customers of prostitution.) So why shouldn't the state get to say, look, we don't care much about the expressive content of porn, but its production is perforce either prostitution or slavery, and we're pretty uncool with either of those options? This removes the whole question of pornography from the realm of the First Amendment, allowing us to conclude rather easily that it should not be protected without imperiling any other First Amendment guarantees.

I'm not sure I would support that criminalization, and I'm fairly certain that you could construct a society in which I wouldn't. That follows from essentially the same logic that says that I wouldn't support criminalization of prostitution in societies where empirically the concerns from exploitation weren't present. Not all (female) feminists agree with this point of view, but some of them do, and I don't think it is a priori unreasonable. But if we have the sense that pornography is really, really bad for society, as MacKinnon clearly does, I think there are pretty good ways to justify banning it without calling it censorship of expression.

Question re: Pornography

I just read the opening paragraphs of Catherine MacKinnon's essay about why pornography should legitimately be prohibited. It's all very women-centric:

If women’s freedom is as incompatible with pornography’s construction of our freedom as our equality is incompatible with pornography’s construction of our equality, we get neither freedom nor equality under the liberal calculus. Equality for women is incompatible with a definition of men's freedom that is at our expense.

Okay, that's fine, but I have a question: isn't some porn of the all-male variety? Aren't there some women who watch porn? Considering that I'm pretty sure the answers to those two questions are both "yes," though the percentages may well be small, does MacKinnon's logic allow us also to censor gay male porn? Or porn enjoyed by women? And if not, isn't there a problem here? In a sense, MacKinnon's argument depends on the idea that women are always the ones getting screwed (in the non-sexual sense) when someone or anyone is getting, well, screwed.


EDIT: Her article on the whole is defending a particular anti-pornography ordinance based on the view that pornography is damaging to women's equality. She also makes clear that she isn't interested in defending the ordinance against 'views which have never been law,' such as First Amendment absolutism. I should state that I think she is 100% correct that, if we're going to get into the censorship business at all in this area (which according to the Court, we are), we should be allowed to do it on feminist grounds (or quasi-feminist, to encompass the concerns I raise in the previous paragraph). Also she is of course 100% correct that, even under the Black & Douglas view, child pornography or other forms of directly exploitative production techniques can and should be criminalized.

The Justification for Statutory Rape Laws

Statutory rape laws strike me as kind of weird. Even if a) the defendant can show that their partner deliberately concealed from them the fact that they were underage, or b) the defendant can show that their partner really, really, really wanted to have sex with them, i.e. it was extremely consensual in standard parlance, the defendant is still guilty. The only plausible rationale for this kind of strict liability is the idea that you don't want to put the burden of having to press charges on a minor, who might be easily intimidated or pressured out of wanting to do so. Some young girl can, for example, be pressured into saying that she consented when it actually was standard-order rape. And, of course, there's the fact that as the age of the minor involved approaches zero, it crosses a threshold at some point beyond which any claim of either a) or b) is just impossible. You can't not know that an eight-year-old is underage, and it's just true that an eight-year-old is not going to meaningfully consent to have sex. You've gotta draw a line somewhere, I guess, though as a matter of real-world psychology I think eighteen is a little too high. Then there's the idea that a teenager can be rather easily manipulated into "consenting" by an older, more experienced predator, and that we don't want to let that predator say "but she said yes!"

But that is not, apparently, anything related to the reason why we have statutory rape laws involving teenagers who might actually naturally want to have sex. The Supreme Court once overturned a statutory rape law that applied only against men who had sex with underage women, and applied even when the man was underage himself. Why did the state have such a law in the first place? Why, to prevent teenage pregnancy, of course! Why did the court strike the law down? Because it held that the unequal treatment of men and women was not even rationally related to the desire to prevent teenage pregnancy. The dissent (by right-wingers) argued that since women have the natural penalty of pregnancy that attaches to sex, but men don't, the law in question just "evened up" the incentives facing each gender.

Can I just say how seriously f@cked up all of that is? The sexual criminal code is not an instrument of social policy like that. The whole point of sex crimes is that they are not really sexual in nature but rather violent in nature, using sex as an instrument of violence. The ideas of statutory rape given above have nothing to do with that basic notion. We're imprisoning people and placing them on sex offender registries because we want to disincentivize teenage pregnancy? If we're so keen on preventing teenage pregnancy, why not require that all youngsters who have sex use some form of birth control? We don't find such laws for adults to be valid, but that's because we don't think the state has a valid interest in preventing people who want to get pregnant, or at least who want to take a reasonable risk of getting pregnant, from doing so, if those people are adults. If we think the state has an interest in preventing teenage pregnancy, in what way is a law against sex using birth control even remotely 'narrowly tailored' or 'minimally invasive'? Why are we even calling the crime in question rape, when it clearly is nothing of the sort?

That was kind of a rant, and I get that in many states the statutory rape laws may be designed to actually combat things like power-differential rape between people of different ages, or sexual abuse of genuine children. But if the best answer we can give for why we need to hold that fifteen-year-olds lack the ability to legitimately want to have sex is that the Council of Elders wishes they wouldn't have sex, because then they might get pregnant and Bad Things would happen, then it seems to me that all we've got is a massively disempowering, puritanical morals code.

Yes, It's (At Least Partially) About Repressive Sexual Mores

I'm reading a book about Justice Brennan, and a chapter I read last night discussed the very important case Griswold v. Connecticut. It mentions how, around the time of Griswold, the Catholic Church was beginning to debate itself about whether or not it ought to think birth control was unacceptable. And it quotes some Pope from shortly before that era, probably Pius XII, saying that birth control was not okay because it was "mutual masturbation...gaining pleasure by an unnatural act." Which brings me to my point: yes, this is about an anti-fun ideology. By "this" I mean, very broadly speaking, every aspect of the modern Christian conservative political movement's desire to regulate all and sundry forms of sexual behavior. Birth control, gayness, abortion, premarital sex, all of it. It's about being anti-pleasure. Having too much fun in the wrong ways is considered a Sin. Why? Unclear. Who does it hurt? Why does god mind, if he does? Is it that, if we like this life too much and have too much fun here, we won't be sufficiently attendant to some sort of supposed future life? Or is it just that a bunch of old men think that young people having fun is disturbing to them, personally? Probably a heavy component of this last one. But in any event, we do know that the old line about how Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere is having fun applies more broadly than Puritans per se.

Side note: I do admit that there are legitimate reasons to be opposed to abortion that do not involve being anti-fun. I myself don't think that a pro-fun position is sufficient to make abortion good (in fact, I don't think anything makes abortion good, I think certain circumstances make abortion least-bad and that the government shouldn't criminalize it), just as I don't think a pro-sexual privacy position is sufficient to make it constitutionally protected (though I do think it is constitutionally protected). But I think as an empirical fact the anti-fun movement is a considerable part of the anti-abortion movement.