Comments Elsewhere

Sloopy:

Right, Ampersand. Feminists (men and women) stood up and made lawmakers take notice and take action. Why is it unthinkable, why is it bad, when other people do the same?

Feminists (and, let’s be honest, most of them just happened to be women) created the modern network of battered women’s shelters in the 1970s by forming their own groups and buying property on short money from local women’s groups and the support of larger feminist organizations such as the Ms. Foundation. The first modern battered women’s shelter was probably Chiswick Women’s Aid in London, which began offering refuge services in 1971. The next year, the first battered women’s shelters in the United States were started with a similar model in the United States. These shelters were started in nonprofit storefronts, squatted spaces and women’s homes. They built fundraising networks from Women’s Liberation groups, Al-Anon meetings, whatever formal or informal networks they had at their disposal. With time they managed to purchase houses and begin to offer more comprehensive services. Cooperation from law enforcement was minimal and government funding mostly nonexistent until the 1980s, and not provided in any large-scale and coordinated way in the United States until the passage of VAWA in 1994. You should note that by 1979 there were over 250 shelters operating in the United States, even without any particular help from the government. You should also note (as Bean mentioned earlier) that shelters continue to receive the vast bulk of their funding from private donors, not from grants, today. The battered women’s movement did not come about by “making lawmakers take notice” or by extracting government funding. Women did it themselves and carried the torch for years without any help.

Men today have more money, more valuable social networks, and more political clout than women’s liberationists had in 1971. If MRAs were working to use the resources that they have in order to boost funding and availability of resources for battered men, rather than filing suits to try to force women’s shelters to be defunded, or filing suits to try to force existing women’s shelters to admit men, or whining to the legislature to try to get them to give men’s shelters a cut of the very limited government funds that are currently appropriated for women’s shelters, then it would be much easier to take them seriously and I would applaud their efforts. As it stands, though, they mostly don’t seem to be interested in doing the work for themselves and they mostly seem interested in zero-sum legal maneuvers that will only profit men’s shelters at the expense of women’s shelters. To hell with that.

Echidne: “In some ways Gates is advocating more choices for American firms at the expense of American workers. Under his scenario firms could outsource jobs or import workers, whichever turns out to be more profitable, and the U.S. workers would have to compete both at home and abroad with foreign workers.”

But I wonder why I should care about the condition of American workers specifically rather than the condition of workers as a whole. I mean, yes, relaxing immigration restrictions does cut into the benefits that American IT workers enjoy by bringing more non-American qualified professionals into the labor market. But so what? That represents a net gain for Indian workers (for example), and I don’t think the fact that they’re Indian makes their well-being less important to me.

I’m also not sure what the traditional worries about globalization and authoritarian regimes (e.g., the effects of “competition” with literal slave labor or labor in countries with widespread government repression of workers) have to do with Gates’s proposals in particular. I mean, yeah, there may be reasons to worry about that when we talk about offshoring of textile production, but (1) it’s not at all clear this is much of a problem in the IT sector, and (2) H-1B visas don’t have anything to do with offshoring anyway; the workers they bring to the United States enjoy all of the labor standards prevalent in the United States (they do get treated poorly by the immigration bureaucracy, but that’s La Migra’s fault, not the boss’s, and the answer there is surely liberalization rather than restriction).

ken melvin: “What right thinking person would spend $100k and up for an education that leads to a $40k/yr job (about what Gates wants to pay)? Offshoring, illegal immigration, H1-B, they all have the same effect on american workers.”

I try hard to resist the urge to simply paint IT protectionists as a bunch of pampered crybabies, but it’s hard not to when you see things like this. There are a lot of people in the United States, let alone in the developing world, who would kill for a $40,000 / year salary, particularly if that salary came with a white-collar work environment. Even if the cost of making that were $100,000 spread out over 4-5 years. You’d have made your money back within 3 years. That’s assuming that you were the one actually paying the $100,000, which kids going to $25k – $35k / year schools almost never are (most of the money generally comes from a combination of scholarships and funds provided by mommy and daddy).

I don’t think that immigration restriction is ever the appropriate response to labor problems, no matter what industry we’re talking about, but the attempt to lump IT professionals in with industrial workers and minimum-wage service workers (for whom unemployment and wage cuts may make the difference between having or not having a roof over their heads or healthcare for their kids) and say that their situations are all of a piece is frankly ridiculous.

Elena: “There are Chinese chain restaurants that pile Mexican workers into vans and shuttle them around the country, paying them a flat rate of $300/week. They rent cheap apartments for their workers as an added incentive.”

Well, good for them. $300 / week is decent pay if your employer is also covering your rent as a benefit. It’s very good pay compared to what the workers would be making if they stayed back in Mexico. I mean, look, there are lots of reasons to think that employers hiring undocumented immigrants are often sleazebags. They often are. But the fact that they pay them and provide housing for them is not among them.

Elena, again: “The noble intentions of immigrant rights groups that want amnesty for workers who do work Americans “won’t do” play right into the greedy hands of business leaders who want to circumvent fair labor practice for their workers. The fact that Bush wants immigration reform should be a red flag. It’s not because he loves Mexicans.”

I could say just as easily that the noble intentions of those who want protectionism and immigration restriction for the sake of labor are playing right into the hands of the nativist hard Right and the abusive immigration bureaucracy. But the interesting question isn’t who does or does not happen to share your policy conclusions; it’s which conclusions are true and what policies we have good reasons to adopt. So what reason is there to think that escalating the immigration cops’ assault on immigrant workers, or even leaving it in its present state, is going to do any good for immigrant workers? Or, if you think that it won’t do good for them but it will do good for American workers, what reason is there to think that American workers’ lives and livelihoods are more important than (say) Mexican and Central American workers’?

Well, it sounds like there was a lot interesting and worthy of attention in Shiva’s talk. But I’m getting a bit hung up on this:

“There are 25 different written languages in India. Each region has its own newspaper. Thus Indian citizens aren’t subjected to media saturation of constructed political issues. Dr. Shiva notes how, according to the U.S. media, abortion and gay marriage are more important than the war and the economy. Television serves as a tool of distraction from the concerns of our real lives.”

I mean, since when is abortion (for example) not a concern of our real lives? Real women need abortions every day and legislators who push an anti-choice agenda want to point real guns at them if they try to get one. It’s no less a matter of life and death than the war, and certainly more of one than, say, “the economy” — a nebulous statistical construct that clusters together some issues of immediate, pressing significance to our everyday lives (the kind of jobs that are or aren’t available in your or my hometown) and a lot that are just as remote as, well, the price of tea in China. I know that a lot of people on the Left are leaning these days towards thinking that if they could just try to play up class and downplay “cultural issues” then they could bring in white men who might otherwise drift toward the pseudo-populist hard Right, but it seems like every time this strategy gets spelled out it seems like something that ought to make feminists (for example) feel really queasy.

Michael: “Iraq is fucked and I don’t know how to unfuck it. The occupation has been a disaster. If the United States left now there would be a three-way civil war.”

The best that we can do is leave now. Maybe there will be a three-way civil war and maybe there won’t; there’s no good way for us to know. But that would only count as reason against pulling out immediately if you thought that continuing occupation by American soldiers is going to make that situation better rather than worse.

I mean, could you tell that girl that the occupation is doing more good than harm?

thehim: “For the U.S. to have been successful in a situation like Iraq, we would have had to make huge strides, even before the invasion, to build up that trust.”

For the U.S. to have been “successful” in a situation like Iraq, we would have needed not to slaughter thousands of civilians, even if G.W. had not lied through his teeth, even if he strictly adhered to the truth and spent months on a P.R. campaign. It’s not like the CIA installed a trap-door underneath Saddam Hussein and the Ba’ath Party commanders that would have let us “go in” to Iraq without killing people left and right. Modern total warfare may have victors, but it has no “successes.”

This is an interesting and nuanced picture of Andrea’s life. I think there is also a lot to disagree with here, but I appreciate those who can disagree with Andrea’s work without dismissing her or hurling abuse at her, like some of her critics (on both the Left and the Right) have been fond of doing in the past several days since her death.

A couple of notes.

1. Catharine MacKinnon DID NOT SAY “In a patriarchal society all heterosexual intercourse is rape because women, as a group, are not strong enough to give meaningful consent.” These words were written by Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge in their book Professing Feminism. They are trying to summarize MacKinnon’s views, but this is their (mistaken, incidentally) interpretation of her views, not anything she ever wrote. Unfortunately Cal Thomas mis-attributed the quote to her in a March 1999 article and the mis-attribution has been running around the Internet ever since. (Snopes has a decent page on this.)

2. You cite a passage from Susan Brownmiller’s book Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. Maybe her rhetoric is inflammatory; I don’t think it is particularly, but I’m used to far more strident writers than Brownmiller. But in any case it wasn’t particularly influenced by Andrea at the time. (Brownmiller started writing Against Our Will in 1971. She was already involved in the radical feminist movement in New York, but as far as I know she had not yet met Andrea — who was living as a battered wife in Europe at the time and who didn’t publish her first book, Woman Hating, until 1974.)

3. Above you say: “What Andrea Dworkin got right is that pornography encourages the basest instincts of male sexuality. … What Andrea Dworkin got right is that male lust is intrinsically self-serving. And since nature has made men more powerful than women, sexual liberation inevitably benefits men and hurts women.” Well, Andrea did criticize the effects of pornography on men’s sexuality and she did criticize self-serving male lust. But she did not believe that it was a matter of “instincts,” and she did not believe that men’s lust is intrinsically self-serving or that there’s any kind of biological inevitability about it. Right or wrong, she argued that pornography is part of a conscious, male-dominated political order, that male lust is “self-serving” in our society but that we can and should struggle to build a new society in which men’s sexuality is free from domination and narcissism, and that “sexual liberation” hurt women and benefitted men because it was “sexual liberation” on male terms. (She did not think that the fact that it was sexual liberation on male terms was biologically inevitable; she thought that it was the result of men’s political power, which she thought to be something that could be and should be overthrown.)

Well, my worry about the “Third Wave” terminology has always been primarily that it’s premature. “First Wave” and “Second Wave” aren’t generational terms; when we talk about “First Wave feminism” it’s important to remember that we’re talking about a historical movement that encompassed three generations of women—women spread across a huge array of different organizations and publications and campaigns, and women who at times had pretty intense conflicts within the movement over goals, tactics, ideology, organization, priorities, and (while we’re at it) race; these conflicts often ended up taking shape as intergenerational conflicts between the older leaders and the upcoming young activists.

If we’re going to start using “wave” as a generational term, then we’re not in the third wave of feminism; we’re in at least the 6th (which seems like a bit much). On the other hand, if we’re going to take a bit longer historical view, then we could at least wait until we have put a good 72 years of effort into Second Wave feminism before we start hiving our efforts off into a new “Wave.”

Amp:

Well, if I were a judge in that case, I’d certainly decide for “not guilty by reason of insanity.”

Why? This looks alarmingly like treating someone as crazy simply because their beliefs are morally depraved. I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but in actual historical reality lots of Nazis and Klan members have actually thought this way about Jews and Blacks (for example) and acted accordingly, to horrifying effect. I don’t think they were “insane” in any sense that affects legal or moral responsibility. They were just evil. Why should our hypothetical murderous anti-Christian be thought of any differently?

I find it fascinating that the Catholic Church, at least in this official document, entirely avoids using the word “Protestant” to describe, well, Protestants.

Well, the “separated Churches and Communities” Unitatis Redintegratio aren’t just Protestants; they’re also talking about the Eastern Orthodox churches, to take one important example.

Dr. B.: Thank you for this post. It’s one of the best things I’ve read in a while on the bottom-line importance of a consistent pro-choice position. This whole argument reminds me of nothing so much as the arguments between immediatists and gradualists over the abolition of slavery — and not coincidentally, of course, since banning abortion just means legalizing slavery in the case of pregnant women.

amy: Hold the bus. Did I say “women in general don’t think about their abortions”? No. But I do believe that in any large group of people, you’re going to find some who ain’t all that thoughtful or responsible. That’s who laws are for.

This is not so. Laws (as opposed to advice or legislative resolutions) are for authorizing men with guns and clubs to enforce compliance with a proscription. Passing a law against something means, ultimately, being willing to cuff, beat, imprison, and/or shoot someone over it.

This is an important fact about government action that had better not be ignored. When you talk about using legislation to control people—women—that are declared to be irrational by some process of public deliberation, you are not just talking about telling them what to do. You are talking about attacking them if they do not do what they are told to do.

This is important to remember, because not thinking about it can lead people to sign on to the most monstrous sorts of views and argumentative methods.

amy: I do not regard a 10-week fetus as a baby. I do regard a 38-week fetus as a baby, and I suspect the vast majority of pro-choice voters agree.

But being pro-choice is not a matter of letting “pro-choice voters” decide what Julia can do with her own body. It’s a matter of defending Julia’s right to decide what she does with her own body. The pro-choice position is not a majoritarian position; it’s a position about rights.

bitchphd: You do not have a fundamental civil right to tell me what to do with my own body. That is slavery.

amy: b, of course I do. As part of a legislative process, I have a fundamental civil right to influence laws on what both women and men can do with their bodies. Can I tell you directly what to do or not do? No. I can only do it as legislator to citizen, though I can be pretty powerful about it if people ignore the issue and leave most of the billwriting to me.

You’re either not responding to bitchphd’s point or you’re saying something which commits you to a crazy position. If what you are saying is that freedom of political speech and freedom of conscience is a fundamental right, and so you have a right to go around saying that you support bans on abortions under conditions X, Y, and Z, well, of course you do. But that’s not a response to the statement that you don’t have a right to tell another woman what to do with her own body, since bitchphd is clearly talking in terms of enforced government policy here, not merely in terms of your rights to hector and admonish other people.

If, on the other hand, you’re saying that you are a citizen in a democratic polity and you therefore have a right to enforce your ideas about an abortion ban if you can get it done through the political process, then the argument only goes through on the premise that anything that comes about as the outcome of a democratic political process is therefore something that the government has the right to enact. Which is an absolutely crazy position. Political victors in democracies do not properly have totalitarian authority over the citizens. There are lots of things that nobody has any right to enact no matter what political process approves them—laws permitting slavery for example, or laws authorizing the extermination of Jews, for example—and any political theory which would regard these outcomes as possibly legitimate is frankly one that’s beyond the pale for civilized humanity.

You might claim that you’re not arguing from the universal claim that any decision issuing from a democratic process is therefore legitimate, but only that abortion is a field where majoritarian decision-making is appropriate. Fine; but then you’d have to give some argument for that, rather than just appealing to polls and pointing out that we live in a quasi-democratic polity. You’d also have to give up the claim that you are pro-choice, since allowing for abortion laws as long as they are supported by a majority may not be anti-abortion, but it is also not pro-choice.

Thus Robert:

Murder is a legal term that means the deliberate ending of a human life with a certain type of intent. It’s murder for me to shoot my wife’s ex-husband because I want him to die; it isn’t murder if I run him over by accident, or if I shoot him in the woods because I mistake him for a deer.

The only way abortion would be legitimately considered murder is if the person performing the operation, or the person who requested it be performed upon her, thought the fetus was a human being and wanted to end its life. That’s murder by anyone’s definition. If a person is honestly convinced that a fetus is not a person, then by definition they do not have the requisite frame of mind to commit murder. Manslaughter, at most.

So if I earnestly believe that Christians are not human beings, and that I therefore have a right to hunt anyone who makes a confession of the faith like a beast, and I act on this earnestly held belief by gunning down some folks at Sunday services, does that mean, on your view, that I am not guilty of murder, but rather of manslaughter at the most?

Come on, now. If you’re going to come down on abortion, at least don’t be mealy-mouthed about it.