WhirledView

Hormones, again!

By Patricia L. Sharpe

A few days ago I was in Silver City, New Mexico, where a friend was searching for affordable housing. Silver City’s heyday was the late 1800s, when the city was home to mining money. The ore-meisters built cupola-topped red brick mansions on the main drag, but mining, in it’s usual cyclical way, crashed. Then a flood came and washed away much of the center of the city. A surviving old house is now the wildly quaint city museum.

The next memorable era in Silver City was the hippie phase, which the museum does not recognize. Sixties-recalling murals, second hand shops and cafés dominate the historic city center today.

Now a third phase is underway. Real estate values are so depressed and/or reasonable that Silver City is becoming a retirement destination. So my friend decided to check it out.

That she did, for a day and a half, after which, last Wednesday morning, it was time to leave. Since our quaint B&B served the world’s most horrible breakfast, with swill as coffee, we stopped at a place called Java the Hut (Har! Har!) to fill our thermoses.

Java the Hut is also the place to go for a morning gab session. Three guys of the retiree variety were lounging on comfy couches taking about the primary in Pennsylvania. I hadn’t heard the late results, so I asked if any of them knew what the final vote was. The spread, one said, was nearly ten percent, with Clinton leading, which led one of his buddies to observe, “Twenty-five percent of Obama’s supporters would throw their weight to Clinton. Only 19 percent of her supporters would do the same. It’s racism,” he concluded.

I couldn’t resist. “If one is racism, the other is sexism. Why aren’t you denouncing that?”

The three of them laughed (Har! Har!). “A woman in the White House! Can’t risk it. Once a month, you know, women lose it.”

The curse of the curse! A monthly warpath! Was I really hearing this?

I muttered something about the 24/7 effects of testosterone on the current White House resident and his closest advisers, but I was so dumbfounded that didn’t think of the other perfect comeback. By the time any woman is ready to run for the presidency, menstruation is likely to be history.

But maybe my lapse was just as well. Sexist popular culture has nothing good to say for the business of being female during menopause either.

In short, if you’re a woman, young, middle-aged or old, you can’t win. And that’s what these guys were hoping, until Clinton grabbed the lead in Pennsylvania.

But sexist? Not them!

So if anyone’s still wondering why a lot of white men of the normally (covertly) racist variety are going to vote for Barak Obama, this little anecdote may shed a little light on the phenomenon.

Misusing Science

by CKR

I posted an op-ed by David Barash the other day on WhirledView Choice, with a snarky comment about the author being male. What occurred to me as strange was that Barash knew better, in a couple of dimensions. I've read other stuff he's written.

Now Jenny Duschek, a science writer, replies that science is showing us that neither females nor males are perfectly monogamous, even in species that were thought to be exemplars of the form.

And here's an even better exposition of that research, some of it done by, er, David Barash.

We may speculate about men's hormonal difficulties in thinking about sex and applying logic simultaneously. But isn't that kind of talk getting tired? Once it was us women. Then the endocrinologists came along to show us that men had hormones too. I recall hearing Estelle Ramey, back in the seventies, saying "Women have cycles. Men have cycles. Cabbages have cycles." She was replying to the common wisdom of that time, which was that women's raging hormones unfit them for thoughtful professions and, of course, politics. And, oh yeah, they were crazy when those hormones slowed down, too.

So now it's men's raging hormones. Those hormones don't unfit them for thoughtful professions or politics, never did. But they do justify hiring prostitutes, dumping middle-aged wives for trophies, and other lapses of monogamy.

Please.

Cabbages have cycles, just like humans. That doesn't mean that we all have to send down roots and sit outside fattening up in the cool spring days, then send up a seed stalk in the hotter summer. Swans aren't monogamous. Worms fuse together in sexual ecstasy. Preying mantises eat their mates. Some male fishes take care of the kids while their spouses go out and have fun.

Humans are capable of thought and choice, even commitment. We don't have to be slaves to our biochemistry. Spitzer made a choice every time he thumbed in a text message, pulled out his credit card, signed into a hotel. So do all men. They are no more slaves to their hormones than are women.

Let's Reject All the Isms

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

The Obama campaign is in a dither because Clinton-supporter Geraldine Ferarro observed, in public, that Obama is getting the lion’s share of the African-American vote and they are crying foul. They see racism.

But whoa!!!!

After every state’s votes are counted, the media rush to note that Hillary Clinton has got a majority of the women’s vote, with special emphasis on white women. That would be sexism, then, wouldn’t it? With a tinge of reverse racism yet!

So what’s the difference? Are the observations equally inappropriate, or are we going to have dueling isms, a rank-ordering of which ism is better (or worse) than the others. Which ism is truly taboo. Which ism is little more than petty quibbling.

A friend and I noticed something interesting this morning. One of us is an Obama supporter, the other is a Clinton supporter. The Clinton supporter is livid over the sexism and misogyny that she perceives in press coverage of Hillary’s campaign and doesn’t see why it’s so horrible to note that African-Americans might be disproportionately in favor of Obama. The Obama supporter doesn’t notice the vitriol that’s been directed toward Hillary, but she’s not so happy about references to the African-American vote.

Interesting, no?

And come the general election, we’ll have another ism to contend with. Ageism. Most twenty somethings should pray to be able to function at the intellectual level of John McCain—and he’s zipping around a lot faster than a log of sluggish sixteen year olds I’ve known. But the age issue comes up all the time. Is seventy really that old in the 21st century? Isn’t it time to stop throwing words like geezer around? Even Golden Ager is pretty contemptuous.

So let’s face facts. We have an African-American, a woman and a guy with white hair in this campaign. They are all pretty sharp. They are all very well informed. It’s possible to have very strong personal feelings about one or the other, it’s possible to make meaningful policy differentiations, but let’s agree that all the isms are equally unsavory and to be condemned.

It’s Not Too Late to Vote for Hillary, or Another Independent for McCain

Democrats are trying to figure out whether Barak Obama, who has attracted so many independent votes in the primaries, will be able to garner the same support in the general elections. The Washington Post, for example, is running stories with titles like “Obama's Red-State Prospects Unclear; Democrat's Support May Have Limits” and “Could Obama Turn Red States Blue?” That being the case, it might be interesting for WhirledView readers to learn the current thinking of a New Mexico independent who voted for Hillary Clinton. Elizabeth Trickey is an attorney who practices in Santa Fe.

It’s Not Too Late to Vote for Hillary,
or Another Independent for McCain

By Elizabeth Trickey

The conservative pundits on TV have had that ‘cat that just swallowed a canary’ look lately…fat and happy. And why shouldn’t they be? It seems their plan has panned out. First they, and other conservative media representatives, spread the idea that Hillary had “too much baggage” to win. What was the baggage? Bill Clinton, arguably the most popular politician in both the 20th and 21st century. Then, in a Democratic field filled with legitimate, experienced candidates well tempered in the fire of the American political scene, they let it be known that their most feared candidate was Barack Obama.

Barack Obama? A guy with only a three year track record at the federal level, and before that as a state representative? The man known to have the most liberal voting record in the Senate. A man with a catchy slogan, “Yes We Can,” but no evidence of a plan for what that might be. In contrast, Hilary Clinton, has proven to be measured in her responses, extremely well-informed and statesmanlike. She’s in the middle of the road, like the rest of America, and she works well with her colleagues in the Senate. Even many upstate Republicans like her now. So to what can we attribute her latest losses? Perhaps to a media that likes Obama’s sound bites rather than her substance. Or one that fell for the conservatives’ line.

What has her biggest crime been to date? Not divorcing Bill? Could it be that staying married under very difficult circumstances might represent a strong mainstream Christian response, or even true love and forgiveness? Hmmm! Wouldn’t that appeal to the very conservatives so desperately courted by McCain, whose own marital past is a potential minefield of difficulties?

Hillary has been attacked with stated fears that her presidency would simply be a third term for Bill. Sure, a re-elected, successful Senator from New York, top of her class from Wellesley, Yale Law graduate when a very small percentage of that class were women would cede her presidency to her husband!

So what are we seeing here? Perhaps a vast right wing conspiracy to manipulate the Democrats into running what, after the disastrous Bush Administration, is the only Democrat that could lose? Or is it just more evidence of the glass ceiling which prevents women from leaving the pink collar world for the boardrooms? It's said that this election isn’t about gender or race, to which I have to say, “Oh, yeah?” African-Americans are choosing Obama at a rate of something like 80%- 85% range. And who else? White men. And the last group, one that pains me most, is young women. Those too young to know that they will grow up to hit the same ceiling when their turn comes unless they get behind the one candidate with an unimpeachable record, the experience and maturity to lead our great nation in these troubled times. The one that can truly make this nation work for the majority. Now that would be change!

I have no doubt that Hillary Clinton’s presidency would look out for all Americans equally, but her election would change things for women exponentially. Obama’s campaign has proven that race is no longer the obstacle it once was, and that gender remains the greater political problem. In fact, with his highly privileged background as a former Harvard Law Review editor, I view him as indistinguishable from some equally inexperienced white guy. He’s not ready. The Republicans know it, and they will attack him with everything Clinton’s campaign has left unsaid.

The last time we sent a Democrat president to Washington with a proud claim to being a Beltway outsider, Jimmy Carter was nearly ridden out of town on a rail after a one-term, largely ineffective administration.

So where does this leave me? If Hillary is not the Democratic candidate, I’ll be just another independent for McCain. Like me, he’s moderate, so moderate in fact that his name was bruited about as a good candidate for the DEMOCRATIC Vice-Presidency in the last election. Obviously, he plays well with others and would work well with both parties in Congress. Yes, his stance on the war troubles me, but I know he didn’t take it for political gain. It was considered political suicide when he announced it, before the surge in Iraq started to work. His forthright support for campaign finance reform, business reforms and the like make him entirely attractive, and trustworthy. The contrast with Obama could not be clearer. We know who John McCain is, as we do Hillary Clinton.

A choice between McCain and Clinton would be a fight among equals, with the choice coming down to real issues like their plans for Iraq. A choice between McCain and Obama will be a choice between a polished political statesman, and a neophyte. But, it’s not too late, fellow Independents and Democrats. We can make the right choice, an electable candidate who deserves the credit for what she’s done, not blame for her husband’s conduct. Yes we can. Get behind her, and we can make real changes for America.

Time Hurries On

And the leaves that are green turn to brown,
And they wither with the wind,
And they crumble in your hand.
---Simon and Garfunkel, 1966

by CKR

Green we were, young people marching for civil rights, working out relations between women and men as though we had discovered them, facing a war that didn’t seem right, building our own world that would be better than our parents’. The new ideas grew like green leaves, some well, some poorly.

It’s been forty years and more since we and our ideas were so green. Forty years before that, the 1929 stock market crash and the depression were in the future, as were World War II and the Korean War, all part of our parents’ generation. The fears of nuclear destruction, the inevitability of conflict that became Vietnam, those were ours.

Green fears and ideas turn to brown. They become the compost out of which new green grows: part forgotten, part unrecognizable, indigestible bits still sticking out.

Tony Judt chronicles the greening and browning of what he calls “The ‘Problem of Evil’ in Postwar Europe.” The attempted genocide of the Jews was first ignored, then recognized in the sixties, then incorporated into everyone’s history, and now seems to be moving toward an overemphasis that will drain it of its meaning.

The greening:

The Narrow Door

By Jinx McCombs, Guest Contributor

It has become deeply unfashionable (again!) to talk about gender issues. I came of age in the 1960s, in what is often called the "beginning of the women's movement" (a discourtesy to the many earlier generations of women who worked for equality).

If someone had told the women of my college graduating class that by the turn of the 21st century there still would have been no woman American president or vice-president, that women would still be far in the minority among Senators, among CEOs of major companies, among judges --- that still, the further up the ranks you went in almost any organization, the fewer women you would find --- we'd have laughed and said "Wait and see!"

Now, almost a decade into the 21st Century, what do we see? The mood of today seems broadly similar to that of the early 1960s: a strong bias against rocking the boat, sub voca admonishments to count our gains and not risk making ourselves look petty by "playing the gender card."

Unquestionably there have been gains, slow and steady. Many barriers have eroded or fallen. Many women are holding positions of responsibility and authority in business, government, and politics. For decades now, increasing majorities of men as well as women say that in choosing a person for promotion or a candidate to vote for, their decision is guided by the abilities of the individual, not gender or race. I think few are hypocritical in saying this; they mean it.

Why the discrepancies?

So why does the real-life situation look so far from the 50-50 gender population distribution? And why are minorities also still represented at far below their demographic numbers?

My thesis, developed over decades of observation, is this: in a choice between a white male and any other, the "other" will be held to much stricter limits of personal characteristics, qualifications, and behavior. This is the Narrow Door.

The Narrow Door operates in two ways. First, the range of "acceptable" behavior is narrowed, usually at both ends of a scale. For example, a personal style which is seen positively in a white male as strong and authoritative is likely to be seen negatively in a woman as bossy and controlling. A man's "good support and coaching of staff" may be seen in a woman as "coddling and micro-managing."

Second, the Narrow Door often means that negative charges against a candidate --- especially if they fit previous stereotypes --- are accepted as true with little examination or evidence.

The Narrow Door works outside conscious awareness. (Common usage would be "subconsciously" but the term "outside conscious awareness" emphasizes that we can become aware of the influence and mitigate it.) But in highly competitive arenas such as national politics, some will exploit Narrow Door assumptions to damage opponents.

Cultural stereotypes vs cultural realities

The cultural stereotypes about women are especially in conflict with the cultural expectations about people in authority, and this has made the Narrow Door particularly stubborn for women. A woman who is seen as fitting the stereotype for a leader is likely to be dismissed from consideration because she is too jarring, too unpleasant, too odd --- too far from the cultural stereotype of a woman. "People just aren't comfortable with her," and "she is too controversial a figure."

Leaders are supposed to be authoritative, decisive, knowledgeable, able to empathise but without losing the ability to lead. Women are (still --- despite public embrace of generalized rhetoric to the contrary) expected to be gently empathetic, consulting rather than deciding independently, modest in their knowledge to avoid any hint of arrogance.

The Great Big Promising Elephant in the We-need-change Room: Hillary is a Woman

By PLS

She's a woman and she knows it takes a village. It's time for Hillary to play this card!

It's risky, of course. But the cautious unisex campaign she's been running isn't working. Everyone agrees she's competent; everyone agrees that she could do the job; but no one's excited.

Damned if you do and damned if you don't. It's still not easy to be a woman.

'The Female Trap

Hillary did what smart women were supposed to do when she left college. She subordinated her career to a bright man. In the process, she accomplished and learned a lot. Ditto during the Bill Clinton presidency. She learned as much as any staff member would have learned. Her claim of experience based on that relationship is anything but bogus, as countless married women with similar experience know.

Including me. I was married to a specialist in Indian politics. By the time he'd researched and written the book based on his dissertation, a book whose analytic structure was my idea and which I rewrote word by word, paragraph by paragraph, I was an expert on Indian politics and the Congress Party, and I remained so. In fact, I was more engrossed in Indian affairs than the subject of my own Ph.D., which was American Literature, and I remain so. What did I get out of it? The usual blow-off in the acknowledgments. To this day, my income is seriously diminished by the fact that I made that marriage and gave it all I had.

There are millions of women who also made this bittersweet bargain in the school of marriage and hard knocks. That's why vigorous efforts to disparage Hillary's experience have fallen flat. And yet it's a rare woman who isn't, understandably, a little defensive about the situation.

So Hillary, who went on to become a superb politician and legislator as Senator from New York in her own right, still works to prove and prove and prove that she wasn't a deaf, dumb and blind dunce all those years as Wife of Bill and especially as First Lady, when tradition wouldn't let her hold a respectable job of her own. The carpetbagger who wasn't supposed to be elected breezed through a re-election for a second term as senator. But she's still behind the career path eight ball for those years when she left Yale for Arkansas and then found herself in that ghastly First Lady position. So now she's overcompensating. She's overselling the experience factor in a market that's looking for change.

The Wife and Mommy Trap

But Hillary's also got a loyalty problem. She's still married to the guy. She can't diminish him. She can't totally distance herself. What's more, even as she hopes a little of the enduring loyalty to Bill will rub off on her candidacy, she needs to fear the impact of the Clinton haters. It's a messy business that younger women may not entirely understand.

Speaking of Hillary as First Lady, I heard her speak to university students in Kampala, Uganda. Bill had just given a wow of a speech in which he pepped up an audience that President Museveni had put to sleep. Hillary's speech was every bit as enthralling to her audience of academics and students. That's just one reason why Hillary has a huge number of admirers in the international community. She also delivered a stirring address at one of the UN conferences on women. So Hillary not only knows foreign policy, she has a huge bank of good will abroad. Karen Hughes should have consulted with Hillary before she trotted off to sell America to the Arabs. But where's that passion now? Advisers have neutered Hillery.

R.I.P. Benazir Bhutto

By PLS

She was ambitious. She was intelligent. She was articulate. She was beautiful. She was brave. She is dead.

The news was shocking—and somewhat expected.

Of all the aspirants to power in Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto was the most implacable in her opposition to regressive Islam. As a highly educated and sublimely confident female politician, she posed a danger to the militant Islam project in Pakistan in a way the Islamist-pandering, on-again-off-again secularist Musharraf never did. Nor did her arch-rival Nawaz Sharif, a follower of the very conservative, missionary-oriented Tabligi Jamat. Nawaz accepted exile in Wahabi Saudi Arabia, after all, while Benazir Bhutto in exile was at home in London and, on the Arabian peninsula, in the far more tolerant Emirates.

One thing no one has mentioned (to my imperfect knowledge anyway) in the course of sketching Benazir’s route to death in Rawalpindi yesterday, is that she encouraged a resurgence of the arts in Pakistan during her second prime ministership. A feminist poet who had to seek refuge in India during the puritanical military dictatorship of Zia-ul-Haq not only returned to Pakistan but was given a position in the government’s cultural hierarchy. Female artistes were able to present classical dance programs in public, not only Kathak, which flourished in Muslim courts, but Bharat Natayam, which is a South Indian dance form. Painting thrived, too, with modern miniatures, some very witty and contemporary, pouring out of the art schools of Lahore. Non-religious classical music could also be enjoyed in public. People breathed freely. Well, some did. Others gnashed their teeth and insisted that female leadership was inconsistent with Islam.

Benazir was so articulate that one was tempted, at times, to think of her as glib, as if the word democracy might be falling a bit too trippingly from her tongue these days. But during her last term in power, there was indeed an opening up of life in Pakistan, the sort that’s consistent with the individual freedom that underlies the vital functioning of democratic institutions. Indians recall that she sought rapprochement with Pakistan’s huge neighbor, too. No doubt she was mightily constrained by the Pakistani army (as was Nawaz Sharif, when he was in power). And there were those corruption charges! Of course, even the Pakistani army is not exactly pure when it comes to extra-curricular financial opportunities, but the charge always resonates, as indeed it should.

I was more than a little amused during those long months when the Bush administration pushed for the never credible shotgun marriage that a Bhutto-Musharraf government would have been. Suddenly Benazir Bhutto had become the last best hope for democracy in Pakistan. What a turnabout! Ten years ago, when I was in Karachi and Benazir was in power, my diplomatic colleagues denigrated her as a hysterical ineffectual female and hailed Nawaz Sharif as a reality-based businessman America could work with. When I suggested that my dear male colleagues might be confusing style with substance, they pooh poohed the very possibility of sexism tainting their reports. Ha!

If the personally secular Musharraf has been a bit two-faced about his relationship with radical Islam, in the border areas and elsewhere, Nawaz Sharif is personally and openly of a conservative stripe as a Muslim. I found myself speculating (uncomfortably) as to whether, in the drive toward victory in the upcoming parliamentary elections, Nawaz might have made an unholy alliance with potential Islamist assassins. I am, now, convinced that such was not the case. I’ve watched the clip showing his reaction to the assassination at least five times. The anguish in his face is too total and too nuanced to be phoney. The man is shocked and distraught. The facial expression of “President” Musharraf, on the other hand, is stony and unreadable. Anything is possible, as Benazir herself suggested, openly. However, Musharraf's declaration of three days national mourning seems fairly striking. That’s high honor paid to an upstart woman. It’s not likely to increase his popularity with those who have tried to kill him in the past.

So what will happen with those elections? Was Benazir’s assassination a rather nasty way to get them called off? Was her death instrumental—or the whole point of the matter? I don’t know.

Finally, if Benazir had lived and become PM again, would she have been more broadly successful than previously? Only if critical elements of the army had chosen to support her and her goals, for a change. Would they have? That, too, I do not know. Nothing in Pakistan is more opaque than the collective thoughts of the all powerful army which poor George W. Bush naively thought he understood and could use for his own purposes. Billions and billions of dollars later, he knows better, I hope.

The Misanthropy State: Don’t Make Too Much of Iowa

By PLS

When all candidates are males, the Iowa caucus process probably serves as a good straw in the electoral wind. But that assumption must be considered gone with the wind, now that the leading Democratic candidate is a woman. It won’t be a fair contest in a miserably misanthropic state.

Iowa has no female Senators. Never has. It doesn’t even have a female Member of Congress. Never has. Iowa has never had a female governor either. Female Lieutenant governors can’t crack the granite ceiling.

Mistrust in female leadership is crumbling throughout the U.S., and it isn’t even a pervasive middle western bias. Iowa’s neighbors manage to elect women to top posts. Kansas and Michigan currently have female governors, for example. As for Senators, there are female incumbents from Michigan, Missouri and Minnesota. In the House Ohio, Minnesota, South Dakota, Wisconsin and Michigan are represented by one or more females. And so on.

This being the case, results from the Iowa caucuses will have to be very carefully analyzed. Obviously, if Hillary Clinton wins big, it will be an extraordinary accomplishment.

If she loses by anything but a humiliating margin, the winning candidates should in no way be considered to represent political preferences in other states or to represent a momentum that can be recapitulated elsewhere. Iowa should not be seen to give any male candidate a lock on the nomination.

In short, journalists who write as if Iowa is a microcosm of the US in 2007 will be doing us all a great disservice.

Will political reporters have the sociological savvy to properly interpret the electoral preferences of this state?

For that matter, to what extent can any of them rise above the unsavory bitch or bimbo stereotypes that women know so well?

The Five Step Plan to Secure and Happy Homes

By PLS

Some people will do anything to protect a foetus. I find their theology and tactics repugnant, but they have been pretty darned effective in gnawing away at women’s abortion rights. So let’s borrow from the enemy, I say, to protect the family from financial predators.

Families are losing their homes right and left across this great country. This is a terrible threat to family values. A family on the street is a family truly in danger.

Conservatives have already laid the groundwork for this great cause. The Supreme Court has decided that grown women can’t be trusted to make intelligent decisions about their own bodies, and people who otherwise want to keep government out of our lives think they have the right to make reproductive decisions for people they aren’t even related to. It’s one tiny little step to agreeing that lots of people simply don’t have the education or experience to make good decisions about mortgages.

So let’s help the innocents who might be tempted by predatory lenders. I call it the Five Step Plan to Secure and Happy Familyhood:

1. The video: Our video won’t show cute little foetuses, it will show the destitute in extremis. Everyone about to sign up for a subprime loan will have to watch a tear-jerker of a video showing what can happen when you lose your house and can’t declare bankruptcy and your kids can’t go to school because they don’t have a settled address and your teeth drop out for lack of care. Etc. Etc.
2. The picketers: outside every subprime mortgage lending institution let's station aggressive noisy picketers with gruesome signs showing starving kids and crying mothers and fathers drinking their shame away. Etc. Etc.

3. The Written Warning: before anyone can sign for a subprime loan, he or she must read a precise description of terms and penalties in simple English—and in an easily readable typeface (no squinting allowed) and then pass a test* showing comprehension.
4. The Delay: potential borrowers should be forced to go home and cogitate for at least 24 hours after they receive the warning, during which time the little test can be graded by an incorruptible neutral party.

5. The Legislation: all of these procedures are palliatives. The only way to keep good but naive people from being taken advantage of and ruined is to pass legislation which will outlaw these predatory loans. The sooner such consumer protection legislation can be tested and declared constitutional by the courts the better.

There are of course some conservatives who think that people who sign up for bad mortgages have only themselves to blame, but surely we can count the on the family values lobby to support this initiative. What could be more destructive to family life than losing a home? Oh yes, a little rebalancing of the bankrupcy act to provide more consumer protection would also help.

*This was my bright little idea. It would be a bit of a nuisance, but it sure would help to keep people from signing impetuously, optimistically, foolishly on dotted lines they should avoid.