Political polarization and the acceleration thereof have been headline-grabbers for years, and the so-called battle of the sexes is of much older vintage. But what happens when you blend the two into a growing partisan divide between men and women? Well, you end up with warnings that the sexes are diverging in their politics, with all that implies—whatever that might be.
"In countries on every continent, an ideological gap has opened up between young men and women," writes John Burn-Murdoch at the Financial Times. "Tens of millions of people who occupy the same cities, workplaces, classrooms and even homes no longer see eye-to-eye."
Burn-Murdoch highlights data from South Korea, the U.S., Germany, and the U.K. In each country, women are swerving left while men are tending right. In the U.S., Germany, and the U.K., women's leftward swing is most pronounced, while in South Korea the larger movement is among men becoming more conservative.
"In the US, Gallup data shows that after decades where the sexes were each spread roughly equally across liberal and conservative world views, women aged 18 to 30 are now 30 percentage points more liberal than their male contemporaries," notes Burn-Murdoch. "That gap took just six years to open up."
In the U.S., men's opinions drifted left about 10 years ago before moving back to the center. The biggest change has been the leftward surge among women, echoed in other countries.
Diverging political opinions between the sexes were called out earlier, by Jean Twenge, who wrote in her 2023 book Generations: "Among liberals, the future is female, and among conservatives, the future is male."
Twenge's conclusions were challenged by, among others, Daniel Cox of the American Survey Center. He agreed that young women are trending liberal, but that young men currently look more moderate or politically noncommittal than conservative.
"One important reason the politics of young men is so difficult to pin down is that so few have participated in institutions that shape their values and help them identify their purposes," Cox added. "Young men may also take longer to define themselves because masculinity itself can be difficult to define in modern culture. It's frequently treated as a pejorative, but it's a quality many young men still aspire to."
With the left, in recent years, harping on "toxic masculinity" while conservatives promote traditional male characteristics, it's no wonder that attitudes towards masculinity have become predictors of political affiliation in the U.S. But a similar divergence in politics seems to be taking place in other countries.
Alice Evans, a gender researcher and visiting fellow at Stanford University, attributes the political divergence along sexual lines to economic and cultural frustrations, less mixed socializing, and self-aggrandizing "influencers" playing on gender differences for personal gain.
In the West, older men and women tend to have similar views because "they came of age at a time of shared cultural production and mixed gendered socialising," she writes. "But now – in economically developed and culturally liberal societies – young men and women seem to be growing apart. Evidence points to economic frustrations, social media filter bubbles and cultural entrepreneurs."
"Failure to address this gap may impede heterosexual love, friendships and family formation," Evans cautions. She suggests the divide might be bridged by growing prosperity, bursting social-media bubbles, and cross-gender friendships.
Cultural attitudes and economic shifts are very real and can certainly drive resentment as some groups lose status or are flat-out denigrated. Psychologist Helen Smith wrote the 2014 book, Men on Strike, about male reactions to a "system that seems to be increasingly stacked against them."
Segregated communities also tend to be self-reinforcing. We've seen that as Republicans/conservatives and Democrats/liberals geographically relocate themselves to like-minded communities where people share the same viewpoints.
"America is growing more geographically polarized — red ZIP codes are getting redder and blue ZIP codes are becoming bluer. People appear to be sorting," NPR noted in 2022.
"Groups of like-minded people tend to become more extreme over time in the way that they're like-minded," commented Bill Bishop, who wrote about the phenomenon in 2008's The Big Sort.
If young men and women aren't socializing together to the same extent as their parents and grandparents, but are discussing politics and other important issues in separate communities, they may drive already conflicting views farther apart.
But how far apart are men and women, really? It's one thing to say that women are veering to the left and men to the right, but what does that mean? The answer is: It sort of depends.
Ohio State political scientist Tom Wood found that, when you compare answers to questions on specific policies such as gun control, abortion, and taxes, women do indeed come off as more to the left than men. But when you compare the differences in the answers, as Jan Zilinsky of the Technical University of Munich did, on most issues the policy gap isn't that big.
Are policy preferences more important than political tribe identity? That's something of an open question, though recent experience in the U.S. suggests that tribal identity is very important. Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times points to diverging voting patterns between men and women, which can have big consequences no matter what people prefer on specific issues.
"It would be easy to say this is all a phase that will pass, but the ideology gaps are only growing, and data shows that people's formative political experiences are hard to shake off," adds Burn-Murdoch.
At a moment when political differences already seep into everyday life and ruin everything, perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that relations between the sexes are also falling victim.
The post The Battle of the Sexes Turns Political appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Yesterday was "Equal Pay Day," so named to mark the point in the year that a U.S. woman allegedly must work to make the same amount of money as her male counterparts made in the preceding single year. As has become tradition, Democratic leaders marked the occasion with big talk and little substance.
Their big idea was restricting the use of salary history in hiring. President Joe Biden released an executive order instructing the Federal Acquisition Regulatory Council to "consider" implementing rules that "limit or prohibit Federal contractors and subcontractors from seeking and considering information about job applicants' and employees' existing or past compensation when making employment decisions." Vice President Kamala Harris announced that the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) would "begin work to address the use of salary history in the hiring and pay-setting process for federal employees."
Careful observers may notice that nothing concrete is actually being done; the big announcements amounted to plans to "consider" or "begin work to address." But the amusingly toothless nature of these announcements is actually a good thing, since an actual ban on salary history disclosure (even just among federal workers and contractors) would be pretty silly.
The idea that salary history disclosures harm women has become commonplace—the thinking being that if women are financially disadvantaged at their first jobs then their salary history will suggest they can be paid lower wages at their next job and so on, creating a vicious cycle of lower pay from which women can never emerge.
Several states have already passed laws to ban salary history discussions during the hiring process. But evidence that this actually helps women is mixed. Meanwhile, such restrictions would have unintended consequences.
"For example, employers who can't ask about prior salary might assume that a female candidate would accept less money than a man, because women make less on average," as The New York Times has previously noted. In this scenario, a ban on salary history discussions could lead to women getting lowballed in job offers.
Salary history bans could also cost people—particularly women and younger workers—some job offers. It's not hard to imagine an employer choosing to hire someone whose salary requirements seem slightly lower than an equally qualified candidate with higher requirements. In this case, prior salary disclosure could mean the difference between getting a job or not.
In other cases, where an employer has a strong preference for a particular candidate, the company may be prepared to offer a higher salary than the baseline in order to recruit them. Without knowing the candidate's salary history, however, the employer may be lost as to what to offer. They might offer lower than the candidate currently makes, leading the candidate to reject the job that could have otherwise been a good fit.
Which is all to say that surely some women may actually benefit from past salary disclosure—especially now that young women are out-earning their male counterparts.
In general, letting employers and prospective employees exchange more information, not less, seems likely to lead to the best matches and the most satisfaction.
The Biden administration's enthusiasm for limiting prior salary disclosure jives with the general cluelessness (or deliberate misrepresentation) by politicians and activists on the issue of equal pay.
The feminist campaign for "equal pay for equal work" was once quite justified; women frequently faced lower pay than men for performing the same jobs. But outright pay differentials based on sex have long been illegal, and the pay gap between women and men in the same positions is now quite small. A 2016 study of wage data in 33 countries including the U.S. found that men made 1.6 percent more on average than women doing the same work.
Today's rhetoric about wider disparities in male and female incomes tends to 1) rely on research looking at incomes across professions and positions and 2) ignore explanations other than discrimination that might explain pay disparities—things like gender differences in types of work, work schedules, and years in the workforce. Politicians and media then use this distorted picture to spawn outrage and get kudos for addressing the issue, even if nothing they're doing can actually "fix" the complicated causes behind disparities.
There may be a broader discussion to have about whether female-heavy industries are undervalued or how choosing to have children may harm women's salary prospects more than men's. But the issue is nowhere near the simplistic narrative that many modern progressives often make it out to be, in which sexist bosses and companies simply choose to pay women less than men for the same work and everything can be fixed with federal mandates.
"Ag gag" law unconstitutional. A federal court has ruled against an Iowa law that makes it a crime to obtain "access to an agricultural production facility by false pretenses." The decision by U.S. District Judge Stephanie Rose blocks enforcement of the law on First Amendment grounds. "The case had been on hold while the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals considered a challenge to an earlier version of the law," notes the Des Moines Register:
In partially upholding the first law, the 8th Circuit found that false speech is not protected by the First Amendment if it enables a trespass. Under that standard, Rose ruled Monday, the second law still doesn't pass constitutional muster.
By criminalizing deception to gain access to an agricultural facility "with the intent to cause physical or economic harm," it impermissibly distinguishes between animal rights activists and others who might lie to gain access to facilities for other reasons, Rose ruled.
"Simply because speech is unprotected does not grant a free license for the government to regulate that speech based on viewpoint," she wrote, finding that "the law seeks to single out specific individuals for punishment based on their viewpoint regarding such facilities."
Massie sues the CDC. Congressional Republicans led by Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie are suing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to end mask requirements on airplanes. Massie is joined in the lawsuit—filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Kentucky—by 16 other GOP members of Congress, including Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) and Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), Lauren Boebert (Colo.), Paul Gosar (Ariz.), and Andy Biggs (Ariz.). You can find their full complaint here.
"The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not have the legal authority to force people traveling on commercial airlines to wear masks," said Massie in a statement. "Congress never passed a law requiring masks on commercial flights. This lawsuit targets the faceless bureaucrats who are behind the CDC's unscientific regulation so that this illegal mask mandate can be brought to a permanent end."
• President Joe Biden has signed a massive $1.5 trillion government funding bill that includes $13.6 billion in assistance to Ukraine.
• The U.S. Senate unanimously voted to make Daylight Savings Time permanent.
• Idaho's bill banning abortion around six weeks and allowing family members of pregnant women who get abortions to sue is headed to the state's governor.
• Pfizer is asking the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to approve a second COVID-19 vaccine booster for people ages 65 and up.
• An interesting mice study looks at the effect of body temperature on longevity.
• The Human Rights Defense Center is suing over the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services' policy of forbidding books to be mailed to inmates unless they come from one specific book wholesaler.
• Former Los Angeles police officer Cheryl Dorsey on why the state should repeal its loitering for prostitution purposes law.
• Russia's invasion of Ukraine complicates the democracies versus autocracies narrative, writes Daniel R. DePetris at Newsweek.
• How an academic grudge turned into a #MeToo panic.
• Ignoring the EARN IT's Fourth Amendment problem won't make it go away.
• New York may not make to-go cocktails permanent after all.
• Idaho hair braiders are suing over occupational licensing requirements.
• Maryland moves to end college degree requirements for many state jobs:
Today, the governor is announcing Maryland's plan to formally eliminate the four-year degree requirement for thousands of state jobs. https://t.co/VHFadj1Zoc
— Kata Hall Burke (@katadhall) March 15, 2022
The post Biden's Plans To Fix the Pay Gap Won't Actually Help Women appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>For more than a year, the U.S. has been flooded with gloomy headlines and dire predictions about women and work. "The pandemic is devastating a generation of working women," opined one Washington Post writer in February. Citing data showing that 2.5 million women dropped out of the workforce since the COVID-19 pandemic began, Vice President Kamala Harris said "the pandemic has put decades of the progress we have collectively made for women workers at risk."
Harris called it a "national emergency"—albeit one that could be fixed by greenlighting the Biden administration's coronavirus spending plan.
And so the narrative typically goes: women's employment prospects are in crisis; the way out is passing the Democrats' preferred economic policies. (See Matt Welch in Reason's June print issue for more on this rhetoric.)
But the magnitude of this gender gap has never been as great as many have made it out to be. And recent data cast further doubt on the "she-cession" narrative. At the end of April 2021, the unemployment rate for women was slightly lower than the unemployment rate for men. And the women's labor force participation rate had recovered almost as much as the men's rate had.*
Just How Big Are These Gender Gaps Now?
To read headlines about gender and job losses, one might get the impression that U.S. women are faring drastically worse on the coronavirus-era employment front than men are. Yet such losses have never been as drastically gendered as many doomsayers let on.
"Labor force participation—defined as all civilians working full or part time, as well as those who are unemployed but looking for work—fell dramatically for both genders between March and April 2020," noted Gallup. In April 2020, men's labor force participation was at 97.8 percent of its February 2020 level and women's labor force participation was 96.9 percent of its February 2020 level—a gender gap of just 0.9* percentage points.
By February 2021, labor force participation for both sexes had ticked back up somewhat. And while women were still seeing a less full recovery, the gap was again less than one percentage point. Compared to February 2020, men's February 2021 labor force participation was 2.2 percent smaller and women's was 3.1 percent smaller.
That's not nothing—"the gap in labor force changes amounts to roughly 493,000 more women than men being absent from the labor force since the pandemic began," Gallup pointed out in early March. But it's also not evidence that women have been uniquely devastated by pandemic-related job losses, especially when—contra previous economic downturns—many of the circumstances that initially created the job losses will remedy quickly as life returns to a more normal pace.
Indeed, that already seems to be happening, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
In April 2021, the labor force participation rate for U.S. men 20 and older was 69.8 percent, down from 71.6 percent in February 2020. For women, it was 57.2 percent in April, down from the 59.2 percent in February 2020. So, while women's labor force participation was lower than men's at the start of the pandemic and still is, women aren't far behind men at reaching their pre-pandemic participation level, with the April 2021 labor force participation rate for men 1.8 percentage points lower and the rate for women down 2 percentage points.*
The labor force participation rate is a separate measure than the unemployment rate, which is concerned with how many people are out of work and actively seeking a job. On unemployment, U.S. women are also faring better than their male counterparts (though "better" here does come with some caveats, since unemployment numbers don't include people out of a job and not seeking a new one).
In April 2021, the unemployment rate for U.S. men ages 20 and older was at 6.1 percent, down 7 percentage points from its April 2020 peak. For women ages 20 and older, it was at 5.6 percent—down 9.9 percentage points since the previous April.
Put another way, women's unemployment rate is now just 2.5 percentage points higher than it was in pre-pandemic times, while men's unemployment rate is 2.9 percentage points higher.
The Truth Behind the Panic
It is true that American women initially lost more jobs to COVID-19 than their male counterparts did (in contrast to the typical recession pattern).
In February 2020, the civilian unemployment rate for women age 20 and up was 3.1 percent, according to BLS data. For men, it was 3.2 percent. But by the end of April 2020, the unemployment rate for women had jumped to 15.5 percent, while for men it only jumped to 13.1 percent.
Two explanations for this discrepancy have emerged. First, women tend to outnumber men as the primary caregivers for children and elderly or ailing family members, leaving them more vulnerable to work disruptions when schools and child care centers shut down, when kids need homeschooling, or when relatives need care. Second, women are more highly concentrated in retail, leisure, and hospitality jobs, which were more heavily affected by pandemic-related closures, restrictions, and mandates.
While the first factor has gained the most attention, the second one may be the bigger culprit.
Labor force participation for women with children did indeed drop more than it did for men with children, "consistent with the theory that working mothers disproportionately took themselves out of the labor force to care for children who were no longer able to attend day care or school," noted Gallup. Yet "the drops among women without children and men without children are also sizable," which "suggests that factors other than child care have significantly influenced decisions to leave the workforce."
"Overall, these labor force patterns seem largely tied to occupational differences between women and men," according to Gallup's analysis of BLS data. "Occupations with a higher share of women have exhibited lower labor force participation rates and higher unemployment rates throughout the pandemic."
Either explanation suggests that—for both women and men—the drop is more likely short-term than long-term.
A Call to Arms?
Given the current state of recovery, "it does not make sense to enact permanent programs, such as government-run paid family and medical leave, subsidized childcare, and universal pre-K with the justification of fixing a COVID -19 disparity that no longer exists," argues Heritage Foundation research fellow Rachel Greszler in a new report.
"Policymakers can do far more to help women and families by removing government-imposed barriers to flexible work, to employer-provided paid family and medical leave, and to accessible and affordable childcare than by adding costly and bureaucratic new programs and upending the labor market in ways that would limit families' incomes and choices," she posits.
Flexible work arrangements are something cited by women and men as one of their top employment wishes. To the extent that the pandemic has normalized more working from home or working non-traditional hours—and done so in a gender-neutral way—it could be good for workers generally, good for working parents, and especially good for women, who in pre-pandemic times were more likely to take advantage of flexible work policies.
"The pandemic caused a massive leap forward in technology that has likely resulted in a larger increase in workplace flexibility and family-friendly policies over the course of one year than would otherwise have been achieved over an entire decade," observes Greszler.
She also points to another positive sign for female workers: "Between the first quarter of 2020 and the first quarter of 2021, the median usual weekly earnings of women increased by 5.3 percent, while men's rose by 2.2 percent."
*Correction: This article originally misstated the percentage difference in labor force participation between men and women.
The post The Gender Gap in Pandemic Job Losses Has Been Wildly Exaggerated appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) may have made sense for a certain time and place, but Democrats' continued attachment to this 20th century relic has never made much sense. So it's not with much chagrin that I report that the Department of Justice (DOJ) has declared the ERA dead.
Initially, Congress said the ERA—passed in 1972—would be obsolete if not ratified by the required three-quarters of state legislatures by a 1979 deadline. Later, Congress extended this deadline to 1982. It still wasn't met.
"We conclude that Congress had the constitutional authority to impose a deadline on the ratification of the ERA and, because that deadline has expired, the ERA Resolution is no longer pending before the States," DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel said in a January 6 opinion, released yesterday.
In recent years, two new states voted to ratify the long-dead legislation—Nevada in 2017 and Illinois in 2018—and Virginia is expected to do so this year, becoming the long-needed 38th state. But some states that do not support the ERA have been asking, What about that deadline? So the National Archives and Records Administration (which is tasked with verifying state ratification) asked the DOJ for guidance.
It would be fine, the Office of Legal Counsel said, for "Congress to restart the ratification process by proposing it anew." But it takes issue with the idea that "the congressional deadline was invalid or could be retroactively nullified by Congress."
"The Supreme Court has upheld Congress's authority to impose a deadline for ratifying a proposed constitutional amendment," states the DOJ's opinion. "Both Houses of Congress, by the requisite two-thirds majorities, adopted the terms of the ERA Resolution, including the ratification deadline, and the state legislatures were well aware of that deadline when they considered the resolution."
This ruling "doesn't directly affect the litigation," University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck told CNN. But "unless it is overruled by the attorney general or the president, it likely will bind the archivist—meaning that the only way a new ratification by a state like Virginia would likely be effective is if the courts say so."
"The United States is ready to embrace peace with all who seek it," said President Donald Trump in a televised address to Iran yesterday.
"This is unequivocally good news," as Eric Boehm wrote at Reason yesterday. "But once the threat of war has mostly passed, observers should start asking: What exactly has the saber-rattling of the past week accomplished for the United States?"
The House will vote today on a War Powers Resolution sponsored by Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D–Mich.). It mirrors the one that Virginia Democrat Tim Kaine introduced in the Senate, and it says the Authorization for Use of Military Force that preceded the second Iraq war doesn't mean Trump can target Iran at his will.
"In the briefing and in public, this administration has argued that the vote to topple Saddam Hussein in 2002 applies to military action in Iraq," Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) told CNN yesterday. "That is absurd. Nobody in their right mind—with a straight face, with an ounce of honesty—can argue when Congress voted to go after Saddam Hussein in 2002 that (they) authorized military force against an Iranian general 18 years later."
Meanwhile…Lindsey Graham, folks:
"You know, they're libertarians." https://t.co/KU4lVlcwIj
— Jane Coaston (@janecoaston) January 8, 2020
The cop I wrote about in the post below got no jail time for lying about an alleged vehicular assault. If the guy he wrongly accused had been convicted, he'd be looking at a minimum of 5 years. https://t.co/Yg8dso3nuE
— Radley Balko (@radleybalko) January 9, 2020
The post Justice Department Tells States the Equal Rights Amendment Is Dead appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>
"The time has passed" for an all-male military draft, a federal judge in Texas has ruled.
The Selective Service System assumes "that women are significantly more combat-averse than men" but presents no evidence to this effect, writes U.S. District Judge Gray Miller in his decision, issued late last Friday. He notes that "it may well be that only a small percentage of women meets the physical standards for combat positions. However, if a similarly small percentage of men is combat eligible, then men and women are similiarly situation for the purposes of the draft and…discrimination is unjustified."
The matter has made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court before, in 1981. In that case, justices called the sex-selective draft "fully justified," since women weren't allowed in combat roles back then. But now that women can join in combat too, the rationale for the draft no longer makes sense, the National Coalition for Men argued.
Judge Miller agrees. In fact, "the average woman could conceivably be better suited physically for some of today's combat positions than the average man, depending on which skills the position required. Combat roles no longer uniformly require sheer size or muscle."
In practical terms, the matter doesn't mean much, as the decision only provides for "declaratory relief" and not any action against the Military Selective Service Act. "Yes, to some extent this is symbolic," the National Coalition for Men's lawyer tells USA Today.
But it comes as some movement for reforming the draft is afoot. An "11-member commission is studying the future of the Selective Service System, including whether women should be included or whether there should continue to be draft registration at all," USA Today notes.
Tech staff side with Trump on "Fake News." A new Buzzfeed survey of Silicon Valley tech companies has found "deep skepticism toward the media and significant concers about the role idenitty politics plays in press coverage of technology." Slightly more than half of those surveyed at least "somewhat agree" that "Trump has a point when it comes to the media producing fake news," and 38 percent said media has gotten "too feminist."
Upper-middle-class Americans don't follow top 1 percent or lower 90 percent in economic patterns. "Since 1980, the incomes of the very rich have grown faster than the economy," notes New York Times opinion columnist David Leonhardt. Meanwhile, "the upper middle class has kept pace with the economy, while the middle class and poor have fallen behind."
There's a debate among economists, social scientists, and advocates about whether the upper middle class, then, has more in common with its lower or higher wealth counterparts.
"Both sides have a point," writes Leonhardt. But "it's a mistake to divide the country into only two groups. To make grand pronouncements about the American economy, you need to talk about three groups."
It's not enough to just legalize marijuana at the federal level—we should also expunge records of those who have served their time, and reinvest in communities hardest hit by the failed War on Drugs—which has really been a war on people.
— Cory Booker (@CoryBooker) February 23, 2019
• Yes, New York just "passed a law allowing abortions after 24 weeks if the mother's health is at risk or there is an absence of fetal viability," Snopes notes. But "the law does not allow for unrestricted abortion up through the normal term of pregnancy."
• Will any Democrats address their vote for their FOSTA votes?
My latest, for @broadly.
Every Democratic 2020 candidate in Congress voted for a law that decimated my community—will any step up to answer for it?
Please pass the word—we'll need the grassroots to ask the question to get an answer. #LetUsSurvivehttps://t.co/FLEIeSQCEA
— Liara Roux (@LiaraRoux) February 22, 2019
• Carpenters, strippers, dog walkers, and may other California workers are struggling to deal with the state's new rules on independent contracting.
• An important long-read from The New Yorker on the appalling state of health care in our prisons and jails.
• Should we be worried about this giant iceberg breaking off Antartica?
The post The Time for an All-Male Military Draft 'Has Passed,' Says Federal Judge: Reason Roundup appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Gillette, the shaving company, debuted a new commercial this week that assails "toxic masculinity" and challenges men to behave better toward women and each other. But since modern cultural discourse involves two constantly outraged tribes careening wildly from one controversy to the next, this perfectly inoffensive message has somehow been rendered bad by team red.
"The Gillette commercial is the product of mainstream radicalized feminism—and emblematic of Cultural Marxism," wrote Turning Point USA's Candace Owen, a conservative pundit. Right-leaning author Michael Knowles accused Gillette of "granting the premises of SJW jackals." And over at National Review, Ben Shapiro claimed that the company was "kowtowing to leftist social priorities" in order to "inoculate [itself] from the woke scolds of the Left." (If that was the goal, the ad will certainly fail—woke scolding is a condition for which there is no reliable vaccine.)
These strong claims—cultural Marxism! SJW jackals! Leftist social priorities!—should strike anyone who actually watches the ad as fairly ridiculous. Here it is:
Yes, the ad invokes "toxic masculinity," an ill-defined concept sometimes deployed by the campus left in overbroad ways. But most of the ad depicts men deciding not to bully each other, harass women, or commit violence. Are these really "leftist social priorities"? Do conservatives really wish to portray them as such?
Shapiro's catchphrase is "facts don't care about your feelings," which he deploys—often correctly—to chide the left for having rendered unsayable something that is true: There are generally some differences between men and women, for instance. But this seems to be a case where the right's feelings are getting in the way of facts. Men commit a lot more violence than women, sexual harassment is undeniably a problem in many workplaces, and boys should be raised not to attack each other.
It's true that not all men engage in violence, sexual harassment, and bullying—and on the flip side, plenty of women are abusers. Collectivist assumptions are obnoxious—and anathema to libertarian principles—whether they are deployed against men, women, white people, black people, etc. Certainly, some on the left are guilty of going this route (as are many who claim to speak for the right). But the ad never said that all men are bad. It never argued that masculinity is always and everywhere a dangerous ideal. It made a very modest statement—treat people better—in hopes of selling more razors to people who agree. Again, why is this bad?
To his credit, Shapiro makes perfectly legitimate points in the rest of his column about the importance of young men having strong male role models in their lives:
If you want to raise a generation of men who will treat women well, act as protectors rather than victimizers, and become the bedrock for a stable society, you need more masculinity, not less. In fact, a recent study from Stanford, Harvard, and the Census Bureau found that high levels of father presence in local communities may matter even more than having a father in the home directly; the study explained, "black boys who grow up in areas with high father presence are also significantly less likely to be incarcerated."
Exactly right: Young guys need to learn from men who treat women well and act as protectors rather than victimizers, which…is exactly what the Gillette ad called on men to do.
People are free to associate with whatever brand they want, so if Gillette's so-called virtue signaling bothers someone that much, that person may go ahead and buy razors elsewhere. But it would be a shame if the right started boycotting companies for taking the position that maybe hurting people is bad. Is owning the libs really that important?
The post The Gillette Ad Tells Men Not to Hurt People. Why Is This Offensive? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Starting last week, fresh alarm about a pay gap between men and women started percolating, spurred by a new report from the Institute for Women's Policy Research (IWPR). The group suggests that wage disparities between U.S. women and men are more severe than we previously knew. Forget the adage that women only make about 80 cents to every dollar a man does—in actuality, it's more like 49 cents for every dollar, IWPR says.
Most media outlets have been reporting the research credulously and with little context. "Women don't earn 80% of what men earn. The true number is closer to 50%," states Felix Salmon at Axios, for instance. Fortune reports: "In 2016, women reportedly earned 80 cents to the average man's dollar. However […] a woman today earns just 49 cents compared to the average man's dollar."
But whether it's presented as a revision to previous data or some sort of new trend, this statistic is misleading. Like a lot of previous studies on the gender wage gap, IWPR's new work doesn't actually compare whether "equal work" by women and men earns equal pay. It doesn't look at earnings between men and women in the same or substantially similar jobs, take into account number of working hours, or break down wage gaps by industry or age.
In other words, it doesn't do any of the things that would be useful for measuring and interpreting the data. It doesn't tells us anything about the thing that really matters, which is (conscious and unconscious) gender bias in the workplace and the prevalence of discriminatory pay rates. Which is also to say that it doesn't tell us anything about the things people are pretending it does.
Not that you would know that from IWPR's marketing of the report, which it has titled "Still a Man's Labor Market."
"Our analysis finds that we have actually been underestimating the extent of pay inequality in the labor market," said Heidi Hartmann, IWPR's president and co-author of the report, while dismissing wage gap explanations that rely on "occupational differences or so-called 'women's choices.'"
But of course occupational differences matter when measuring pay. Few people think a surgeon should get paid the same as a grocery store cashier, or that someone who works 50 hours a week should earn the same as someone putting in 20 hours at the same job. And outside of certain fashionably progressive circles, most would say the same even when this results in lower lifetime wages for individual women or puts a dent in women's wage averages.
It's certainly worth exploring why women-heavy sectors often offer lower pay rates, why women gravitate toward lower paying occupations, and what other factors may play a role in depressing women's earnings relative to male peers. But we can't consider these things without precise and holistic data, or by looking at the workforce from only one angle.
In this case, Hartmann and co-author Stephen J. Rose looked at a longitudinal dataset from 2001-2015, measure average annual earnings across the period for people who worked any amount during any of these years, and then compared the averages for male and female workers overall as well as different subsets of men and women. Annual earnings were "defined as the personal average over multiple years and count only years with earnings."
Overall, "women workers' earnings were 49 percent—less than half—of men's earnings, a wage gap of 51 percent in 2015," the authors conclude.
It's by lumping together the full spectrum of workers (from those employed full-time, year-around for all 15 years of the study period to those who only worked part-time, or sporadically, throughout the period) that they're able to reach this dramatic conclusion on the gender wage gap. The authors admit that "the earnings gap across the most recent 15 years for those who generally work full-time, year-round in this study is similar to the more commonly used one-year numbers from the same years (23 percent)."
But when you take the data out of its ideological framing, there are some interesting findings in the new IWPR report.
In many ways, the picture has gotten progressively better for women over the past 50 years. During the first period (from 1968 through 1982), only 28 percent of women worked every year—a rate that rose to 57 percent in the latest period (from 2001 through 2015).
Average annual earnings among female workers rose whether they did or didn't take any gap years:
And "overall, women's typical hourly wages increased by 45 percent from the first to the third period (from $11.51 per hour to $16.65 per hour)."
Meanwhile, men saw hourly wages remaining "almost flat across the nearly 50 years of this study"—one of many bad indicators for male employment, even as men continue to outpace women in earnings and workforce participation.
Among men, some 77 percent worked every year in the latest study period, down 11 points from the first study period. Most of the drop here happened in the 1983-1997 period, during which the percentage of men who worked every year shrunk to 76 percent.
Average annual earnings among male workers either dropped or rose a modest amount depending on worker category:
From where I'm looking, the picture is far from perfect for either men or women. Women were starting from a much lower place with regard to workforce numbers and wages, and remain behind men in both areas. But while women's participation and wages have been rising, men's wages have flattened or decreased over the past five decades in many cases and they're seeing shrinking workforce participation rates.
Looking at men's work is important even when just considering women's workforce gains, as it provides vital perspective on the numbers. Consistent, full-time, year-around labor participation is perhaps lower for both women and men than many realize.
The study defines strong labor force attachment as working full-time year-round for at least 12 of 15 years; moderate attachment as working some every year but fewer than 12 years of full-time year-round employment; and weak attachment as anyone who earned nothing for at least one of those 15 years. Among women, strong attachments rose from 11 to 28 percent since the start of the study period while weak attachments shrunk from 72 to 43 percent. But among men, strong attachment fell from 75 to 59 percent while weak attachment rose from 12 to 23 percent. "Women with weak attachment show the greatest increase in hours of work among women, while their male counterparts show the largest decrease," the study notes. During the latest study period, women with strong attachment worked an average of five fewer hours per week than male counterparts.
And while women have seen an increasing wage penalty for taking time off, men are seeing the same thing. For women in '68-82, a year off during the 15 year period meant about $3,000 less in average annual wages. By the next period, it was closer to a $10,000 difference and by the latest, more than $15,200. For men, a gap year in work meant earning about $8,600 less in the first period and nearly $12,400 less in the second period. For 2001-2015, it meant more than $22,300 less in average annual earnings.
The post There's a New Wage-Gap Myth Going Around and It Makes Women's Work Life Look Grim appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Men and women show more pronounced differences on personality tests in countries considered to have higher levels of "gender equality." That's the main takeaway from two recent research studies getting good media buzz.
More fuel for the culture wars? It shouldn't be. There are a number of ways to interpret the data, and the authors of both studies caution against taking their results as congruent with standard progressive or traditionalist narratives. The quirky nature of the findings is what makes this some of the interesting recent scholarship in sex and gender studies, presenting wiggle room for speculation and myriad questions for future research.
In the International Journal of Psychology, Swedish scientists Erik Gioola and Petri Kajonius look at personality trait differences between men and women in 22 countries. Their results include 130,602 participants between ages 19 and 69—57 percent of them women—who opted into an online personality survey (in English) after finding it via word of mouth or online search. Specifically, they looked at five broad personality traits: agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, neuroticism, and openness.
"Because personality is inherently multidimensional," write Gioola and Kajonius, they rely on complex multivariate model measures to come up with some composite personality data, rather than looking trait by trait or using an average of the five as in prior studies. To measure a country's cultural equality between men and women, they relied on the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Index rankings.
"Moderation analyses showed no significant effects of sex on the relationship between any [one] of the big five personality traits and gender equality," they write. Across countries, higher gender equality scores were correlated with:
But comparing the composite personality data, they found that "sex differences in personality are larger in more gender equal countries." Specifically:
So how do we interpret these results? The authors consider several ways. One theory is that when people are less confined by strict social norms and roles, their innate personalities and preferences can shine through—and these preferences aren't progressive. "A possible explanation," they write, "is that as gender equality increases both men and women gravitate toward their traditional gender roles."
The evolutionary perspective says that an environment with fewer cultural restraints allows men and women to reclaim their true—and quite different—selves. But proponents of this perspective need to grapple with another paradox: what is supposedly stopping those in less gender-equal countries from embracing traditionalism and sex differences? And how does all this square with the evolutionary theorists who say higher neuroticism, anxiety, and depression scores among women in modern liberal democracies is caused by women having to suppress their true traits and desires?
Ultimately, "a combination of social role theory"—that gendered traits are a product of culture and socialization—"and evolutionary perspectives may be needed to account for this curious result," the study authors write.
Perhaps countries with smaller social and economic gaps between men and women wind up valuing other sorts of differences between them more. Women, men, or both may have found that as more women entered schools, workplaces, politics, leadership roles, and more egalitarian relationships, embracing and emphasizing complementary or opposite traits—consciously or not—served as a competitive advantage or necessary survival skill.
Or maybe women's new cultural roles shifted expectations and stresses in ways that triggered aggregate personality shifts in both sexes as a byproduct. A 2008 study on male/female personality differences in 55 countries found that "overall, higher levels of human development—including long and healthy life, equal access to knowledge and education, and economic wealth—were the main nation-level predictors of larger sex differences in personality." The "primary cause" of this differentiation was "changes in men's personality traits."
And let's not overlook reactionary motifs, either. As places grow more egalitarian in economic possibilities, legal rights, and social expectations—and women's status both in their homes and in the larger world grows—not everyone embraces it equally. Most modern states are made up of neither staunch traditionalists nor social radicals, yet folks with only minor ideological attachments to strictly divided gender norms may still embrace more symbolic aspects of them. Consciously or not, people often cling to outward markers of differences more staunchly when other lines start to blur (something we see far outside the realm of sex and gender).
Those who abhor or feel left out by the changes—which can be a large percentage of the population—may cling more fiercely to old roles and ways. And those who seek to subvert the old rules may consciously adopt conventional aspects of femininity or masculinity in order to get by, especially in more culturally homogeneous or strict societies.
Which raises the possibility that country-level differences in trait distribution may not be linked to gender equality per se so much as the phenomenon's corollaries: economic liberalism and prosperity, increasing levels of cultural and political openness, individual rights and potential.
"Cries of 'correlation isn't causation' tend to accompany any studies like these, but they're oddly absent from conversations about the paradox," notes Cathleen O'Grady at Ars Technica. "That might be because it seems unnecessary—when you're talking about gender equality and gender differences, there's such an obvious relationship that it seems like, for once, we could ignore the niceties about correlation and just assume that one causes the other."
But there are limitations to the World Economic Forum rankings. "The index looks at progress on measures like economic participation and political empowerment, but it isn't able to capture wobblier human factors like cultural beliefs and stereotyping," writes O'Grady. "This is illustrated by looking at Rwanda, which has made enormous strides in political representation of women while making little progress in changes to traditional gender roles; it currently ranks sixth on the index". And while "data on whether the differences increase as countries climb the ranks of gender equality" could help clear up some clutter here, "there could be something else underlying the pattern: cultural history."
One interesting thing to study would be the degree to which gender gaps in personality traits map to a place's slant toward individualism or collectivism. In the Gioola and Kajonius study, countries with strong individualist traditions (the U.S., France, Australia) tended to show higher variance, while those that have put more emphasis on the collective good (China, South Korea, Japan) showed less.
Another new study, this one published in Science, looked at data on 80,000 people from 76 countries with an emphasis on traits such as altruism, trust, patience, and risk taking. Authors Armin Falk, an economics professor at the University of Bonn, and Johannes Hermle, a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley, found that both higher levels of gender equality and wealth corresponded to bigger differences between men and women on these traits.
In a previous paper from Kajonius using the same data, researchers found that "within-country sex differences for the five personality traits showed similar patterns across countries," and that "the relationship between a country and an individual's personality traits, however interesting, are small"—overall, they found that an "average 1.8% of the variance in personality traits could be accounted for by country belonging. Put differently, within-country differences in personality traits are of more interest than between-country differences."
The post Men and Women Are Less Alike in More Feminist Countries appeared first on Reason.com.
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Google spreadsheet "whisper network" spawns lawsuit. Author and editor Stephen Elliott, founder of The Rumpus, is suing over his inclusion on a Google spreadsheet that started circulating around this time last year. Dubbed the "shitty media men" list, it was created by a woman named Moira Donegan, who urged female friends and fellow writers to anonymously out male journalists, pundits, and literary types who were known to take sexual liberties. The list wound up with allegations against more than 70 named men, ranging from making unappreciated advances on women colleagues to serial sexual assault and rape.
Elliot was anonymously accused of conduct from rape to "unsolicited invitations to his apartment." In a lawsuit filed Wednesday in federal court, Elliott is seeking at least $1.5 million in damages.
In the suit, Elliott asks for details—names, addresses, etc.—on those who contributed to the list, which had straddled the line between public and private. Anyone who had a link could see it and contribute, and even after Donegan took it down, screenshots and PDFs of the page persisted.
Donegan took down the document not long after Buzzfeed published an article about it. She said she hadn't been trying to publicize the names of alleged shitty men, simply to create a digital "whisper network" that allowed women in media to warn one another—more like an email forward of yore than a Facebook post.
But according to Elliott (and some of the other men named on the list), this still had the power to have "derailed" his life. His lawsuit said he will subpoena Google for metadata that can help him figure out who specifically made the allegations against him.
Wait. Stephen Elliott is filing a lawsuit against the creator of the SHITTY MEN IN MEDIA list? Every man on that list i recognized—had reason to be there. Unfathomable. So much will come out in discovery. If I were a man on that list I would NOT want that lawsuit to go thru.
— Christine H. Lee (@xtinehlee) October 12, 2018
Some of the other men whose names were on the list questioned his strategy. "If the problem was that his reputation was affected, this is going to make it infinitely worse," one told The Cut. "And that would be true for me if I were to join him, if I were to make myself part of the public face of this thing. Like, what would I do that for? Money? I've tried to clear my name individually, but I would never join a lawsuit. That just wouldn't help."
Facebook purges political "spam." More than 800 pages and accounts were booted by Facebook yesterday. The company said it's because these accounts and pages were spreading spam. Some trafficked in ads appearing to link to political news that actually went to marketing content. Others used different accounts to push the same political posts, memes, and news out more widely, in violation of Facebook policies.
"Unlike previous sweeps of pages in recent years, which have included hundreds of pages and accounts from Russian and Iranian actors attempting to muddle the United States' political conversation, the pages and accounts removed on Thursday all originated domestically," notes Slate.
Some of the accounts that were removed include such libertarian favorites as Cop Block, the Free Thought Project, and Police the Police.
Big Tech embraces big regulation.
Doing research on GDPR. Given the shocking but not surprising study yesterday showing the law has helped Google relative to other ad tech vendors (h/t @s8mb), I wanted to collect my favorite GDPR facts/stats in one thread. Feel free to add yours! https://t.co/W2ocs1zlwo pic.twitter.com/qTY0I30UrN
— Alec Stapp (@alecstapp) October 11, 2018
Tech companies are asking the U.S. government to enact European Union–style privacy rules, now that the big companies have already had to comply to keep regulators across the pond happy. Click through the whole Twitter thread above from Niskanen Center tech-policy analyst Alec Stapp for more on just how bad the effects of these draconian "privacy" and "consumer protection" policies have already been in the E.U.
He's announcing he made a hat for Trump that says "made an updated hat that says 'make America great' without the 'again'…and Trump wore it!"
Shows a picture on his iphone of Trump wearing said hat.
Says the "again" part of the original slogan "hurts back people." pic.twitter.com/mt2vO3Sl86
— Jack Jenkins (@jackmjenkins) October 11, 2018
The post Writer Stephen Elliott Sues Over 'Shitty Media Men' Spreadsheet: Reason Roundup appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh has been accused of sexual misconduct ranging from flashing to attempted rape. Some of the accusations were the subject of widely televised testimony in the Senate last week. Conventional wisdom now holds that it was Kavanaugh's personal performance during this testimony—not the believable but unprovable allegations of his first accuser, Christine Blasey Ford—that tanked the judge's credibility among the persuadable.
Those who have been swayed against Kavanaugh cite his vague and sometimes implausible answers about his high school and college life outside of the alleged assaults. They argue—in tweets, essays, explainers—that his shiftiness should serve as a mark against him, even if it's not necessarily evidence that he's guilty of sexual violence. That he may not have lied outright, but his evasive and emotional performance was still potentially disqualifying.
Whatever more serious things Kavanaugh may or may not be guilty of, his antics inspired suspicion that the perfectionist public persona was but an exquisitely constructed mask. Kavanaugh's credibility crisis isn't about belief (or lack thereof) in any particular set of facts but a perceived absence of authenticity in the nominee overall.
Perception Is Everything
What exactly is authenticity? For some time, it's been a powerful buzzword. Social media marketers, millennial whisperers, politicians, and restaurants all touted it. We were told that authenticity was what hot demographics were craving and missing—in their lives, their processed meats, their travel experiences, their "news brands." It was the key to selling yourself as an "influencer." It was the key to winning elections.
But authenticity is a fuzzy concept. Hillary Clinton has always suffered from a lack of perceived authenticity, even among people who would also describe her as honest. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump is often credited with an abundance of authenticity—a man who calls it like he sees it—even among those who admit that he's not always 100 percent truthful. Instagram stars can have authenticity even while shilling and staging and posing. So too for celebrities whose stage-managed endeavors strike the right notes.
Authenticity isn't related so much to universal truths as loyalty to your inner truth—an honesty about who you are and where you're coming from. Being authentic only implies being worthy of belief that you are indeed authentic.
Authenticity is as authenticity is perceived.
The Anatomy of Gray Areas
Authenticity—or a lack of it—lurks in many recent "gray area" discussions around sex and relationships. Take this recent piece, published by the feminist site Jezebel, about a former editor at the millennial progressive publication Mic.
The editor, Jack Smith IV, had built a high-profile career exposing right-wing "fascists" and championing social justice causes. But the article alleges that in private, Smith was far from the feminist-minded good guy he had built his public brand on. Shortly after the article came out, Mic placed Smith on temporary paid leave; he was fired a few weeks later.
The author of the Jezebel piece, Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, lays out a litany of Smith's alleged abuses against women he dated or hooked up with, including telling one woman he wouldn't have sex with her unless she wore specific eye makeup and berating another for hours because she said she was slightly younger than she was. For the most part, it's the kind of stuff that falls into the category of caddish, lame, or unsavory behavior without being criminal—the so-called gray areas.
Only two of the article's many allegations about Smith include claims of non-consensual acts. One woman accuses him of foregoing a condom without her permission during (otherwise consensual) sex. She also says that during the sex, Smith "wrapped his bicep around my neck and restricted my breathing," ignoring her when she asked what he was doing. In neither instance, however, did she tell him to stop, according to this article. Their relationship continued "for several months."
One of the charges lobbed against Smith is that he had sex with a woman after she explicitly consented to it, told him to get a condom, and told him to be rougher. She alleges that she only did those things because she was feeling insecure and guilty. This is presented not as a story about women struggling with sexual assertiveness but as a failing on Smith's part.
Throughout the piece, Shepherd pivots between positioning it as a big-picture story about sex and power and a particularized case against Smith. Ultimately, both frames feel incomplete. What can we really take away here, other than that Smith seems like a drag to date? The author shies away from providing a coherent model of consent and good sexual etiquette. "Manipulative behavior and sexual coercion of the type Smith is accused is notoriously difficult to define," she writes.
Ultimately, Smith's real sins seem to be less about specific boundaries crossed than about how his alleged treatment of women doesn't match the feminist airs he put on in public. It's an alleged authenticity deficit that doomed him.
At least some jerks have the honor to be authentic about who they are. Perversely, these types are generally better positioned to weather exposure of bad behavior. Meanwhile, the hypocrisy of sneakier jerks adds fuel for the flaming pitchforks.
The Wisdom of Villains
Another recent authenticity-crisis casualty was Ian Buruma, editor until last month of The New York Review of Books. This time, it wasn't Buruma's own authenticity that was called into question; it was an article he published by the former Canadian radio host Jian Ghomeshi.
In 2014, Ghomeshi was fired from his job and declared a pariah in the media after nearly two dozen women accused him of not respecting boundaries during sexual encounters. A court indicted, then acquitted, him on charges in six of these cases. He settled with one accuser out of court.
Buruma said he accepted the Ghomeshi essay because he was interested in hearing from someone on the far side of public disgrace. But it failed to include some key facts and was widely seen as an inauthentic attempt at rehabilitation that The New York Review of Books should not have published.
In post-publication interviews, Buruma posited that we need neither moral purity nor authenticity from someone to learn from them. Buruma told Slate he was interested in what it was like being "at the top of the world…and then finding your life ruined and being a public villain and pilloried. This seemed like a story that was worth hearing—not necessarily as a defense of what he may have done." Critics retorted that no form of the essay would have been acceptable.
Personally, I agree the piece left much to be desired. But I also think Buruma was on to something. There can be value in the wisdom of villains.
Around five years ago, a person who helped get me through one of the roughest periods of my life was concurrently going through his own Jack Smith IV–style fall from Male Feminist hotshot to disgraced creep. Unlike Smith (who has been basically missing online since the Jezebel story came out), this man couldn't shut up about it, chronicling his job losses, marital breakdown, and mental-health decline in an alarmingly public and realtime fashion.
I never suffered any delusions about his moral culpability—most of the things causing crowd consternation came from his own past writing. He had been given a pass for past transgressions by confessing them and claiming to be redeemed. But this redeemed self was at best an idealized vision he tried and failed to live up to, at worst a calculated deception designed to optimize his online brand and predatory potential. The feminist internet in which I lurked and worked then was in a tizzy over which it was, how he pulled off the con, and who had enabled him.
I reached out directly. I wanted to know something beyond the tweets. I wanted to understand, or at least glean more data for my analysis about how someone could so loudly preach one thing and live another. I was curious, supremely bored, and going through a career, relationship, and all-around rough patch. I was feeling down. Then depressed. Then worse.
For a brief but intense time, we struck up a strange long-distance friendship. What started as an amused bid to ascertain his authenticity became something darker, weirder, more desperate. He slipped in and out of the hospital, headlines, and social media mobs. I imbibed him as a much needed distraction, puzzle, mentor, monster, and cautionary tale.
I never did make much headway on getting to any truth about him. But that had ceased being the real point. I had needed help and (though I didn't consciously think of it like this then) seized upon him because I supposed he had both experience and no room to judge.
In the five years since I watched along online as he lost almost everything, I've watched him build a new life, one that revolves around his kids, therapy, working at a grocery store, adoring his new girlfriend, staying out of the spotlight, and staying humble. Is this the work of a master sociopath, or a once-again redeemed man?
We all like to think we can tell the bullshitters from the genuine believers and repenters. We use these wispy calculations to get to what's often considered the crux of the redemption issue: Have they earned it? Do they really deserve another chance? Certainly, no one is owed an opportunity to plead their comeback case. Yet "platforming" them isn't really the problem so much as failing to put what they have to say in proper context.
I want editors, curators, and gatekeepers who are better and smarter than the con men. But also ones open to the possibility that sometimes, the con men can still teach us about ourselves.
Authenticity vs. Truth
There's much talk lately about who deserves a second chance and how to tell when they do. Some folks almost everyone agrees do not deserve it—your Harvey Weinsteins and Bill Cosbys. Those who commit violent or myriad crimes. Whether Brett Kavanaugh falls into this category remains an open question.
But what about Jack Smith IV? Aziz Ansari? Louis C.K.? Al Franken? Avital Ronell? These "gray area" perpetrators present more room for debate. Here, authenticity becomes central, perhaps even more so than the truth of the specific accusations. Is their repentance really sincere? How do we square the now with the then?
Not even those specifically trained to tell truth from lies—judges, police, etc.—do much better than anyone else at it. What hope, honestly, do the rest of us have? Outside the cases where someone is caught in the act of contradicting his own redemption narrative, it's an unfalsifiable proposition.
You can drive yourself crazy trying to know for sure what's in someone else's heart. You'll still fail. Luckily, forgiveness can be as much about what we owe ourselves as what someone else deserves.
Forgiving someone—friends, lovers, public figures, internet strangers—doesn't mean you need to hang out with them or support their work. It's a means of letting go of the corrosiveness of harboring hatred. Relinquishing the idea that there are tell-tale gives about the state of someone's soul if you just watch closely enough.
Accountability and authenticity are important, but they're not everything. And whether we're talking about personal growth or social change, focusing too much on parsing particular motives and taking down individual enemies can get in the way.
A more productive moral imperative is getting at the underlying systems that allow bad actors in your own world or the world at large to thrive. But this is hard to come by in a culture intent on making people pay in perpetuity for their interpersonal failings. Right now, the media are too eager to draw lines in permanent marker around both villains and victims, while the rules for each category are scribbled in disappearing ink.
The post Authenticity and Truth in the #MeToo Era appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Some billionaires, already invincible in every other way, have decided that they also deserve not to die," snarks Dara Horn in her op-ed, "The Men Who Want to Live Forever," at The New York Times. "Today several biotech companies, fueled by Silicon Valley fortunes, are devoted to 'life extension' — or as some put it, to solving 'the problem of death.'"
Horn is the author of the novel Eternal Life, in which her protagonist, a 2,000-year-old woman who can't die, has evidently come to the profound conclusion that human life without the constraint of always impending death is ultimately meaningless.
While acknowledging that some women might be interested in availing themselves of anti-aging therapies, Horn argues in her op-ed that the pursuit of eternal youth is a peculiarly male aspiration. "Of all the slightly creepy aspects to this trend," she observes, "the strangest is the least noticed: The people publicly championing life extension are mainly men."*
Horn links the male pursuit of everlasting life to men's solipsistic sense of invincibility. An outgrowth of that, she thinks, is that such men feel entitled to treat "young women's bodies as theirs for the taking."
Her larger contention is that women learn through rearing children and taking care of the sick and elderly the real limitations and infirmities to which all human bodies are subject. "For nearly as long as there have been humans, being a female human has meant a daily nonoptional immersion in the fragility of human life and the endless effort required to sustain it," Horn writes. Her upshot is that responding to the needs and demands of others leaves women little time or energy for self-involvement. Maybe so.
Still, Horn does recognize that research aimed at "solving death" might "inspire the self-absorbed to invest in unsexy work like Alzheimer's research. If so, we may all one day bless the inane death-defiance as a means to a worthy end." Yes, we might well. And for what it's worth, Alzheimer's research seems plenty sexy to me.
Horn concludes by suggesting that "men who hope to live forever might pause on their eternal journey to consider the frightening void at invincibility's core. Death is the ultimate vulnerability. It is the moment when all of us must confront exactly what so many women have known all too well: You are a body, only a body, and nothing more."
The truly frightening fact is that no human body—female or male—is invincible. Developing therapies that slow and even reverse physical and mental aging will be a tremendous boon for everyone, regardless of sex. There is nothing inane about the quest to liberate humanity from the immemorial curses of disease, disability, and early death. Everyone should get to decide that they deserve not to die.
*Disclosure: I am one of them.
The post Is Immortality Gendered? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>White women are souring on the Republican Party, according to a new ABC News/Washington Post poll, leaving white men alone as a pro-GOP voting block.
An early measure of voter mood going into the midterm elections, the poll asked whether people were more likely to vote for Democratic or Republican congressional candidates this November.
Democrats were the preferred choice overall, earning a 12-point lead over Republicans among registered voters and a 14-point lead among respondents who said they would definitely vote this fall. The "Democrats' 12 percentage-point advantage on this 'generic ballot' question is the largest in Post-ABC polling since 2006," notes Post pollster Scott Clement.
Republican candidates did come out on top among male respondents: 51 of all the men surveyed and 48 percent of male registered voters said they would vote GOP in the midterms. The GOP was also the preferred choice among white voters overall, with 48 percent saying they favored Republican candidates and 43 percent backing Democrats.
Meanwhile, just 19 percent of nonwhite voters told pollsters they would vote Republican. Sixty-nine percent said they'd vote Democrat.
That much looks a lot like what we saw in the 2016 election, when voters of color overwhelmingly backed Hillary Clinton and when Trump was tops with white voters. According to exit polls, about 58 percent of (non-Hispanic) white voters supported Trump, while 66 percent of Hispanic voters and 88 percent of black voters chose Clinton; among black female voters, Clinton's support jumped to 93 percent.
Men were also more likely to be Trump voters (53 percent to 41 percent) in 2016, while women were more likely to support Clinton (54 percent to 42 percent). But nonwhite men voted more like their nonwhite female counterparts than like white men, and white women voted more like white men than like their female counterparts of color.
According to exit polls, some 53 percent of white women who voted in the 2016 presidential election chose Trump, giving him a nine-point lead over Clinton with this cohort. White women were also more likely to choose Republican candidates in the 2014 midterm elections, by 14 points.
This latest survey marks a change. White female voters now poll more like women (and men) of color than like white men.
Among registered voters, the poll showed white women preferring Democrats by a 12-point lead. Some 50 percent said they would vote Democrat in the 2018 midterms, with only 38 percent preferring GOP candidates.
Non-white female voters preferred Democrats by a 53-point margin.
Overall, 64 percent of all women polled preferred Democrats (up from 55 percent in fall 2017), with 29 percent preferring Republicans. The score was 57–31 in Democrats' favor when we consider only women who are registered voters. And two-thirds of this group said they "strongly disapprove" of Trump's presidential performance so far.
The only group in the survey to overwhelmingly support the GOP was white men. Among the registered white, male voters surveyed, 58 percent said they would vote Republican in the 2018 midterm elections and only 34 percent said they would vote Democrat.
It seems the "Trump effect" on electoral politics so far has been to push white women away from the Republican Party and further isolate white men's voting preferences.
The poll was conducted January 15–18, 2018, and it included 1,005 American adults, 846 of which were registered voters. Overall, 31 percent identified as Democrat, 23 percent as Republican, and 40 percent as independent. Independents were more likely to support Democratic candidates (50 percent) than Republicans (34 percent).
The post The Trump Effect: White Men Stand Alone? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>As this mass cultural conversation about sexual consent continues, I keep remembering a discussion I had last fall. A friend, a woman in her mid-20s, was embarrassed by the comments about her appearance that a middle-aged man she was working with kept making. His remarks weren't lewd or egregious—more along the lines of "that dress looks nice on you" at the beginning of a business meeting, when no men present receive similar sartorial appreciation. Enough to make my friend uncomfortable, to wish he would stop; not severe enough to quiet the doubt that maybe she was overreacting, that maybe she should just shrug it off.
I asked her if she had said anything to the man (who was not her co-worker but someone she encountered frequently in professional contexts) about his comments, and we discussed the merits of this approach: Perhaps he didn't realize he was making her uncomfortable. If she said something, he would likely stop. And if he didn't, then she knew what she was dealing with—not someone clueless, well-meaning, owed the benefit of the doubt, but someone actually intent on harassing (or very poorly hitting on) her. And then that situation could be confronted appropriately.
Yes, she agreed… mostly. But there was something giving her pause: "I shouldn't have to say anything. He should know better."
He should know better because it was 2017. He should know better because she had not been enthusiastic or receptive to his comments on her physical appearance. He should know better.
She's not wrong. And neither is the chorus of people protesting a recent article, in babe, about a sexual encounter involving the actor and comedian Aziz Ansari. The story described a date a young woman had last year with Ansari, as told by the young woman, called "Grace." It ended when his aggressive and clumsy attempts at seduction left her in tears.
At no point, according to the article, did Ansari force himself on Grace, threaten her, or make her fear for her safety. Nor did he hold a position of power over her or represent some sort of gatekeeper in her industry. She simply thought Ansari would respect her initial statements about slowing down, that he was genuine in professing to be OK with that, that they could continue engaging in some sexual activity without him continuously pressuring her for sexual intercourse. She stuck around largely because she thought things might get better.
Some, like Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic, have mocked Grace for this. To Flanagan, Grace clearly wanted something from Ansari—affection, romance, a relationship—that he wasn't willing to give, and her whole grievance is predicated on a pathetic refusal to give up on that scenario and either give in to the sexual encounter or get the hell out of Ansari's apartment.
But to others, including a lot of prominent younger feminists, the pathetic one here is Ansari. He should have stopped pawing at Grace and pushing for sex once she expressed reservations. Her continued presence in his home wasn't consent for him to keep pressing for something she had already said she didn't want. And anyone questioning her reaction, worrying about whether this tale was fair to Ansari, waxing about how affirmative consent is anathema to seduction, or explaining that everyone has had encounters like these is missing the point: Women are tired of having encounters like these. Women want better.
What has tended to get lost between these two takes is their shared premises. Even among old-school conservatives and "problematic" feminists like Flanagan, there has been little suggestion that Ansari's actions are awesome and defensible. You won't find many people arguing that this is how men are supposed to pursue women, that dating necessarily involves women playing hard to get and men taking that as coyness, or that she was leading him on by being in his apartment and owed him some level of sexual activity. The most full-throated defenses of Ansari's actions argue instead that they were both drunk, that her cues were subtle, and that he may (as he allegedly said in a follow-up text) have genuinely thought she was enjoying herself.
Meanwhile, relatively few people are actually calling Ansari's actions sexual assault. People insisting that it's stupid and trivializing to say this was assault or harassment are mostly railing at strawmen. Yes, the story has been inartfully squeezed into the #MeToo frame, but that's more a matter of media economics than anything else. There's no mass of people pushing to criminalize actions like Ansari's or saying he should be fired from any of his projects. His critics' biggest ask has been that people use this as a discussion point and a cautionary tale.
But also lost is this: One of the hardest parts about adjudicating these things on paper is all the minute things that make a difference in the moment. People don't like to focus on this, perhaps because it undermines some cultural need to create heroes and villains, or victims and villains, in every narrative. To make things clear cut.
Why did Grace stay? Flanagan scoffs at the idea that she thought she could change the course of things: What led her to believe that this time would be different? But things are always different. The way someone kisses, or smells, or touches you. The music they play. The connection you feel. How you think the other person sees you. How high your expectations were for the experience beforehand, and how closely it conforms to them. For the many, many people not guided in their sexual relationships by some sort of strict social or religious code, any or all of these things can factor into how far they'll go sexually with someone and when.
Sometimes you don't leave right away because you're still assessing the situation—maybe it was just an awkward first pass. Maybe you are just getting used to each other. Maybe they misunderstood you earlier. Can you turn it around? Do you want to? Staying or going isn't a predetermined conclusion; there's a process of figuring things out.
There is, to be clear, absolutely nothing wrong with that. But while one person is doing this dance internally, the other person may well have no idea. Part of not being sure is at least some want for the other person to like you or impress you still, which can manifest in something that at least looks like enthusiasm. Sometimes we all give off more ambiguous signals than we realize.
Things are also different at a more basic level: Sometimes people do not respond like Ansari allegedly did. Flanagan latches on to the fact that Grace supposedly told Ansari that men were "all the same" as evidence that she should have known better. But this accepts that Grace's assertion was right. Certainly plenty of men pick up cues and accept no as an answer the first time. Certainly plenty are content with some intimacies on a first date and not others. Certainly first dates have happened where the man would happily have sex but the woman isn't sure yet and so they wait and they wind up a happy couple. All sorts of things are possible, because neither men nor women are a monolith in their sexual wants or prowess and because encounters between two individuals are always particular.
Without judging the specific actions of anyone in the Ansari story, it's possible to use it as a jumping off point to talk best practices for similar situations. For those in Ansari's position, the key is to take a partner's initial reticence seriously. If someone says he or she doesn't want to have sex but continues to hang out and/or engage in other activity with you, enjoy this and don't keep pressing for more. Or if that doesn't work for you, stop and call the night to a close.
And if your date says something unclear about their wishes, ask them to elaborate. It may be awkward, but it's better than the alternative. When Grace told Ansari, "I don't want to feel forced because then I'll hate you, and I'd rather not hate you," it wasn't quite the obvious instruction some have been making it out to be. (My first thought on her meaning there would be, "OK, make sure she feels comfortable going forward," not "stop all sexual pursuit now.")
The bottom line isn't that you must stop and verbally discuss consent to every step of sexual interaction. It's that if there is any ambiguity, it's important to use your words.
This goes for people in Grace's situation too, of course. "Most of my discomfort was expressed in me pulling away and mumbling," she says about the beginning of the encounter. Later, she says that "I know I was physically giving off cues that I wasn't interested" but she doesn't "think that was noticed at all, or if it was, it was ignored." But between these moments, Ansari offered plenty of cues of his own that this wasn't going to go as Grace hoped. Meanwihle, she continued to engage in some level of sexual activity with him, including mutual oral sex.
It's not unreasonable to think that Ansari may have interpreted her decision to stick around as openness to the possibility of not feeling "forced" with time. Grace's protestations were never a outright "no" to all further sexual activity until they were, at which point Ansari stopped and he called her a car. Being unambiguous and direct worked, and doing so earlier could have altered the course of the evening.
There are a lot of people who say: She shouldn't have to be so blunt, or to say it more than once, or to physically leave in order to show she's serious. He should have picked up on cues. He should have stopped asking about sex after her initial lack of enthusiasm. He should have known better. But no matter how true that might be, it doesn't change the fact that he either didn't understand or didn't care. And some people will always not understand, and some people will always not care.
We shouldn't have to is fine, so long as it's followed for now with: but when you do…
The same for: They should know better—than to make those comments, to keep pushing, to not understand what your cues. But when they don't…
Then more direct communication is in order. So many of today's sexual problems stem from people being socialized to be afraid of that. But it's hard to rectify when cultural chatter around the Grace and Ansari story suffers from a central source of distress within it: the main participants just keep talking and signaling past each other.
The post Aziz Ansari and the Limits of 'He Should Know Better' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A new study released by the Pew Research Center supports what some of us have argued all along about online harassment: that it affects men as much as women and that the problem should not be framed as a gender issue—or defined so broadly as to chill legitimate criticism.
If anything, the study says, men tend to get more online abuse than women, including serious abuse such as physical threats (though women are, predictably, more likely to be sexually harassed). However, when people are asked about free speech vs. safety on the internet, women are more likely to come down on the side of the latter. Thus, it is very likely future efforts at speech regulation will continue to be cast as "feminist" initiatives.
Online harassment has become something of a cause célèbre in the last three years. It has been explored (and deplored) in numerous media reports; it has attracted the attention of politicians and even of the United Nations.
A basic premise of these discussions has been that women, especially outspoken women, are specifically and maliciously targeted for hate, abuse, and threats; many feminists have claimed internet misogyny is the civil rights issue of our time.
The Pew survey of over 4,000 American internet users over 18 conducted in January challenges those contentions. Forty four percent of the men and 37 percent of the women said that at some point, they had experienced at least one of the behaviors the study classified as harassment.
Most of this abuse involved offensive name-calling and being embarrassed on purpose. However, 12 percent of men and 8 percent of women said they'd been the target of a physical threat; 6 percent of men and 8 percent of women said they had been stalked; 8 percent of men and 7 percent of women they had experienced "sustained harassment"; and 4 percent of men and 8 percent of women said they had been sexually harassed.
Men and women under 30, who are the most likely to spend a lot of time online, are, unsurprisingly, the most likely to experience all kinds of online abuse, including its more severe forms.
It's true that women who been targets of online abuse were more than twice as likely as men to describe their last such experience as extremely or very upsetting (35 percent vs. 16 percent). But, interestingly, there was no gender gap in actual negative effects of online harassment, be it mental stress, problems with friends and family, romantic problems, reputational damage, or trouble at work. Twelve percent of both male and female victims—or about 5 percent of all respondents—said that online harassment had made them fear for their or their loved ones' safety. One percent, with no gender difference, had been victims of doxing—the unwanted disclosure of their personal data online, ranging from real names for those who post under pseudonyms to place of work or home address.
Few will be surprised to learn that women under 30 were substantially more likely than their male peers—53 percent vs. 37 percent—to report receiving unsolicited sexually explicit images. But in a more counterintuitive finding, men in that age group were more likely than women—14 percent vs. 10 percent—to say that explicit images of them had been shared online without their consent. (For those 30 and older, the figure was 5 percent for both sexes.)
This differs sharply from feminist scholars' claims that 90 percent of so-called "revenge porn" targets women, a figure based on a self-selected and mostly female sample. But it supports a 2013 study by McAfee Security in which men were more likely to report both being threatened with having intimate photos of them posted online and actually having such photos posted.
More women than men in the Pew Study, 11 percent vs. 5 percent, said they had experienced gender-based abuse online. But this gap may be partly due to differences in what men and women perceive as gender-based. A woman who is called fat and ugly on Twitter is likely to see the insult as sexist; a man who has a similar comment slung at him will likely see it simply as a personal insult.
And all the dramatic claims about the terrible hardship of being a woman on the internet with an opinion? Entirely wrong: men in the Pew survey were almost twice as likely as women (19 percent vs. 10 percent) to say they had been harassed online due to their political opinions. Part of the disparity is no doubt due to the fact that men are more likely to talk politics on the internet; in one recent study, 60 to 65 percent of Twitter users tweeting on political topics were men. But it certainly doesn't sound like men who talk politics have it any easier.
There is really no way to massage the Pew data to fit the women-as-victim narrative—but some tried. Gizmodo's Bryan Menegus simply misstated the findings, asserting that although men are targeted more overall, "women—especially young women—make up an outsized proportion of users who experience the most severe forms of harassment, like stalking and threats." Vox's Aja Romano wrote that "more severe harassment disproportionately affects younger internet users, women, and people of color."
But the dishonest reporting prize goes to Slate's Christina Cauterucci, who cherry-picked the few numbers showing worse harassment of women, ignored the ones showing equal or worse abuse of men, and finished by upbraiding males for not taking online harassment seriously. Headline: "Four in 10 People Get Harassed Online But Young Men Don't Think It's a Big Deal, Says New Survey."
As bad as it is, Cauterucci's article highlights the survey's real gender split on the issue of safety vs. freedom online. Asked whether offensive online content is taken too seriously or too often excused, women are evenly split; men come down, nearly 2:1, for "taken too seriously." Among women under 30, a small majority (54 percent) agree that offensives online content is taken too seriously; but three-quarters of young men agree.
The divide was even sharper on the question of whether it's more important for people to be able to "speak their minds freely" or "feel welcome and safe" online: 56 percent of men opted for more freedom, two-thirds of women for more safety. (Interestingly, despite millennials' reputation for wanting safe spaces, young adults of both sexes were more pro-free speech than their elders—but the gender gap was still large: speaking freely was a higher priority for nearly two-thirds of men under 30 and only four out of ten women.)
Before anyone rushes to declare women enemies of freedom, it should be noted that the sexes actually don't differ all that much in their view of what should be done about online harassment. Only slightly more women than men (35 percent vs. 29 percent) say that elected officials have a major role to play in combating it; while women are more likely than men to see a major role for law enforcement (54 vs. 43 percent), the age gap on this issue is far larger (58 percent of seniors vs. 37 percent of young adults).
Meanwhile, there is a broad consensus that social media platforms and other online services have a responsibility to stop harassing behavior by users: 82 percent of women and 75 percent of men agree. Clearly, both men and women believe that some curbs are necessary, but they tend to want the lines drawn in different places. It is also likely that women's views of the issue are influenced by the false perception that women are singled out for constant and vicious abuse on the internet.
The Pew report points out that online harassment is, to a large extent, a subjective concept. Even something as ostensibly straightforward as a physical threat can be a matter of interpretation: Is "I hope you get cancer" a threat? How about "Kill yourself"? The definition of sexual harassment is even blurrier: "Wow, you look hot" in response to a photo posted to Twitter or Facebook could be sexual harassment to an overzealous feminist but a perfectly acceptable compliment to someone else.
The Pew survey shows that a small number of people experience internet abuse severe enough to cause serious negative consequences, including problems at work (3 percent of all users and 7 percent of young adults), financial loss (2 percent), and trouble getting a job or housing (1 percent each). It's also troubling that more than one in ten internet users have feared for their safety due to online harassment, even if it's hard to tell how often those fears were based on a serious threat.
Is there a need for better law enforcement responses when online harassment escalates to the point of causing real harm or credible fear of harm? Probably. And, of course, service providers have every right to curb behavior that is not illegal but causes persistent aggravation to other users and even drives them away from online platforms.
Unfortunately, the social media's attempts to police harassment have been plagued by accusations of left-wing bias and political favoritism. And some feminists and other progressives have a disturbing tendency to equate criticism with abuse.
Just recently, culture and videogame critic Anita Sarkeesian, one of the most high-profile targets of online harassment, called YouTuber Carl Benjamin—a.k.a. "Sargon of Akkad"—"one of [her] biggest harassers." Yet Benjamin's videos critiquing her are well within the bounds of polemics; indeed, he has voiced support for the suspension of Twitter accounts that engage in harassment, though also suggesting that Sarkeesian is not particularly bothered by it. (Despite numerous accusations of harassment, the "Sargon of Akkad" account remains in good standing with YouTube; Patreon, the popular crowdfunding platform, also recently said that he was not in violation of its rules of conduct.)
There is no doubt that severe harassment can chill speech and debate on the internet. But accusations of harassment can also easily turn into a weapon for silencing and punishing legitimate speech that someone finds undesirable.
Efforts to find the right balance are not helped by peddling a false women-in-jeopardy narrative. It would be a good idea to remind everyone, including women, that annoying words on the internet can nearly always be safely ignored.
Ladies, woman up.
The post Men as Likely To Be Harassed Online as Women appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The percentage of Americans who believe abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances is at the highest it has been in more than two decades, according to the latest national poll from Pew Research Center. In the October 20-25 survey, 59 percent of respondents said abortion should be generally legal, while just 37 percent said it should be banned in all or most circumstances. "Support for legal abortion has fluctuated in recent years," Pew noted, "but is at its highest level since 1995."
Among Republicans only, beliefs about abortion in the latest poll were almost directly inverse that of the general U.S. population, with 62 percent of Republican respondents saying abortion should be illegal in all or most cases and just 34 percent saying the opposite. There was little difference among men and women, with 32 percent of Republican women and 36 percent of Republican men expressing pro-choice views.
Meanwhile, more than three-quarters of Democrats (79 percent) say abortion should be legal most of the time—up from 70 percent in Pew's March survey—and just 18 percent say it should generally be illegal.
"The partisan gap in support for legal abortion, 45 percentage points, is at its widest point in close to a decade," Pew points out.
On the Democrat side, it's women who have driven the increase in pro-abortion sentiment since the Pew's March poll. In that one, 68 percent of Democratic women and 75 percent of Democratic men said abortion should generally or always be allowed. In October's poll, the percentage of Democratic men saying the same was down slightly, at 71 percent, but the percentage of Democratic women who said abortion should mostly or always be legal shot up 18 percentage points, to 85 percent.
The post Support for Legal Abortion at Highest Level Since 1995, But Partisan Gap Widening appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) did indeed sign the "Contraceptive Equity Act" into law yesterday, mandating that the state's health insurers cover emergency contraception and vasectomies at no out-of-pocket cost to consumers. The measure has been much-hyped by Maryland lawmakers and reproductive-health care groups as the first state expansion on Obamacare's contraception mandate. But that distinction will be short-lived, as Vermont has now passed a similar requirement for insurers to cover male sterilization without any co-payment permitted.
Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin (D) is expected to sign the measure, which passed the state Senate and House earlier this month.
Specifically, the bill codifies the Affordable Care Act's (ACA) contraception mandate—the controversial requirement that health insurance plans offer a range of female birth control options at no out-of-pocket cost to enrollees—into Vermont law; allows women to obtain up to one-year's supply of birth control pills at once (previously three months' worth was the limit); and add the male sterilization surgeries known as a vasectomies to the list of birth control options that insurers must offer "free" of charge.
Obviously, the more "free" services that legislators require insurers to offer, the more insurance companies will raise premiums or otherwise adjust their business models to make up the difference. But shifting the cost of preventing unwanted pregnancies from reproductive-age women and men to all Americans seems to be a major new policy goal. The Maryland measure even managed to pass with strong bipartisan support.
Vermont's bill was sponsored by Rep. Chris Pearson, a member of the Progressive Party. Birth control "is a family decision in many cases, and we should not pretend that this burden only falls to women," he told Vermont public radio. "[It should] reflect the reality in that many, many cases, families make this decision together, and that's appropriate."
Families can of course make decisions together without needing them subsidized, but hey. Maybe Pearson's rhetoric sounds legit if you don't listen too hard.
The new state contraception mandates are already drawing objections from religious groups that oppose all methods of birth control. Catholic Deacon Pete Gummere noted that the Catholic Church's opposition to "artificial" prevention of pregnancy does include vasectomies, and argued that Catholic employers shouldn't be required to offer health-insurance plans that they consider an affront to their religious principles. This was the argument at the center of the 2014 Supreme Court case Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, in which the Court granted a religious exemption from the ACA's contraception mandate. We may soon see the issue transferred to state courts if this new contraception mandate catches on.
The post The New Contraception Mandate: Free Male Sterilization appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In America and the U.K., the "gender pay gap"—the space that separates average male-worker wages from average female-worker wages—has been picking up steam as an important political topic, especially as elections near. In the process, a lot of misinformation is also gaining traction. Yet rigorous research on the gender pay gap paints quite a different picture than the political spin on it does.
As evidence, see this recent paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research ("The Gender Wage Gap: Extent, Trends, and Explanation"), co-authored by Cornell economists Francine D. Blau and Lawrence M. Kahn. Blau and Kahn looked at gender pay gap stats dating back to the 1950s and stretching through 2010. What they found—in the U.S. and other economically advanced countries—is that the difference in average pay between men and women in the workforce has been declining for decades. But this hasn't been happening at an equal rate for workers across income brackets, nor has progress been steady over the past few decades.
The gender pay gap shrank the most in the 1980s. "The period of strongest wage convergence between men and women was the 1980s," found the economists. Progress at narrowing the pay gap "has been slower and more uneven since then."
In 1980, American women's average hourly earnings were about 63 percent of men's, but by 1989, women were earning 73 percent of what men did. But since the 1980s, the gap has closed much less quickly. In 2010, women were making 79 percent of men's overall wages. In 2014, full-time female workers earned about 79 percent of what men did on an annual basis and about 83 percent when wages were measured weekly.
Wage-gap narrowing wasn't tied to government policies. In a section on the impact of government policies on the gender pay gap, Blau and Kahn explore whether "the time path of the increase in women's relative earnings appears compatible with an effect of [federal] laws and regulations." In short: not really.
"We see no indication of a notable improvement in women's relative earnings in the immediate post-1964 period that might be attributable to the effects of the government's antidiscrimination effort," Blau and Kahn write. And while gains were made in select fields, the overall gender pay gap "remained basically flat through the late 1970s or early 1980s," also times of relatively high government action in this area. Meanwhile, "the largest female relative wage gains and the strongest evidence of a decline in the unexplained gender wage gap were during the 1980s…which includes a period in which the government's antidiscrimination effort was noticeably scaled back."
So what does explain the closing of the gender pay gap in the 1980s? One suggestion researchers offer is a shift in the labor market that favored women. The decline of manufacturing jobs and other industries involving physical labor during this time, along with the rise of white-collar and computer-utilizing jobs, "appear to have favored women relative to men in certain ways." Trends that tilted toward men in the 1990s—the researchers don't mention any industries in particular, but the early Internet companies seem one likely culprit—may explain the slow down in closing the gender pay gap.
Gender differences in occupations and job roles matter most. Researchers call variables like education level and past experience "human capital factors." In the mid to late 20th century, human capital factors were one of the biggest reasons behind the gender pay gap. But the role these factors play has been dropping, due "both to the reversal of the education gap between men and women and the narrowing of the gender gap in experience," Blau and Kah note.
In 1980, the experience gap explained 24 percent of the gender gap, but this was down to 16 percent in 2010.
Yet "employment segregation by sex" still factors significantly into wage differences. In fact, "gender differences in occupations and industries are quantitatively the most important measurable factors explaining the gender wage gap," according to Blau and Kahn. The share of the gap accounted for by "factors like occupation and industry actually increased from 27 percent of the 1980 gap to 49 percent of the much smaller 2010 gap," they write.
High-income women have seen the smallest wage-gap closing. Between 1980 and 2010, the wage gap narrowed more slowly for women at the top income and job levels than it did for lower-paid and less specialized counterparts. By 2010, the gender wage gap, "which had been similar across the wage distribution in the 1980s, [was] larger for the highly skilled than for others," write researchers.
"Labor force interruptions" to have or care for children and a need for more flexible hours may penalize workers in some professions, such as law and business, more than those in lower-wage occupations, they suggest. Studies have shown that "work histories and current hours seem to be a particularly important determinant of gender wgae differences" in some high-wage professions, and work flexibility (working non-traditional hours or from home) imposes a higher wage penalty on people with law degrees and MBAs.
Findings are fuzzy about the impact of family-leave policies. "The effect of parental leaves on the gender wage gap is theoretically ambiguous," according to Blau and Kahn's research. "Empirical evidence in the United States suggests that the effect of the [Family and Medical Leave Act] has been modest."
If anything, the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA)—which mandates 12 weeks unpaid but job-protected medical leave following the birth or adoption of a child or in event of a spouse or dependent falling seriously ill—has had a small positive effect on women's employment level overall but no effect on the wage gap, according to one large study. A smaller study on the effect of California's 2004 law mandating six weeks of paid parental leave also showed that more people went back to work post-leave, but the effect on wages wasn't significant. And a 2015 study suggested the FMLA increased the gender gap in promotions.
Global studies show similarly mixed results. In a 1998 study of nine Western countries, not including the U.S., researchers found women's wages were unaffected by short parental leave policies but suffered with leave policies of more than five months. An earlier study by Blau and Kahn found that the expansion of family-leave policies in non-U.S., economically advanced nations between 1990 and 2010 resulted in an overall increase in female labor force participation but was also associated with "a lower likelihood of women having full-time jobs or working as managers or professionals."
The post 5 Quick Facts About the Gender Pay Gap appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Americans think that addressing human trafficking should be a "high" or "top" priority for the government, according to public opinion research commissioned by the U.S. Justice Department. In a survey of some 2,000 American adults, 80 percent said they have "some" or "a lot" of concern about human trafficking in America and 51 percent think that thwarting it should be a government priority.
Only 45 percent of those surveyed said they have "some" or "a lot" of concern about U.S. prostitution.
The research was conducted in the spring of 2014 and released as part of a large report on "legislative, legal, and public opinion strategies that work" to combat sex and labor trafficking. The first two sections of the report examined state strategies, arrests, and prosecutions for human-trafficking offenses from 2003 through 2012. The third section was aimed at identifying "what the public knows, thinks, and feels about human trafficking," as well as "factors that may cause people to change the way they think about and engage with the issue."
This section is especially interesting because—based on both the questions asked and the way researchers discuss responses—you can see how the federal government prefers to frame the issue of human trafficking and what rhetorical ploys they're hoping will catch on. For instance, most survey respondents had "a solid understanding that human trafficking is a form of slavery," the researchers state, brandishing this idea—human trafficking is modern slavery—as simple fact rather than an emotionally charged frame.
Overall, the public still holds many "incorrect beliefs about human trafficking," researchers say.
Many of these "incorrect beliefs," however, describe what were previously (and in many places still are) common and legally accepted notions about human trafficking: that it is "another word for smuggling immigrants," that it "always requires threats of or actual physical violence," and that it "requires movement across state or national borders." Others are only "incorrect" if you use an incredibly expansive definition of human trafficking (i.e., one that includes all prostitution as sex trafficking).
For instance, researchers note with seeming dismay that while most people (73 percent) say human trafficking is widespread or occasional in the United States, few believe it is widespread in their own states or communities. But there is no evidence to suggest that human trafficking is "widespread" anywhere in America, let alone in every community. The majority of these people are probably correct.
The report also cautions that "the public has not made the connection between how their own attitudes and behaviors can either help or hinder the movement against human trafficking." Yet it offer no further information about what this alleged "connection" is.
Republicans, men, and whites were the least likely to be concerned about human trafficking in America or to say it should be a government priority. Democrats, older adults, racial minorities, and women were the most likely to be concerned and to want the government to take action. Meanwhile, "sex related behaviors" such as having visited a strip club or watched porn within the last year corresponded to greater knowledge about human trafficking but less concern and less belief that it should be a government priority.
The researchers recommended "public awareness campaigns directed toward reticent groups, which includes males, whites, Republicans, those that consume pornography, and those that visit strip clubs."
Other messages the government would like people to take away include that that people "who knowingly enter prostitution can still be trafficked" (73 percent of respondents agreed to this) and that helping a minor engage in prostitution is always sex trafficking (78 percent concurred).
The post DOJ Report: 'Males, Whites, Republicans' and Porn Watchers Hold 'Incorrect Beliefs' About Sex Trafficking appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>For a minute, it felt like we were on the world's most mundane secret mission: at 6 p.m., you will be emailed a secret location in Dupont Circle. Talk to no one about it. Enter through the bar and proceed down into the basement area—if anyone asks, say you're looking for Luke. There, awaiting you, will be… a conference table full of bloggers and a raging narcissist pissed at the media. Woo-hoo, Saturday night!
The reason for all this intrigue was a press conference hosted by 36-year-old writer Daryush Valizadeh, better known as "Roosh V." Though he started out in the mid-aughts preaching the gospel of "pickup artistry," that particular phenomenon has fallen out of vogue. Now Roosh heads up what he calls the "neomasculinity" movement, using his blog and the men's website Return of Kings as headquarters, along with selling self-published books about how to bang women in other countries. Until last week, he was mostly unknown outside avid followers and avid opponents. But that changed when Roosh arranged social meetups for fans in cities around the world, and a lot of activists, journalists, and politicians lost their collective minds about it.
Make no mistake: I am no fan of Roosh's writing or worldview, though I find his schtick more sleazy than terrifying, more Milo Yiannopoulos than "KKK of misogyny." On the way to Saturday's press conference, a journalist friend with me had much better humor about the whole spectacle. The self-important security scheme, the aggrieved victimhood dripping from Roosh's tweets—he was clearly loving this, and a part of me hated feeding into it. But I was going, out of a combination of curiosity, the potential newsworthiness, and it falling into the category of "too weird not to."
But perhaps Roosh was only responding in kind to the sort of paranoia with which he'd been greeted around the globe all week.
In Australia, Immigration Minister Peter Dutton said he would consider denying a Roosh a visa. He told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that "Australia doesn't welcome people to our country who disrespect women." In general, Australian media reported on a Roosh tweet saying "The border is weak. I will get in" and "I have the funds to get in by boat through one of multiple weak points. Money is no barrier to the operation" as if they were deadly serious.
The U.K. House of Commons debated Roosh on February 4, during which Kate Green MP asked for Return of Kings fans to be deemed a "hate group"—a designation that that would make membership illegal. Home Office minister Karen Bradley MP noted that "the home secretary has powers to exclude an individual who is not a British citizen" if their presence isn't "conducive to the public good"—though she "cannot comment on individual cases"—and said she would consult with internet service providers and sites such as Facebook about possibly banning Return of Kings content. More than 40,000 people signed an online petition calling on authorities to ban Roosh from entering the U.K. and to "take all available action in this case to prevent [fan] meetings taking place," citing their "terror against women" as justification.
A similar online petition, this one signed by more than 45,000 people, warned that "there is strong evidence indicating that 'RooshV' has entered Canada and is in Montreal. We ask Mayor Bonnie Crombie of Mississauga, Mayor John Tory of Toronto, and Mayor Denis Corderre of Montreal to denounce 'RooshV' and to urge local businesses and organizations to deny him accommodation while in Canada." The petition claimed that Roosh would be coming to Canada in violation of section 319 of the Canadian Criminal Code, which bans meeting for the purpose "of inciting hatred of an identifiable group."
In America, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott put out an official statement that "this pathetic group and their disgusting viewpoints are not welcome in Texas."
District of Columbia police indicated that they had an eye on a scheduled meetup in the nation's capital. Des Moines, Iowa, police put out a Facebook message warning that the meetups "may be a ruse to commit rape. We have no information that this will actually take place but we recommend that no one, men or women go to any of the sites."
At Chicago's Loyola University, sexual assault survivors were warned to avoid the area where one local meetup was scheduled, a meetup local police said they were "well aware" of and would be "monitoring." At the University of Rochester in New York, campus admins called in extra school security officers and city police for a meetup there, sending out an all-campus alert that Roosh "offers extreme writings based on his philosophy of Neomasculinity."
The school "does not believe the event will actually happen, but is still taking precautionary measure to ensure student safety," the local Democrat and Chronicle reported. These measures included consulting with the New York State Intelligence Center, which decided that there was "no evidence to suggest a gang, group, or organization is involved."
'The Most Hated Man in America'
At Saturday's press event, five women and maybe a dozen men fill the room, folks I would soon learn work for places such as The Washington Post, DCist, Wonkette, Washingtonian magazine, Vice, The Daily Beast, and a German television station. At a few minutes after 7 p.m., Roosh comes charging through the door, sizing everyone up, barking orders about who could film where and complaining about the room's low energy. Within minutes, he says—not entirely chagrined—that he's been called the "most hated man in America."
Though their demeanors are very different and their views opposed, Roosh reminds me of another Internet-famous man who was called that, Hugo Schwyzer. A former Pasadena Community College professor and male-feminist writer for places like Jezebel and The Atlantic, Hugo's sex scandals (sleeping with students among them) and public mental-health breakdown—playing out in real time on Twitter—were very much a big thing from my vantage point in the women's blogosphere. Not only was everyone on feminist Twitter talking about it, but Schwyzer was also covered in a lot of mainstream American and U.K. outlets. A hashtag, #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, sprung up around allegations that Schwyzer had fucked over feminists of color. The U.K. Telegraph suggested he might be "evil incarnate."
A few years later, in D.C., whenever I've mentioned Schwyzer to writer friends or colleagues, no one knows anything about him. That the whole dramatic Hugo saga had only really been relevant and salient to a small segment of the Internet, I was sure—but I hadn't realized how truly small that segment was. "Male feminist sex scandal" gets clicks, but it doesn't stick in people's minds. I bring it up because I think this Roosh situation is very similar. The story has been magnified out of all proportion because for a lot of traffic-thirsty web writers or editors, putting "pro-rape activists" in headlines or tweets is too good to pass up—even if it may not technically be true and props up a man and movement they claim to abhor. But while it's likely to have limited reach and flash-in-the-pan stickiness for most, the Roosh situation is still interesting as a case study of collective catharsis through call-out culture and moral panic as meme.
The root of the "pro-rape" accusation is a Roosh blog post ("How to Stop Rape") that proposes legalizing rape on private property. Roosh claims it was "a thought experiment" or satire—a disclaimer on the post now says as much—and says he doesn't think rape should be legal anywhere. Many protest that Roosh's P.S. isn't authentic. And even if it is, "the idea driving this 'satire' seems to be either that women are usually responsible for their own rapes, or that they routinely call something rape when it isn't," Emily Crockett writes at Vox.
But call it a "thought experiment" or call it trolling, I do think Roosh was being deliberately hyperbolic and provocative, as is his style, and does not believe in literally legalizing rape.
Regardless, though, does it matter if his original intent was earnest proposal if he since recanted? It shows the so-called "social justice warriors" won. Or, in less absurd terms: sane and individual-autonomy respecting views are such the social norm that even someone who states outright that his ideal society is "traditional" and "patriarchal" won't publicly condone sexual violence against women.
Literary Affect
At the press conference, Roosh tends to minimize his more outrageous statements. Perhaps it's all smoke and mirrors, but what emerges is a picture much less flattering to the international Lothario image Roosh projects but much more flattering to him as both a savvy self-brander and a human being.
"Macho sex writing—to convert that to 'rape' takes such a leap of faith that you have to be a liar," he says when about scenes in his series of "bang books" that have been described as pro-rape.
"You literally say they were 'too incapacitated' to consent," challenges Washington Post writer Caitlin Dewey.
"Macho sex writing is not a court," Roosh fires back. "It's not a piece of evidence….Maybe some things [in the books], I wanted to come across as an aggressive guy. Maybe I do. But just because it's [in the books] doesn't mean that there is a victim out there and she suffered. Have I raped anyone? No."
So the stories were fiction? asks another reporter. No, said Roosh—but maybe they were his "interpretation" of his events.
The bottom line, though, is that "not a single woman has been hurt by me," says Roosh. "I've never been accused of rape, I've never been charged. No follower of mine has read something of [mine], and then gone on to rape, because I know if they did hurt a woman it'd be all over the news."
The whole thing calls to mind two more male writers: Matt Taibbi, probably best known for his work at Rolling Stone, and Mark Ames, who now writes for outlets such as Pando. The pair worked together at an English-language newspaper in Russia in the late '90s and subsequently published a book about the experience called The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia. Within this book, there are scenes of the mostly-male Exile editors sexually harassing their administrative staff—going so far as to tell secretaries they must sleep with them to keep their jobs—and Ames threatening to kill his pregnant Russian girlfriend if she doesn't get an abortion. The men never claimed at the time that it was satire or fiction. In explaining, Ames was prone to saying things like "Russian women, especially on the first date, expect you to rape them."
Despite this, Taibbi and Ames have continued to flourish as leftist writers, and as far as I know no feminist groups or Canadian mayors have tried to prevent either from visiting the country. Perhaps they're just lucky to have come of age in a different Internet era. Perhaps it helps that their politics and progressive credentials are otherwise right.
None of Roosh's views are right, from the left's perspective. From the perspective of most Americans, really. His work routinely stresses that women should be "submissive," that their highest value is as sex objects and mothers, and that America would be greater if only women were skinnier and had less sex outside marriage.
But while such views on gender roles are far from normative in 21st-century America, it's not as if they're relegated solely to Roosh and his crowd. There are still a good deal of evangelical Christians who preach female submission to their husbands, with a lot of blogs kept about the subject. There's a lot of popular music about how bitches ain't shit. There are immigrants from many cultures where egalitarian gender roles aren't standard. We don't—and shouldn't—prevent any of these groups from meeting or monitor them when they do.
What's more, people with sexually deviant turn-ons or loony, bigoted, and just plain unpopular ideas get together all the time. Unless there's evidence they're plotting something criminal, authorities should back the fuck off, really.
Freedom of the Manosphere
As much as we might hate to admit it, Roosh is a journalist. His main site, Return of Kings—one of the hubs of what's sometimes called the "Manosphere"—and its forums get nearly two million visits per month. As neither Roosh nor any writers or readers of Return of Kings were under suspicion of criminal behavior, it is at the very least bizarre that law-enforcement officials would feel the need to comment and keep an eye on their gathers. And it's probably the kind of thing we should condemn, those of us interested in freedom of speech, press, movement, and association.
People will object that these groups were "pro-rape" meetups. But outside media misinformation, there was nothing about the proposed happy hours to suggest they had anything to do with rape.
"Starting on [January 31], a lot of you have lied by saying I am a 'pro rape advocate,'" Roosh tells the press gathered with him Saturday. Outlets also said the fan meetups were about "learning how to rape. 'They're going to exchange tips.' Some of you have even called it a rape rally. A rape—what the hell is that, a rape rally?"
There was no public elements planned for the 163 gatherings. Roosh calls them "social happy hour[s]" where men could "meet in private to talk about anything—work, politics, girls." The plan for each was to meet in a public place and then migrate to a nearby bar.
Subjecting these men to police surveillance and intimidation based on the state's perception of a publication they like seems a bit totalitarian, no? Let the bitter, horny, heterosexual men have a safe space, too.
Do You Even Lift?
On February 3, a post on Return of Kings announced that the meetups would be canceled. "I can no longer guarantee the safety or privacy of the men who want to attend," Roosh wrote. "While I can't stop men who want to continue meeting in private groups, there will be no official Return Of Kings meetups."
At Saturday's press event, someone asks why Roosh's cadre of alleged alpha-men would cancel get-togethers over a little thing like feminist protests or a few police cars. "Because you have gotten governments involved by lying about their intention," he responds. "Now the world thinks they're going to meet to, uh, to rape people. So why are they going to meet now? Do you think it's smart now for them to go and meet after that?"
Roosh goes on to suggest this reporter himself certainly wouldn't have gone in those circumstances, adding, "I mean, do you lift?"
It is hard to tell if this is performance or not, creating a psychic uncanny valley not dissimilar to the effect of Donald Trump's—Roosh's favorite 2016 presidential candidate, by the way. Asked what he likes about Trump, Roosh replies that it's because "he hates you guys too. The enemy of my enemy is my friend."
Someone suggests that hating the media isn't a political ideology. "But anti-establishment is," Roosh replies.
Anti-media as he may proclaim to be, it's not inconceivable that Roosh organized and then canceled the social meetups precisely in order to gain media attention. Being prevented from meeting only fuels his followers' narrative of hysterical, punitive feminists and a "cucked" media beholden to identity politics. All of it drives more web traffic.
Asked whether this controversy had been good for him, Roosh says it is "the best and the worst. I mean, what's going to happen now is I'm going to be known, in the media, as a 'pro-rape' advocate for the rest of my life. 'Oh, that's the guy that believes all women should be raped.' But at the same time, they're going to say, that's the guy, I know his name."
Roosh claims to live "somewhere in Europe," though he grew up in Maryland, where he says he's currently visiting family. He told Dewey he doesn't know why the house he claims is his mother's is registered under his name.
Media Malpractice
Roosh has no regrets about publishing the "How to Prevent Rape" essay, he says. "That article was making a point about personal responsibility, that a woman's safety is not only in the hands of men but it's in their own hands too. And I guess that point didn't get through, so on that account, I did fail. I failed to give the point. But that doesn't mean I did anything wrong."
Sexist pig or not—remember when people just called people sexist pigs or "chauvinists," instead of branding them dangerous on an international level?—Roosh is correct on some key points about modern media.
Asked if he could acknowledge that his writing was offensive, Roosh responds "So what if you're offended? So what if I make fun of you? Is that where we're at now, that we can't write things that hurt people's feelings? Good, get offended, feel something."
"Do I believe that a woman should submit to a man?" he says. "Yes. Does that mean that my family's address should be put online because of that, and the media staking out their home because of what I write? No."
After the hacker-collective Anonymous "doxxed" Roosh's family (i.e., revealed their home address online)—info since confirmed by The Daily Mail—Roosh says he has received "dozens" of threats of violence and arson. "Your work, and the work of your colleagues, has incited a mob, based on lies, that has put my family in danger," he chastises media Saturday. "If they get hurt right now, God forbid, it's because of you."
Roosh himself has been accused of inviting fans to dox journalists who cross him. But he insists he merely asked followers to gather publicly available information on journalists, such as their home cities and Twitter handles. "I never said I was going to share their address, that was another lie," he says Saturday. "It's like you guys can't stop lying." (Truly, the Taylor Swift of MRA bloggers, folks.) He complains that "it's like a game" for media, cutting-and-pasting from one another's stories when they see they're generating hits.
There was a hint of "holy shit" in many of Roosh's statements, an incredulity that anyone who works or spends a lot of time on the Internet many sympathize with. Sometimes the media—mainstream, ideological, fringe, local, global, whatever—is just astonishingly bad. From the Chinese man who sued his wife for bearing ugly children to eggs being "as bad for you as smoking," the influx of Super Bowl sex-slaves to the hordes of sexist "Bernie Bros," the press routinely, en masse, gets things totally wrong.
Sometimes this is rooted in bias, but just as often it's a more economic than ideological imperative, a mandate to produce fast copy that generates good traffic. This means many writers take the veracity of other publications' reporting for granted. When the original account is incorrect, inaccuracies and distortions can spread like a game of Telephone from The Huffington Post to Jezebel to The Guardian, and so on.
Asked whether he considers himself a victim, Roosh says "You know what, no. I take full responsibility for everything that I have done. But that doesn't mean that I can't state what you did wrong."
Vanity Virtue
At The Washington Post, Caitlyn Dewey argues that "the number of people who actually follow Daryish Valizadeh is smaller than it looks."
"While his flagship website, Return of Kings, is well-trafficked—averaging slightly less than 2 million views per month, according to Similar Web—that number is not necessarily indicative of the size of Valizadeh's following," writes Dewey. "On both Twitter and Facebook, Return of Kings has fewer than 13,000 followers. The site's accompanying forums have registered 19,600 accounts, but half have never posted."
Dewey calls the whole Roosh situation "manufactured publicity on a scale that few fringe Internet movements have ever dreamed of." On Twitter, Roosh is milking it for all he can.
But on his blog, Roosh condemns the very sort of manufactured controversy he's complicit in. "Instead of focusing your anger on real problems in your neighborhood, city, and country, the media has made you emotional against a man who poses absolutely no threat to anyone," he chastises his opponents. "I'm being used as a target so that you can expend your rage on me instead of other entities that are genuinely hurting your standard of living."
It's obnoxiously self-aggrandizing but…also not untrue. Roosh's assessment of what's hurting people's standard of living is probably vastly different than mine, as both are also vastly different from media-criticizing leftists like Freddie de Boer. But one thing we all agree on is a similar diagnosis: online media prioritizes sensationalism and righteous signaling over accuracy and nuance. This is far from ahistorical, of course, but it also makes modern media much less "progressive" than many in it would like to think.
At the end of Roosh's press conference, I come away feeling more charitable about him than I did going in, which could mean he's a good showman, a sociopath, someone conflicted (both Crockett and Emmett Rensin at Vox offer profiles to this effect), or simply that he's neither a terribly sympathetic person nor cartoonishly evil. In any event, the clickbaity portrayal of him as some outlandish misogynist villain, ready to storm Australia via private yacht and host how-to-rape seminars globally, overshadows more interesting and perhaps revelatory components of the manosphere phenomenon.
If reporters had tried to talk to the men attending Return of Kings meetups, instead of insta-demonizing them, what might they have found? Rage-filled rape advocates? "Beta males" who "don't even lift?" How many of them? What way do they lean politically? What draws them to Roosh's writing? Are these guys with power, or guys trying to cope with not having power?
These would be informative things to know. Instead we have overblown fears and parody villains, predictable liberal responses, wasted opportunities. Rape is bad and good people should be against it—everybody got that? Because as common sense as that might be, it's also the only major takeaway an international press corps has established here.
The Return of Kings meetups gave the popular media and its acolytes the latest opportunity to assert their goodness, to feel the catharsis of raging in solidarity. But was even one person's opinion changed, or anyone's ability to understand one another increased?
The post How Maryland 'Neomasculinity' Blogger Roosh V Became an International 'Pro-Rape' Villain appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In the early 1990s, Scandinavian researchers published a meta-analysis of sperm count studies in which they concluded that the number of sperm men were producing had fallen by half since the 1930s. The decline was allegedly the result of men being exposed to trace amounts of synthetic chemicals in plastics and pesticides that mimic estrogen. Greenpeace launched an anti-chemical campaign with the clever slogan, "You're Not Half the Man Your Father Was" and also claimed that the chemicals were shrinking average penis size as well.
The claim of sperm decline was just recycled by andrology researcher Niels Jorgensen at the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology's annual meeting in Lisbon last week. Jorgensen provoked a spate of anxious news articles when he asserted that exposure to cosmetics, sunscreen, and varoius plastics was reducing human sperm production. In fact, Jorgensen was merely reporting the findings of a study that he had published back in 2012.In that 15-year study involving nearly 5,000 Danish men he supposedly found that only 25 percent had good sperm quality. That figure is evidently the source of the claims being made in the media.
What's really interesting is that Jorgensen's 2012 study had actually reported:
"Fifteen years monitoring of semen quality in men of the general population indicated a slight increase in both median sperm concentration and total sperm count."
That's right sperm counts among Danish men are not declining, but actually increasing from 45 million to 48 miliion per milliliter between 1996 and 2010. The World Health Organization's latest sperm quality reference limits were set by measuring the amount of sperm produced by recent fathers in six different countries. The lower limit (5 percentile) for sperm count is 15 milion per milliter. The Mayo Clinic also uses the WHO reference limits noting:
Normal sperm densities range from 15 million to greater than 200 million sperm per milliliter of semen. You are considered to have a low sperm count if you have fewer than 15 million sperm per milliliter or less than 39 million sperm total per ejaculate.
Eyeballing Jorgensen's data, it looks as though more three quarters of his subjects produced sperm in amounts higher than that.
A 2013 meta-analysis of 35 major studies found no overall decline in sperm quality. From the abstract:
Allegations for a worldwide decline in semen parameter values have not withstood scientific scrutiny. Methodological flaws in an influential 1992 paper are summarized here, and studies that have been published since 1992 are reviewed. Of the 35 major studies of time trends in semen quality reviewed here, eight (a total of 18 109 men) suggest a decline in semen quality; 21 (112 386 men) show either no change or an increase in semen quality; and six (26 007 men) show ambiguous or conflicting results.
So no sperm apocalypse, after all.
Bonus Monty Python song "Every Sperm Is Sacred" from The Meaning of Life below.
The post Sperm Apocalypse: Are You Just A Quarter of the Man Your Father Was? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Together with Cacilda Jethá, Ryan has written about the history of human sexuality and why we should fight against "socially imposed restrictions." By looking at archaeology, primate biology, human physiology, and anthropological studies of pre-agricultural tribes from around the world, Ryan says we aren't meant to be in life-long monogamous unions.
Ryan sat down with Reason contributor Thaddeus Russell for an in-depth discussion about his book, the role of sex in society, and the harmful consequences of repressing healthy sexuality.
About 27 mins.
Produced by Sharif Matar. Camera by Zach Weissmueller and Matar.
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The post "We're All Perverts": The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality with Author Christopher Ryan appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>International researchers said their startling findings should change perceptions about how common violence against women is and prompt major campaigns to prevent it. Still, the results were based on a survey of only six Asian countries and the authors said it was uncertain what rates were like elsewhere in the region and beyond. They said engrained sexist attitudes contributed, but that other factors like poverty or being emotionally and physically abused as children were major risk factors for men's violent behavior.
The post Up to 1 in 4 Men in Parts of Asia Say They've Raped Before appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Instead of primping and preening, imagine what would've happened if the lovely Marisa Powell had prepared for the pageant by, say, studying a relevant article about the gender wage gap at Politifact? If only Miss Powell had been a subscriber to Reason magazine, she would've been ready for "celebrity" judge NeNe Leakes' sneaky gotcha question!
Well, imagine no longer.
About one minute.
Produced by Todd Krainin.
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The post What if Miss Utah Gave the Correct Answer at the Miss USA Pageant? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>University of Michigan (Flint) economist Mark Perry has a interesting post at his Carpe Diem blog about a new Bureau of Labor Statistics study that finds that far more women than men are now earning bachelor's degrees. Perry notes the the BLS study…
…includes data on educational attainment at ages 23, 24, and 25 by gender from a longitudinal survey of 9,000 young men and women who were born between 1980 and 1984. For each of the three ages reported (23, 24, and 25) there is a significant gender gap favoring women for college degrees, and for the youngest cohort of 23-year-olds the gender disparity is huge: there are 165 women in the sample who have graduated from college at age 23 for every 100 of their male peers. (his emphasis) Also, at each age group there are more women currently enrolled in college than men (e.g. at age 23, 17.3% of women are enrolled in college vs. 16.8% of men), so there is really no chance that the college-degree gender gap will close in the future.
See chart below:
Just because men are increasingly feckless, that doesn't mean that there's any war being waged against them, right? On the other hand, Perry notes that the Obama White House created in 2009 a special panel to to encourage federal agencies to take "into account the needs of women and girls in the policies they draft, the programs they create, the legislation they support."
Last year the Pew Research Center issued a survey that found that American women are now more keen to climb the career ladder and bring down big salaries than the guys are:
Two-thirds (66%) of young women ages 18 to 34 rate career high on their list of life priorities, compared with 59% of young men. In 1997, 56% of young women and 58% of young men felt the same way.
In my blogpost about the Pew study I noted:
Colleges have been enrolling lower percentages of males relative to females for a while now. The current ratio hovers around 60/40. So guys, even if you don't see how a college education will help you with your downsized career plans, given these new survey results you might want to consider enrolling as a way to acquire an MR degree.
Given these trends, the dating scene for guys who do go to college must be awesome.
*Hat tip to Carpe Diem commenter Bruce Hall for the headline.
The post The War On Men Is Working* appeared first on Reason.com.
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