What Nawal El Saadawi and a music teacher in Iowa have in common

A story out today in the New York Times on rising divorce rates in rural America surprised me for its incredibly old-fashioned kernel of truth inside: women's economic empowerment leads to happier, more liberated living. From a woman who went to college and got a master's degree, on divorcing her high-school educated ex-husband:

“As we get more education we get more confidence and more income,” Ms. Vermeer said, “women are saying, ‘Look, she finally had the guts to stand up and walk out.’

I will never get tired of hearing statements like that.  Compare it to leading Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi's thoughts in an interview I did with her for The Nation:

Within a household, the individual woman must have power. It’s not easy—it means political rights, economic independence, knowledge. A lot of women are afraid of loneliness, so when they see a woman who can live alone, then they think, “Hmm, I can do that.” But you need an example, and that is why I am proud to say I have divorced three husbands.

Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Nawal El Saadawi, Mohamed Yunus, Nicholas Kristof (I hate to say it, but he's been a very vocal proponent of the economic empowerment of women) and their ilk still rule the day.  As long as we're mired in capitalism, must we play the game?  Hmm...

Is Kathleen Parker for serious?

I hope she's being ironic, and I'm just too thick to tell, but in a boring story full of generalizations about feminism in the Middle East (about the nuances of which she seems wholly ignorant), Kathleen Parker writes that "what we enlightened Westerners know is that empowering women empowers us all."  Not only is the story full of sleep-inducing cliches such as the aforementioned, but it utterly fails to address the actual ins and outs of what different sorts of feminism look like in the Middle East, which is, of course, a large and varied region. She writes:

Among life’s surreal experiences, few can compare with finding myself seated on a baroque bench, one of dozens lining the perimeter of an ornate drawing room in the palace of Sheikha Fatima Bint Mubarak in Abu Dhabi, chatting it up with three Ph.D.-endowed women sheathed in black abayas, sipping sweet hot tea and eating candies. “I think you Americans do not enjoy being women as much as we do,” said one, peering into my face with an earnestness one usually associates with grim news delivered to next of kin.

Say what?

Yes, if you use your own experience as the standard for how a life should be lived, then having a PhD. and wearing an abaya will strike you as 'surreal.'  The rest of the article swiftly turns its back on those Emirati women, (useful as an anecdotal lead, not so much after that) and focuses on topics that...hey wait...look at that -- have to do with her forthcoming book, "Save the Males."

Save me from this drivel.

The Arab League: Why?

That was the title of a story idea I had conceived of at least a year ago, but which became, in published form, a slightly different question: "Will the Arab League Finally Lead?"  Find out the answer in today's story in the Atlantic.  

The idea first struck me when I was living in Cairo, and used to walk past the Arab League building on my way to and from Arabic classes at the American University of Beirut.  It's a big, white building, rather majestic for something built in the 1960s, and home to the most relentless inactivity imaginable, or pomp and impotence, as I like to call it.  It make the UN looks like a hotbed of political activism.  In Damascus, also, I often passed a gorgeous white building around the corner from the Four Seasons hotel, designated for the Arab League.

And I had to ask myself - what the s**t are those guys (and they are all guys -- one person I interviewed called it an "all-male preserve") doing to justify all this prime real estate?  Off the top of my head, I couldn't think of anything.  My friend Mitch, who has covered the region for years, always says that the last thing you want to hear under any circumstances is "Don't worry, the Arab League is on it."  That more or less means "you might as well disembowel yourself and tip yourself off a high building, since nothing positive could possibly come out of that scenario."

Then all this much ado about Libya commenced, and I had to wonder...is the Arab League going in a new direction?  Click to find out:

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/03/after-mideast-uprisings-will-the-arab-league-finally-lead/72541/1/

Assclown of the Day: Kirsten Powers sweeps past Seif al-Gaddafi

Assclown-watchers know that when Seif al-Gaddafi steps up for a live TV interview, as he did today on Al Jazeera English, odds are about 99:1 that he's taking home the Assclown of the Day award.  I won't dwell on his assclowniness in this interview, I'll just give you three words to describe him: incoherent, imbecilic, and most of all infuriatingly condescending to the kickass reporter who asked him tough, awesome questions.  It probably didn't help her cause that she was female.  He practically rolls his eyes at her questions.  It's maddening.

I was also pretty tempted to give the Assclown of the Day award to whoever gave orders for soldiers (they can share in the prize, like when a Pulitzer is awarded to a reporting team) to fire on unarmed women protesters who were demanding the resignation of fraudster, assclown president Laurent Gbagbo in Cote d'Ivoire.  Seven or eight women were killed.

But because the term "assclown" to me implies a certain degree of rank stupidity, not just evil or inhumanity, I'm going to have to bestow the pointy hat today on Kirsten Powers, for her stunning, what-kind-of-crack-are-you-smoking claim in the Daily Beast that access to contraception does not reduce abortion.  She writes:

During the recent debate over whether to cut off government funding to Planned Parenthood, the organization claimed that its contraceptive services prevent a half-million abortions a year. Without their services, the group’s officials insist, more women will get abortions.

I’ll admit I bought the argument—it makes intuitive sense—and initially opposed cutting off funding for precisely that reason.

Then I did a little research.

Not only is this an example of smug, terrible writing (the "First I thought the obvious, but THEN I did a little research" set up is tedious and clichéd), but just to be clear, by "research" she means "totally misinterpreting some Guttmacher stats and squeezing her eyes shut in the face of the intuition [sometimes it's there for a reason] that told her that access to contraception helps prevent pregnancy."

Here is what her "research" led her to conclude:

This doesn’t mean that access to contraception causes more abortion—though some believe that—but that it doesn’t necessarily reduce it

Apart from not explaining how in the #@%&! access to contraception could possibly cause abortion (I thought it was pregnancy that caused abortions, not methods of preventing pregnancy), she shamelessly concludes, with zero substantive evidence, that Planned Parenthood's

...deception smacks of a fleecing of taxpayers in an effort to promote an ideological agenda, rather than a sincere effort to help women plan families.

The "ideological agenda", by the way, is that it is:

...in reality, a population-control organization. Funny, this was never mentioned in the gauzy $200,000 advertising campaign launched last week. It also doesn’t make it into the “About Us” section of the group’s website, which repeatedly claims its mission is to protect women’s health, when in fact the real mission is to keep the birth rate at whatever level the leaders believe it should be.

Well, luckily there's Lindsay Beyerstein at Big Think, who rebuts her in the blink of an eye with a simple left-right combo:

Actually, the original study found that 12% of women who weren't using birth control when they got pregnant cited lack of access as a reason why not.

Powers' logic is as faulty as her facts. Her main evidence that birth control doesn't prevent abortions is a study of women getting abortions. If you only look at women seeking abortions, you're only going to see cases in which contraception failed, or wasn't used.

If you want to measure the power of prevention, you have to look at the millions of sexually active people who use birth control and don't get pregnant.

It's so painfully obvious, I feel like if I tried to talk about this verbally I would wind up sputtering and screaming.  Even prominent right-wing donor Richard Scaife has come out in favor of Planned Parenthood, writing in a column what most of us, save Kirsten "Assclown of the Day" Powers, know already:

Of course, no one wants teenagers to get pregnant. Yet far too many do -- and they need reliable, honest advice about what to do next. For many of them, Planned Parenthood is the only reliable source of that advice. For many others, Planned Parenthood is the only safe, reliable source of counseling to avoid getting pregnant in the first place.

I'm still struggling to understand how:

1) someone could write something this intellectually flimsy and expect for it to stand up and hold its shape

2) this article was greenlit by an editor at the Daily Beast

3) the Beast has not yet run a version of it with the entire text in strikethrough and a gigantic apology at the end.

How is it possible?  Any guesses?

Also - if you think I've missed a bigger assclown, please feel free to send suggestions or comment below or on Twitter, @annalouiesuss.  I know there are many out there and sometimes they slip below my radar.

Assclown of the Day: Israel's president should not have to serve time?

Today marks the beginning of a new series called "Assclown of the Day," in which I discuss the actions or ideas of someone who proves themselves to be the biggest assclown I come across in a roughly 24-hour cycle.  NB: This contest does not include Muammar Gaddafi, who will get the blue ribbon #1 Top Assclown award automatically every single day, renewed each morning at 12:01 am, until he steps his sorry ass down.

Reading Allison Kaplan Sommer's insightful post on the Forward exploring sentiment in Israel around the imminent sentencing of Moshe Katsav, its disgraced convicted rapist of a former president, I was shocked to see that someone writing that a lengthy prison sentence is unnecessary because, during the course of the trial:

His coercive and ugly relationship with the women involved in the trial was fully exposed. Rare justice was done here. The former president was tried and the full extent of his wrongdoing was revealed. Even if he is jailed for just a few years, deterrence had been fully achieved.

I'm choking on my disbelief as I reread this.  "Deterrence has been fully achieved"????   Since when has a trial - or anything, really - been sufficient to deter rape from happening?  What about repeat rapists?  I agree that a spell in a miserable, violent environment like a prison may not be healing, but prison reform is another topic for another day.  Forgive me for being dense, but I just don't see how not punishing him according to the law of the land is more deterrent than, say, punishing him according to the law of the land.

It is always possible that there has been a deterrent effect, because according to RAINN, sexual assault has dropped by over 60% from 1993 to 2007.  But if there's still one sexual assault every two minutes, can we really say "deterrence has been fully achieved"?  A couple more stats about rape in the US:

• According to the U.S. Department of Justice's National Crime Victimization Survey -- the country's largest and most reliable crime study -- there were 248,300 sexual assaults in 2007 (the most recent data available).
• There are 525,600 minutes in a non-leap year. That makes 31,536,000 seconds/year. So, 31,536,000 divided by 248,300 comes out to 1 sexual assault every 127 seconds, or about 1 every 2 minutes.

I guess that rapists are being deterred from raping every minute, say, or every 30 seconds?  And consider that your average rapist is not even a top-ranking government official, who may bear some kind of prosecutorial immunity - what's deterring that person? In the Israeli case, as in Malaysia and St. Vincent's (and not counting the numerous ministers/officials/executives who have been accused of similar conduct -excuse me, I have to sneeze - aaaaahCHOOjulianassange!),  the intoxicating effect of power overrides the obvious obligation to be better behaved, since a public life will be open to heightened scrutiny.

I also wonder how the victims, who  feel about him deciding that "justice was done."  The question of whether justice was done really is best left decided to the survivors of the crime.  I'm not calling for an exceptionally harsh punishment or the death penalty, merely noting that:

1- The law is the law, and him being an elected official should not translate to automatic leniency.

2- Until rape statistics go way, way the heck down, is no possible way this statement could be true.

3- This columnist surely wins the "Assclown of the Day" award for today.

The saddest part is that this post was not just written by "someone," actually. The author is renowned peace activist, journalist and columnist Yigal Sarna, who co-founded Peace Now and was awarded an IBM Tolerance Prize.  He has gone a little overboard with the tolerance, in this case.  Rape is not tolerable.

Sidenote - Does anyone else find it sort of convoluted that IBM, whose computers were historically used in the Holocaust, is doling out Tolerance prizes to Israeli peace activists? Or find it weird that a bunch of rabbis support the convicted rapist ex-president?

Whoops! Totally didn't mean to don a ski mask, beat and threaten you.

The Egyptian military apologized for unintentionally using "truncheons and electric shock batons against late-night protesters in Tahrir Square." Someone explain to me how this can be unintentional:

Salma Said was asleep in a tent when it began to fall down on top of her. Outside people were screaming, and she emerged to see people being beaten by soldiers and armed plainclothes security officers wearing masks.

“They had their faces covered like criminals,” she said, “They only showed their eyes.”

“One of the officers threatened to shoot us and said he was going to set our tent on fire,” she said.

Did that officer have Tourette's Syndrome?  How else can you accidentally threaten to set someone's tent on fire?  I'm most curious.

And...you're live! Violent partners admit abuse on tape

The extraordinarily awesome Bill Glaberson of the NYT has a great story today on prosecutors in Queens who use prison phone call recordings as evidence against domestic abusers in their trials.  The recordings are critical, he points out:

The tapes overcome one of the biggest hurdles prosecutors face in such cases: that 75 percent of the time, the women who were victimized stop helping prosecutors, often after speaking to the men accused of abusing them.

....

In the Queens Boulevard courthouse where Mr. Kessler’s assistant district attorneys handle more than 6,000 domestic violence cases a year, the jailhouse recordings have become an appalling kind of reality radio, a fly-on-the-wall guide to the chilling intimacies of domestic violence.

Seeing the headline, my first instinct was that an article like this - assuming it winds its way back to the prison halls - is that it will give away the prosecutor's secrets, and the prisoners will figure out not to say incriminating things like this dumb a**hole did:

A defendant named Juan Mighty explained that it was jealousy that had led him to knife the woman “a little.” But he conceded that the scene had been gory. “There was mad blood in the house, T.,” he said in a call to his brother. “There was mad blood in the house.”

But according to the story, inmates are told their calls are taped.  So there's no issue of deceit or entrapment, just the one little problem of rampant stupidity.

Silly little piece on not drinking inspires rabid responses in the Guardian's Comment is Free section

When I posted this little piece about why I don't drink in the Guardian at the request of an editor there, it got some really nasty responses. I'm not entirely sure why - a lot of people seemed to find my non-drinking stance to be a negative judgment on their own behavior, which it most certainly wasn't intended to be. I did have fun responding, and there were some rather goofy comments too, such as the suggestion that I must be a nymphomaniac. Not so quite... "I don't drink alcohol for the same reason I shun yoghurt – both taste like delicious, sugary things that got left in the sun and went off. I'm not averse to all fermented foods or beverages, but alcohol's predominantly sour and bitter qualities don't sit well with my palate, which tends to prefer sweet and salty foods. Because of this, I've never been drunk, and I can't say I feel the worse for it."

Read the rest here.

Tampons and vaginas - American and Rwandan women face taboos

A story from a couple of weeks ago in the NYT noted that tampon manufacturers have shied away from using the word "vagina" in their advertising, and even the innocuous (and juvenile?)-sounding "down there" was apparently too insiduous for TV stations.

Merrie Harris, global business director at JWT, said that after being informed that it could not use the word vagina in advertising by three broadcast networks, it shot the ad cited above with the actress instead saying “down there,” which was rejected by two of the three networks. (Both Ms. Harris and representatives from the brand declined to specify the networks.)

“It’s very funny because the whole spot is about censorship,” Ms. Harris said. “The whole category has been very euphemistic, or paternalistic even, and we’re saying, enough with the euphemisms, and get over it. Tampon is not a dirty word, and neither is vagina.”

The Times' story seems to address a topic the Onion addressed over a year ago, in a story entitled "Renowned Hoo-Ha Doctor Wins Nobel Prize for Medical Advancements Down There."

Meanwhile, in Rwanda, a similar taboo has prevented a discussion from even taking place around the lack of tampons and pads that women need so they can, you know, function and do things like get to school.  The story, printed last week in the New Times, a Rwandan paper, notes that 18% of women surveyed in 2007 missed school or work due to not having sufficient pads or tampons during their menstrual cycle.

These articles make me strangely nostalgic for a Theater Arts class I took when I was at Brown where several of my classmates wanted our presentation, which was intended to be about Yoruba rituals, to involve our all-female group to burst out of a paper vagina and throw tampons at the rest of our classmates.  At the time I was fiercely against this proposal, but in retrospect, maybe what seemed like a self-indulgent stunt was actually a prescient, much-needed cry against this societal taboo?

New story out today on gender, population and climate change

http://www.womensenews.org/story/environment/100326/co2-releases-wary-talk-population-gender This story, written for Women's Enews, looks at how the debate around climate change may be giving population-policy advocates another avenue to pursue their case. I wonder if having an economic argument to help women plan their families will finally nudge decision-makers to dole out a few dollars towards the cause. Thoughts, anyone?